The Waters of Kronos (3 page)

“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.

And still he stood rooted with a kind 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.”

“I’m afraid,” John Donner confessed, “I couldn’t make it alone.”

“Afraid of what? You can’t miss it. You could close your eyes and you’d run right into it.”

“I’d like to ride with you, if I may,” the man in the road requested. “I’ve not been too well.”

“Well, it’s that much more for the team to hold back. But I guess I can take you.” The driver looked at the stranger as at a difficult person, but he made room on the seat.

As he climbed over the wheel, John Donner glanced back into the wagon box. He saw it filled to the sideboards with the deep product of the earth, the residue of life that had flourished countless years ago. So that was the scent he had noticed standing there, the faint, almost imperceptible, yet unmistakable taint of wet, freshly mined anthracite, a mysterious smell, not quite chemical, yet something as a boy he had often detected in the miners’ trains and even from men with blackened faces trotting home from the station, the odor of a buried world, very difficult to describe, native to the mouth of the Primrose slope and the dripping depths below. He recalled that when the colliery closed down, they had been mining from the eighth or ninth level, each level eighty yards apart, which meant that he was riding now with a cargo drawn from beneath the level of the sea.

The driver waited till his passenger settled himself on the wooden seat. Then he released the brake and they started down into the chasm.

At every turn John Donner looked for the road to peter out. He thought they must surely come upon spots scraped by the bulldozer to nothingness, must reach the edge of the water. But the old shale road continued to stretch beneath them and around their heads the soft country dusk sweet with the farming scents of early September. A lantern shone in Blinkley’s unpainted barn as they passed. He could smell cows. A field of corn shocked in the old-time fashion came down to the rail fence. A horse and buggy went by close enough to be touched by his outstretched hand. Then they came out of the hollow to a familiar level stretch.

This, he knew, was the Breather, where teams coming up the Long Stretch could get their wind before the next grade. And now the lights of the old town were coming into view directly below them, not the bright glitter of electric bulbs but the mildness of oil wicks sending their steady yellow beams among the trees. As a boy he had often coasted to town from here. This was the steepest descent of the Long Stretch, and the horses let themselves into it gingerly, the wagon tongue rising and the horses’ collars thrusting out in protest. John Donner had the feeling he was descending from where he could never return.

They passed the white Shollenberger house high on its
long flight of wooden steps, passed the light and dark brown house of Mr. Kirtz, who drooled on his beard and the green-groceries he sold in the basement of the Eagle Hotel, passed the curious blue house where lived the girl in his school who would never speak above a whisper in class. Years afterward he heard that she had married and had twins, and he had always pictured her in his mind whispering to her children while other Unionville women shouted and threatened.

The wagon was almost down, crossing the alley which the Uptown boys took going home from school. Beyond, he could see Kronos Street lying peaceful, leafy and unchanged, with snug houses under the trees and the Methodist church and old tannery on opposite corners. The driver took his team and wagon across without pausing for traffic. Looking up and down the old street, the passenger could feel an almost frightening solitude. There were no headlights as far as he could see. Sleepy lights slanted from a few houses, from the post office up the hill and from stores scattered among the dwellings.

“I’ll get off here, if I may,” John Donner said. The driver pulled up his horses but his passenger didn’t get off. “Are you acquainted in Unionville?” he asked.

“A little.” The driver took a fresh chew.

“Do you know any of the stores?”

“Well, there’s Smith and Reinbold, and Kipps, Donner and Company.”

At the latter name, the stranger felt a tightening in his chest.

“Do you know if Harry Donner could still be living?”

“Living! I didn’t know he was dead! I seen him a month ago up at Primrose delivering in the Patch.”

Emotion and a certain excitement came up in John Donner. Suddenly he remembered.

“My coat. I forgot it. I left it up in the car.”

“You come on the railroad?” And when the other didn’t reply: “Well, first thing I noticed about you was you had no coat and no hat on. A man don’t hardly need a coat this kind of weather, but it’s unhealthy to go without your hat. It chills the brain. Now, I don’t have an extra hat but I have a coat I don’t use much. It was Jake Stroud’s. His widow gave it to me when he died. You can have it till you get yours. If you don’t mind wearing a dead man’s coat. It could turn cold on you overnight this time of year.”

“Thank you,” the stranger said. “I’ll leave it at Donner’s store for you to pick up next time you come through.” He
climbed down over the wheel and waited for the wagon to pass. It moved by with extraordinary slowness. The driver lifted his hand good-by. There was something strange about him, John Donner told himself, but then there had always been something strange about “die leit ivver der barrick,” the over-the-mountain people.