The Waters of Kronos (4 page)

He started up the Methodist church hill. How incredibly quiet and peaceful it was. Nothing had changed. The sidewalk, moist and slippery as when he was a boy, still shone faintly in the darkness, reflecting unseen light. You had to lift your feet to keep from stumbling over the unpredictable bulges where unseen roots had lifted the bricks in giant mole-like waves. He passed the house of Mr. Nagle, chief clerk for the Markles, who owned Primrose Colliery. It had the peculiar dreamlike look of certain houses when he was young, of importance without and hushed withdrawal from the world within. Across the street the white horse of Dr. Sypher, who had brought him into the world, stood hitched to the buggy, head drooping, perhaps asleep. At the top of the hill was the old post office, tinier than ever in its square boxlike building that had once been a squire’s office. It must be after six o’clock in the evening but the stamp window was still up,
with Katie Gerber calmly reading someone’s paper behind the partition of call and lock boxes. No one was visible on the public side. In an hour it would be jammed with townspeople chatting to each other, waiting for the seven-thirty mail from Lebanon to be “changed,” everyone keeping an eye on his or her box not to miss when a letter or paper might be popped in.

As he went on, someone emerged from the shadows and came toward him, a boy touching the trees as he passed, darting away from the stranger, tagging the post-office tree by sidling around it like a squirrel, then into the post office with the letter in his hand and out again almost in the same motion, returning down the street he had come. He left in the man a baffled feeling. That slender face he thought he had seen before, but where? And what was his name? Even the shirt the boy had on, a design of stripes and colors he hadn’t seen for years, left the man with the strangest sensations.

He stepped into the post office and waited till the brown eyes of Katie Gerber appeared at the high stamp window, severe at the sight of a stranger.

“Can you tell me who that boy was?” he asked.

The brown eyes scarcely changed.

“I heard somebody but didn’t notice,” she said. Through
the partition he saw her go to the mail drop, lift out the last letter, look at it and drop it back without saying anything. What she had learned was for her own information.

The man went uncertainly back to the sidewalk and down the shadowy street. How fragrant was the air he had grown up in and never noticed, redolent of bark and leaves as of the forest! That was Unionville, he told himself, the combination of town and woods, life going on in these houses under the trees, eating, sleeping, reading, making meals in the kitchen all beneath the giant limbs. He could hear at this moment the faint sounds of a piano and horn from different houses, each pursuing a different tune, reaching him through the inexhaustible filter of leaves. He made his way past the brick house built by one of the tannery owners, and the frame house where old Josie Rehrer lived. Across the street stood the white house where his mother used to send him for milk, through the gate and around to the back porch, where he had to wait till his kettle was filled from a crock on the cellar floor.

They called it the Markle square. You never said block in Unionville. The big Markle house, with a full third floor where the servants lived, gave it dignity. He was coming to Dan Markles’ ornamental iron fence now. The heavy gate
led to a rounded portico, shaped like a Christmas cooky. There was another portico on the second floor, a conservatory wing on the first and a wonderful room with deep red leather chairs and walls lined with books enough for a lifetime of reading. The Markle square was a long square, and here in the middle of it, far from the lamppost at either end, all was swathed in muffled darkness but he could smell the rich fragrance of an expensive cigar drifting out from behind those closed yellow blinds.

And now he felt a rising constriction. Ahead on the far side of the street he could make out the general store of Kipps, Donner and Company, known in the family as “Papa’s store,” with a broad store porch and a dozen steps the width of the building rising from the sidewalk, both store and steps unpainted but tacked with a multitude of tin advertising signs, mostly for tobacco. Faint light filtered from the old-time store windows, crude compared to those of today. Like the post office, the store was still open and would be, he knew, long after Katie Gerber closed the post office.

