The Waters of Kronos (2 page)

A turn in the road hid the lake. For a moment it seemed that he was really going home, back to the old town and its familiar scenes. Then the heavy blot of water reappeared and he found a secondary road leading off to the left, marked
CEMETERIES
. This he followed until ahead he saw what looked like flocks of sheep grazing on the hillside, but all the time he knew that the white dots were too evenly spaced for sheep.

The first sign read
ST. PETER’S LUTHERAN CHURCH. PARKING
. That, he remembered, was what they called the Old Lutheran in Unionville, the church from which the New Lutherans had sprung, and he drove slowly on to the next sign.
JACOB’S LUTHERAN
was what everybody called the White Church in the country below town. He remembered that his Grandfather Morgan’s horse, Mike, would of himself on a Sunday turn off the road into the White Church
grounds and shed which on weekdays he passed without notice. Aunt Jess said that Mike, being a horse, had no hopes of getting to heaven, but he knew a good deal more than many Christians who had.

The third sign,
CHURCH OF THE BRETHREN
, puzzled him. It must be the Dunkard Church from the Big Dam built back in the eighteen twenties to feed the canal. During the Civil War it had broken and flooded the town, drowning many, an omen and symbol of the future that few had paid attention to then. John Donner had never seen the Big Dam in water, but he had seen the Dam Church, as his Grandfather Morgan wryly called it sometimes, and once his mother’s maid, Annie, who always wore her Dunkard cap even under the sunbonnet, had taken him as a small boy along to the Dunkard Love Feast. He remembered that he wasn’t allowed to sit with Annie and the other women but had to go alone to the men’s side, where he had never forgotten the ecstatic pleasure on the violent face of a red-bearded man when a black-bearded brother ceremoniously washed his red hairy feet.

Well, that was three cemeteries. The fourth he came to now,
ST. MARK’S REFORMED AND TRINITY LUTHERAN
. It took him time to figure that out. It must be, he decided,
Kinzell’s, known for miles for its festivals and feuds. John Donner could see it in his mind now, a grim old weather-beaten country church standing in its grove of dark pines. There had been something stark, almost sinister about this church to him as a child. He had thought Pap-pa very brave to go there and read the law from the bare pulpit. But then Pap-pa was afraid of neither man nor devil, and they said that half the crowds at his funerals came to hear what unpredictable things he would say. Like the time he preached the sermon of a Kinzell church member who had once joined a dubious lodge, which attended the funeral in a body.

“We’ve lost a pillar of the church,” they said Pap-pa preached. “He will be sorely missed. The community can hardly do without him. But if certain of you lodge members had died, it would be a different story. The community could easily do without you. You’d be missed nowhere except at some bar or tavern where your rump has worn its mark into the wood, or at the house of some woman, not your wife, where you have no decent or moral right to enter.” Oh, Pap-pa had a strong tongue when he chose to speak his mind. During the Civil War his sermons for the Union irked the Copperheads who claimed the war was fought only over
“a few niggers.” They threatened to tar and feather him but the most they did was roach the mane and tail of his horse while he was preaching.

John Donner stopped the car at the sign,
ST. JOHN’S
, the last of the group, his grandfather’s church, St. John’s Lutheran. There certainly had been a lot of Lutherans around here, most of them ruled over by Pap-pa. And now the man himself lay among them, his strong tongue silenced, his humorous mind at peace, his tireless form still.

Leaving his coat and hat in the car, the visitor walked over to the cemetery gatehouse. A guard looked up the names he mentioned, made notes on a card, then set briskly off with him in tow. It was like an army cemetery, the visitor noted, spread like a huge fan, the whole mechanically designed and executed, with graves very close together, each headed by a small marker exactly like its neighbor’s, all precise and impersonal as the tiers of an outdoor auditorium, which it resembled.

They passed silently through the maze. Each white stone bore its number, name and year of birth and death. Nothing more. The guard consulted his card from time to time and stopped presently at white stones no different from all the rest. John Donner looked down and saw the lettering:

1827–1899

738

“This is the first grave you asked for,” the guard said briefly. “I’ll wait till you’re ready and take you to the next.”

“If you don’t mind,” the visitor said, “I’d rather be alone.”

“Just as you say. I’m instructed to follow your wishes. You’ll note every grave is numbered. I’ve jotted down the numbers of the people you asked for. Most of them are right around here, but some are elsewhere. If you follow the numbers, you shouldn’t have too much trouble.” He handed the visitor the penciled card, then marched back the way he had come.

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?” John 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.”