The Waters of Kronos (13 page)

What he wanted, he mustn’t forget, was the secret, the final answer to the search. Now was his extraordinary chance. If anyone knew, it must be the child, himself, back here at the source.

“Will you listen, boy?” he asked hoarsely, earnestly. “I want to ask you something. Will you promise to think?”

“Why, ye-ss,” the boy said uneasily, staring at him.

“Do you ever have nightmares? Don’t answer me. I know you do. What I want to ask you is did you ever hear voices—after you’re awake? I mean—that remind you of something, perhaps somebody in your nightmare?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” the boy stammered but there was fear in his eyes.

“You’re surprised that I know? You needn’t be. Just tell me something—have you ever had a notion whose voice it is?”

“No, sir,” he stammered.

“But you don’t like the voice?”

“No, sir.”

“You’re afraid of it—of the person?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you don’t know who it is?”

“No, sir.”

“You’re sure?”

“I think I’m sure.”

“Then sometimes you think you know?”

“No, sir,” the boy said, but he whispered it.

“You mean you have no idea at all?” the man persisted. “You never had an idea who this person is? Not even the faintest idea? Not even now?”

This time the boy did not answer.

“Then you have some idea who it is,” the man declared. He leaned forward, trembling violently. This was the moment of revelation. “You must tell me now who this person is. I command you.”

“I can’t,” the boy cried and turned and ran down the stairs.

The old man sat there. He must compose himself. He dare not look at Mrs. Bonawitz. She must think him a madman, a fool, or both. He felt rather than saw her take the tray, heard her shoes on the stairs, then snatches of what she related caustically to her man in the kitchen.

The guttural of their distant voices troubled him again, rising and falling, reminding him of the hidden enemy. Who was this undisclosed foeman whose heavy tones had the power to chill his blood, to suck light and color from the day? The boy had given no clue to his identity, had refused to answer, and yet it was obvious that he knew him. The one they both feared and hated was not far from here.

Through the walls for a moment he heard his father’s voice, impatient, tinged with gloom. No, it couldn’t be he, John Donner told himself. Why, no man was liked more
warmly over town and countryside including Broad Mountain. His jovial hackneyed sayings that the sons groaned over were hailed in other households, welcome everywhere.

“Good night, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he’d call after young and less young folks on their way to bed. “I’ll see you in the morning, in the morning by the bright light, when Gabriel blows his trumpet in the morning.” How often had John Donner heard that! No guest was more welcome at another’s table or strove harder to earn his keep. His father would sit pleased as Punch at his place, his napkin tucked into his collar, his plate attacked with gusto, his praise for food and hostess without stint or sparing. He had a well-used phrase for every occasion. Let his hostess ask if he wanted water, and he would answer heartily, “Water for me, bright water for me and wine for the trembling debauchee,” and when she had put down the glass in front of him, “Your kindness is only exceeded by your good looks.” When he could eat no more he would decline with a beaming “I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, any more would be a superabundance.” Aunt Jess, as well as Matt and Polly, thought “the world and all” of him.

And yet John Donner remembered his father a different man at home. As a boy he had never given it much thought.
After all, there was little need for company manners among your family in your own house. He could see his father in his mind now, a dogged figure sitting at the head of the kitchen table, speaking little, insulated, stern, preoccupied with heavy thoughts. Once or twice he had insisted they had forgotten to say grace.

“We didn’t pray!” he rebuked them after they had started to eat.

“We did!” the family protested but he silenced them with a look seldom seen on fathers today, the glance of authority and reproach that said, “Do you mean I pray and don’t know it, like the heathen?” Propping his right arm again on the table, he lowered his forehead to his hand and waited for them to lay down forks and spoons and dutifully hear him go through the familiar phrases once more. As a guest in another’s house his prayer was elaborate as befitted a Sunday-school superintendent aspiring to the ministry, filled with Biblical phrases, “handy with preacher talk,” as Annie used to say of him, the supplication closing with the words, “Bless these bounties prepared by kind hands, feed us with the bread of Heaven and at last save us. We ask it in His name, Amen.” At home there must have been no
special bounties or need, for the end was shortened simply to “Bless this food and us to thy service, Amen.”

