The Waters of Kronos (8 page)

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 and 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.

The walker could smell the new tannery now as he went down the Methodist church hill. Across from it lived another tannery owner, whose wife and eight children, John Donner knew, were within the decade to die of tuberculosis. Passing, he could see some of them tonight through the bay window, Mrs. Bambrick, a gracious woman, reading to three of her younger children. They made a disturbing scene, the blond
hair of the girl down over her shoulders, the boys too young and fair for death. There had been a time, John Donner grimly remembered, when he wished he might have knowledge of the future.

Oh, the town was shot through with things now he would give a great deal not to know, tragedies that cried tonight to be halted before it was too late. He put down his head as he passed the bitter house where Helen Easterly had taken her life some four months after John Donner as a boy had seen her with three older boys lying in the straw of her grandfather’s stable. And there was the house where Alice Seltzer had her girl child in the dead of night, never to see her again. Before daylight they had taken the babe twenty-five miles by horse and buggy to the Lebanon hospital, from which she was adopted by a country couple to be brought up in the Amish faith and never to know that her father and uncle were one.

Certain houses almost cringed as he passed, but the sorriest, most wretched and hopeless of all was the frame cottage of the Flails. John Bonner himself at the age of ten had come with the curious to see the blood still dripping into the tiny front room while upstairs in two still smaller and more accursed rooms lay huddled shapes that had once been Griff
Flail’s wife and four small children, struck down in their sleep by the father, who had then dispatched himself. It was a masterly job by an experienced hand, for Griff was a butcher for Sherm Rhine, and the nearest neighbors during the night had never heard a sound.

As John Donner approached the tragic little house tonight he could see the soft lump of Mrs. Flail, still alive, with two of her younger children, one rocking in her arms, the other at play at her feet. Concern for them swept him, and he halted at the rail.

“Go away!” he cried, his voice thick. “Leave Griff. Leave him tonight. Go home. Don’t risk another day or it might be too late.”

The answer he got was horrified silence. He saw that the mother had snatched up the second child and was staring at him through the dusk, while neighbors started up from their porches to see who was threatening a poor woman and did she need help to save herself and her small children from a madman?

Perhaps he was mad, he told himself, expecting others to listen to his ravings. He escaped uptown, but he felt debased. In youth or even manhood walking was a joy, effortless, almost an act of flight, but given age and weariness
the walker was aware of its grotesqueness, to be cut in two below the waist and able to transport yourself about only by setting one of these severed parts in front of you and then the other, and so on monotonously like a tadpole split down the middle imagining itself king of creation.

Everywhere he went now he thought he tasted a strange bitterness in the air as if the unhappy Unionville dead released by the hour were abroad in the town, trying like he to find solace on the streets where they had walked before, leaving trails of melancholy and despair. He puzzled over the deep insupportable sadness. Were he and the dead the only victims or did many of the living feel it, too? At this very moment here in Unionville were there those who went about their chores and errands, confessing nothing to those about them, saying “It’s a warm evening” or “See you tomorrow,” carrying their grief with them to their beds and to their feet when they got up in the morning, never knowing its source, nor did any other man?

Some of the stores were closing but the depot remained open and lighted, waiting for the eight fifty-five from Auburn, the last train till the early miners’ train in the morning. John Donner was grateful for the open waiting room. He felt a little peace here in this house that belonged to an
absentee landlord and was free from the pressures of the personally occupied. Nobody resented his presence or showed that he wished him to leave. The very look of the benches was impersonal, meant for transients such as he and the two old men smoking and talking with long lapses of silence in this pleasant retreat shot with the scent of travel and far places and the sudden chatter of the telegraph instrument.

Sitting here, John Donner thought of the stations of the cross. Well, there were also stations of the aged and out of work of all ages, sanctuaries in which to catch their breath and pass that which lay such a daily burden on them. As a boy he had never thought much about it, but he could see the stations in his mind now, all over Unionville, the watch box at the crossing, the stools in Rehrer’s saddlery and at the shoemaker’s, standing room at Hoy’s blacksmith and wheelwright shops, the chairs on the DeWitt porch and store benches under the wooden mercantile awnings, a dozen facilities now vanished. And yet modern towns considered themselves humane and all-providing.

He watched with regret the train come in, the sprinkle of passengers and the two old men depart to their homes. Never had lighted windows looked so desirable and unattainable, even those far back from the street. As a boy he had
thought the peculiar and withdrawn lived there. Tonight the gloomy paths leading to these distant houses were gilded with golden light. Their windows and those of all Unionville houses, he noticed, had a mysterious and elusive quality like life, not artificial and glittering as the electric-lit windows he had left above the chasm. Down here they flushed with a soft bloom, as if a glowworm had turned on its cold light. You looked for it to go out but it kept on and you kept watching it like a modest flower or small miracle. Almost never did these windows plunge suddenly on, or off into blackness, like lamps fed by the fickle magnetic spark. They dimmed and faintly brightened as if even the inanimate here breathed and was alive.