The Waters of Kronos Page 6

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Breeding Marsh

  John Donner stood on the sandy sidewalk after the door had shut out the light. Aunt Jess’s house still hung in a cloud around him, rich and warm with those intimate details once taken for granted, or of doubtful beneficence, but now enhanced, made sweet to the point of pain by the long past and the present still denied him. Actually, there’s no house here, he said under his breath to comfort himself. All this is really gone, departed, old stuff, no more than some unaccountable figment of the brain. But even as he said it the house continued to stand there with its rectangular yellow eyes regarding as an alien him on whom it had once smiled as a friend, and in the end he felt that he was the old stuff, the departed, the figment of the past.

  He reached out a hand to the third maple, the one over the gate that used to turn such a faithful vivid scarlet in the fall while others on the street reached no more than orange or pale cerise. He would prove it an illusion and hence all this unreal, fanciful. But the tree was a rock, the bark rough, knotted and insoluble.

  If this were real, then he must be the unreal, he told himself, the insubstantial and imaginary. More than once in the past he had had this curious feeling about life and its illusions, coming on bits of evidence such as, for instance, his name. How often and incredulously as a boy and even as a man he had repeated it to himself, “John, John, Johnny, Johnny!” It had sounded strange and hollow to his ears all his life. He couldn’t believe the name quite his. It never looked right, spelled with a “j” and with an “h” where no “h” should be. There was something wrong about it. He had gone over other boys’ names, trying them, speaking them aloud, fitting them to himself. There were nearly a dozen that sounded more real, one in particular that he felt was really his, but in the midst of it someone would brutally call “Johnny!” and drag him back to the dream that others called reality.

  He had once told his mother how he felt. She had confessed to him that she had never liked her own name, neither Valeria nor Vallie. He had felt better at once. He could tell anything to his mother. She was never surprised, or if she was, she didn’t show it. Whatever his doubts about justice and right, about doctrine and orthodoxy, whatever shocking words or still more shocking conceptions he had heard, whatever his protests or questions, she had had them before him or had at least known about them. Her calm could lay so easily the specters in his mind. She was incapable of being outraged when he was concerned. She would not be outraged by him today. She had always understood him even when most irrational and incoherent. She would understand him now. He could not imagine her otherwise. She would listen no matter how grotesque and improbable his tale or how his father stood back. If ever she should not—but he dare not think of such an eventuality.

  Deep in his mind he knew that this, hidden and concealed by a multitude of complex acts and thoughts, was what he feared the most, was why he had not gone to her already. Her heart was the one sure and priceless possession he could count on here in the abyss and dare not be risked or gambled. And yet eventually he knew he must do just that. He had best go to her now while the chasm still held and the water held back.

  He went down the dark path his father’s feet had taken under the great ash trees which grew so rank in Unionville. Not until he was in his sixties had he learned that they were sacred among the ancients. He thought he could feel them like leafy idols over his head tonight, listening to his step, watching him without eyes, aware of his whole past. This was where he had played soldier with a wooden gun. And here under the biggest tree on Kronos Street, that some said had grown gross from human phosphates washed underground in the old hollow from the cemetery, was where as a child he had first noticed the changed track of the sun, that in October it was already dark at six. Beyond this tree he was setting foot in the home square, another very long square, the middle so far from lampposts that the gloom of foliage overhead confused him. He was uncertain whose house was whose. Only his feet knew, taking him unerringly to the steps they had run up so often and blindly as a boy.

  Old and stiff, they wanted to run up now. The red hall lamp (all the best houses had them) was lighting him home. Another moment and he could burst in that old friend of a door, be young Johnny Donner and be safe.

  “Careful! Careful!” he warned. He must go slowly, feel his way, knock on his own door like a stranger, but not on the front door lest his father come with a face that asked, “What are you doing here?” Around back there was a chance his mother might answer. There in that moment at the door together, recognition would come. Now what was the cowardice that still smote him as he made his way back through the familiar alleyway, and why should he have to struggle like a worn-out swimmer through heavy seas? There was light in the kitchen as always, a light soft and mild, and somewhere young people’s voices.

