The Waters of Kronos Read Online Free

like I was a cat. Well, on the Fourth ofJuly 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 hadstarted 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 concentrationand 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 downin the turning hollow he knew it must come to an end in water and