You Will Never See Any God: Stories (4 page)

Dahlman felt the fire in his arm, a kind of quickening needle warmth, the first charge being the worst, burning up to his shoulder so quickly, and he waited there, the burden of old Gerber on his other arm. He tried to calm himself and tried to think, and he thought, he was a peaceable farmer, a good quiet man, and he had done most things rightly and fairly, and every goddamn thing went wrong at once, and he wished for a moment that he had someone there to complain to, to tell exactly as it happened that he had wanted none of it and deserved none. He thought, too, of why he had ever left the yard or the house, if he had just stayed in the house old Gerber would have peacefully died and he, Dahlman, would not have been there, nor would he have heard the dog or touched the snake. And at the next moment he was enraged, and he had a sudden urge to leap upon that snake and to crush it in his fists, grind it into a writhing and rubbery powder beneath his grip, beat it into mangled shreds, beat it and beat it, and he thought that really he would have, but the weight of Gerber was too heavy on him. He stood holding his breath, feeling that burden of old Gerber on his arm and shoulder as if lodged there forever, and the building fire in his other arm from the snake stabs and both were strengthening at once, the weight and the poison fire.

“If I should leave Gerber here,” he said, thinking aloud to himself, “perhaps I could make it . . .” It was now no more than thirty yards. He remembered from his school days that exertion after a
snake bite was bad and that it would spread the poison quickly through him, and if he carried Gerber on there would only be exertion. If he let Gerber fall . . . released himself from that weight . . . for all he knew the old man was dead anyway. He remembered the old animosity, the bafflement and irritation of three generations of Dahlmans. Let him drop there, the water would accept old Gerber as readily as it had always reached out for him down there at his swamp shack.

From the edge of the water came the barking of the dog and whining, and the dog’s high sound merged with a ringing in his ears.

Dahlman did not even look at the dog, did not look at anything for the sun was far too bright on that dark water and there was growing a terrible hotness in his head. He shoved the weight of the old man ahead of him along the tree, and he remembered vaguely that the snake had retreated the other way and they were all right. “Come on, come on,” he muttered, grinding his teeth in his fury. A little froth appeared on the corners of Dahlman’s mouth and his jaw was working as his legs and arms worked. He was very hot and the dizziness crept along his spine to the back of his head and he had to blink to see at all.

“Come on.” He hefted the old man, pulled him nearly upright, and then he plunged past the tree into the thigh-deep water, dragging Gerber by the arms and the coat. Dahlman stumbled on the tough and tangled cornstalks submerged in mud and he fell, flailing backward, and struggled up to swallow mud and then the air and he grabbed the slipping Gerber again and pulled him on with an outraged rush, dragging him on ferociously, as a mad and bedraggled dog would drag some black, offal-stuffed rat, the legs of Gerber slithering behind, leaving a little wake of bubbles and mud.

“Come on, you old bastard, come on.” Dahlman looked ahead,
but the sun was swimming in the film of muddy water and he was dizzy and he could not see and he started to vomit, but the tightness in his chest was too intense and all that he coughed was a little saliva. He closed his eyes tightly so that he could not see at all and he went on. He felt the old rows of corn in the mud and he counted them, and he lost count for the ringing in his ears and yet he went on, until the blood thundered in his skull and twisted his brain so that his eyes seemed to leave their very sockets, were wrenched aside too, distorted as his whole body was rent and distorted. The dog barked nearer, farther, nearer, louder and louder, the dog going mad in its panic, and Dahlman clenched his face and tried to run, dragging the slithering Gerber like a turtle through the mud and he fell and felt the water splash and the water did not even cover his knees. He clutched ahead and found the barking dog. His hands caught the dog and he pulled himself ahead and he and Gerber and the sprawling, yelping dog were rolling together, and Dahlman swore over and over with the blood choking him, “Damn you, Gerber. Damn you.”

There was the high cry of the woman, and Dahlman saw the convulsive sun vibrate and the earth yawned and opened and the world burned him in its jerking convulsive motion.

The Right Hand

The boy stood tense, holding the post steady and straight in the post hole his father had dug to fill the broken line in the fence. He was a young boy, twelve or so, with light blond hair, like his father’s where it had not turned gray, and with eyes the color of smoke, holding the even cool color in his eyes as he looked across the hill into the valley where the neighbor lived. The boy watched the neighbor come slowly up the hill, across the cornstalk-littered ground, turning now deeply but sparsely green with the new spring crop of oats. The neighbor was still a long way away, but the boy scrutinized him closely as he approached.

