You Will Never See Any God: Stories (14 page)

“The other people,” I said.

“I don’t know what we’ve got to do with them,” he said.

The farmers arrived; there was Kamrad and Heintzelman and Anderson, and the first two were big and powerful Dutchmen, and Anderson was a thin Swede, and they were all bundled thickly against the weather. They climbed off their tractors and went to the car and looked, and they were astonished, except for Anderson who had to lift the blanket to peer more closely, and he sucked between his teeth all the while he looked.

The men came to the fire, and they nodded at us. “Does Rudy Heron know?” Heintzelman asked.

My brother and I shook our heads negatively.

“We better move them out of there,” I said. No one replied and no one moved.

“I took a load of cobs over to Rudy’s place this morning,” Anderson said in that high-pitched, still-Swedish voice of his. He had been born in this country, but he had taken the accent from his father. “Rudy didn’t say anything about his wife not being there, at home. I did think it funny he didn’t take me in the house to get warm.”

“How could he say anything about his wife not being home?” my brother asked, slowly and mildly. “Would anybody say anything if his wife was gone, and hadn’t come home all night?”

“Rudy’s awful jealous of her,” Kamrad said.

“He had a reason to be jealous this time,” Anderson said, with his high-pitched giggle. He looked around at them, as if hoping someone else would giggle, too.

The men looked at the car, and knelt beside the fire and chipped at the wood and threw some sticks into the fire, and looked at the car again, and hoped it would not be there.

“I wish that sheriff would get here,” my brother said.

That is what they all want, I thought. They wanted the sheriff to come, and take it all off their hands, so they could go home and not think about it anymore.

“Rudy Heron’s going to come down here,” I said. “He’ll hear about it and he’ll come down here, and it won’t be good.”

“What can we do about it?” Heintzelman asked.

Anderson gave his high-pitched laugh. “Ya, what can we do? We can’t stop him if he wants to come and look at his wife.” He looked around at the others.

“We better pull them out of the car and wrap them up separately, here on the snow,” I said.

“No, you better not do that,” Anderson said. “The sheriff might not like that, when he gets here. He wants to see them like they are.”

I did not like Anderson. He could incense me quickly. “Nobody has to see them like that, the sheriff or Rudy Heron or anybody else.”

“You could get into trouble touching them,” Anderson said. “They got to make an investigation. You’d be changing things, and you might get arrested.”

“We’ve got to do something,” I said, looking first at Anderson, and then at the other men, too, for I could tell they nearly agreed with him. They looked into the fire, and not at me. “What about if Rudy Heron comes here? It’s the man’s wife,” I went on loudly, almost shouting at them, at these married men. “The woman’s dead. He can know that, but to see her this way . . . We’ve got to do something.”

“Ach, everybody knows what kind of woman she was,” Anderson said.

I was suddenly angry, and I jumped up and went around the fire and put myself in front of Anderson. “Who knows?” I shouted into his face. Anderson backed away from me and pointed at the car. “You want to tell everybody, don’t you?” I went on. “You don’t give a damn if everybody talks, and the kids and the husband and wife of those two hear about it the rest of their lives. You want to bring Rudy Heron and the whole goddamn neighborhood down here to look at them, don’t you?”

“That’s the way they died,” Anderson said.

I felt my shoulder move, wanting to hit him, but I did not. I dropped my hands and turned away from him. They were all afraid to do anything, afraid of any kind of action or involvement. Anderson, the men, even my brother wanted to treat it as if it did not really concern them. They did not want to protect the other people; they did not care.

“Do you have to get so mad all the time?” my brother asked. He was always the cooler one of us.

“They’re dead,” I said. “Let them be dead. Who gives a damn now what they were doing. But nobody else needs to know, and nobody needs to get hurt, their kids or anybody else.” I went by the men, one by one, and looked at them. “I’ll move them myself,” I said.

“I’ll help you,” Heintzelman said finally.

