The Waters of Kronos Read online

  John Donner waited till the sound of footsteps had died out on the grass. He looked back to the stone.

  So this was where Pap-pa was finally put to rest, with no more of a marker than anyone else, he who had baptized eleven thousand souls, worn out twelve horses, ruled three congregations and two wives. The second wife lying beside him, Palmyra H. Morgan, No. 739, had outlived him but she had not been mother to his children or grandmother to John Donner. His real Grandmother Morgan he had never seen. Where was she now? Mary Scarlett Morgan, 1828–1867, almost lost in the shuffle, five or six graves away from her spouse, and yet she had borne all his children, dying at thirty-nine from a fall at a picnic. Her daguerreotype showed the strongest face of the family with deep-set eyes like a female Cromwell. Her grandson recalled that this was the second time her body had been moved, the first only a year or two after interment, when the monument was erected. The grave diggers had come to Pap-pa in excitement. Four men could hardly lift the coffin, they said. They were sure the body had turned to stone. They wanted permission to open the coffin. But Pap-pa had been adamant and refused.

  About him now, nearer than his first wife, lay her sisters and brothers-in-law, clergymen like himself. Here were two who had never married, Rosemary Scarlett, who, his mother told him, could recite Shakespeare by the page. She had entertained for her father when he was in the legislature at Harrisburg, and died of consumption at eighteen. Her sister, Teresa, the poetess, lived to be eighty-four, a teacher who took her school on a daily walk and more than once held up a hissing gander helpless by the neck till her charges were past. Her tomb down in the old Unionville cemetery had read “A lover of children.” The Scarletts were known for their epitaphs. The Rev. Timothy Scarlett, D.D., L.L.D., had on his late stone “He spoke and taught as one having authority, fervent in the spirit of the Lord,” while the stone of his brother, the Rev. Howard Scarlett, D.D., Ph.D., read “A scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, he brought forth out of his treasury things old and new.” Their wives, who outlived them, had no epitaphs.

  Now where was his Great-Grandfather Scarlett, a captain in the War of 1812, squire, legislator and “oil inspector under Governor Hiester,” or so Aunt Teresa used to say? Down in the Unionville cemetery his name graced a marble monument, a shaft of twenty feet as befitted his station. Here he was just No. 732, reduced almost to oblivion, his silent wife beside him. John Donner couldn’t remember ever seeing a picture of him. Beyond lay his own favorite Aunt Jess with Uncle Dick Ryon, who had once lived in Colorado and Florida, very briefly as befitted an Irishman who couldn’t resist telling his employers off. Their daughter, Polly, who had been one of the closest of cousins to the Donner boys, was nearby, but her two husbands had been buried elsewhere as had her son, the idol of the “freind-schaft,” dead of diphtheria at eight years.

  All the while the visitor held in his mind the two graves that mattered most. In the Unionville cemetery he had gone to them straight off before any other, seeing nothing else for a time than the pair of strong upright granite slabs with the deeply carved letters, the Rev. Harry A. Donner and Valeria M. Donner. It had consoled him to find them in such a favored place, on the big Morgan-Scarlett lot, one of the pleasantest spots on the hill, where the ground began to slope gently toward the south. The sun lay warm on the graves in winter so that the snow always melted here first and there was a superb view of the valley and mountains. But today he had trouble coming on their names and then found them lost in the second row among strangers. He stood for a while staring at them, frowning.

  What had he come back here for anyway, he demanded of himself. Was he secretly trying to find a final resting place for himself? When young, he would have rejected the thought instantly. Now he wasn’t so sure. It was true that fire had never appealed to him. He had thought scattering your ashes rather a conceited thing, making a rite out of the trifling and profane, as if the landscape you loved cared. Also, he wasn’t certain that it wasn’t a form of escape, to avoid the prospect of long decay, a kind of claustrophobia about being put underground. He himself had thought to follow the courage and custom of his ancestors. But where, he had never decided. The depositories of his Western city had seemed too cold and impersonal. Their sleepers didn’t know the names of the sleepers next to them. One winter in Georgia he had considered the South. The cheerfulness of the darkies who served him and of the woodsmoke that came from their cabins appealed to him. But he would still be alien there, and a perpetual dampness seemed to mildew the ground. The New Mexico country he loved would be drier. Some of his best friends lay in that desert land, moldering painlessly away into dust to be blown someday over the country. Nowhere did graves look more lonely and abandoned. He remembered what an old rancher sixty miles from a railroad had once said to him.

