Free The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter Page A

thought, as it did for those who heard it day in and day out. But if it had been open, he would not have gone in. The street, that was for the stranger, for the unrecognized and unbidden. He passed the Knittle house built, they said, of bricks brought home in the Knittle dinner pail, two a day, from the brickyard where Oscar worked. Next door was the Ditrich house put up in canal days with a roof slanting much farther back than in front. All the boys at school had lookedup to Eddie Ditrich, whose uncle wrote him letters from the Richmond jailhouse.
    And now he was approaching the Swank house. Out on the West Coast on nights of winter rain he had more than once smiled over Emmy Swank, who in the early days boasted of one of the few bathrooms in Unionville but used the outside privy to “save the toilet.” Even on snowy nights they could see her go out the garden walk with a lantern. Now as he came closer he heard the raw voice of the totally deaf who talk constantly to conceal their handicap, halting tonight only when the stranger was almost abreast and then loudly before he had fully passed, “Who was that? I thought it walked like Harry Donner but it wasn’t stout enough. They say he’s going to be a preacher, at his age!”
    Oh, he told himself, the whole town was a living museum of people and places the like of which, once gone, would never be seen again. Back on Kronos Street, for Mifflin ran only to the school, he passed the shop of Dummy Noll, who had frothed at the mouth at young Stan Greenawalt, for taking him to be soled a pair of tattered shoes found in the canal. They were always baiting Dummy. Uptown was another deaf-mute place, Kissawetter’s, like a scene out of Grimm’sfairy tales, especially around Christmas, with roly-poly dolls rocking silently and toy figures mutely nodding and the proprietors, man and wife, making signs to the customers and the customers making signs to them until it seemed that the entire store and its glittering contents and all who came in had been put under a spell until the fairy prince should come and set them free.
    The combined jewelry and clothing store of Jimmy Pomeroy next door was another place of necromancy and magic, black magic to a small boy of the church, the fearful dummies in the shadows, the row of forbidden books by the arch agnostic Robert Ingersoll on the shelf, and behind the counter the gaunt black-garbed figure of Jimmy himself, a watch-maker’s magnifying glass glued to one eye, a ready and sonorous polemist who on Sundays walked the streets alone, absorbed by his grand thoughts, seeing almost no one, his face turned up to the heaven which church people said he was doomed never to see. Tonight John Donner remembered that a few days before he died Jimmy had written with soap on his bedroom mirror, “We fade and flutter at the end like leaves in the fall.” He felt a kinship for the man tonight, a desire to sound out his philosophy but a customer turned in ahead of him, and he went on up the street past the woodensteps to the feed store of Georgie Brandt, who had tippled too much at the hose house one night and woke up next morning to find he had bought Trot Maurer’s barber shop. Georgie couldn’t barber but he had got Trot to stay and barber for him, and when Trot went home for dinner Georgie would leave feed to his wife and come over to get a customer ready on the chair till Trot came back, lathering him and talking, till one day Trot didn’t come back and at the end an angry customer tore off the bib and put Georgie on the chair, lathering him till Georgie talked him out of it, for Georgie was a good talker and most people liked him.
    John Donner tried to laugh at the memory, but the laugh wouldn’t come, neither then nor when he passed the Daubert house, where young Cora and Jack had taught him the art of burping, swallowing air and storing it in the stomach until it could be belched out at will. One time in the midst of their accomplishment the