You Will Never See Any God: Stories (15 page)

The men stood back in a cluster, horrified, afraid of Heron. Only my brother knew what to do. He came up again, and he spun Heron around and tried to hold him away from the mutilation, but Heron struck my brother on the shoulder with the stick. I moved behind Heron and I jerked his arm behind his back and twisted at the claws of his hand until the stick came free, and I kicked it away, into the fire. Heron twisted loose, and he came towards me, howling everything and nothing. I hit him on the mouth, and his eyes didn’t change at all, in spite of the blood in his mouth, and he kept howling and spitting blood. I pulled my arm back quickly and I hit him hard, back-handing him with the hard leather mitten across his face, and the blow made him groan and blink and turn, and I went in quickly and I brought my arm beneath his and twisted him over, and my brother was helping me, and we swung Heron down, crashing him hard against the frozen ground and snow, and his face drove into the packed snow.

I put my knee on him, and I leaned over him and I said, “Come to yourself, man.”

It was all out of him then. He lay there, gargling and spitting saliva and blood, and he made biting motions in the snow, and
even when I stood up he just lay there, and he was crying, and making noises as a hungry animal makes when it is eating ravenously, and his jaws worked on the snow. It was terrible, listening to him, and all the men were frightened and ashamed, and they wouldn’t look at him. We all knew that in a way Heron truly loved the woman, in spite of everything, he did love her, and he was a victim of that, and he hated her, too, and it was something none of us could help him with.

My brother went around Heron and he carefully wrapped the bodies again.

The children had come from the cart and I did not know how long they had been standing there. They had been watching, and their eyes were seared with it all, and they were terrified. There were four children and the oldest was about seven and the youngest about two, and both the oldest and the youngest were girls, and the middle two were boys.

“Why did he bring them?” I said, and I looked again at the man groveling in the snow, and I wanted to drive my boot into his groaning side.

I went around to the children and I brought them up to the fire to warm them and I carefully turned them away so they could not see their father. The children were frightened and quiet, but they kept turning their heads to see the man.

They were terribly cold in that bitter wind, and they had been dressed hurriedly and badly, and the little girl had lost a mitten and her overshoes were on the wrong feet. I rubbed her frigid cheeks and I gave her my large mitten to put on and I tried to play with her, to have her smile, but she would not. She said some words that children say very early and I felt my jaw trembling, and I could not speak at all, and I set her gently on a little log and I took off her overshoes and put them on the right way. I buttoned the other children up properly, and gave my scarf to the older boy,
who did not have one. I took the children to the cart again, after they were a little warm, and the oldest girl was crying and looking back at her father, and I could tell in her eyes that she had seen too much, and she would never forget any of it now, none of them would ever forget. It was terrible, that understanding look, that recognition in a child’s eyes. When the other children saw their sister crying, they too began to cry. And I thought, we have done this to them, all of this; it was as much our fault as the fault of their father.

I put them on the cart, one by one, and I tried to comfort them, but it was no use. Even in my arms they remembered too well, and they looked past me to see their father and mother. I motioned to my brother, for I couldn’t speak, and he brought some blankets from the car, the ones they, the mother and the man, had used to cover themselves, and I wrapped the children warmly. Kamrad came over to drive the children to our place. My brother stood beside me and watched Kamrad and the tractor and the children go, but I could not see them, for my eyes were blinded by that glaring sun and the vivid, hurting snow, and my nose was running, and wetness froze on my cheeks.

I had tried, I thought; feebly and without hope I had tried, and it was not good enough, and I was angry. I slapped my bare hand and my mitten together and I went back to the fire.

“Did you have to bring the children?” I shouted at Heron. “I don’t care what happens to you. You can go to hell. But did you have to bring them?”

Heron still lay stretched on the ground, his face in the snow, and the snow around him was pinked by his blood. I beat my hands together, and I remembered it all, especially the children, and I looked at Heron, and I could not contain that feeling any longer. I went over to him and I swore loudly at him and I kicked him hard, very hard, in the side, at the place where the ribs end.
His breath came out of him in a contorted gasp, a kind of bark. I was glad. I wanted to hurt him.

“Get up,” I shouted at him. I took his collar and jerked him, when he did not move quickly. Heron braced himself on his hands, and he groaned, and lifted himself painfully. He clutched his side and he stood up and walked feebly and slowly, as if he had become aged and senile in that moment. I followed him, threatening him, and he looked at my coat collar and not into my eyes, and he did not even care then. He would not have cared if I had killed him. He slumped down upon the log where the little girl had sat, and he bent himself at the waist, holding his side and rocking back and forth against the pain, and moaning.