  His hand shook as he rapped on the door.

  “Who’s there?” a voice called, not his mother’s. She never called like that. It was Annie, his mother’s old Dunkard maid.

  “I’d like to see Mrs. Donner.” His voice was shaky.

  “What do you want with her?” Annie demanded. The old stranger in the door gave the ghost of a smile. That was like Annie, only a midget of a woman (they used to call her Half Pint) yet always speaking her mind. What business did a man, and especially a strange man, have at this time of night with a married woman like Mrs. Donner?

  “I just want to see her,” John Donner told her. And when there was no reply: “I’m related to her.”

  “Oh!” Annie said, which meant several things—so that’s how it is and why didn’t you tell me before? “Well, she’s not here. She’s up at the preacher’s.” Then she added, “If you came for the funeral, you don’t need to count on sleeping here tonight. She already has more than she can handle. I got to sleep with young Timmy.”

  So his mother was at the parsonage. He might have known. It was the family get-together the night before the funeral, with Uncle Peter and Aunt Hetty and all the great-uncles and -aunts from Philadelphia. He could never face his mother among so many. He had always had her to himself when they talked.

  “Annie!” he begged.

  “What!” she answered in the explosive Dutch intended to admonish or cow.

  “Annie. May I talk to you a little?”

  “Well, talk then!” she told him shortly, making no move to open the door.

  “I can’t talk through the cracks,” he protested, turning the brown knob. His mother almost never locked the door, but Annie—a little fighting cock of a woman afraid of neither man nor spook, she claimed—would turn the key, he remembered, whenever she was alone.

  “Why can’t you?” she came back unmoved.

  “Annie!” He shook the knob. “Let me in.”

  He could see her through the window standing small and belligerent in the middle of the floor, her small white Dunkard cap on the back of her head.

  “What do you want in for?”

  “I want to see you and talk to you. I want to see the house again.”

  “You’re not coming in here,” Annie informed him. “Not till I know who you are.”

  “You know me,” he promised. “You know me well. Don’t you remember Johnny?” Why, as a small boy Annie had taken him everywhere.

  “Johnny who?” she wanted to know. He saw her take the light and come to the window. She put up the shade to the top with one hand and with the other held the lamp close against the pane. A long-forgotten childhood feeling went over him at sight of the old green print of her dress, of the cocky nose and the small mouth turned down.

  “I never seen you before, old man,” she informed him.

  “But you did!” he pleaded. “We were thick as thieves. You were very fond of me. You’d do anything for me.”

  “Well, you should of made hay while the sun shone,” she retorted. “I don’t know you no more.” She put the lamp back on the table.

  “Annie! You can’t do this to me!” he cried.

  She
turned on him.

  “Why don’t you come in the daylight?” she scolded. “What do you come at night for like a thief trying to sneak and slobber your way in where you have no right?”

  The old man stood silent. That had shaken him. What could he say? It was the great riddle. He could only answer that this was the way it was. There was no use trying to explain to Annie. After a little he turned and went defeated to the street. As he stood there looking back at the house such yearning came up in him that he could scarcely stand it, a yearning for many things vanished, but most of all for what as a boy he had valued so little and almost despised.

  He found himself presently moving up the street. Once upon a time he had thought that man had invented nothing better than town life on a warm evening with the feel of neighbor friends around you, with the south wind stirring the town leaves and the lazy twang of frogs from the canal. The silent shadows of toads hopped in the garden. Occasional townspeople would pass on the street, the girls in light summer dresses, and all the time the drift of voices from front porches where families sat with occasional words between them or to those passing and pausing to chat and tell some news, so that by the time one went from Mill to Maple Street a social evening could be passed.

