You Will Never See Any God: Stories (16 page)

“Where did you get that?” the mother asked in the evening when he came up from the barn.

“I found it in the pasture,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t like cats around,” she said.

“It’ll catch mice,” he said.

“See that it stays outside,” she threatened.

That determined him. He snuck it in, put it in a box by his screenless window, so that it could go in and out.

On the hot nights he could hear its passage, and sometimes if he awoke he could see the slivers of eyes in the darkness, opening, closing, slowly, very slowly, giving him a peculiar chill.

Perhaps he would have been startled, even afraid, if he had not always been pleased, when thinking of it, at defying his mother’s command. The cat was there, inside the house, as he wished.

In the daytime it disappeared, where to he did not know. Saw it from time to time beneath the porch or in the loft of the barn, but usually not at all.

He went regularly to his duty of keeping his eye on the cows. The afternoons swooned with heat. The sun sat in its haze, too bright to look at. His short shadow was noiseless as he, through the thickets by the dry dead stream, through the powdery dust on the path the cows took. The milkweed that he touched filtered pollen upon his hands, the feeble tree-branch posts leaned, drowsed in drunken posture held up by the rusted wires. The cows baked beneath a cottonwood’s shade, lashing flies, eyes closed, stomping hoofs against the flies, choking on cuds.

He could hear the sound and he shivered, truly shivered, skin cold as touching a sweating arm. She was singing. Words too distant for him to understand, high-pitched, cracking almost. Nothing musical, even he who knew nothing of music but a few hymns and the schoolroom mutterings to the teacher’s piano, knew that this tuneless screeching was a following of some melody he did not know.

He peeped past a post, looked between bunches of sweet clover, yellow blossoms wilted in the motionless heat. He went on
his hands and knees, the pollen falling on him, careful not to move the bunches if he could, no wind, no other motion than himself.

She had stopped singing. He waited, looking through the great bunches of clover, webbed and tight and defensive. He was no more than forty feet from the little shanty, the weathered boards stiff and black. Shrilly she started again; a yelp, shriek of sound, stopped again. Language unknown to him.

She came through the doorway, opening into darkness, her movement sending him into a tight, sprung posture, holding all breath, feeling ooze of sweat from his face. She dumped a pan of something, potato peelings, whatever, the one hen came to peck, and one cat too, his cat he believed. And looked again at her. Amazed at how old she seemed, white hair he had only slightly noticed that one time he’d seen her, hair undone, wisps of white down her face as if a white liquid poured over her head, congealed there. Wrinkled, wrung face, pinched mouth. Same angular body, long, long, rising up.

She sang, stood there and shrieked sounds, six or seven words he did not understand, popped the bottom of the dishpan with her hand, freeing the last peel or two, went in again, was silent.

The boy watched the cat glide up, lift one forepaw, sniff at the peelings, sit down, lick itself. His own cat, he believed, although he could not be certain, believed it was his, in that heat nothing registering right, all uncertain for him like unsteady imaginings or dreams.

He went the way he had come.

“Oh, I don’t like her,” the mother said to the Nystroms next time they went up the hill to visit. “I saw her in town one day, and she looked just crazy.” She gave a shudder to indicate her distaste.

“She goes in with the Liles,” old man Nystrom said, waggling
his big head. “They say sometimes her bag of groceries is as big as a candy sack.”

“Funny one,” Nystrom’s wife said. “Always acted strange. I went over there once and she wouldn’t even let me in the house.”

“Na,” the mother said.

“Some say she’s done peculiar things.”

“I’ve heard her sing,” old man Nystrom said.

“Sing!” the mother cried.

The big man grinned. Yellow, crooked teeth. Big mean blue eyes. “Oh ya, sometimes the whole day through. I’ve heard her when I stopped the tractor.”

“And there are times when she’s not around for months,” the oldest son said.

“Oh ya, that too,” Nystrom said.

“They say she’s a witch,” Nystrom ‘s second son said.

They all laughed at that.

Mrs. Nystrom the loudest. “Kept my kids scared for years, telling about the Widow. They would sure mind then.”

The mother hissed with laughter.

“Ya, she’s kept the kids toeing the line for years over that. Only way they go over there is on a tractor,” old Nystrom said.

“Wouldn’t catch me gettin offen it neither,” the older son said, sucking in his nostril and giggling.

“She is a sight to see sometimes, although some say she was a pretty woman years back,” Mrs. Nystrom said. “She’s not a witch. Isn’t any such thing.”

“Shoulda told us that years before,” the oldest son said, whickering.

“Let’s see, what you need to be a witch?” Nystrom asked. “Pin cushion, baby fat, and a fire. And a . . . a cat. Yeh?”

“Well, I’d never make a witch,” the mother said, tee-heeing. “A pin cushion gets too dirty, so I use a box, and I just hate cats.”

A pause and old man Nystrom made profound nods of his head, his eyes squinting. “Oh, the Widow’s all right, I guess. Never bothered anybody.”