My brother took my arm and pulled me away from Heron. “Let him alone,” he said. “He has lost his wife. Let him alone.”

“Yes,” I said.

I needed to do something, and I got an axe and I chopped a considerable pile of firewood, and I threw all the wood on the fire at once, until there was a very large blaze. I didn’t care if the bodies melted and the schoolhouse burned.

We waited forty-five minutes more for the sheriff to arrive and no one said a word in all that time. The only sounds were of my axe and of the snapping fire, and of the wind driving its bitter coldness over us.

The sheriff came in a truck with chains, up the track that Rudy Heron and his tractor had made. He sprang out of the truck before it stopped and he came over to us. He was a spry old man who looked like an insurance salesman, with his smooth and dimpled face and his goldrimmed spectacles. His face was high-colored in the cold, and it was round and pink, like a pale and fat and squashy tomato. He knelt to examine the bodies, and he murmured things to himself and made notes in a pad, and his face remained rosy and calm.

“About the newspapers . . .” my brother said.

“It has to be reported,” the sheriff said.

“Just that they were sitting there and they died of monoxide poisoning, and nothing about night,” I said. “It happened in broad daylight.”

“They’ve been dead quite a while,” the sheriff said. “Late last night, probably.” He sucked between his gold teeth. “What is your interest in all this?” he asked me.

“It’s not in them; it’s the other people,” I said.

The sheriff looked at me a moment and then he nodded. “All right,” he said. “That’s how you found them then?”

“Yes. Just sitting,” I said.

“In broad daylight, sitting on a country road, stranded in a blizzard, and the engine was running to keep them warm,” the sheriff murmured. He pursed his lips and made some notes in the pad.

“Just like that,” I said. It was a foolish attempt, I thought, and hopeless, and everyone would know and talk and snicker, but it made me feel a little better.

The sheriff tried to talk to Heron, but Heron would not say anything at all. He groaned in that steady hurting sing-song way, as he had been for nearly an hour, and his eyes rolled strangely, and he held his side.

Someone told the sheriff that Heron had a sister in Charleston, and the sheriff said that was good, they could take him there, since he was in a bad way.

They loaded the bodies onto the truck, and with the bodies out of sight, and with Heron in the cab with the sheriff, the coldness came on all of us again. We felt the hard wind, and some of the farmers looked at the sun and talked of getting home for dinnertime.

My brother asked me if I wanted to go along to town in the truck, to the undertaker, but I said no.

“We made a mistake,” I said. “We should have taken them in by ourselves, before anyone knew about them.”

“We might have got into trouble,” my brother said. “The sheriff had to be here.”

“It was a mistake,” I said. “No one should have known about it, especially the children. We did it badly; it was our fault.”

“You know how it is in this country. Everyone would have found out and talked about it anyway. We did everything we could do.”

“We didn’t protect the others,” I said. “It was a mistake.”

My brother looked at me, and he spread his hands, and I knew that he understood what I was saying. He turned and went to the truck.

“If you see Conrad Wenzel’s wife, be careful with her,” I said after him. “Don’t tell her how it was.”

“She will know all about it already,” he said. “It will be all right with her anyway. Women are tougher about these things than men.”

My brother got into the truck and it turned around and went back up the road. The farmers watched the truck go, and then they got on their tractors and drove up the long hill, to go to their warm houses and their dinners and their talk.

The wind was fierce and the fire had died, and I let the last few logs sizzle against the blowing snow. The car stood beside the building, and the open door was swinging in the wind. The snow drifted into the car, whitely and cleanly. I thought of closing the door, but the window was broken anyway, and the snow could not be kept out. It did not make any difference. The snow and the cold and the wind had killed them, and now it would cover everything, coldly and cleanly and treacherously, and only the cold and falsely clean and treacherous minds of the people would remember it all.

I was alone down there, and I felt the chill of the place, and I wanted to get away. I started the tractor and drove over the fence-line and across the hollow. Behind me, the tracks were filling up with the fine hard crystals, and the fire was out, and the schoolyard was twisted and reshaped and very white. It was as if there had never been anyone there, but the wind and the winter snow.

The Witch

Up from the road where they passed they could see the tiny house, gray where the weather struck, surprisingly white in tips beneath the darkened eaves, the house a sudden box on the expanse of land that rode the horizon like a plateau up from the road.

“Who lives there?” one of the twins, the thin-faced one, asked.

“The Widow O’Neill,” the old man said. He drove the Model-A Ford of course, the furious-lipped mother on the other front seat, the four brothers in back, Werner the oldest, Walter, and the twins of twelve, Herman, the thin-faced one, and Henry, the round-faced one.