John Donner stood under a tree looking across the street. He felt sure he could make out a man behind the counter. When he went over to the other side the man had disappeared but he thought he heard a familiar voice singing. He knew
then it must be his father. As a boy he had sometimes wished his father tuneless like other fathers. Or if he had to do something, why didn’t he whistle like many of the Pennsylvania Dutch? He sang incessantly, rousing Sunday-school hymns when he felt good, sad songs when “down in the mouth.” “March on, march on, for Christ counts everything but loss,” was one of the stirring kind, together with “Onward, upward till every foe is conquered and Christ is Lord indeed.” The fervor, that’s what his father liked, so he could let himself go. He used to thunder out “Peal forth the watchword, silence it never.” “True hearted, whole hearted,” was another, and “Speed Away.” It had always seemed incongruous to be with his father driving the slow heavy three-horse team with a load of groceries up the mountain and hear him ring out to the culm banks, “Speed away. Speed away. On your mission of light. To the lands that are lying in darkness and night.” This was the gospel version. Once in a great while he would sing the real words, “There’s a young heart awaiting thy coming tonight.”

Chiefly his father sang when active, running up and down the stairs, when going to answer the doorbell, while working with his hands. He seldom sang sad songs except at home. An audience enlivened him, gave him power. He liked people,
was stimulated by them. He made his son wince by speaking to everyone he met on the street, male or female, young or old. Not only here in Unionville but in Lebanon, where people looked after him curiously. Uncle Dick said his brother-in-law had once cordially greeted a painted-up whore they passed on Center Street in Pottsville. He also embarrassed his son in church. He sang so much louder than necessary. Charley Miner once said he had looked for Harry Donner in a crowd of a thousand men roaring out “The Star Spangled Banner” in the Rajah Temple in Reading. He could hear him, he said, but he couldn’t see him. That was his father to a T. In church the boy imagined everyone staring at them, thinking it was showing off.

Today outside the store the son recognized the song. Its name he didn’t know but he was startled by the words. It was almost as if his father knew he was there.

Gradually he knew better. He had heard his father sing it too often at home. The meaning in the words then and now
was hidden. His father, he felt, had always sung at home in riddles, saying in music what he could never bring himself to reveal in speech. As a boy he had thought these particular words a warning to him to give up his youthful, dissenting ways, his shying from church and people, and enter into his father’s hearty way of life and religion.

Now his father came back into view behind the counter. At the sight of his unmistakable black mustache and powerful movements, the old restraint the boy felt for his parent came over him. Why, he had asked himself a thousand times, did this stiffness exist between them? Nobody else appeared to feel that way toward his father. His cousin Pol, some few years his senior, adored him. Her brother, Matt, looked up to him, and Matt was no mollycoddle, a member of the bunch that put wagons and buggies in the canal on Halloween. Only he, Johnny, his oldest son, was uncomfortable with him. As a child he couldn’t easily fathom it except that his father was not his real but a foster father and that the constriction must come from his side, which was why the boy resented it so keenly, coming from one who was so open, friendly and companionable with everybody else.

Once away from his father, he thought he had outgrown and forgotten it. And yet each time they met again, the incomprehensible
constriction would rise between them. The stronger and heartier his father, the more stubborn and powerful the feeling would take form in the son. Standing here outside his father’s store after all these years, he could feel it tonight, gripping him without rhyme or reason, holding him back, a grown man, even today. Sometimes he wondered if, whatever it was, it hadn’t been the origin of his interest in books and nature, not born of commendable thirst for knowledge, but from a shying away from his father’s world of enthusiastic sociability with people, which had given him as a boy only difficulty and suffering so that he found relief in freedom and solitude in fields, the forest and the printed page, like an unreasoning moth released from the hand and soaring in air it had never taken cognizance of before.

He came to himself with a start. Someone was coming up the store steps behind him. Whoever it was must have seen him standing here, peering through the windows. He turned and saw the lynxlike beard of Mr. Paxman, his blue eyes hard as at someone caught spying.

“You want something?” he asked sharply.

“I’m looking for—” John Donner began and caught himself in time. He had almost said “my father.” He tried again more cautiously. “I wanted to see if Mr. Donner was here.”

