You Will Never See Any God: Stories (17 page)

Above the cold stove, by the one side window he suspended the damp dead cat, looped the wire around its neck, hung it from a calendar nail on the wall, feeling the muscles jerk in his slender forearms, glad, God how glad to be freed of this, to have brought it home to her. He watched it sway from its anchor, the electric fur prickled out as if it were alive and fearsomely angry. Looking at it gave him a nervousness, a running of his nose so that he had to rub his sleeve across it. He went out.

Camped behind the chicken coop, he paused, threw desultory clods at the hen dusting itself, went up after a while and sat down along the fence dividing the pasture and the sweet clover patch. In the later afternoon the quality of the heat changed a little, he could feel it, crazy charge that made him want to move his elbows and knees. The cows herded up beneath the thick locust trees in the hollow, the tails lashing at the flies. To the southwest the gray cloud crouched upon the long horizon. Touches of wind came. Whirlwinds funneled, whiskering the fields.

Chill touched his arms. There would be rain, lightning, and hail. A cow bellowed against the flies or its own bones, he did not know.

The fat cloud glowered, puffed, overrode the sun. Far off he could see the thin veins of lightning. Here in stillness, in the
oppressive heat he waited. He saw her come, up from the road, running almost, dark-clothed, angular, spider-leg of woman, the storm seemingly at her elbow, the hard gusts of dust snapping around her. He could feel the dust where he squatted.

She went in, hurried, the door open, blowing shut with an astonishing crack. And then he heard one scream, first scream of a woman he’d ever heard, something about it that froze his arteries, and he scrambled backward, turned about in expectation of something terrible all around him, always at his back, and turned and turned again, hearing that terrible echo in his skull, ran sobbing and laughing down to the cattle, the wind and the dust upon him, the first drops of rain thudding. The gray-green vaguely translucent cloud, like looking into the core of an enormity, of the universe, wavered above the hill. There would be hail.

“Come on, cows, come on,” he said, shouted finally, propelling them homeward, prodding them. They ran. He ran after, slipping in the mud, glad when the thunder erupted, the hail ripped the trees, drowning the awful sound of screams he yet heard in his hot brain, hearing himself whimper and when he heard that, hearing his own giddy laughter too. She had screamed, screamed terribly, really scared her. He had to laugh.

The heated summer passed; dry September came. They went to school again; walked a mile and a quarter to catch the bus. In the evening he got the cows furtively, quickly, with no open look beyond the fence, all was a terrible silence within him. Corner-eyed he glanced, pretended not to see, the blackened shacks, the free door on the cob shed, the gathered dust of road, of field.

“Dry year,” old Nystrom said, that big head almost ready to lop from those huge shoulders. “Not much corn this year.”

“No,” the father said. Not much corn any year where he farmed.

“Guess I’ll do the Widow’s patch first. Try out the picker over there.” Guff of laughter.

“Ain’t seen her,” the father said. “Lile said she ain’t been down to go to Martinsburg at all.”

“Oh, she does that sometimes. Gone for a year or more one time, I remember.”

“I’m glad she goes away. Gives me the creeps,” the mother said.

“No trouble I wonder?” the father said.

“Naw. Not with her,” old Nystrom said. “I sent Hank to knock on her door one time. Ask her about picking corn. No answer.”

The big-eared young man bent forward eagerly. “Man, I didn’t want to do it, afraid she’d jump out at me. But I knocked all right. Guess she went away.”

“Ya, she does that,” old Nystrom said.

“Good. Brr,” the mother said, shaking her thick body. “Gave me the creeps whenever I saw her.”

“I’ll go down and take a look myself before picking starts,” old Nystrom said.

On a stark October afternoon the boy went that way, after school, darted through the dry old sweet clover, the seed heads shattering the little seeds over that dry ground, saw the little lane grown with the tough foxtail, and the ditch run with weeds.

A wind had turned from the north. He shivered. The cob house door banged. There was no chicken, no hen in the coop, dust gathered there in corners. He waited and dawdled around the blackened door, touched with his toe the slivered and weathered step. No sound at all but the suck of wind, scurry of weed and dust.