They had come there in the spring; the boy’s father and the family of six, not counting the mother, had come to this cold farm with its spiny trees like thistles and the old, unpainted buildings crouched between two hills like broad-backed snuffing gray-colored hogs. The boy had come with his parents and his five brothers and sisters, but for two months he had seen no stranger except at the country school—only his father had visited around, talking to the neighbors and returning home to tell what the neighbors knew.

The cows broke out the day before, snapped the rusted wires and the rotted posts that harbored fat white slugs and the sawdust manure of wood-boring bugs, and had trampled across the neighbor’s oats field, chewing up the harrowed land turning green with young oats with their hooves, before the boy and his father got them turned back. The cows were still in the yard and he and his father worked on the fence, putting the posts in first before the wires could be pulled up and repaired. The day was cloudy, portending rain, and the clouds slid fast from behind one gray hill, over them, to the other hills beyond, drizzling lightly, only to be told by the sensitive pricks on bare arms, leaving a coldness like a snake-skin chill.

“Kick in some dirt, Clayton. Don’t just stand there,” the father said with a voice thick and slow but still reflecting a kind of impatience. The boy looked down to the half-moon slit around the post and pushed some dirt into the hole with his foot. The father told him to stop then, and he bent, kneeling beside the post, and tamped the dirt tight and hard. The old man used a long, slender steel rod to tamp the dirt in. The boy watched the arm and the steel rod pump up and down, leisurely but powerfully, saw the sweated shirtsleeves move with the slow, strong movements of the old man.

“There’s a man coming up the hill,” the boy said. The old man did not say anything. He acted as if he hadn’t heard.

“There’s a man coming,” the boy said again, insistently.

“I know,” the father said, his voice flat with indifference. “I seen him an hour ago. Now pass in some more dirt.”

The boy pushed in the dirt and watched the man come to them, the shoes of the man heavy in the mud of the new oats field.

“Howdy,” the man said, when he was near to them, and the father turned on his knees and laid the bar aside.

“Howdy,” the old man said, grasping the post and standing with
heaviness and tiredness. The father squinted at the face of the neighbor, hidden partly behind the pulled-down cap, while the boy gawked at it. It was a face bloodless and yet suffused with a blood color, a face with a scraped lavender birthmark, the mark starting at the temple, hidden partly by the cap, and cutting down the left side of the face from the ear to the jawbone and fringed at the lips with the deep-purple shade, the color of a rotted plum that the worms have eaten into, and the mark branded the eye with a living, livid, sore redness, making anyone who saw the man look instinctively at the inflamed texture around the left eye. The birthmark pulled the lips crooked, made them seem open, even if they were not, made them look dead with that deep-purple, bloodless, blooded color. It was the purple of something dead—the purple on dead horses’ heads before the rendering truck or hogs come to them. The boy stared at this face, the face reflecting the sorrow and the sufferings of lifetimes, a face with the mark of Cain perhaps, or just of the man’s parents; it was a face with that naked hurting look of a burn or a brand healing and yet never quite healed, always inflamed and sensitive and sore; it was a face of terror and of bad dreams, giving to anyone who saw it a weird and evilfearing anxiety.

“You’re Ezra Stark,” the father said.

They both—the boy and the father—watched the lips of Ezra Stark to see if they were alive, if the purple face and the drooping red-bordered eye were something living or dead.

“Yes,” Stark said, his lips hardly moving, and he looked at the boy, but the boy did not notice the eyes; he only saw the inflamed worm-lavender cheek and the sagging corner of the raw mouth.

“I was over to your place the other day,” the father said. “But there was nobody home.”

“I must have been in the field,” Stark said. There was a faint lisp in his voice, a faint struggle to form words and speak. He spoke very slowly, and his voice was deep.

“We’re just putting up the fence,” the father went on. “My cows busted out.”

“I seen the oats field,” Stark said. He looked at the gawking boy again, studied the boy’s face a moment and looked away, at the old man again. The father noticed the boy then, too.

“What you looking at, boy?” he said. “You never seen a stranger before? You can finish up this post—that’ll give you something to do while men talk.”

The boy knelt obediently and pushed dirt into the black half-moon and tamped the clods, crushing them, sealing the post in.

