The Waters of Kronos (12 page)

The name produced instant reaction.

“Any relation to Harry next door?”

“Distantly,” the old man murmured. “He doesn’t remember me. I saw him at the store last evening.” He felt his weak position, almost that of an impostor. “I’m a little more closely related to her.”

“She was a Morgan,” the doctor said. “I didn’t know of any Donners on her side.”

“Yes, there were three or four of us Donners related to her,” the old man insisted. Then suddenly: “I wish I could see her. Do you think she would come?”

“Just how are you related?” the doctor persisted.

The old man sank back.

“It was such a long time ago.” He closed his eyes. It was no use. It was all so difficult, complicated and painful to explain
the simplest reality. He heard the doctor speak to Mrs. Bonawitz.

“You might ask Mrs. Donner. But I’m not sure he knows. He’s pretty weak and his memory’s affected. I shouldn’t like to move him today. Could you possibly give him a bed tonight? He may come around and remember who he is in the morning. Then we can telegraph and get him home.”

Mr. Bonawitz protested.

“She’s had too much sickness already, Doc.”

“You wouldn’t put him out on the street,” she said angrily, turning on her husband. “He reminds me of Dawdy. He was out of his head a little at the end, too.” She turned to the doctor. “I’ll keep him for one night.”

With the doctor helping, they half lifted, half pushed and drew him up the narrow stairs. In the back room they undressed him, then pulled down over his head a starched nightshirt such as he had seen his father wear. They laid him on the rope bed and left.

He lay there quietly enjoying the clean sheets, listening to the rain on the roof, the slow drip to the alleyway below. He remembered as a small boy standing at the front window next door watching raindrops such as these exploding in a
sidewalk puddle that wasn’t really a puddle but a sea with waves, winds, a distant shore and Christ asleep in the boat. That afternoon he had gone with his brothers to paddle in the river brown with flowing soil, the water warm from its passage over the warm earth, the air rank with the smells of river and banks. Their clothes lay in a dry spot under the trees. It must have been soon thereafter he had lain sick in bed one day aware for the first time of the wide rain system advancing, the thickening clouds, the rain starting, increasing, the parched patches of hairy moss in his mind drinking and greening, the dried-out bogs reviving, the forest mold soaking, the bark of trees blackening and rainy-weather springs flowing. Ever after he had been a spectator of the cosmic forces bringing sea change to the dying earth. Why couldn’t man, he wondered, observe so dispassionately the advance of other cosmic forces, those of the greater change, noting first their signals, then their approach, feeling their nearness, their presence, their strong arms not made with hands carrying him out of reach of the power of man’s mind to know or understand?

The low ceiling here was exactly like the ceiling in the back room across the wall, sloping a little toward the rear, with the paper stained over the back window where water
had once seeped in. But there were two beds over there. Gene and Timmy slept in the other and one night after he was asleep they had taken the shepherd’s crook from the wall and “stirred apple butter,” he being the kettle. Waking, he had tried to kill them, throwing with all his might the silver-lead rock Uncle Dick had brought from Colorado, missing them and mutilating his mother’s picture,
The Wedding Procession
by Delacroix that she had got from Larkin’s.

“It’s the Scarlett temper,” his father had said, although he had something of a temper himself without benefit of Scarlett blood. Uncle Howard said the Scarletts had been French, very sensuous and high strung, and Cousin Myra, who was ambitious, believed that they had noble blood, which was what made them so high-minded and demanding. She said she had heard of an old document in which the name was spelled Scarlatti. John Donner knew later that this was an Italian name. He suspected that Myra had been duped and sometimes doubted he had French blood at all, but he never doubted the Scarlett temperament and wildness, the sudden rush of desire to let go, come what may, to do the violent and forbidden. He remembered an overwhelming impulse as a very small child to jump on a moving coal train, and when a little older to “borrow” a neighbor’s twelve-gauge shotgun
to shoot quail he had seen crossing the road. He had begged, wept, demanded of his mother. The quail were in Mr. Ulrich’s meadow right now waiting to be shot. She daren’t stop him. The world would come to an end. Compelling pressure rose in him like flood water tearing at a dam. His will couldn’t be thwarted.

