You Will Never See Any God: Stories (2 page)

Krause courted controversy, addressing subjects such as infidelity, abortion, racism, homosexuality, abuse. The “censorship,” as he came to refer to it, didn’t change his direction or slow him down. He even wrote a novel—never published—about the English department and the
Prairie Schooner
incident, titled “The Censoring.” But the removal of “Anniversary” from
Prairie Schooner
, and the dean’s dismissal of the story, deeply troubled him. When he received a letter from Bernice Slote, Shapiro’s successor as editor of
Prairie Schooner
, letting him know she wouldn’t be
publishing “Anniversary” but that “we are strong for you, and hope to continue promoting your work,” Krause fired back. “In case your exquisite sensibility does not fully grasp the import,” he wrote, “you will never get another story from me, at any time, under any conditions, until the true situation regarding the
Schooner
is clarified and exposed.”

But a far more devastating development than the censorship awaited Krause; a year after the dean’s public denouncement of “Anniversary,” Krause was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. For his last seven years—he died on Thanksgiving Day in 1970, at the age of thirty-nine, in the house in Hawaii in which Loretta still lives—he researched experimental cancer treatment, managed his academic career, and wrote new fiction and poetry. Though he never abandoned the pursuit of a book deal, he now wrote with a mind toward a literary legacy that he knew might come only after his death. He often spoke to Loretta of his delight in imagining college sophomores attempting to decipher his meanings.

With “The Snake,” a story still assigned in the classroom, he got his wish of inspiring such careful analysis of his work—“The Metal Sky” and “The Quick and the Dead” have also been reprinted in textbooks and anthologies. But the publication of a collection of his stories proved challenging. Compiled together, the stories were too dark, he was told in rejection letters. And as Loretta sought upon his death to fulfill her husband’s dream of publishing a book, the work’s rough and unflinching vision continued to prove too despairing for both commercial and literary publishing.

In a symposium held at the Library of Congress in 1965, Karl Shapiro, still stinging from the censorship controversy, spoke of the role of a journal in defining literature: “A work printed in the literary magazine has only two destinations: the book or oblivion.” When pressed on this issue by his fellow panelists (“Surely
it’s damn good for a writer to be published and to be read by serious readers and serious writers whether or not his particular work is going to be put into hard cover,” huffed Jules Chametzky, then editor of the
Massachusetts Review
), Shapiro did “stand corrected.” He went on to say, “I have come back to the old-fashioned, possibly reactionary point of view, that the function of the little magazine is greater today than ever before; more than ever it has to resist the bait of joining society.”

Krause certainly resisted that bait, writing as he did about characters who themselves chafed at the notion of social engagement. His short stories were respected and rewarded in his lifetime when published individually in journals, and he was well established as a short-story writer by the early 1960s. Not only did he receive recognition from the O. Henry Prize but also from the
Best American Short Stories
series, as edited by Martha Foley and David Burnett, in which his stories were cited as among the year’s most distinctive in 1961 (“The Quick and the Dead”), 1962 (“The Snake,” “The Metal Sky,” “The Fall”), and 1967 (“The Witch,” “The Shooters”). But without a collection, his stories were destined to be lost. “And while the magazine itself is expendable,” Shapiro continued in his Library of Congress presentation, “the book, no matter how bad, is not. It is practically impossible to lose or destroy a book; the Library knows this only too well.”

Though Shapiro might have overstated the unlikelihood of a book’s expendability (even Shapiro’s own acclaimed, award-winning collections of poetry are currently in a state of neglect), the literary hierarchy of the twentieth century was shaped and ordered according to the prominence of an author’s books among readers, publishers, and scholars. And in losing Ervin Krause’s voice, we lost a graphic and captivating representation of post-Depression farm life.

With this collection, Krause’s stories—no longer confined to
the archives of middle-twentieth-century literary journals—can enter a new level of consideration. The stories included here are only a fraction of Krause’s complete body of work; some of his stories exist only in handwritten form in his many spiral-bound notebooks. (“Old Schwier,” a story included in this collection, a folktale about maniacal power and devastating regret, is one that Krause never typed nor submitted to journals.)