  “Next year I may be in the ground. But I hope you’ll come just the same. It’ll be mighty lonesome a-layin’ way out here where no human hardly passes.”

  Was that why he had come back to where the air was peopled with the multitudinous imaginary forms of his youth? The rancher had told him that horses raised and broken around ranch headquarters nearly always returned from the open range to die. He didn’t know why but he thought they wanted to be near man again. It was as if the horses had remembered man as a god, and when old age came over them they looked back in their dim horses’ minds to when they had been young and strong in companionship with that god and came back in the hope that their god could help them. Was that, John Donner wondered, the unreasoning impulse deep in his own mind, driving him back to this place?

  He turned away. Whatever he had sought, it was not here. The place was spurious. The old cemetery at Unionville had been genuine, a part of life. Any day and almost any part of the day, especially toward evening, you could see the living among the dead, someone bending over a grave with love and remembrance, running a lawn mower on the lot, perhaps going with a vase for fresh water or resting on one of the green benches scattered under the trees, contemplating life and death or the peaceful scene.

  And on Decoration Day the whole cemetery would burst into spring, a religious symbol, with even the unclaimed lots trimmed, the hill a flower garden, annual visitors from out of town mingling with townsfolk, shaking hands, renewing acquaintance, talking of the past and present, the dead and the living. A parade would move up from Kronos Street with soldiers and Boy Scouts in uniform, children in gay dresses marching and bands playing. Half the town would be waiting or stream up after. Eventually there would be the sharp crack of salute by the honor guard to their departed brethren in arms, and some speaker droning lazily from the back of Lib Fidler’s wagon and, later, Ducky Harris’s truck.

  But he found none of that up here. With a sense of futility and defeat he started back to the car. Before reaching it he came on a small lane, hardly more than wheel tracks running through an unclosed gate to the north and thence through an open field. It was a relief to follow it, to get away where things were natural and real. He went on half expecting to be called back by the guard but nothing happened.

  Halfway across the field he saw a little old car coming out of the hollow. It stopped when it came abreast. John Donner had a glimpse of axes and a crosscut saw in the back. On the front seat two old men turned faces toward him.

  “You can’t get anyplace down there, mister. This road dead-ends.”

  “Doesn’t the Long Stretch road run in that hollow?” Donner asked.

  “Well, it does and it doesn’t. It’s there where it ain’t bulldozed away. But it’s closed up above by the big steel fence and down below by the water. You can’t get up and you can’t get down.” The old eyes scrutinized him sharply. “You from around here?”

  “Once upon a time. My father was Harry Donner. Maybe you knew him.”

  “Harry Donner! Used to have a store in Unionville before he was a preacher? His father-in-law baptized me. Come to think of it, you mind me of him. Your father, I mean.”

  “I look like my father?” Joh
n Donner asked.

  “Well, you do. I ought to know. I buried him. Me and Yuny here. We dug his grave on a cold January morning. Had to build a fire to thaw out the ground.”

  The other old man, whose pipe reeked of black tobacco, took it out of his mouth.

  “What do you think of it up here?” He pointed it toward the cemetery.

  “It’s not like the one in Unionville.”

  “It’s dead,” Yuny said. “Nobody gets buried in it. Nobody digs a grave from one year to another. It’s dead as a doornail.”

  “You know what he means?” the first old man said. “We used to work in St. John’s graveyard, him and me. We had a bet on which would bury the other fellow. Now they got to bury us someplace else.”