Heintzelman and I went to the car, but no one else would help. The bodies were hard as steel and we had a difficult time of it. We found the underclothing of the two, but the pieces were wet and had frozen and even after holding the clothing above the fire and thawing them we could not put them on because of the positions of the bodies. We buttoned them up as well as we could. We were working quickly, but there was nothing we could do, and when we heard the sound of the tractors coming over the hill, we wrapped the bodies quickly in the blankets and laid them in the snow, between the car and the fire.

It was Mellon and Orth and Tangro, farmers in the neighborhood, who came on the tractors, and Orth had brought his fourteen-year-old son along.

“Look what they’re bringing,” I said loudly. “A boy, a kid. Next it’ll be their wives and all their kids, and then we can all sit down here and have a goddamn picnic.”

“The boy is old enough,” my brother said. “What’s wrong with him coming?”

“Old enough?” I said. “Is that why you and everybody else here turned pale when you saw what was in the car? Sure, let the boy come. That’s fine. Let’s have a big exhibition because we’re all so pure, and somebody else got caught. Let’s invite everybody down here to look at somebody else’s exposed sin.” I looked directly into my brother’s eyes. “We’re all pretty pure, aren’t we?” I said.

He rubbed his forehead and almost wearily turned away from me. “Why did you bring the boy?” my brother asked Orth, when the tractors came up.

Orth was taken aback. His mouth opened to speak, but he said nothing, and then he laughed, tittering and confused, for he was surprised at my brother talking like that. “The boy’s old enough,” he said finally.

“Send him home,” my brother said sharply. The boy looked open-mouthed at my brother and then at his father.

“What is it?” the father asked. “Who’s dead?”

“Send the kid home,” I said.

“Ya, ya,” Heintzelman said slowly. “Send him home.”

Orth told the unwilling boy to take the tractor and leave.

When the boy was gone, the men came up and looked at the bodies and one of the men whistled and they came to the fire, sober-faced.

Mellon stood shivering and rubbing his hands. “It’s cold down here,” he said, and I knew he wanted to talk about something other than the two dead people.

It was bitter cold, and the wind hurtled in across the treeless fields to the west, and the tiny ice-crystals of snow were like sand.

“They’re pretty warm, I bet, shoveling coal in hell,” Anderson said, and he gave a short laugh, like a stuttering cough. He nudged Mellon and said, “Ach, they died happy,” in his sniggering, rotten voice.

“Snicker, you dumb son of a bitch,” I said. I wanted to put my hands on his scrawny rooster’s neck and strangle him.

“What you say to me?” he said. “I hit you if you say that to me.”

I stood up from the place where I’d been squatting beside the fire, and I stepped in front of Anderson, and I put my face an inch from his. “Hit me then, and I’ll break your neck and send you straight to hell, too, you dumb Swede Lutheran bastard.” We went
to the same church, so I knew I could talk to him that way with impunity.

Anderson was frightened and he stood back. He shrugged his shoulders to the others, as if it was I that had gone mad.

“What’s wrong with you?” my brother asked me.

“He thinks this is all funny,” I said, “the way we all sit around here not doing anything, knowing that somebody will get hurt from it. He thinks it’s a joke if people have to suffer. Look at his face. You can see what the simple fool is thinking in his dumb face.”

“You better calm down,” my brother said.

“I’d like to,” I said. “Two people are dead, but that isn’t enough. Everybody has to know about it, and they have to get hurt, because a stupid dumb hypocrite like that stands around and snickers. He can hardly wait to get out of here so he can tell about it. He wants to see the other people hurt and in trouble.” I was shouting, and I went around the fire from the men and wouldn’t talk to them.

We heard the tractor coming a little later, and the sound of it was from a different direction, and we all stood to look, and the tractor came from the south, up from the cleared, hard-surface road. The tractor plowed and bucked against the hard, heavy drifts, but still it came on, furiously. There was a little wagon, more nearly a cart, only a sawedoff box over four tiny wheels, trailing the tractor, and the cart bounced and slid from side to side on that rough road. It was Rudy Heron.

We could see the wrapped, small heads moving with the hard movements of the cart.