They passed the lane and the old and creased mailbox, the box without name or sign, open to the wind as if nothing had ever been received or expected, the lane width of one car, straight up the low incline, turned sharply up there, ran back of the house, ditch on either side.

“Don’t look like anybody lives there,’’ Herman said.

“She’s there. Sometimes they don’t see her for a month or more,” the father said.

“Irish trash,” the grim-faced mother said.

“The Nystroms do her farming, don’t they?” Werner the oldest said.

“Ya,” the father said.

“Boy, I wouldn’t go over there for anything,” Werner said.

“Why not?” Herman asked, cranking back to watch from the square rear window.

“Shut up. Fool kid’s talk,” the mother said.

They moved in the barren spring. (The father could not keep a place.) The boys were used to it, were not troubled by the change in schools or the change in bedrooms; the beds were the same. They had an excitement in the discovery of this new place, wandered gladly across its hilly acres in search of the cows at evening, and came to the hill, to the weed-encrusted tumble fence with its old posts made of tree branches and its rusted wire. There at the hilltop they could see the house of the Widow O’Neill, this the reverse side, the dirt road far away now, the lane coming up, turning sharply, the ditches on either side, the gray chicken coop and one other shed, nothing else, no tree, nothing. The tractor of Nystrom buzzed in the field by the road.

Always watching in the marvelous fascination of a different thing, a hope of something mysterious and strange, they looked, turned, looked again, called to the cows, these mongrel cows, roans and brindles, all skinny and mean, headed them back to the place.

On their own side of the fence, there across the far hill in dull placidness they could see the old man and the slow horses barely move along the hillside, the plow leaving a narrow furrow, without sound. The cows clicked home in that spring dust, the fence jumpers wearing their halters of barbed-wire which nevertheless did not keep them in. The cows needed constant watching.

“Let’s go up and see the Widow’s house, what do you say?” Henry said. He was the heavier, the round-faced one.

Queasy feeling in his belly, a fear he did not like, made Herman, the slender one, avert his face. “All right,” he muttered, barely audible.

But milking came and supper and Henry made neither sound nor motion, as if he had forgotten it. Herman wondered why, and was glad they did not go.

It came somewhat later, unexpected.

They kicked up a badger one afternoon and chased the puffing thick creature down to the fence and under it, to its hole in the open field, almost catching up to it.

They scraped at the edge of the hole for a time, knowing it was purposeless. “We’ll tell Werner. He’ll trap him,” Henry said.

The excitement gone, Herman looked down then, down the hill to that quietness where the house stood, intruder in that arid space, the color of dry bark on this northern side where the winter winds could pummel it black, sharp and angular projection with neither tree nor shrub between it and the straight horizon.

“Come on, there’s nobody there now,” Henry said, still flushed from the rush after the badger.

The afternoon sun was hot (it was May), the oat field they walked on had turned pale, pale green if one looked obliquely and caught the shiver of leaves, but straight down were only the brown clouds.

They walked stiff-legged, carefully. It was easy to begin, Herman thought.

“If someone’s there we’ll say we’re after water,” Herman said, liking that slyness of thought.

“There’s nobody there, you can see that,” Henry said, but with a hesitation in his walk, almost a stumble, that made Herman go first.

They went past the chicken coop. One hen, four chicks scruffing in the dirt, the hen lifting feathers at them when they came
too close. They saw the wood lean-to by the house and a cob shed.

“See, there’s nobody here,” murmured Henry. He went to the window, Herman following, to look in, and then suddenly, hideously, long, lean, dark, black from the doorway quickly noiselessly opened, the figure lifted, pale face, pale hair issuing from the darkness of the house and the darkness of the slender hard body, a ferocious gaggle in the throat, and they sucked in their breaths.

Terrible sound issuing although the words, he knew, were only, “What do you want?” They backed, they fell, rose, and turned and ran and behind them a sound like laughter, a cackle of hell after them, they ran. They ran.

Furtive later. They did not talk of it.

They went visiting at times in the evening, the walk up the narrow road to the hilltop to see·Nystrom, old grizzled farmer with big ears and a fat wife and two big-eared sons and two fat daughters. They talked, the women in the house, the men (and boys) outside. Nystrom had a tractor and owned his farm; the old man was obviously impressed, for Nystrom was so common a man, would talk to anyone, not high-toned at all.

“You do the work for the Widow?” the old man asked in the course of the conversation, out sitting on the wooden planking by the pump.

Herman came closer to them at that, listened carefully, pretending to work at the locust tree pod with his fingers.

Yes, Nystrom said, for a share of the crop.

“Funny for a woman to stay there all alone and not move to town.”