The stories Krause tells are bleak but they’re exciting in their raw poetic vigor, and they’re vital to our understanding of these rural men and women and their paradoxical nature of a complicated simplicity. These are the larger-than-life legends of a small locality, stories of personal defeat and ruination that most often went untold in a God-fearing community. While gossip and suspicion rend apart these characters’ lives, the narrative is driven by the reader’s very same desire to learn of the intimate transgressions of the sinners and the sinned against.

“Mythic,” Richard Poirier said of Krause’s story “The Snake,” which he selected for
Prize Stories 1963: The O. Henry Awards
. In his introduction to the anthology (which awarded “The Snake” second place; first prize went to Flannery O’Connor’s classic “Everything That Rises Must Converge”), Poirier writes, “[Krause] is a writer with great meditative dignity of address. . . . [His images and symbols] are necessarily the most obvious he could borrow from literature and the Bible. He is not in the least complacent about this symbolism, however, making of its contemporary relevance more a mystery than an assumption and showing how it comes into being within the blood stream of people who are not aware of the Biblical analogies for what they are doing.”

You Will Never See Any God

Spring Flood

On a hot Thursday afternoon in late May the rain began to fall, warmly at first, spreading gently over the Iowa farmland like warm congealed humidity. The chillness came the next day with the darkening clouds, and the lightning strokes had the cold malevolence of snakes’ tongues. The sullen gullies and the little creeks filled and raged, and the black water sluiced into the placid river, the river itself altering, becoming plugged with dirt and carcasses, a black mucus. Animals floated dead on the roiling water, a sheep or a calf twisted, bloated and huge, and drawn down again, ghost-like, into the black. Muskrats, like pockets of furry mud, paddled without panic, reaching for the banks. Perceptibly the river rose.

Already by Friday evening, or what the people along that river thought to be evening in the somber gloom of rain, the banks of the river were at last overlapped and the levees topped, and the water pulsed through the breaks suddenly with quick and ugly movement like that of an angry reptile’s head. After that first rush of water there was the steady ooze upward, seeping across the rich bottom land, isolating farmyards and drowning the new crops
in the lowlands, and the flooded river began to back water up the little, rain-heavy creeks.

The water carried with it fallen trees and the muck of a thousand Iowa farms, the litter of cornstalks and dry hemp and tumbleweeds, driving startled living things ahead, a bedraggled deer or two, the squawking birds, the rabbits, scarred turtles, water rats, and fish too, mud-colored ancient gar and carp, transported by the flood surge beyond the levees into the dead and quiet fields of three-foot-deep water on the lowlands. The rain fell and the water rose and the farmers slogged through the mud of farmyards, sullenly, and fed the wilting cattle and retreated again to huddle in their raincoats beneath eaves.

“She never stop pouring,” old Gerber said to young Dahlman. Gerber lived in a shack along the river. The shack was submerged already and he had taken refuge in Dahlman’s corncrib, where Dahlman always had to put him up whenever Gerber needed it. The need was usually once a year, when the rains came in the spring and the river came up, and then Gerber appeared at his place in the corncrib, stinking and mudded over like some grizzled river reptile, saying the water was up again.

Gerber was a legacy from the time of grandfather Dahlman; he was immensely old, no one knew how old for sure, and Gerber himself never said. He had once been a hired hand for the grandfather, and a worthless one, old Dahlman had always said, and he had built a shack on the Dahlman land by the river and there he stayed, holed up in the mud and the mosquito slime and remaining alive through two generations of Dahlmans and aging not at all. For as long as young Dahlman could remember, old Gerber came to the Dahlman house once a day for the noon meal, which the woman was forced to feed him. When the father died they tried to ignore him, but Gerber rattled the screen door and said the old man and the old old man before him had fed him and
that they would too. Young Dahlman said he would not, and he held the door against the old man and said, “Go away Gerber, we don’t want you; go away, you hear, don’t come back.” The old man stood there gripping the screen door sill with his turtle-claw hands, panting like a hungry dog, his eyes tiny and evil and undeniable, and he sat upon the wicker chair on the porch, panting and moaning half through the afternoon until at last the exasperated wife scooped up a pie tin full of potatoes and stew and shoved it out the door to him. He ate and left and reappeared the next noon. So he won, and they fed him the one meal although he did nothing at all, never had, for them or for anyone else. The other two meals a day, if he ate them, he got himself. The supplies he needed he stole, oats from Dahlman’s bins, corn from Dahlman’s fields, and occasionally, with resignation as much as anything else, Dahlman provided Gerber with a sack of flour or sugar and a can of coffee. Whatever else Gerber got he speared from the river. He had three spears, ancient things, with smoothworn handles, and Gerber used them with skill. He could stalk fish as no man could, and he could hit the sluggish carp with expertness and surprising quickness and fierceness when he did choose to strike. He ate carp and some people said he even ate gar, those bullet-shaped prehistoric scavengers that thrived on the sewage of the rivers, but no one had seen enough of Gerber to know for sure what he survived on. Dahlman had invaded the tarpaper shack a few times and had looked in the black pot on the stove at the simmered chunks like live things within, and he could never tell what was live or dead, what newly entered or weeks there, what eaten or uneaten.

