Free The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

get-together the night before the funeral, with Uncle Peter and Aunt Hetty and all the great-uncles and -aunts from Philadelphia. He could never face his mother among so many. He had always had her to himself when they talked.
    “Annie!” he begged.
    “What!” she answered in the explosive Dutch intended to admonish or cow.
    “Annie. May I talk to you a little?”
    “Well, talk then!” she told him shortly, making no move to open the door.
    “I can’t talk through the cracks,” he protested, turning the brown knob. His mother almost never locked the door, but Annie—a little fighting cock of a woman afraid of neither man nor spook, she claimed—would turn the key, he remembered, whenever she was alone.
    “Why can’t you?” she came back unmoved.
    “Annie!” He shook the knob. “Let me in.”
    He could see her through the window standing small andbelligerent in the middle of the floor, her small white Dunkard cap on the back of her head.
    “What do you want in for?”
    “I want to see you and talk to you. I want to see the house again.”
    “You’re not coming in here,” Annie informed him. “Not till I know who you are.”
    “You know me,” he promised. “You know me well. Don’t you remember Johnny?” Why, as a small boy Annie had taken him everywhere.
    “Johnny who?” she wanted to know. He saw her take the light and come to the window. She put up the shade to the top with one hand and with the other held the lamp close against the pane. A long-forgotten childhood feeling went over him at sight of the old green print of her dress, of the cocky nose and the small mouth turned down.
    “I never seen you before, old man,” she informed him.
    “But you did!” he pleaded. “We were thick as thieves. You were very fond of me. You’d do anything for me.”
    “Well, you should of made hay while the sun shone,” she retorted. “I don’t know you no more.” She put the lamp back on the table.
    “Annie! You can’t do this to me!” he cried.
    She turned on him.
    “Why don’t you come in the daylight?” she scolded. “What do you come at night for like a thief trying to sneak and slobber your way in where you have no right?”
    The old man stood silent. That had shaken him. What could he say? It was the great riddle. He could only answer that this was the way it was. There was no use trying to explain to Annie. After a little he turned and went defeated to the street. As he stood there looking back at the house such yearning came up in him that he could scarcely stand it, a yearning for many things vanished, but most of all for what as a boy he had valued so little and almost despised.
    He found himself presently moving up the street. Once upon a time he had thought that man had invented nothing better than town life on a warm evening with the feel of neighbor friends around you, with the south wind stirring the town leaves and the lazy twang of frogs from the canal. The silent shadows of toads hopped in the garden. Occasional townspeople would pass on the street, the girls in light summer dresses, and all the time the drift of voices from front porches where families sat with occasional words betweenthem or to those passing and pausing to chat and tell some news, so that by the time one went from Mill to Maple Street a social evening could be passed.
    John Donner was conscious of them now, the mysterious disembodied voices of the unseen, the immediate ones subsiding at his approach and resuming when he had barely passed. “Who was that?” he could hear them ask. He tried to conquer the alien reception with a hearty “Good evening,” as he remembered his father doing, but although they replied dutifully, there was reservation in their voices and he could still hear their speculation after he was by.
    He missed the fortifying sound of Hoy’s blacksmith shop as he passed it, closed for the night. The grimy bare and muscled arm on the anvil might have put a little iron in his veins, he