You Will Never See Any God: Stories (13 page)

He moved his fingers and he crushed the brittle butterfly. In one instant, now, the man thought, I give thee death, and the moment was gone, the instant, the now, already past, was irretrievable. He let the fragility fall, and there was still the light-yellow smudge of the wing coloring covering the blood on the man’s fingertips.

The sun was like a white-hot hammer on his skull. The pain of his legs had settled to a heavy and throbbing sharpness. His mouth was arid and his lips were beginning to crack. He was aware of a labored, groaning sound when he worked to take a breath. And the worst was the sun and the metal sky.

It was as if he could feel his brain shrinking and drying out and beginning to flake off in little feathers of nothingness. It was then he thought that he would die. He knew no one would come. If it would only rain, he thought, if there would only be water.

He began to go under for moments and he did not want to lose consciousness, and he fought it, but gradually it overcame him and he would start into consciousness again and nothing would be changed. The sun hung in the same place, and the birds chattered and the breezes moved the top branches of the willows.

Two sparrows dropped from the trees and hung upon the hemp weeds, and their bright black eyes noted the man and forgot him, and the birds hit the pebbly wash of the ditch in a tangle of grayness and feathers, breeding. The female fled, but the male hopped with insolence almost to the man’s face before it too flew away. A while later the goldfinches came to the ditch and they pecked at the foxtail seeds. They clawed at the weeds and they ate and left.

The man prayed. He tried to remember some of the prayers he’d learned long before, but even the common prayer that began with “Our Father” did not come back to him, and he said to himself, dear god, dear god, bring me water, let it rain. He heard himself murmuring, highpitched and laboring, and he said, let the others find me. Let me have water, god.

When he looked again, the sun had visibly lowered, but it was no cooler. He thought perhaps he might have slept, for his head was clearer and he remembered many things. His legs did not pain so badly and he could actually raise himself on his elbow without the pain in his chest preventing it. The puddle of gaso
line was still there beside him, and it was widening, and he noticed a different coloration, that the liquid was redder and thicker, and it came to him that he was bleeding, that he had been losing that steady trickle of blood all day and his blood and the gasoline were collecting there in front of him.

He was enraged suddenly, and he wanted to weep in his terrible anger. He pressed with all his strength against the hot wheel of the tractor, but nothing moved. He struck at the red steel of the tractor, and the metal was too hot to touch. The metal was foreign and alien there, burning and glistening, and there he was, he thought in his fury, caught beneath the machine, pinned by the hot, unwholesome metal into the earth, and he could not do anything at all. He beat at the metal until his hands began to bleed again, and it was no use. The hot steel of the tractor was shiny and undented.

The man cursed the machine. The tractor was an enemy to him, he thought, it had thrown him and trapped him, and it would not help him. It had been the tool to say, I give thee death. It had conspired to crush him, it and the sun. And yet, he thought, when the ineffectual struggle was finished, when he lay back again, and yet, the machine was only part of it, for the hostile earth, the sliding bank and the hard, pebbly wash pinned him there, too, and there was the hostile sun, and the blue-burner sky. He was a fool, he thought, there was nothing hostile there, nothing had conspired against him, the world was unchanged. There was really no concern with these things around him, with these things that led him to death, there was only disconcern and utter detachment. He was the alien, the hostile one, there. The land and the things that grew from the land, and the metal sky and the hot sun, and even the machine, fashioned by hands not unlike his, none of them had any concern, and even though he was wedded to that soil, pinned by the earth and the machine, and his blood mixed
with the blood of the tractor, he had no connection with anything there. The units were detached; he was alien; he was alone. And he would die as he had lived. It was a terrible realization.

He felt the warm rubber tire, the same tire that pinned him there. The tractor will be all right again, he thought, they will lift the machine and drain it and clean it thoroughly and fill it with fuel and it will run as well as ever; life is not a part of it, it cannot be crushed. He remembered the pride he had had with it, and how he had loved to run this tractor and how he had talked of the work it could do, and how things were better because of this machine. And now only the machine would ever be good again, even if they now lay dead like this together, and the blood ran out of them both and mixed in the gravel beside them.

He turned his face away from the tractor. The sun beat down. The butterflies swarmed, the birds fought and screamed, the breeze touched the languid treetops.