There was a difference also in his father’s singing at home and abroad. Standing by the piano at Aunt Jess’s or in some other house, his favorite, “Tired, Oh, Yes, So Tired,
Dear
,” was just a musical performance, a “rendition” as it was politely called in Guild circles.

At home the same words by the same singer poured out feelingly to his own ears seemed a personal confession, a weariness with life, bringing the odor of grave clothes into the house.

There was another of his father’s favorites that troubled the boy:

The rest of the family paid it scant attention. It was just the Lichens and Moss Song. But to the child, John Donner, there was something else.
Lear
, a play he read with more liking as a boy than a man, didn’t have it. But when in later years he read Sophocles he recognized a fellow doomsman in Oedipus. Oedipus would understand how he felt, the omen of the unfavorable words, the foreboding chorus, the fateful way his father drew it all out, the inescapable doom that lay close ahead, the dread of which would evaporate only in the sunlight of tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow morning was a long way off tonight. Already shadows were taking over the room.

“Mrs. Bonawitz? Could I have a light?” he called.

There was no answer and he called again. Where in God’s name was that woman? As a younger man he would have leaped up and got a light for himself. But as a younger man the dark wouldn’t have bothered him. Why was it that baseless
anxiety attacked age and childhood, least able to fend for themselves? It was one of the miscalculations of creation, or was it? Could there be any trouble next door, he wondered. Might Mrs. Bonawitz have been called to his mother? He remembered as a boy seeing her there during the mysterious attacks his mother had suffered much of her life. As the oldest son he had more than once sent Gene for the doctor and then sat with her, letting her grip his hands against the pain. When he held her wrists he noticed her pulse very fast. Every few beats it fell like a wounded doe. The doctor had called the attacks acute indigestion. John Donner guessed they would be heart attacks today, perhaps something else tomorrow.

“What’s the matter?” he shouted bitterly. “Why doesn’t somebody answer me?”

After a moment he heard a harsh voice repeating the impatient words in his ear. He listened and his flesh crept. It was the voice he had feared since childhood, had sought and never found, heavy, ominous, dragging up with it intimations of terror from the deep. Now, how had the voice of the frightener come into this room? Surely it was not his own that he heard, still hanging in the air? Why, they
always said he had a voice like his father’s, a rich singing voice, a lot of vibrant timbre in it, a speaking voice that “carried over ‘long distance.’”

He struggled to sit up in bed. Through the gloom he could see a face staring back at him through the mirror of the oaken bureau. Could such be himself, this monster, the hair cruelly thin, the skull revealed, the coarsened smear of a face, the confusion of features once so indubitably his own, now run together as if returning to primordial chaos, the thickened shapelessness of cheeks and jaws, he who had been such a slim youth? At the same time he thought he could see staring back at him from the face most of those ancient kinfolk he had known as a boy, in person or hanging in heavy frames on the wall, the thick short neck of his choleric Grandfather Donner, the trap of a mouth of his Great-Grandmother Stricker, his Great-Uncle Timothy’s arrogant nose, the bitter look in the eyes of his Grandmother Morgan who had to die before she had her children raised, and all the other grim, forbidding features of ancestors he couldn’t name but who had looked aged at forty. He had thought them long since dead, buried, disintegrated. Instead they had lived on, endured. They were the real survivors. So long as his flesh had flourished, his vitality had
kept them down. Now that it had waned, they had come up out of him like a den of turtles swarming over a rock.