  “Something was always going on down in that cemetery,” Yuny said. “I could tell you a lot of things. Like the time we had to dig two graves in one day and they got Bob Bender and Ike Zerbe to dig the other one. Bob had his bottle along and when Check here and me went over and seen what they dug, we had to go to the preacher. ‘You got to get that straightened out tonight, Parra’ we told him. ‘There ain’t no coffin made’ll ever fit that grave.’ It was hooked like a sickle. Yep, bent like a quarter-moon. But we got to get home, mister. They lock the gate up here at five thirty.”

  “Yes, I can see you’re a Donner now,” the first grave digger said. “You’re the picture of your daddy. He done something to me once I never forgot. I was only a boy from Canal Street and nobody wanted me around. They didn’t make a fuss over kids those days like they do now. Get out, they’d say to me like I was a cat. Well, on the Fourth of July I seen your daddy fetch a couple wooden boxes of fireworks and firecrackers from the store. I hung around expecting every minute to get sent home. But your daddy called, ‘Come on over here, Check, and set down where you can see and won’t get hurt.’ You boys was all setting on the curb and he made a place for me alongside. He even let me set off some of the firecrackers. He was the first ever treated me like that, and I ain’t forgot it.”

  When the little old car left, Donner went on the other way. What the old grave digger had said had much moved him. In his mind he could see his father as in the flesh, a strong, hearty man with a black mustache. John Donner had often tasted that mustache as a boy. It had embarrassed him. No other father in Unionville kissed his boys. It wasn’t done among the Pennsylvania Dutch. Girls weren’t kissed much either. Many a Unionville girl lived all her life without her father showing her affection. Now, her mother might, if the girl had been away from home for a long time or there’d been a death in the family.

  But John Donner couldn’t say that of his father or mother. He stopped and took a snapshot from his breast-pocket notebook. For years it had stood in a small black frame on his desk at home. Now yellow and soiled, it had started to crack. It was a picture he had taken himself with his father’s old plate camera when he was ten. His younger brothers sat at a small table in the old sitting room, their mother between them smiling her warm love at the young photographer. It was a scene that never failed to bring back the old realities, the almost forgotten sideboard with claw feet, the crokinole board standing against the wall, the colored wall-hangings of his mother, the old-time shepherd dog Sandy panting on the floor, and in the background the two closed doors, one to the stairs and one to the kitchen.

  Under the door to the stairs he could see nothing, but white light streamed from under the door to the kitchen. Beyond that door, hidden and kept back by it, was something he couldn’t name but which in his mind’s eye was infinitely bright and rich with the light of youth. Whenever of late years he looked at it, he could feel something inside of him trying to seize the knob of that door and pull it open so he could pass through it into the light. He could feel that intense inner striving now. But nothing happened. He was a fairly able man who had reached honors envied by some other men, but never was he able again to get through that closed door. This, he suspected, was part of the source of the pain that sometimes came to his head, his setting into motion concentration and mental impulses that had always fetched him what he wanted but were brought to nothing now by an old pine kitchen door. Perhaps it was trying to do the impossible that tortured him. He could feel the pain starting in his head again.

  He put the snapshot away in his notebook and went on, down over the crest of the hill. The cemetery guard couldn’t see him here. Neither could he see lake or cemeteries. They seemed like a dream. This, not that, was the real, he felt, the air blowing from Shade Mountain, the cawing of crows from high up on Summer Hill, the lowering sun lying soft and golden on the unused fields.

  The slow peaceful life he had known as a boy remained in this spot. The field was white and sweet with late wild carrot that some call Queen Anne’s lace. A groundhog lumbered ahead of him, making for its hole. Deeper in the hollow the serene evening song of robins rose over the quiet scene. A wood thrush called. It must be perched somewhere in the trees that stood along the old road that once led to the mines. They had called it the Long Stretch from the endless grade over the hills and through the mountains to Primrose Colliery.