So Gerber lived in the ancient, mudded shack, a creature of mud himself, like something that had arisen one time out of a swamp and proved to be alive. He was without forebears and without offspring, this legacy of two generations past who appeared
like a wart and subsisted like one, tough, implacable, ineradicable, with no connection to anything living or dead.

He hunched over and shook himself like a wet dog and said, “Sure some rain.”

Dahlman nodded and said nothing. He watched the heavy sky and the water spilling whitely from the roofs.

“This river she come up higher than you remember,” Gerber said. “She bring fish.”

“And muck and trees and god knows what else,” Dahlman said.

“Ya, trees come across the road. Trees in your bottom field.”

And Dahlman knew he meant floating dead trees had washed in over the levees, to lie with the rest of the flood muck in the fields.

“Not big trees,” Gerber said with a tiny gesture of his knotted dark hand. The hand disappeared within his sleeve again like the black foot of a turtle withdrawing into its shell.

“Animals come out too,” Gerber went on, his voice removed and hollow. “I see lot of rabbits and coons come out of their holes to high ground. Some drown.”

“The land drowns too in this flood. That is the trouble,” Dahlman said.

“I see muskrat, but the fur is no good, otherwise I kill them. Muskrats almost drowned from swimming. And one snake, black and all muddy, riding on top of a tree that float by.”

“A snake?”

“Ya, the tree float by down there,” pointing towards the river or where the river usually flowed, “and the snake there mad and wet, holding on.” There was a faint wheezing, and Dahlman listened and wondered if old Gerber actually laughed, and he turned to look and saw the old toothless mouth, crimped at the edges and black from mud and tobacco and the motion of the mouth like a turtle’s beak. “That snake mad as hell, not liking the water much, holding on.”

“No. Most snakes don’t like water. Nothing likes it in flood time.”

“It was a mad old snake, not a big one, so long . . .”—measuring out eighteen inches between his black turtle hoof hands—“It look up at me as the tree float by. I spit at it.” Again the faint wheezing sound. Dahlman shuddered, from the rain, from the thought of the wet and angry snake riding a tree into his field, from the old man beside him, from his helpless disappointment with everything that spring.

The wife called for dinner and they went up through the pouring chill rain to the house. Dahlman took off his overshoes and he looked down across the little slope to beyond the barn where the water was dim through the rain. The water had seeped to within one hundred yards of the barn and it spread over the flat land all the way to the river. There was a floating edge of scum, ragged like teeth, all along the cornstalk-littered field, and down there in the water a pair of tree trunks floated dimly and listlessly, like hulks of hippopotamus, only the bulk of trunk showing, and the spiny branches broken or hidden in the rain-mist.

“Water never reach the farmyard,” Gerber said. “It have to come up twenty feet more before it reach here.”

Dahlman shook his head at this reassurance, knowing that old Gerber had never worked the land, had given no time to the soil, did not even comprehend the land swallowed by that flood. Dahlman turned abruptly to the door. “Bernice,” he said, “is Gerber’s plate ready?”

The woman said nothing, only brought the pie tin full of food out and set it on the washing machine on the porch without looking at either of them, and she went in again. Gerber sat down on the old wooden chair and began to eat with his fingers, ignoring the fork Dahlman’s wife always set out. He wheezed to himself and gummed at the food with energy and offered some to the
dog, but the dog, still distrustful of Gerber after all the eight years of its life, lifted his rain-wet body and backed away to a distant corner of the porch.