Guess she likes it that way, Nystrom said. She had talked of going back to Ireland. Had some relatives there, she said.

“Must be a funny one to always be alone in a shanty like that.”

Oh, they tell lots of stories about her, the queer things she does, Nystrom said with a nod of his big head. As for him, he saw her only once in a while, sometimes not for months, but she seemed all right to him. Her cousins came sometimes to see her, and the Liles took her to Martinsburg to buy things. She was always friendly to him. Too bad she was alone all the time, but it seemed that was the way she wanted it.

“I saw her once, when I was out getting cows,” Henry said suddenly, with bravery to speak out to his elders,” and she was real nice.”

Herman listened with a horror at his brother, that he should lie in his teeth like that, trying to pretend something he knew not to be true so that they, their elders, would listen to him and think him knowledgeable, and so that everyone would think he liked the woman. Herman was appalled and could not hide it, and did not try to hide it. There was some enormous deceit here that he could not abide; had his brother, twin brother, forgotten the terror of that afternoon moment, the blind and choking fear that had laid itself on their throats so that they could not speak of it, even to each other? How could he dispel so easily that awareness of a greater evil, so surely felt that terrible afternoon? Ah, he lied, he lied.

When they came to walk home, Henry tried to walk beside him but Herman punched him on the arm and they nearly had a fight, the mother accusing Herman of starting it, lunging for him to slap him, but he was too quick, and able in the openness of the space to dodge her.

“I’ll get you yet, you little devil,” the mother said. “You just wait. I hope he beats you up.”

He fell back, did not answer. Fear of the iron-handed parents held him. She hoped the twin would beat him up; that would be the day. He lagged behind, by himself scuffing in the dirt in the moonlit darkness.

From that time on he went alone, trailing the gaunt cows through the pasture, studying through the tumbleweed and burdock litter along the fence the gray house.

He saw her one day in the doorway. And she saw him. He did not move, thought it pointless to try to hide—he was on his own side of the fence—and she stood motionless far down there looking in his direction for a long time, fixed steady, as if casting spells. He was not afraid.

Nor was he afraid when the clouds built up in the early summer afternoons like a massive black brain of darkness, fissured, convoluted, and the heavens roiled, and the whirlwinds coiled like snakes across the patches of the Widow O’Neill. From the brush along the fences, he, unconcerned, almost, gathered blackberries and half-ripened plums where the worms had come and made them turn ripe too soon, an unnatural ripeness, the green side picked with holes, oozing bright juice, hardened and tight, and the other side turned purple-red where he nibbled delicately, with care. The storms did not frighten him, made him shiver a little at the way the clouds mounted powerful as the earth, the lightning snapped downward, tracing branches, stinging white against the black and hollow-looking clouds.

Then he turned the cows home, judging the movement of the storm expertly, timing it even as he ate carefully around the worm lodgement in the plums, brought the cows up to the shelter of the old gray shed just as the first wind and heavy thudding raindrops hit.

The weather passed, the new days sparkled dry, too dry, too much dust, the land too feeble for anything but sunflowers and cockleburs.

She went away one day, came out, closed the door and walked down the lane, tall figure, angular, sharp as a nose, darkly dressed, gray-black skirt, black hat, not walking so much as sweeping along
for he could not see the lower third of her from over the stunted sweet clover by the fence. She waited a long time at the mailbox and then the Liles came by in the old Chevy and picked her up.

He went down through the clover patch (the nurse crop of oats had been strangled already) zig-zagging a little almost unconsciously for he knew how the clover could lie over and leave a distinct track. At the chicken coop there was the old hen and two half-feathered chicks. Two gone, he thought.

The air was motionless, entirely. He waited, conscious suddenly of the totality of silence, held his breath and listened, not even the murmur of flies. It was as if he were on another planet, divorced from everything he knew. The hot afternoon burned without sound, without motion. Even the chickens spread their drooping wings in the tiny shade, their beaks locked open, only their throats working.

He had one weak urge to shout, to interrupt that silence, change it somehow, to powerfully alter for a moment this quiet deadness, but the wish boiled off, leaving him impotent and hot.

In darkness of the lean-to beside the house a glimmer of yellow-greenish light, opening, shut. The boy backed away, moving he realized even then with a drugged sluggishness that he would remember, came forward a step, forced himself forward. The oil eyes watched him from under there, open, shut, with a slow mysteriousness as if too under a spell. A cat. He reached in, felt the fur, hand fastened on the acquiescent neck, lifted the cat out, neither cat nor kitten, halfway between, gray, color of ashes, brought it to his curved arm. It sat calmly, turned its head a little.