He remembered again how the boy had looked at him when asked the identity of the frightener. So that was why he wouldn’t reply! It was the great deception practiced by man on himself and his fellows, the legend of hate against the father so the son need not face the real and ultimate abomination, might conceal the actual nature of the monster who haunted the shadows of childhood, whose name only the soul knew and who never revealed himself before the end when it was found that all those disturbing things seen and felt in the father, which as a boy had given him an uncomprehending sense of dread and hostility, were only intimations of his older self to come, a self marked with the inescapable dissolution and decay of his youth. Even the creator of the hate-against-the-father legend must in his bitter later years have guessed the truth.

There were heavy steps on the stairs. Light rose and fell, spreading into the room.

“What’s going on in here?” Mr. Bonawitz demanded, lamp in hand.

“It was getting a little dark,” the old man stammered.

“Dark, is it?” Mr. Bonawitz said. He was Pennsylvania
Dutch but, like most hard-coal miners, spoke with the Welsh-Irish brogue of the Patch. “You ever work inside? Well, then you don’t know what dark is. I don’t care how black it gets up here at night, you can always see a little. Even in the house. Under the ground it’s different. It’s dark already going down the slope. The mountain closes over you and when you get to the eighth level you’re half a mile down. If your lamp goes out and you’re working somewheres alone, you’re lost. You might as well have no eyes. The water drips over you and the rats are waiting to feed on you. You can’t see either one. Everything’s black. You get to thinking there’s no such thing as light left in the world. It’s all gone out.”

He set the lamp on the bureau, turned it down economically and went on talking about underground workings and abandoned black shafts where the sound of falling water told of abysses far below from which, once fallen into, the victim could never hope to rise.

When the miner left, the man in bed was conscious only of the precious light, of the tiny yellow flame rising from its brass burner pouring its mysterious substance silently, effortlessly, into every corner. How often when he was sick in bed as a child, this small lamp, or one like it, had been his
company and companion. When he partly closed his lids, the light was a star with more points than he could count. If he shut the lids still farther, the points stretched in brilliant golden threads across the room, touching the walls, reaching floor and ceiling, mystical paths brighter than the lamp itself. Opening his eyes wide would bring it back again, but he liked it better with lamp bowl and globe fringed with golden fire as the twigs of a bush are ringed with the sun after a rain.

The only time the light failed him was once a fortnight when his mother went “to Guild.”

“Good-by. We’ll be home long before midnight,” she would tell him gaily.

He knew it would be so. And yet despair seized him even before they left, his father to the store, from where, when it closed, he would call at Guild in time for refreshments and to bring his wife home. Until then the small boy would lie sleepless. He never knew why. Like so many other inexplicable and irrevocable things, it just existed. He knew he wasn’t alone. His brothers were there and Annie downstairs. But the house was a tomb all the same. The number of minutes in an hour, of hours in an evening, appalled him.

Once eleven o’clock struck, hope in him would start to
rise. He would lie listening for the first footfall in the late street. Mrs. Feezer, a little gray woman like a pouter pigeon, always left Guild early, his mother said. He knew her by her very fast steps, pat, pat, pat, down the dark bricks. Now there was silence again. What he waited to hear was his father bidding good night to the Whetstones. His voice a square away was unmistakable, even on winter nights with the window tightly closed, but the child would not let himself wholly believe or rejoice until the front door opened and he heard the other, the indispensable, voice downstairs.

Then relaxation like a powerful drug bringing with it delectable peace would come over him. It had happened. His mother was home. It was as if she had never been away. In a few minutes her feet would be on the stairs. Shortly she would pass by the door to his bedroom, turning her face to see if he was all right. But almost never did he see her. Even before he heard her hands making pleasant sounds of early readiness for tomorrow’s breakfast he was asleep, and only in the morning would he remember how he had tried to stay awake to see her and hear her special good night in their own secret code. She never thought it strange or queer that when he called, “Good night, Mamma,” he wanted her to
answer, “Good night, Johnny,” saying his name with her lips, understanding what he didn’t have to explain to her, that to answer merely “good night” after he had said “Good night, Mamma” would have left their nightly farewell dismembered, unfinished, like a sweet tune broken off in the middle and left to dangle all night in the air.