His mother had understood. She knew just how to calm and gradually check him. He had seen the same fire at rare times in her, the head up, face alive, the usually calm gray eyes shining with the deviltry of some witty rejoinder or daring enjoyment. Most were agreed it came from the Scarlett blood but all had a different name for it. Aunt Teresa called it “the lambent flame of the Scarletts”; Uncle Timothy, “the Scarlett genius”; Aunt Jess, “going off on a Scarlett tangent” or, when she felt kindly toward the inheritor, “the Scarlett mind.” “You’ve got the Scarlett mind,” she had told her nephew after he had written his first book. He wasn’t sure if it was irony or a compliment, and came to the conclusion it must be both, chiefly the latter with just enough of the former to keep him from getting a “swelled head.” His mother seldom, if ever, spoke of the Scarletts. She just said “Mother” or “Grandfather” or “Aunty” and you knew whom she meant.

“Is there anything you want?” Mrs. Bonawitz asked suddenly, coming into the room.

“I’d like,” he said in a low voice, “if I could see my mother.”

“Yes, I guess all of us would,” Mrs. Bonawitz told him.

“I’d like,” he persisted, “to see Mrs. Donner.”

“You asked that once before,” Mrs. Bonawitz reminded. “If I see her in the yard I’ll tell her.”

“Will you ask her,” he begged, “if she’d let me see the house? Tell her I’ve come a long way. Tell her I’d be very grateful. I wouldn’t be any trouble. Tell her I used to live there once.”

“When was that?” Mrs. Bonawitz asked suspiciously.

“It was a long time ago,” he murmured, slipping back.

He could see rank disbelief in her eyes.

“Now you go to sleep,” she told him.

He tried to do as she said, aware how dependent the old were on the younger, how they must submit, put will behind them, let things take their course. Through his dozing he could hear voices downstairs, first one then the other, sometimes mingling, going on and on, hers sharp, short, sarcastic, his deeper, heavier, ominous. It sounded like quarreling but John Donner knew his townspeople better. Once he had
asked his returning Grandfather Donner, “How’s everybody in Reading?” “I don’t know everybody in Reading,” his grandfather had snapped. And yet he had one of the softest hearts in Unionville. No tramp dare go away from his door hungry. John Donner’s own father would sound angry and embroiled at a distance talking to the boy’s mother at home. If in the midst of it the doorbell rang, he would compose himself for a moment, then go to the door singing a cheerful hymn to correct any wrong impression on the caller.

Just the same there was something in those voices, in the harsh Pennsylvania German tone and testiness, that aroused deep down in John Donner a kind of terror. It reminded him of something, something monstrous, of some other voice, one that gave him a feeling of indescribable fear and repulsion. Whose voice it was buried down there he didn’t know. Perhaps if he knew he would know why he had come back and what he sought.

Lying there with closed eyes, he tried to find some clue to the identity of the frightener. He let the remembered horror hang over him, not too painfully, just enough to bring back figures and faces that moved through the back of his brain, shadowy forms, but he thought he recognized them well enough. He must have been very small the first time his
mother had taken him to the butcher shop but he could still see the wolfish grin on the man coming out of the door who told him, “You better watch out they don’t keep you and cut you up with the meat.” For several years he couldn’t see meat chopped up without feeling his own thighs and breast under the chopper with the thighs and breasts of the harmless beasts of the field.

He was a little older but not much when he went with the other boys of his Sunday-school class to see Tuck Helwig the day before his funeral. They didn’t call it viewing then. Something in him dreaded moving closer to the small active body he had known so well, now lying cold and still in the terrifying small white casket. When he shrank back, an old man, probably not as old as he was now, had chided him in the dialect, “Sei net so bong. Er schtinkt net.” It wasn’t the rebuke but the coarseness to his young friend that troubled him and to this day he couldn’t smell the overpowering sweetness of carnations without faint nausea.

Now other faces were floating into his mind. As a boy he had found something manly in Pennsylvania Dutch outdoor men, like Cap Ridenour marching at the head of Company C, Fourth Regiment, down Kronos Street in his broad white stripes, or Guy Hains and Frank Grebble,
noted hunters, pigeon fanciers and dead shots, who knew every foot of the Shade Mountain. He had looked up to them admiringly till he went to a pigeon shoot across the railroad and saw Frank Grebble tear out the eye of a live pigeon before putting it into the trap, burning its rear hard with his lighted cigar so it might fly erratic with pain and be the harder to bring down.