He rapped upon the door, twice, and jumped back. No sound. If she would answer he would say (heard the words screeching to his ears) he would say, “The Nystroms want to see you.” Prepared it. No reply.

Behind him the scurfy field. The blue-white October sun, settling westward. He thought of knocking again, but backed away and went to the one side window.

In the shadows he saw dimly the whitely tufted skeleton of cat, hanging turning ever so slowly in the wind from the shattered window, and there the black clump of skirt huddled, folded by the stove, the one arm draped clutching still the handle of the oven, and the bunch of hair, the socketless eyes, and the face, the teeth, the drawn neck mummified almost, yellow-white, as if screaming yet in that last terrible agony he had heard, the face staring at him, in this total terror, and he heard again, plunging like a blade into his skull, that scream, piercing, shrill. He turned, feeling wet on his face, blubbering, turned and ran blindly, ran with all his might, howling himself, ran and ran, came to the deceptive weed-overgrown ditch, leapt . . .

It was just before noon the next day they found him, burrowed into the ditch at the side of the lane where it made its right angle leading down to the road, his head twisted to one side, the neck broken when he had tried to jump and misjudged and hit the weeded side of the ditch.

His mother set up a howl. All morning she had swung between frenzy and impatience, had said, “Where did he go? Wait till I catch him.” Changing to worry.

Now she howled. “He looks like he’s asleep. My baby.” His neck twisted over, his head resting lightly on his shoulder, his eyes closed almost peacefully, and on his tongue and lower lip a little crumble of dirt, taken as if in ceremony. As if he would awaken and swallow it now.

They carried him, dead and draped, behind them the fire of the buildings that the furious Nystrom had set.

“Poor kid,” old Nystrom said. “We shouldn’t have talked about her. He was just a curious kid, came up to see for himself what we were talking about, and what he saw was enough to scare anybody, scared me half to death when I saw her in there. Ran away, killed himself like that. She killed him.”

“Did you see the cat?” the oldest brother asked. “What was the cat there for?”

“You know her. She was up to something. Like everybody said. No doubt of that. Died herself. Best to burn it all, get clear of it. My fault. I shouldn’t have talked about it. Impressionable kid. My fault.”

They moved away then, one carrying the peaceful boy, the dirt still on his tongue. They trailed down from the puffing fire, the somber black figures an intrusion on that hard landscape, like a line of stone on that unforgiving horizon.

The Snake

I was thinking of the heat and of water that morning when I was plowing the stubble field far across the hill from the farm buildings. It had grown hot early that day, and I hoped that the boy, my brother’s son, would soon come across the broad black area of plowed ground, carrying the jar of cool water. The boy usually was sent out at about that time with the water, and he always dragged an old snow-fence lath or a stick along, to play with. He pretended that the lath was a tractor and he would drag it through the dirt and make buzzing, tractor sounds with his lips.

I almost ran over the snake before I could stop the tractor in time. I had turned at the corner of the field and I had to look back to raise the plow and then to drop it again into the earth, and I was thinking of the boy and the water anyway, and when I looked again down the furrow, the snake was there. It lay half in the furrow and half out, and the front wheels had rolled nearly up to it when I put in the clutch. The tractor was heavily loaded with the weight of the plow turning the earth, and the tractor stopped instantly.

The snake slid slowly and with great care from the new ridge the plow had made, into the furrow and did not go any further. I
had never liked snakes much, I still had that kind of quick panic that I’d had as a child whenever I saw one, but this snake was clean and bright and very beautiful. He was multi-colored and graceful and he lay in the furrow and moved his arched and tapered head only so slightly. Go out of the furrow, snake, I said, but he did not move at all. I pulled the throttle of the tractor in and out, hoping to frighten him with the noise, but the snake only flicked its black, forked tongue and faced the huge tractor wheel, without fright or concern.