The boy felt a shudder—it was not the air and the wisps of drizzle. He knew what it was—there was evil here. He had a swift recognition of the evil of something warped, the terror of darkness and the strange; he had felt it before, on cold lightning-fired nights, in the chill of the church on Sunday mornings, on entering an unlighted barn. This had always held a secret terror for him, for he went much to Sunday school and church, and he had heard much of evil, had known it to be rampant and secret, and it had always been hidden secretly from him, behind bannisters on stairs, in the darkness of doorways at church, behind corners cringing in barns, in the dank, tree-overhung lagoons that were nursed with bad water and a stench down along the river. It had always been a secret terror for him before, but now it was here, very near to him; he could look up and see the heavy, mudded shoetops of the neighbor with that face strange, carved as if from red and rotted wood with the purple, bloodless leer and the red-rimmed, gouged eye.

The boy breathed quickly, not so much from the work, placing the post, as from the quick fear and hot, nerve-catching fascination of being so near to that which he had feared and had always wanted to see, face to face, all his life, but had never seen until now.

The boy moved his slight shoulders and patted the earth, smoothing it carefully around the post. He knelt and looked from beneath his blue cap bill at Stark, at the man with the hideous evil face. He wondered what the man thought, if there were evil thoughts, plans, sweeping through him, like spiders crawling inside that reddened skull, and if the spiders too had that cold and dead and bloodless purple look, like rotted plums. He thought of it and felt the sudden fascination and hatred come over him again. He was afraid to look at the man’s face, looking instead at the heavy mud-laden shoes, hearing the voices of his father and Stark speak from a distance.

His father did most of the talking; he was always one for that, never missing an opportunity to visit even if no one else wanted to talk, as they did not want to around this, their new place. His father talked of oats and went to scrabble in the wet dirt to look for seed that hadn’t sprouted, and the man, Stark, followed him, and stood in half-crouched posture, bent from the waist, as if he were hardly interested in what the father did. The boy watched him now, watched with a calm intensity, expecting the man to do something, violent and sudden, and if he did the boy knew what he would do; he would spring to the aid of his father in that struggle, he would swing the long steel bar, he saw it now—the swift, crushing, sodden violence, and the fine muscles in his arms grew rigid in preparation, but the man did not do anything at all.

The man, Stark, went away then, down the long slope towards the shack and the outbuildings partly hidden by trees, partly by the hills, moving with heavy, mud-laden feet, pulling up the oats turf worse than any cow had done.

“He has a bad scar,” the father said to the boy. They went to the next post, and the father dug the spade in and turned the earth out, preparing to make the hole.

“What did he get it from? Did he always have it?” the boy asked.

“It’s a birthmark,” the father said. “He never goes anyplace because of it. I’m surprised he came up here to talk to us today.”

“He probably had a reason,” the boy said, with faint insinuation.

“What reason?” the father asked, gasping with the work of the auger. “Oh, the cows—no, he wasn’t mad about that. He didn’t even mention it.”

The boy listened to his father and knew the old man did not understand as he understood.

The boy could move like a shadow or like smoke, noiseless and swift, more often not moving at all, standing silent, blending in with where he stood. He had learned it hunting with his father, had learned to stalk rabbits and squirrels and an occasional rare deer, moving as silent as smoke through the woods, blending by his careful tenseness into the trees and the corn. Sometime when he was younger—it was on another farm, another time—he had recognized his ability to be silent, to tread with smoke softness, and he could come nearly to neighbors’ yards and there he squatted and watched and listened and when he was satisfied he drifted off again. He was quiet, the boy; he told no one of what he did or what he had seen or heard—he knew much, for he heard many of the intimate and violent man-and-wife arguments of his neighbors—knew more than the neighbors would ever admit aloud, and no one ever questioned him. There were six in the family and he was the third, and they were all too busy to notice him except when they needed him for work or chores—milking or egg gathering. The boy helped with the chores on summer evenings, milking down in the hot, fly-infested barn, and then, later, he sat in the wooden chair by the yellow kerosene lamp in what was called the living room, although the only thing that
made it different from the kitchen was that it had no stove and dinner table, and there he dutifully did his catechism work. He was to be confirmed in the church in the spring, and it was important that he know his lessons of devoutness and godliness, and his mother listened to him recite before he could go out again.

The summer nights were thick with hotness and liquid heaviness, giving the evening a warm, oily texture like warm bacon grease, airless in the hollows between the hills where the corn grew lush and tall, crowded with the small, intimate sounds of locusts and crickets, sounds that mixed and settled in the hot, pollen-laden air, but jarred somehow by the strangeness and loudness of human voices and the slamming of doors far away. The evenings lingered, dusty and quiet and warm, lingered in a dusty lethargy, like a fat and squashed too-ripe pear silked over with dust.