“He’s gone!” Mr. Paxman informed him.

“But I thought I saw him through the window.”

“He’s out of business,” Mr. Paxman said. “He’s going away to study to be a preacher. He sold me his share in the business. You’ll have to talk about business to me.”

“I don’t want to see him about business,” the stranger said. “It’s personal.”

The bearded man looked disappointed. His interest evaporated.

“Well, in that case you’ll find him still here. He was helping me out tonight while I went to supper.” He stood back, waiting for the other to enter.

Now that he was actually expected to face his father, John Donner froze. He would have retreated, if he could. What could he say that wouldn’t make him out an impostor or a lunatic? He was conscious of Mr. Paxman watching him, questioning his hesitation. He forced himself up the remaining steps to the accustomed stout double door. It still bore the old latch, very low down so a child could reach it, of wrought steel, an arc of metal for the hand and a steel trough above so the thumb could press down and lift the catch inside. This he did. The door opened and he went in.

Nobody was there. The familiar store room, still more of a
dark cave than he remembered, stood empty, the old square and slanted glass showcases cloudy and scratched, with the sediment of sugar in the counter cracks, the shelves loaded with multitudinous objects not to be found on the market today. Tinware hung from the high ceiling, and sugar, cracker and flour barrels stood below. He breathed an air compounded of age and dampness, of molasses and cloth dyes, of spices and coal oil, of rubber boots and leather shoes, of tubs of overripe butter and cheese, of bananas black and spoiling on the bunch, all these and a hundred other scents mingled to form the whole and familiar blend. Bracket oil lamps cast shadows on the wall, imprisoned flies buzzed on strips of flypaper, and the bare floor was deeply grooved and worn by the dragging of heavy containers.

Then the stranger heard someone coming up from the cellar, the swift steps he had heard a thousand times, sharp, vigorous, the toe of each shoe striking forward on the steps. The cellar door opened and he saw his father, lamp in hand.

“Here’s an old man to see you, Harry,” Mr. Paxman said.

The caller winced. Why, it had been Mr. Paxman and his father who had been old, not he. His father looked no more than thirty-five as he set the lamp in its bracket and wiped his hands on a dirty roller towel. He came forward holding
out his hand with that hearty ease he always enjoyed with strangers and which somehow impoverished and cramped his son to see.

“I don’t think I caught the name,” he said, the same unforgettable smile under his black mustache.

“My name is John,” the stranger said hoarsely.

His father’s eyes searched his face while still holding his hand.

“Haven’t we met before?”

“Yes, many years ago.” For a moment the son had the feeling that his father was going to recognize him. Then he saw it was only his parent’s inveterate interest in people.

“You come from around here?”

“I do, but my people are dead and gone. They’re not even buried here now.”

“Then you don’t live around here any more?”

“No, sir. I’ve come a long way, longer than I could tell you.”

His father nodded politely. He looked up at the wooden clock ticking on the wall. The son saw it was still lettered
SALEM THREAD
, in black on the glass.

“Mr. Paxman said you wanted to see me?”

The stranger nodded. He saw his father waiting and knew
what he waited for, but how could he tell him what he had come to see him about when he didn’t know himself? What could he say at all that wouldn’t lead to difficulties and suspicion? He told himself he should never have approached the store. He saw his father watching him intently. In the end he exchanged a meaning look with Mr. Paxman.

“Well, I have to be going down the line,” he said.

Panic seized the stranger. He dare not let him go.

“Is the family well?” he stammered.

“Why, yes. Pretty well, thank you.”

“You have two other boys, don’t you?”

“Three,” his father corrected. “Three boys. My wife hoped the youngest would be a girl.”

“They’re all right, the boys?”

“Tiptop,” his father said. The son remembered it was one of his favorite words.

“And my—I mean, their mother? Is she all right?” Anxiously.

“You know my wife?”

“I knew her once long ago. I don’t know if she’d remember me now.”