I let the engine idle then, and I got down and went around the wheel and stood beside it. My movement did frighten the snake and it raised its head and trailed delicately a couple of feet and stopped again, and its tongue was working very rapidly. I followed it, looking at the brilliant colors on its tubular back, the colors clear and sharp and perfect, in orange and green and brown diamonds the size of a baby’s fist down its back, and the diamonds were set one within the other and interlaced with glistening jet-black. The colors were astonishing, clear and bright, and it was as if the body held a fire of its own, and the colors came through that transparent flesh and skin, vivid and alive and warm. The eyes were clear and black and the slender body was arched slightly. His flat and gracefully tapered head lifted as I looked at him and the black tongue slipped in and out of that solemn mouth.

You beauty, I said, I couldn’t kill you. You are much too beautiful. I had killed snakes before, when I was younger, but there had been no animal like this one, and I knew it was unthinkable that an animal such as that should die. I picked him up, and the length of him arched very carefully and gracefully and only a little wildly, and I could feel the coolness of that radiant, fire-colored body, like splendid ice, and I knew that he had eaten only recently because there were two whole and solid little lumps in the forepart of him, like field mice swallowed whole might make.

The body caressed through my hands like cool satin, and my hands, usually tanned and dark, were pale beside it, and I asked it where the fire colors could come from the coolness of that body. I lowered him so he would not fall and his body slid out onto the cool, newly plowed earth, from between my pale hands. The snake worked away very slowly and delicately and with a gorgeous kind of dignity and beauty, and he carried his head a little above the rolled clods. The sharp, burning colors of his body stood brilliant and plain against the black soil, like a target.

I felt good and satisfied, looking at the snake. It shone in its bright diamond color against the sun-burned stubble and the crumbled black clods of soil and against the paleness of myself. The color and beauty of it were strange and wonderful and somehow alien, too, in that dry and dusty and uncolored field.

I got on the tractor again and I had to watch the plow closely because the field was drawn across the long hillside and even in that good soil there was a danger of rocks. I had my back to the corner of the triangular field that pointed towards the house. The earth was a little heavy and I had to stop once and clean the plowshares because they were not scouring properly, and I did not look back towards the place until I had turned the corner and was plowing across the upper line of the large field, a long way from where I had stopped because of the snake.

I saw it all at a glance. The boy was there at the lower corner of the field, and he was in the plowed earth, stamping with ferocity and a kind of frenzied impatience. Even at that distance, with no sound but the sound of the tractor, I could tell the fierce mark of brutality on the boy. I could see the hunched-up shoulders, the savage determination, the dance of his feet as he ground the snake with his heels, and the pirouette of his arms as he whipped at it with the stick.

Stop it, I shouted, but the lumbering and mighty tractor roared
on, above anything I could say. I stopped the tractor and I shouted down to the boy, and I knew he could hear me, for the morning was clear and still, but he did not even hesitate in that brutal, murdering dance. It was no use. I felt myself tremble, thinking of the diamond light of that beauty I had held a few moments before, and I wanted to run down there and halt, if I could, that frenetic pirouette, catch the boy in the moment of his savagery, and save a glimmer, a remnant, of that which I remembered, but I knew it was already too late. I drove the tractor on, not looking down there; I was afraid to look for fear the evil might still be going on. My head began to ache, and the fumes of the tractor began to bother my eyes, and I hated the job suddenly, and I thought, there are only moments when one sees beautiful things, and these are soon crushed, or they vanish. I felt the anger mount within me.

The boy waited at the corner, with the jar of water held up to me in his hands, and the water had grown bubbly in the heat of the morning. I knew the boy well. He was eleven and we had done many things together. He was a beautiful boy, really, with finely spun blonde hair and a smooth and still effeminate face, and his eyelashes were long and dark and brush-like, and his eyes were blue. He waited there and he smiled as the tractor came up, as he would smile on any other day. He was my nephew, my brother’s son, handsome and warm and newly scrubbed, with happiness upon his face and his face resembled my brother’s and mine as well.

I saw then, too, the stake driven straight and hard into the plowed soil, through something there where I had been not long before.

I stopped the tractor and climbed down and the boy came eagerly up to me. “Can I ride around with you?” he asked, as he often did, and I had as often let him be on the tractor beside me. I looked closely at his eyes, and he was already innocent; the killing was already forgotten in that clear mind of his.