  He came on a vestige of that road presently. Farther down in the turning hollow he knew it must come to an end in water and above him run futilely into the steel fence. At places, the woodcutters had said, it was bulldozed out. But here for a short distance in the shelter of the hollow it lay untouched and utterly unchanged, the same yellow shale where butterfly weed grew, the same thick velvety leaves of the moth mullein and the bright patches of goldenrod. It even smelled like it used to, like Union Valley had always smelled. He had lived over much of the country and seen more of the world, but he had found no odor like that of the mixed woods and fields where he had been born, the wild scent of native grasses mingled with that of hardwood leaves, hemlock and pine. Old cherry and ash trees stood along the road. After climbing the fence he was glad to lean against one of them to combat the faintness in his head.

  He must have stayed there a long time. The longer he stood in the growing dusk, the less it seemed that he had ever gone away. Nothing here had changed. He could almost believe that he was still a youth and that the beloved town and valley lay intact and untouched below. Why, this had been the most familiar road to him around Unionville! As a boy he had coasted down it in winter. Summers he had gone with his father, who twice a week delivered a three-horse covered spring wagon of grocery orders to the mining patches on Broad Mountain. So often had his father passed this spot, he thought there must still remain in the road some faint tread of his wagon’s tires and impress of his horses’ shoes. Standing here now peering through the dim light, he could almost feel himself a boy coming down from the mountain, sitting beside his father on the spring seat, the wooden brake screeching, the horses “rutching” and ahead of him home and supper waiting in the evening lamplight.

  His nerves tautened. Did he only imagine it or was something moving up there on the Long Stretch? Yes, he could see it now through the trees and dusk. It was coming toward him on the road, a wagon with a white top like his father’s, three horses, and a gray like old Bob hitched in the lead. The strangest feeling ran over him. He must be really ill, he told himself, for there was no open road above for the wagon to have come from and no place but water below for it to go. Besides, there were no wagons like that on the road any more. Men drove trucks. Even the old woodcutters had a car. Yet he could plainly hear the rumble of the oaken running gear and the sharp sound of iron horseshoes striking stones in the road. An inexplicable fear possessed him. Then as the wagon came abreast he saw that the driver was not his father but an old man, older still than he, with long gray mustaches.

  If the driver saw him, he gave no heed, driving on grave and preoccupied, the reins in his hand. In another moment or two he would be past.

  “Speak to him. Speak to him before he’s gone!” John Donner cried to himself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Chasm

  And still he stood rooted with a kin
d of paralysis as in a dream, watching the wagon go on, carrying with it a mysterious brightness about its canvas top, leaving him behind in the gloom of the hollow.

  “Wait!” he cried.

  The driver looked back, his eyes sad and deep above drooping mustaches, like a face from another world, but he did not stop. John Donner hurried after the wagon.

  “Please. May I speak to you?” he begged.

  And still the wagon bumped on, lurching, the driver silent. John Donner had the impression the man was incapable of speech. Then, farther down the steep grade, he drew his reins and halted the horses with the front wheels of his wagon resting in a cross gutter. The visitor ran after. Careful, careful what you say, he urged himself. But speak! The man is waiting!

  “Can you tell me where this road goes?” he asked.

  “Goes? Why, it goes to the mines,” the driver said, becoming suddenly real enough, exploding the myth of dumbness.

  “I mean the other way.” John Donner pointed into the chasm.

  “That way goes to Unionville.” The driver spat heavy tobacco juice over the wheel and waited.

  “But Unionville—” John Donner said and stopped. He had almost said that Unionville was gone, drowned out, never to be seen by human eye again. Careful, careful, he repeated to himself, then aloud, “You mean you’re going down there—to Unionville—tonight?”

  “Farther’n that. I got to go over the mountain.”

  So that was why he had three horses in his team. John Donner remembered that the mountain road was steep. He edged closer.

  “May I ride with you?” he asked.

  “If you’re going to Unionville, you can walk it,” the driver said. “It ain’t far.”