The old black gums exposed as Gerber grinned at the dog. “Old Gerber gonna eat fish pretty soon. Lot of carp in that field out there; gonna get my spear and get some carp. You be glad to eat from my hand then, old dog. I feed you carp guts, you eat.”

“Dirty old man,” the wife said when Dahlman went in and closed the door.

“I know, I know,” Dahlman said wearily. Impatiently he swung about the room talking loudly, knowing that Gerber could hear if he wanted to listen. “Why doesn’t he go somewhere else, to some neighbor’s place maybe? Why does he have to come here? He eats our food and drinks our water, and he prowls around stealing our corn and chickens, and making himself a damned nuisance. I wish the old devil would die.”

“Oh Ronald,” she said in mild, unspirited rebuke.

“Well why not?” he said. “I wish he would. Just because the old man fed him and gave him a place to sleep, he thinks he’s part of us now. He has a hold on this place. There’s nothing we can do, not until he’s dead and gone.”

“But to wish that,” the wife said, shaking her head. “At least you shouldn’t say it.”

“Oh, it’s right all right. Gerber should die. He’s dirty and foul, foul breath, foul smell, foul mouth, everything. He should die. Damn him.”

“Ronald,” she cried. “You get so upset when you start with him. I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I wish I wouldn’t, too. I’d like to be free of that for once. I would like some time to live for just a little while knowing that he’s not there skulking around like some damned mangy dog. I would like to be free of him.”

“He can hear you out there,” she murmured.

“I don’t care.”

“I’m afraid of him, sometimes. I don’t know what he might do if he got angry at us.”

Dahlman threw up his hands and went off into the next room to stare out the window at the rain and the gray-sludge lake formed beyond the cattle barns. The gloom lowered over the land and the sky bled. He could not see beyond the water in the cornstalk field.

“Damn this rain,” he muttered, but loud enough for his wife to hear. “The crops are gone, ruined, and even the oats and soybeans on the hills will be finished if it rains any more. And that old bastard sits out on our porch and eats our food. Do you know what he said to me?”

“What?” she asked.

“He’s happy that there’s a flood, because he can spear carp. Now he can eat carp!”

“It can’t last much longer,” she said. “It just can’t.”

“Maybe he’ll go out there, spearing fish, and he’ll drown. Maybe his shack will wash away.” (And if Gerber lived, he would have me help him build a new shack, Dahlman added to himself.) He looked out the west window towards where Gerber’s hovel usually crouched like a beaten, bedraggled dog, but the rain hid that too. “Maybe he will drown and the shack will go, and we’ll see nothing of Gerber again.”

“He’s part river gar now,” the wife said. “He will never drown.”

Dahlman’s face grew gloomy with the thought and the rain. Outside he saw Gerber detach himself from the mudded concrete porch steps where he had eaten and move formless and black and slow across the yard, leaving great clumps of prints as he walked. At the middle of the yard Gerber turned and looked up to the house, and his face, aged and gray-yellow, mal-colored, lifted and
the old eyes fell upon Dahlman, and Dahlman jerked back from the window as if he should not be there watching, and he forced himself to the window again. The ancient man in the yard dug within the bib of his overalls with their slippery black sheen, extracted a pinch or two of tobacco, hooked the tobacco and his black fingers behind his yellow lips, and the hand came away. All the while he looked at the house. And then his mouth opened a little, perhaps in a smile, perhaps to chew the tobacco, perhaps to urge the dog which stood dripping and forlorn in the middle of the yard, the dog afraid of him and hating him, yet going wherever Gerber went, to squat on his trembling, frightened haunches ten feet away and look at the foul old man who spat at him. Gerber turned and went on, creating again the ponderous prints in the yard mud, and the wet dog trailed after, delicately lifting his feet, searching his way, but the dog too growing muddy. Gerber disappeared within the corncrib. Dahlman, watching, knew what he did, knew he found his corner among the dirty empty sacks, pulled the sacks over his legs and chewed his tobacco and inhaled the dust and watched the squatting dog.

“He said he saw a snake out there on a tree,” Dahlman said softly, half to himself.

“A snake,” she said, startled, pausing in her motion in the kitchen.

“The tree was floating, he said, and the snake was on the tree.”

“Oh I don’t like that,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

“But to see a snake now, with all this rain . . .”

“What? You’re not superstitious, are you, Bernice? One little snake is the least of our worries.”

“But we’ve never had snakes around this place.”