“No, you cannot,” I said, pushing aside the water jar he offered to me. I pointed to the splintered, upright stake. “Did you do that?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, eagerly, beginning a kind of dance of excitement. “I killed a snake; it was a big one.” He tried to take my hand to show me.

“Why did you kill it?”

“Snakes are ugly and bad.”

“This snake was very beautiful. Didn’t you see how beautiful it was?”

“Snakes are ugly,” he said again.

“You saw the colors of it, didn’t you? Have you ever seen anything like it around here?”

“Snakes are ugly and bad, and it might have bitten somebody, and they would have died.”

“You know there are no poisonous snakes in this area. This snake could not harm anything.”

“They eat chickens sometimes,” the boy said. “They are ugly and they eat chickens and I hate snakes.”

“You are talking foolishly,” I said. “You killed it because you wanted to kill it, for no other reason.”

“They’re ugly and I hate them,” the boy insisted. “Nobody likes snakes.”

“It was beautiful,” I said, half to myself.

The boy skipped along beside me, and he was contented with what he had done.

The fire of the colors was gone; there was a contorted ugliness now; the colors of its back were dull and gray-looking, torn and smashed in, and dirty from the boy’s shoes. The beautifully tapered head, so delicate and so cool, had been flattened as if in a vise, and the forked tongue splayed out of the twisted, torn mouth. The snake was hideous, and I remembered, even then,
the cool, bright fire of it only a little while before, and I thought perhaps the boy had always seen it dead and hideous like that, and had not even stopped to see the beauty of it in its life.

I wrenched the stake out, that the boy had driven through it in the thickest part of its body, between the colored diamond crystals. I touched it and the coolness, the ice-feeling, was gone, and even then it moved a little, perhaps a tiny spasm of the dead muscles, and I hoped that it was truly dead, so that I would not have to kill it. And then it moved a little more, and I knew the snake was dying, and I would have to kill it there. The boy stood off a few feet and he had the stake again and he was racing innocently in circles, making the buzzing tractor sound with his lips.

I’m sorry, I thought to the snake, for you were beautiful. I took the broken length of it around the tractor and I took one of the wrenches from the tool-kit and I struck its head, not looking at it, to kill it at last, for it could never live.

The boy came around behind me, dragging the stake. “It’s a big snake, isn’t it?” he said. “I’m going to tell everybody how big a snake I killed.”

“Don’t you see what you have done?” I said. “Don’t you see the difference now?”

“It’s an ugly, terrible snake,” he said. He came up and was going to push at it with his heavy shoes. I could see the happiness in the boy’s eyes, the gleeful brutality.

“Don’t,” I said. I could have slapped the boy. He looked up at me, puzzled, and he swayed his head from side to side. I thought, you little brute, you nasty, selfish, little beast, with brutality already developed within that brain and in those eyes. I wanted to slap his face, to wipe forever the insolence and brutal glee from his mouth, and I decided then, very suddenly, what I would do.

I drew the snake up and I saw the blue eyes of the boy open wide and change and fright, and I stepped towards him as he
cringed back, and I shouted, “It’s alive, it’s alive!” and I looped the tube of the snake’s body around the boy’s neck.

The boy shrieked and turned in his terror and ran, and I followed a few steps, shouting after him, “It’s alive, it’s alive, alive!”

The boy gasped and cried out in his terror and he fled towards the distant house, stumbling and falling and rising to run again, and the dead snake hung on him, looped around his neck, and the boy tore at it, but it would not fall off.

The little brute, I thought, the little cruel brute, to hurt and seek to kill something so beautiful and clean, and I couldn’t help smiling and feeling satisfied because the boy, too, had suffered a little for his savageness, and I felt my mouth trying to smile about it. And I stopped suddenly and I said, oh God, with the fierce smile of brutality frightening my face, and I thought, oh God, oh God. I climbed quickly onto the tractor and I started it and pulled the throttle open to drown the echoes of the boy shrieking down there in the long valley. I was trembling and I could not steer the tractor well, and I saw that my hands were suffused and flushed, red with a hot blood color.