But the face that hung darkest in his mind was that of the woman on Canal Street where you came down the bridge over the railroad, a dark dried-out face with eyes even blacker than Mrs. Bonawitz’s, eyes that took hold of you like flypaper and wouldn’t let go. Townspeople had seen her turn into a black cat and go through a knothole no bigger than your thumb. When old Mose Brant had shot his cow that wouldn’t give milk, Dr. Sypher had had to pick shot out of Katarina Messer’s buttocks. One morning her neighbor on one side heard her talking to her neighbor on the other. “I dreamt you hung yourself last night,” she said to Mrs. Trumbo, who had seen much trouble, and two days hence Ray Trumbo, who lived in Turkeytown, had to cut down his mother from a rafter. Most of the young people hated to pass Katarina’s house, especially at night or even in the daytime when they knew she was sitting at the window
watching them. There was one way to protect yourself, the orthodox exorcism, “Kissmice,” and hardly a boy or girl in Unionville who didn’t say it aloud or under the breath and keep saying it religiously, “Kissmice, kissmice, kissmice, kissmice,” until he or she was safely past and free.

The old man saw Mrs. Bonawitz come into the room with a yellow wooden tray. She propped him up with a heavy quilt folded behind the bolster. On the tray were greasy pannhas, which the uninitiated call scrapple, fried potatoes, plain bread and brown coffee boiled in the customary pot seldom emptied of grounds till no more could be added. He remembered what his mother would bring him as a child when bedridden, a soft-boiled egg, delicately browned toast and cambric tea.

“Feed me, Mamma!” he would say and she would put the sulphur-tarnished spoon with some egg to his wide-open mouth, this in compensation for being sick, giving him with each bite an indescribably warm shining look of the eyes.

“Now you got to eat,” Mrs. Bonawitz said bruskly, “if you want to stay out of the bury hole.”

There was the sound of a door downstairs and of voices, then Mr. Bonawitz’s heavy tones in the dialect from the kitchen.

“I guess you don’t understand Dutch,” she told him. “When I was out back I told Johnny Donner you were related to his mom and wanted to see her. My man just called that Johnny’s over now. I told him to send him up.”

“Johnny Donner?” the old man asked, struggling to sit erect, his one thought how he would look.

She seemed amused.

“You don’t need to mind. He’s only a boy,” she said.

He heard indistinct sounds in the hall below, then steps on the stairs, coming closer and closer, two or three treads at a time. Could it be, he wondered, that he had ever had a step so light and effortless? A boy rounded the door jamb and stood in the doorway. His eyes fled from the strange old man to the woman.

“I told her, Mrs. Bonawitz. She said she couldn’t make it any more today on account of the funeral and company but he can see her tomorrow.” He said it quickly, almost as one word, and moved to go.

“Wait!” the old man called hoarsely and the boy turned with uneasy reluctance. Was it possible, the man thought, that he had once been slender, fair-skinned and light-minded as this, his blood vessels new and pliable, his eyes like spring
water, his face fresh as a girl’s? “Speak—say something!” he enjoined himself, then aloud, “How is your mother?”

“She’s all right,” the boy said as if with surprise that the old man would ask about her.

“Does she still bake your favorite graham bread and baked beans?”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so?” the man said. “Don’t you know? Don’t you like it?”

“Yes, sir. It’s all right.”

“And the lamp in your room? Does she still keep it lighted for you at night?”

The boy stirred uncomfortably.

“Yes, sir,” he said and started to turn.

“Wait!” the stranger begged.

He must be careful, he told himself. He daren’t frighten him away. A hundred things he would like to say. Did he appreciate his mother, his youth? If not, for God’s sake beat the ancient method of the zodiac, the slow unwieldy scheme of awareness after deprivation, the cruel system that taught you most beautifully and effectively when it was too late. On second thought, badgering would do no good.
You didn’t learn the issues of life by being taught, threatened, reminded, coaxed. You could so learn the lesser arts and graces that never entered your real being but were a kind of mark on the forehead that gave you entrance to doors in life and in the end mattered nothing, like wooden beads on the abacus that never actually counted anything but zero.