  John Donner was conscious of them now, the mysterious disembodied voices of the unseen, the immediate ones subsiding at his approach and resuming when he had barely passed. “Who was that?” he could hear them ask. He tried to conquer the alien reception with a hearty “Good evening,” as he remembered his father doing, but although they replied dutifully, there was reservation in their voices and he could still hear their speculation after he was by.

  He missed the fortifying sound of Hoy’s blacksmith shop as he passed it, closed for the night. The grimy bare and muscled arm on the anvil might have put a little iron in his veins, he thought, as it did for those who heard it day in and day out. But if it had been open, he would not have gone in. The street, that was for the stranger, for the unrecognized and unbidden. He passed the Knittle house built, they said, of bricks brought home in the Knittle dinner pail, two a day, from the brickyard where Oscar worked. Next door was the Ditrich house put up in canal days with a roof slanting much farther back than in front. All the boys at school had looked up to Eddie Ditrich, whose uncle wrote him letters from the Richmond jailhouse.

  And now he was approaching the Swank house. Out on the West Coast on nights of winter rain he had more than once smiled over Emmy Swank, who in the early days boasted of one of the few bathrooms in Unionville but used the outside privy to “save the toilet.” Even on snowy nights they could see her go out the garden walk with a lantern. Now as he came closer he heard the raw voice of the totally deaf who talk constantly to conceal their handicap, halting tonight only when the stranger was almost abreast and then loudly before he had fully passed, “Who was that? I thought it walked like Harry Donner but it wasn’t stout enough. They say he’s going to be a preacher, at his age!”

  Oh, he told himself, the whole town was a living museum of people and places the like of which, once gone, would never be seen again. Back on Kronos Street, for Mifflin ran only to the school, he passed the shop of Dummy Noll, who had frothed at the mouth at young Stan Greenawalt, for taking him to be soled a pair of tattered shoes found in the canal. They were always baiting Dummy. Uptown was another deaf-mute place, Kissawetter’s, like a scene out of Grimm’s fairy tales, especially around Christmas, with roly-poly dolls rocking silently and toy figures mutely nodding and the proprietors, man and wife, making signs to the customers and the customers making signs to them until it seemed that the entire store and its glittering contents and all who came in had been put under a spell until the fairy prince should come and set them free.

  The combined jewelry and clothing store of Jimmy Pomeroy next door was another place of necromancy and magic, black magic to a small boy of the church, the fearful dummies in the shadows, the row of forbidden books by the arch agnostic Robert Ingersoll on the shelf, and behind the counter the gaunt black-garbed figure of Jimmy himself, a watch-maker’s magnifying glass glued to one eye, a ready and sonorous polemist who on Sundays walked the streets alone, absorbed by his grand thoughts, seeing almost no one, his face turned up to the heaven which church people said he was doomed never to see. Tonight John Donner remembered that a few days before he died Jimmy had written with soap on his bedroom mirror, “We fade and flutter at the end like leaves in the fall.” He felt a kinship for the man tonight, a desire to sound out his philosophy but a customer turned in ahead of him, and he went on up the street past the wooden steps to the feed store of Georgie Brandt, who had tippled too much at the hose house one night and woke up next morning to find he had bought Trot Maurer’s barber shop. Georgie couldn’t barber but he had got Trot to stay and barber for him, and when Trot went home for dinner Georgie would leave feed to his wife and come over to get a customer ready on the chair till Trot came back, lathering him and talking, till one day Trot didn’t come back and at the end an angry customer tore off the bib and put Georgie on the chair, lathering him till Georgie talked him out of it, for Georgie was a good talker and most people liked him.

  John Donner tried to laugh at the memory, but the laugh wouldn’t come, neither then nor when he passed the Daubert house, where young Cora and Jack had taught him the art of burping, swallowing air and storing it in the stomach until it could be belched out at will. One time in the midst of their accomplishment the doorbell rang and running to answer it they found Mr. Krammes, the Evangelical minister. He told them solemnly that Mr. Burlap, their next-door neighbor, had just died, and there the three of them stood helpless, not daring to speak or answer a word for fear of releasing a chorus of resounding belches.