The sun had set itself on the rim of the ditch when the deerflies struck him. They came buzzing suddenly and they tangled in his hair and found his ears to burrow into and they struggled into his nostrils and bit sharply and angrily. The man moved his hands feebly against the flies. He had lost all of his strength, he thought, and then he remembered the bloating, fly-infested bodies of animals he had seen dead in fields, and how the maggots were working almost before the carcass was cool. He thought how it would be to find him like that, green and with the worms lacerating his face, and he fought against the flies, but they were inexorable and angry. The man became furious too, and he struck at them, and then he dug at the dirt and he covered his skin and his head with dust and crumbs of dirt. The flies persisted, but the man covered himself finally, and he lay beneath the gentle and cool layer of dust, with his hand over his nostrils, and the flies left gradually, and he was alone again.

The sun watched him lingeringly and moved with slowness beyond the edge of the bank. It was cool then, suddenly. The evening clouds came up, with the color of wine. The birds shrilled and worked high after mosquitoes. The butterflies were gone; they had gone with the sun. And there was the scurry of small animals in the weeds.

The flakes in his skull were falling rapidly now, he thought, there was no feeling in him anymore, it was as if the weight of the tractor was already off him, as if there was no machine, no life, no light, nothing around him; the world was settling in his flaking-off brain.

There was a padding sound near him and he saw the lean coyote slip along the bed of the ditch, and the coyote sniffed at the straw hat and it turned the hat, and the light wind rolled the hat very near the man, almost to his head. The coyote saw the man then and it came up, sniffing gingerly. The coyote had eyes that were yellow-green and the eyes burned in the darkness like oil, and the animal came to sniff at the dust-covered and swollen strangeness, and it brought its wet nostrils to within an inch of the man’s. The coyote backed away and it began to pant lightly, and it scratched itself, leisurely, and then its head came up, alert, and the animal turned and slipped away, without sound.

The man thought he heard voices and shouts and footsteps and he looked up. No, he had been dreaming, he thought, and he turned his body quite easily. He recalled the yellow-green eyes, like fire, and he wondered if he had dreamed that too. His hand flung out and he touched moisture, and his mouth gagged after water, and it took him a thrilling instant to realize it was the gasoline puddle beside him. It was thick now, and coarse with blood.

The night came on blackly, the stars were out, and the locusts and crickets buzzed with violence near beside him. The moon rose above the ditch, and it was enormous and flattened and gold.
The eyes and the mouth of it were agonized and lamenting. The man was glad when he saw the moon. The moon is my sister, he thought. The flakes within his skull were falling upon his eyes, and he thought of someone or something bringing him water. Overhead, the wind-swayed willows made scratches against the terrible moon.

The Quick and the Dead

I was looking for stray calves that wind-whipped, violently cold morning. The cattle were in the yards, but there were two missing and so I went out across the stubble fields to look for them, while my brother, who owned that farm, finished the morning work. The snow was deep in the fields; it had started to snow lightly during the afternoon of the previous day, in flurries at first, and during the night it had come heavily, with a high wind, and it was drifted and banked with an ice-hard covering.

The day was clear, with an icicle-blue clearness, and the frigid sun huddled not far above the horizon, surrounded in its rainbow of sun dogs. At the hilltop, a half-mile from the place, the wind was like frozen stilettos in my eyes and on my face and it took my breath away. The wind howled fiercely out of the northwest, carrying the snow and the cold with it. I was dressed warmly, wrapped in sheepskin to my eyes, but the cold was still vicious. The hill was long, dividing the field into two nearly equal halves, and the half I crossed to took up a quarter-section of land itself. The field had once been an entire farm, but the farmstead now lay abandoned and gray, surrounded by the thistle-like trees in
one corner of the land, not far from the schoolhouse, which too had long since been boarded-up and abandoned.

Across the long hollow, beside the schoolhouse, I saw a patch of green, metallic and shiny, and there were drifts all around the gray building. It was too cold to think well, and the oddness of that bright color made no impression on me at first. I saw the two calves huddled in a hollow, under the lip of a snow bank, not far away, and I ran down there, and I pulled the calves up roughly, because I knew their lives depended on moving quickly. They were without energy and I pushed them along ahead of me to the hilltop, slapping them with my hands, and they huddled their frail backs with the wind and finally they began to scamper off towards the place.

I wondered at the greenness, and I looked across the long valley at the schoolhouse. It was difficult to see against that piercing glare of the sun on the glazed white snow and against the wind. The green metal was there, obliterated at moments by the blowing snow. It was a fallen shutter, I thought at first, but I knew there were no metal shutters there, and no signs blown in on that isolated road and by that building. I knew I would have to go down there.

