The Waters of Kronos Read Online Free PDF Page B

mission of light. To the lands that are lying in darkness and night.” This was the gospel version. Once in a great while he would sing the real words, “There’s a young heart awaiting thy coming tonight.”
    Chiefly his father sang when active, running up and down the stairs, when going to answer the doorbell, while working with his hands. He seldom sang sad songs except at home. An audience enlivened him, gave him power. He liked people,was stimulated by them. He made his son wince by speaking to everyone he met on the street, male or female, young or old. Not only here in Unionville but in Lebanon, where people looked after him curiously. Uncle Dick said his brother-in-law had once cordially greeted a painted-up whore they passed on Center Street in Pottsville. He also embarrassed his son in church. He sang so much louder than necessary. Charley Miner once said he had looked for Harry Donner in a crowd of a thousand men roaring out “The Star Spangled Banner” in the Rajah Temple in Reading. He could hear him, he said, but he couldn’t see him. That was his father to a T. In church the boy imagined everyone staring at them, thinking it was showing off.
    Today outside the store the son recognized the song. Its name he didn’t know but he was startled by the words. It was almost as if his father knew he was there.
    “Lift high the latch, my boy, my boy,
    And wait outside no more.
    There’s love and rest, my boy, my boy,
    Within thy father’s door.”
    Gradually he knew better. He had heard his father sing it too often at home. The meaning in the words then and nowwas hidden. His father, he felt, had always sung at home in riddles, saying in music what he could never bring himself to reveal in speech. As a boy he had thought these particular words a warning to him to give up his youthful, dissenting ways, his shying from church and people, and enter into his father’s hearty way of life and religion.
    Now his father came back into view behind the counter. At the sight of his unmistakable black mustache and powerful movements, the old restraint the boy felt for his parent came over him. Why, he had asked himself a thousand times, did this stiffness exist between them? Nobody else appeared to feel that way toward his father. His cousin Pol, some few years his senior, adored him. Her brother, Matt, looked up to him, and Matt was no mollycoddle, a member of the bunch that put wagons and buggies in the canal on Halloween. Only he, Johnny, his oldest son, was uncomfortable with him. As a child he couldn’t easily fathom it except that his father was not his real but a foster father and that the constriction must come from his side, which was why the boy resented it so keenly, coming from one who was so open, friendly and companionable with everybody else.
    Once away from his father, he thought he had outgrown and forgotten it. And yet each time they met again, the incomprehensibleconstriction would rise between them. The stronger and heartier his father, the more stubborn and powerful the feeling would take form in the son. Standing here outside his father’s store after all these years, he could feel it tonight, gripping him without rhyme or reason, holding him back, a grown man, even today. Sometimes he wondered if, whatever it was, it hadn’t been the origin of his interest in books and nature, not born of commendable thirst for knowledge, but from a shying away from his father’s world of enthusiastic sociability with people, which had given him as a boy only difficulty and suffering so that he found relief in freedom and solitude in fields, the forest and the printed page, like an unreasoning moth released from the hand and soaring in air it had never taken cognizance of before.
    He came to himself with a start. Someone was coming up the store steps behind him. Whoever it was must have seen him standing here, peering through the windows. He turned and saw the lynxlike beard of Mr. Paxman, his blue eyes hard as