No, no, the boy thought, he knew that was not true. All had been planned, all had been figured in that terrible awareness of
him
, he himself, Herman, always that, she knowing of
him
even when singing, walking the lane to await the Liles, always she had known he was there, precisely where and how and when, through the cat awareness of him, surety of
him
, he knowing it now, at last with absolute certitude, nothing on her mind but
him
, she obsessed with
him
, sent the cat to watch
him
, lay in wait to catch
him
. He could feel it on him, like a massive weight, hot, overwhelming.

Old man Nystrom winked profoundly, waggled his big head. “Looka the boy taking it all in,” nodding at Herman, the boy’s eyes huge, concentrated and dark.

They laughed again, all of them, turning to look at him.

The mother tsutted her tongue and tee-heed. “He’s swallowing it whole, it looks like.”

In the night he heard the pad of feet, the scratch of claws on the wall. He sat up in the cot where he slept, saw out there the mysterious moonlight, the breathless night, the shadows, gray and grayer, and near him, here in the very room the slight mew of sound.

“Get out,” he whispered, gargle and screech in the back of his throat. “Get out.” Thought he saw the blur of gray shadow through the open window.

He saw her in the barn, the cat, in the loft, wilder now, looking at him, not responding to his cold looks and brief entreaties. Or in the large garden, moving delicately as a shadow in the reaches of the fence, watching him. Always it watching him, its eye upon
him. At the shoulder of the henhouse, in the hidden foundation of the granary.

In the night he heard the rustling purr close beside him, flailed up at that sound, his body jerking, he striking the wall with fist and elbow as if an electric probe had nudged him. Saw blurred motion when he came awake, sometimes the oil eye, green, blinking, watching him, the fleet and soundless flight, over the sill. He lay awake for hours sometimes in the hot nights, the moon rising ever later, hearing the creaks on the stairs, the hush of the trees outside, out there, hearing the groan of the planet turning, and out there in the brush beneath the trees the swift and decisive collision of things, brief and sudden battles, rattle of earth, weeds, leaves, and something undone.

He had dreams, the sweat hot on him in the airless cubicle of room. Her face appeared, coming to him as she had that day, the first time, sudden, terrifying, her face moving closer, he seeing more clearly, sharply than he could ever remember, the lined thin face, the swatches of white hair, the eyes blue—that bothered him, the blue eyes, he knowing even in sleep that they should be, must be, bloodshot, red, and terrible. She saying, “What do you want?”

He awoke to the dawn and his private terror, moved preoccupied through vast enmities. His twin brother jeered at him for not getting to go along to Martinsburg because he had sullenly talked back to his mother over hoeing the garden. He wrestled his brother to the ground in a silent fury, dirtying him good, breaking one lens of his glasses in the scuffle.

His father had followed the mother’s charge to beat him. The father had complied with usual rigor.

“Oh, you’re a little devil. A little devil,” the mother said. And gave him worse names too. “You need a beating every day.”

The other two brothers worked in the field. The Model-A sound chuffed off beyond the stark hills.

The heat of the pain was still on his back from the beating.

He found the cat in the pocket of shade behind their henhouse, the eyes nearly closed to the sun, its full-grown body limber, flexed out, the head lifted a little, it accepting the warmth. He got a saucer of the precious milk from the cave where it cooled, cajoled the cat with it, brought the cat forward, drew the gunny sack behind him, waited. The head dipped, the little pink tongue touched at the saucer delicately. His hand fastened on the looseness of fur behind the neck, lifted quickly, to the mouth of the sack, the sudden feet clamping at the sack, and the head was in, shoved the body. Writhing motion, fierce “meow” of sound. He lifted the bag, keeping his eye on the way the burlap hunched as the cat moved, the way the claws appeared thinly and whitely like slivers, puncturing the bag, the powerful wrestle in there.

At the horse tank he lowered it, took a board and forced it down, a sudden violence of motion as the water penetrated, shrill sound as the woman made, making his neck chill, the fastenings of the claws higher and higher almost to where his left hand gripped the opening of the sack. He looked behind him, around him, never certain of aloneness with three brothers. Only the somnolent yard, the heat, the burned-lemon sun. Long, long he waited. Lifted the heavy bag, dropped it out in the dust. Eyes open as if the dying had come with an immense and terrible surprise, soggy fur, the sudden awareness of how small and thin the creature was, ribs showing racked like toothpick, pinch of tail. He hung the sack in a slat of corncrib to dry, wanted no question from the distrustful brothers or father.

The cat he took by the tail, and the wire, and he went out, across the road, up the path the cows took, up the long hill.

The wild sweet clover, too old to cut, had turned ratty and clumped.

He waited. Squatted in the heat, chewing foxtail stems, waited.
Saw her go finally, past the thukking tractor. The car came and took her away. He waited, the slow Nystrom boy turning the tractor, pausing for water from a jar he had brought, finally going then too.

The boy went at a trot, with a heavy breath in his chest, a lunging dedication to his run as if it must be done at the instant, now and no later. He went up to the one-step porch and turned the knob and went in as if he had done it a thousand times, as if he knew the location of each part and piece of the house from a thousand visitations.