It was hard going, and the hollow was drifted up, and I kept breaking through the crust of the snow. I came up from the hollow, sinking in the deep snow and struggling through it, and the wind was vicious, and the cold sank into me, like fangs. I crossed the bedraggled schoolyard fence. There had once been many trees around the schoolhouse, but only grass and weeds grew there anymore, and there were two old box elder trees, near dying, and two already dead and fallen over, and one small evergreen, and a covey of plum brush which nothing could kill. The building itself was ratty and tattered, and some of the shingles had come off and the boards hung loosely from the black windows. The snow was
drifted deeply around the schoolhouse, and the roof was swept clear by the wind.

I circled the building warily, for even in my chilled mind I was a little afraid. It was as I had guessed; there was no shutter there, no sign blown down. A car was parked beside the building, out of the northwest wind, and the snow had blown in, drifting over the front of the car. It was the green metal side of the automobile that I had seen from the hilltop. I hesitated, and then I kicked through the deep snow to the car. The front of the car and the side of it near the building were covered over with hard but fragile-looking little curlicues of wind-shaped snow. The snow was as clean and brilliant white as a wedding veil. The windows of the car were frosted over from the inside, and I knew that meant that someone had been within the car when it was freezing out, and the moisture had condensed and frozen on the windows. I was frightened, and I slapped my mittened hands together. I knew the car had not been there the previous evening, for the snow had only begun then, and I had brought the tractor down across the stubble, herding the cattle back to the barns, and nothing had been there. The car had come in the night, when the wind was still blowing the dirt country road clear. Perhaps the people in the car had set out on foot, I thought; I hoped they had, for there was nothing that could live long in that weather.

I rubbed the glass gingerly, but the frost was inside, I remembered stupidly, and then, through the fragile, laced frost at the edges of the glass, I saw the clump on the front seat, and I knew then, even in my frozen brain, what had happened. I shouted and I beat upon the window. I tried the door but it was locked. Nothing moved.

I wore heavy leather mittens and I hit the window once, twice, three times, and the window smashed, shattering glass and the window frost into the car, and I reached in and opened the door.

A man and a woman were on the front seat and they were in an embrace, and they were dead. A blanket was pulled up over part of them. There was a quick coldness in my belly and I was afraid I would vomit, but I did not. I did not look again at them, then. I pulled the blanket farther over them both, hiding the heads, and then I heard the little buzzing sound. The ignition was on. I reached in carefully, over the two, not touching them, and turned the keys off. They had come there in the night, I thought, and because it was cold they had left the motor and the heater run, and the gas had been drawn in and the odorless monoxide covered and suffocated them, before the storm and the cold had penetrated the car. The engine had run until all the gasoline was gone.

I was trembling and I closed the door and took a few steps away, and I could not think of anything, and then I was driven back to the car because I could not believe it. It was as if I had fallen somewhere in that bitter cold and was freezing to death and I was dreaming it all. I opened the door once more. They were there, and I knew them. The woman was Mathilda Heron, the wife of a farmer who lived not far away, and the man was Conrad Wenzel, a young man not yet thirty, who was new in the town and who was a teacher in the junior high school.

I slammed the door hard and I ran and the wind lashed, prickly and cold, against the backs of my legs, and even though I fell several times in that deep and treacherous snow, I did not stop running. The hill was long, and the ice-air clutched at my lungs, and each breath became a cold and bitter agony, like teeth clamped into my chest, but I could not stop running.

My brother was waiting for me and he was standing in the warmth where the cattle were feeding, and I leaned, sweating and cold, against the board fence, and I told him what I had seen.

He blinked and he struck his forehead with his hand and asked
me twice if I was sure, and I nodded each time. He swore and shook his head and said the sheriff would have to be called.

“The sheriff will have to come quickly,” I said.

“Why?” my brother asked. “They won’t move from the car.”

“They don’t matter,” I said. “Everybody else will find out if it isn’t done quietly and quickly.”

My brother shrugged his shoulders, and he looked at me as if to ask what else we could do. It was not our affair, and there was nothing either of us could do about it.

“Yes, all right,” I said. “Call the sheriff.”

We went up to the house where it was warm, and my brother placed the call, and while he waited for the sheriff to come to the phone, we looked at each other, and we both knew what it meant in that country, with the party lines and all the men sitting at home in front of their stoves, gathering reports from their telephone-listening wives. My brother tried to tell the sheriff to simply come out, but the sheriff, too, could see the weather; and it was eighteen miles from the county seat to our place, and so finally my brother had to tell him angrily that there were two dead people in a car, and the sheriff asked him if he knew who they were, and my brother said “no,” and hung up. We knew then that the whole neighborhood, the whole town, would know within a matter of hours, would hungrily feed on the details, in the way that starved cats pull at the entrails of fish until they had them all.