“He brought the kids along,” my brother and I said together, with the same thought and in the same astounded and awful voice. Heintzelman groaned, and suddenly it was as if all the men there knew of our relationship to the two dead people; even Anderson
was silent. We all moved together then, and made a half-circle around the bodies and waited for Heron.

The tractor had chains and even then it was difficult to steer, we could see that, and Rudy was holding the wheel of the tractor with savage concentration, and the cart behind lurched and swayed. The heads of the children kept bobbing up and down and they tried to hold on to the board sides.

The tractor was there, and Rudy Heron left it running wide-open, very loudly, and he jumped down and walked over to us, and in the cart the children peeped over the edge at their father and us.

“Is my wife here?” Rudy asked, striding towards us. He was a slightly built man, dark-faced, and his jaw and face were long and narrow, and he had not shaved, and the thin sliver of a scar on the tip of his chin was very white against his blue-black face. His eyes were small and yellowish and glittering, unalive, like the eyes I had seen in dead animals.

“Is my wife here?” he asked loudly, again, and he came on into our midst.

“She’s here,” my brother said, holding his arm out and stopping Heron. Heron struck at my brother’s arm, but my brother turned with him, stepping back, but still between him and the bodies.

Heron looked at my brother’s face, and then he seemed to get control of himself, and he said, “I want to see my wife. Which one is she?”

“Here,” my brother said. He backed away from Heron, and he knelt and pulled the blanket down an inch or two to expose the upper part of the dead woman’s face.

Heron looked at her, and he rubbed his beard and his eyes, and we thought he might be crying, but then he asked, “Who was she with?” He turned to look at the ashen-faced and sober men. “Who?” No one said anything.

Heron’s eyes burned us one by one. “Who?”

“Conrad Wenzel,” Heintzelman said, coughing out the name. “He must have been bringing her home, and they made a wrong turn, got lost, and thought this was a farm or something. Probably got stuck.” Heintzelman was speaking rapidly, but his voice gradually became less and less firm. “It was easy for Wenzel to get lost. He’s not from around here, you know.” His voice trailed off.

“I know,” Heron shouted. “I know Wenzel. Come mooning around my wife. I seen what was going on.” He looked at the woman’s face. “Who found them?” he asked.

“I did,” I said.

“And how was they? What was they doing?”

“Sitting,” I said. “Sitting in the front seat, dead. It was the gas from the engine . . .”

“Sitting! Hah! Sitting!” Heron leapt suddenly at the blanket-covered body of the woman and he tore the blanket back, out of my brother’s hands, and Heron began to howl, and he laughed and howled, and he fairly leaped around the body, and he turned and bellowed for the children to come there and look at their dead mother. “Come,” he bellowed, in his strangely deepened and rasping voice. “Look at her, look what she was doing when she died. She’s a whore. Look, your mother’s a whore. Come look, see what she is.” Suddenly he flung the blanket away, and the wind picked it and rolled it, and Heron plunged at the other body, while we stood there, frozen, watching him, and none of us could move. Heron tore that blanket off too. He began to kick the body, hard, with his heavy boots, and he kicked at the groin of the dead man, as if all of the dead man and all of Heron’s hate were concentrated there, and Heron was howling and his face was wild and he was frothing at the mouth and the froth froze on his face, like white scars.

My brother caught Heron’s arms and pulled him away, but
Heron lunged at my brother and shoved him backwards, over the body of the woman, into the snow. Heron seized one of the sticks I had cut for the fire, and he began to beat on the face and body of the dead man, and the body rolled onto its back and the frozen hands were at its shoulders, supplicating, and the eyes and the mouth were open, and the dead man seemed to be screaming, bleating in agony, but the only sound was the other agony of Heron in his shrieking. Heron slashed and beat with the stick upon the dead body, and the stick made terrible, coldly white, everlasting marks on the frozen flesh, making the peculiar gritting sound like the sound a spoon inserted into a half-frozen box of berries makes, and the marks of the stick would never be erased.