  Couldn’t he ever smile any more, John Donner asked himself, not even at Chippy Luckenbill? Here was his Union Hotel across from the new tannery. The same Mr. Krammes preached against liquor and Chippy told his wife, who went to the Evangelical church, that if she ever got Krammes to preach his funeral sermon, he’d rise up in the coffin and curse him. In due process of time Chippy Luckenbill died and Krammes was to preach the sermon. Chippy’s cronies and customers came to the funeral to see what would happen.

  “Well,” the church people taunted them afterward, “did Chippy rise up in his coffin?”

  “No,” his cronies said regretfully, “but he got mighty red in the face.”

  There must be something the matter with him, John Donner told himself, that even Chippy Luckenbill left him unmoved. He remembered he had had no supper. He turned downtown toward the DeWitt House, nearly as old as the town itself, with white verandas upstairs and down and a rich scent throughout of well-aged kegs and bottles such as survives in no bar or cocktail lounge today.

  Inside the swinging slatted door the room was dim and cool. A few men sat at the far end with Jake DeWitt, last of the DeWitt line.

  “Good evening,” John Donner said courteously and stood at the bar.

  One or two of the men mumbled but Jake did not get up. He had usually refused to do that for a single customer. The talk in the dialect went on and John Donner waited until in time another customer entered and Jake came reluctantly from his corner.

  “I wonder,” the old stranger said, “if I could get a sandwich and a glass of beer.”

  “Supper’s over,” Jake told him. “Dining room closes at six thirty.”

  “I know,” John Donner said, remembering that meals were early in Unionville, dinner often at eleven and supper at four or five. “But I’ve walked pretty far and am a little shaky.”

  Jake’s eyes still refused him, harder now, disapproving of the resort to pity. The other went on.

  “Mrs. DeWitt was always a friend to me. Will you ask her if she’ll feed a hungry man?”

  Jake was examining him minutely now.

  “What’s the name?” he wanted to know.

  “Donner.”

  “You related to Harry?”

  The stranger nodded an
d Jake moved to the second customer, setting out for him a glass and the schnapps bottle without asking what he wanted. Then he turned, went into the hall and John Donner thought he heard him on the stairs. He came back without saying anything. It was a good sign, John Donner judged, and in time came a light rapping on the hall door. Jake was again sitting in his corner, but he got up at once and went to the door. The old man at the bar saw a pair of eyes scrutinize him intently from the crack. In a moment they vanished but Jake brought back a plate laden with a huge slice of homemade bread cut in half and stuffed with baked country ham. Then Jake drew him a heavy glass schooner of beer and picked up the dollar bill he laid down.

  “We use good money here,” he said, giving it back.

  “What’s the matter with it?” John Donner protested.

  Jake took another bill from the till, laid it grimly on the bar, and the stranger remembered he was in the chasm. Beside the other bill, his own looked small and inadequate.

  “It’s good,” he insisted. “It’s just the new size.”

  “Too new for me,” Jake grunted. “You can tell whoever made it he should use more paper.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “A dime for the sandwich and a nickel for the beer.”

  John Donner reached in his pocket, relieved to find the solid hardness of coins. At least silver had kept its shape. He wished he had more of it. Laying a quarter on the bar, he left. When he came out, the street had changed. These were the same houses but the shape of roofs and walls appeared to have altered, as had the lineal relationship between doors and windows. Things he had forgotten until now came flooding back to his consciousness. Ahead waited the broad, shallow Kunkel house, where the skeleton of an infant lay at this moment hidden in the thick walls and not to be found until they were dismantled. Across the street with a slate roof and many stained-glass windows stood the ten-room brick house of Harold Sterner, who was to sell tannery stock among his neighbors and friends before bankruptcy.