My brother swore shortly, surprising his wife.

We could hear the phone ringing and my brother’s wife answering it before we got out the door; the neighbors were beginning to call.

We took the tractor, and axes to cut wood for a fire, and some gasoline in case the car could be moved, and two old blankets. The tractor had chains and was powerful and it did not have trouble with the drifts. We went up over the hill, the way I had come,
for it was the shortest way. We pulled the fence down at the schoolhouse yard and drove the tractor up beside the car. The blowing snow was filtering in upon the two people now, and they were partly frozen; we could tell that by the strange, hardened white color of the flesh of them.

I attacked some fallen branches with the axe and chopped out some firewood, and I built a fire in a small bare spot, not far from the car. I pulled down some of the dry boards that had been used to cover the schoolhouse windows, and in a short while there was a good blaze going.

My brother looked at the bodies and he came over to the fire, and we talked about them.

When the farm a quarter-mile to the south had been operating, the road along there had been in use, and the country schoolhouse was used, too, a few years before, but with the enlarging of our farm and the other farms around there and the hard-surfacing of the county road a half-mile to the south, the country road and the school had no purpose, and both were abandoned. The road and the schoolhouse yard were used lavishly in the summer times by high school lovers. Many times, late in the evening, while at work in the fields, we had seen the cars parked in the same place where this green car stood. It was a favorite place, near enough to town, and there was no traffic, and it had opportunity and darkness. And these two had come here in the dead of winter, for their privacy, their opportunity to make love without anyone knowing, for they were both married, and each of them had children. It was a good place for lovers, and these, too, would have escaped without notice, but for the treachery of the snow and the cold.

My brother and I went to see if the car could be moved, but the drifts were packed and hard, and it was too viciously cold, and we returned to the fire. I thought of the woman, Mathilda Heron, and of her husband, Rudy Heron, and what kind of man he was,
and I said, “We should move them out of the car at least. If Rudy comes down here, if he hears about it, there will be trouble.”

My brother nodded, but he hesitated when I opened the door of the car. The bodies were wound in the blanket, and to move them out and separate them, we would have to lift them out after the blanket was taken off. My brother looked at the woman’s face, and he would not touch them, although I knew he was very tough about seeing things dead, and he was three years older than I and had had more experience. I could not move them alone, and I did not ask him again to help. The woman did something to my brother, I could see by his face.

My brother had not been married long, and he had told me a long time before about the woman, Mathilda Heron, and how she used to get drunk sometimes in the bars in town, and how the men could talk easily to her, and she loved the attention of men, and they could take her out to the country, if the men pleased her, and most of them did. My brother had been one of these men, a year or so before, and I knew he was thinking about her. There was a gentleness in his eyes, and I knew he was thinking that even though she may have been too free, perhaps even a whore, she had done no harm to him, or to any of the other men.

The woman’s husband, Rudy Heron, was intensely jealous of her, and he used to get drunk, and try to follow her, and he swore he would kill anybody with her, but everybody laughed at him behind his back and thought him to be a fool, because he could not adequately keep his woman. The longer it carried on, the worse his jealousy became, and the louder his talk, and the drunker he was on those hot and violent evenings, and then even he knew he could not take her home as he should, or follow her, all he could do was slump over the bar and mutter and rage to himself.

Mathilda Heron was a pretty woman, I remembered. She had
clear, clean skin, and a very large bosom, which, haltered and proper, she liked to thrust before the eyes of the men, and she had bright, very alive, brown eyes, and light-brown hair, and nice enough legs, with full, smooth calves, in spite of the four children she had borne. Even those four young children could not dissuade the woman, and one could see in her eyes her tigerish wants, and her husband was not her man.

The schoolteacher we knew only vaguely. I had seen Conrad Wenzel a few times in town, and he was a slender, cleanly handsome man. He was always neat and well-dressed, I remembered, as if he had come directly from a shower, and he had a ready smile, and I vaguely remembered his wife beside him on the street, and a child or two. His wife was dark-haired and pleasant, and slender, and I did not know her further than that.

Then they started coming, the neighbors. They came over the hill on their tractors, following the tracks we had made. They had heard about it by the telephone, and now they came, like vultures, to look upon the bodies. I said what I thought to my brother, and he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Ah, we probably would be doing the same thing if somebody else found them.”

“But it’s different,” I said. “It makes it our responsibility this way, because we found them.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.