The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

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 blondhair 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 GriffFlail’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 wearinessthe 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