The boy moved then, after his Bible history and catechism lessons, drifted like smoke across the barbed fence, hardly raising a sound, and across the road to the other fence and was submerged in the cornfield. He followed the corn row down the hill, moving with alacrity and swiftness and utter stillness, with less sound than the bees above the cornfield or the rustle of the blue-green bayonet leaves themselves, which no one ever hears consciously, and he stepped carefully from foxtail clump to clump, so that there were only a few random footprints in the dirt.

He came at last to the farmstead, to the bleak, unpainted buildings in the hollow. The boy slid on his belly along the fence until he came at last to a stop in the shadow of brush that had once been a plum thicket and there he squatted and watched the yard. The house was near to him, on his left, and to his right stood the gray outbuildings, the barn and the corncrib and granary and chickenhouse. It took the boy a moment to sense where Stark was; he listened and turned his head carefully until at last he rec
ognized the faint sounds of movement in the barn. Stark was milking. The boy squatted and clasped his hands between his knees and waited.

He had come there many times, to this spot or to places near it, and he had waited and watched. He was never impatient, and sometimes he did not see anything and at other times he saw much. He remembered especially, clearly, the time Stark brought the basket full of movement up from the hog yard. The boy saw the wet slimy head of a newborn calf over the edge of the basket as Stark carried it up, and the boy wondered why he carried the calf to the house. He saw for a moment incantations, weird magic in firelight, sacrifices of newborn calves with blood dripping endlessly from slashed, furred throats, all this and more behind the sagging screen door of Stark’s house. The light came on in the backroom where the shades were always pulled—the boy had learned quickly that Stark always went there soon after sundown and lit the lamp, making the tan, always-pulled shades glow with a weak yellow color, and then there was a light, too, in a nearer, a front room, that must have been the kitchen, but there was no other movement and no other sound, and then the lights were extinguished, first the front one and then the one in the backroom and there was nothing else at all, no light, no sound. The boy slid down the little slope until he knelt by the porch, but still he heard and saw and smelled nothing. It was as if all living creatures had vanished from around him and he was utterly alone. It terrified him and fascinated him, as seeing Stark that first day had done. He returned night after night, intent on seeing the calf; he changed his vantage point until he was certain it must still be in the house, or perhaps in Stark himself, or perhaps still bleeding as some evil sacrifice to a terrible, purplefaced, livid god. And then one day he saw the calf again, saw Stark lead it out, his hands under the calf’s belly, quite gently, across the porch, and the calf could not
walk, and it tried to stand and could not and it collapsed, bellowing a strange, squeaky and broken half-wit bellow. The boy understood then; he had seen newborn calves chewed by hogs, and he knew this calf had its forefeet chewed off to nubs, and Stark had wrapped the feet, and the bandages were red with iodine and sticky with some khakicolored poultice. Stark lifted the calf and set it carefully in the grass and weeds flanking the house, folding the calf’s struggling legs so it would lie down, but the calf kept trying to stand up and would not lie down, even when Stark was there holding it. Stark tried to feed it with a bottle, but it would not take the nipple. Later on, the animal tired from its violent struggle to stand, and Stark came out in the late-evening gloom after the milking and he was able to feed it a little, but it was apparent to the boy, who had often trucked out dead pigs and chickens and even calves to the fields to rot, that the calf would die, and yet Stark tried to feed it and keep it alive. It was all like something mad, something utterly fierce and crazy, the way the gaunt, disfigured man came out and struggled with the weak, dying calf and tried to feed and nourish it. When Stark was not there on later evenings the animal tried to rise, and it fell on its side, and rose again, and it undid the bandages in its threshings and the white, hard nubs of the bones stood out like something naked and hurting and polished whitely, like ivory, and the boy thought “kill it, kill it” with a fury at the man who would want to keep such a thing alive, but still Stark tried to feed it and nourish it and he replaced the bandages and lathered them heavily with Vaseline. After two days the calf would not eat anymore and even then somehow it managed to stand, its sides transparent against the toothpick, tiny-slat ribs, and it wandered thus, falling and rising and floundering in the dust of the yard, like some mad tormented creature, driven by something inexplicable and terrible, seeking to hide in the shade of the plum brush, but always falling and
being drawn in the wrong direction, wandering, mad and awful, disfigured and torn, yet somehow, madly, relentlessly living, driven like its master to live, in spite of the want for death, until at last it did die, with even the last death motion feeble, and the calf bellow only a gurgle in the quivering throat, and in the evening when the dust had cooled and Stark came back in from the fields, he took the calf and carried it up the pasture hill and buried it. The boy could see the place where he went quite clearly from where he watched.