The Waters of Kronos Read Free Page A

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 beenburied 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 andbroken 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,