You Will Never See Any God: Stories (8 page)

A century and a half since Leipzig. Yes, he could do it, he could kill the young man, without pretense of compassion, confession, anything, just kill him, and told himself it was ridiculous, absurd, he who had never contemplated murder of anyone in thirty-odd years, and even as he thought it he studied the motion of the other stooping to fold the blanket, the fright of the other, this absurd fear of him, Leonard, that made him even more willing to do it, now contemplated a neat mark on the other to put his bull’s-eye on. He would feel nothing. Neither of them would feel anything.

At the same time he could have laughed. Was it possible? he asked, possible that a murderer of a whole family and hired man to boot would be frightened of him? No one had been afraid of him before, no need to be. And here the young man was obviously scared. It was amazing to him. He wanted to discuss it with the young man, but what could he say, how could he begin? “Say, are you afraid of me?” Pointing the rifle at him perhaps? As he might have asked the terrified cat a while before. The rifle made one invincible.

“Well, I got to be getting on,” the other said with his folded blanket under his arm, standing there facing Leonard as if asking permission to go to the car.

“Yes. Be sure and close the fence gate good and tight. These are young calves in here and pretty wild.”

“Sure will. I know all about fences.” The other went on then, to the car, got in. Leonard went the few feet so that he was opposite to him, so he could watch. The old car’s engine cranked over, finally started with a clatter, and the machine backed away. The
young man stopped at the fence, carefully put up the wires, looking down through the trees to where Leonard stood, obscured he knew, watching. How easy it would be, the press, the snap of sound, the awful impact. He stood there, chilled, feeling the cold pressure of relentless and terrible things growing within him, feeling the stinging bite of his neck as if a snake had toothed him there.

The wires were painstakingly finished, the young man drove on, out of sight immediately but Leonard able to hear the retreat of sound.

All the way back to the farmhouse he shot anything that moved, two cottontails, a big brown thrasher, one crow, and a woodpecker. He did not miss.

Old Schwier

Rudolph Schwier was the richest man in Charleston. He lived on the hill at the east end of town, up away from the river, in a shabby old frame house that had been white once but was turning gray. A house never made money for anybody, he always said. That’s what he told the wives of his farm tenants whenever they would timidly suggest wallpaper or calcimine for their chicken-coop houses. Old Schwier owned thirty-one farms, spread around Charleston in all directions, even across the river in South Dakota. He owned the creamery and one of the town’s two grain elevators, too.

Schwier had come to Charleston from Schleswig-Holstein when he was seventeen. He worked for a year as a hired hand for a bachelor, whose name no one remembered anymore, on a farm northeast of town until one day the bachelor got kicked in the head by a horse and was killed. Schwier brought him to town in a buckboard and they buried him. Schwier kept on farming out there and it wasn’t long before it was called the Schwier place. He was a hard-working man, no one could deny that; before he was twenty-five, he had two other quarter sections. Even then no one
liked him much. The farmers around, who were far from gentle themselves, said he was a brute with his horses and cows, and besides that they could never talk to Schwier; he had nothing to say to them, and if they paused and leaned over the fence to await his coming to the end of the corn row at cultivating time, Schwier would simply turn his team and head back and not even look up at them.

When he was a little past thirty he married the fat daughter of one of his tenants. She turned into a stolid and heavy and silent woman and her arms were always burdened with kids. Schwier had four girls and six boys and when each was old enough, eight or so, they were working twelve and fourteen hours a day, just as he was. They went to school when Schwier found time to let them go, and they were all plodding and thick-witted and ham-fisted and they were supposed to be stupid. They got away one by one, hitchhiking out or catching the train or getting married and leaving if they could. If it was one of the boys who left, Schwier would go into an enormous rage. He got his buggy and a boy or two and the blacksnake whip and he drove around the countryside, asking all the farmers if they had seen his son. The only one he ever caught was the oldest; he found him under a wooden culvert and old Schwier pulled him out of there and tied a rope around the boy’s waist and dragged him home. He took the boy out into the barn and beat him half the night. The boy went around with a cringing look and with a crouched back and he shambled after that, but he tried again within six months. This time he was not caught.

The tenth and last of the Schwiers was Diedrich. He was born when his mother was nearly forty-five. There was trouble and Schwier was off to a sale and it was the dead of winter and by the time the daughter got back with the neighbor woman the woman was dead and the boy was on the floor beside her, bawling up
through the blood and water and slimy filament. Diedrich was a frail boy. He was raised by his sister, Bertha—she was eleven years older than him. Perhaps because of the boy, she stayed longer than most, until he was nine. Schwier got a hired girl then to take care of things, and when she, too, ran away, Schwier was furious, because he had been paying her money. He hitched up his team of bays to the buggy and he yelled at Diedrich to open the gate. The boy couldn’t get it open quickly enough and the high-spirited animals were whipped over him and the buggy went over his legs. Both legs were broken in four places. The boy crawled back to the house. Old Schwier tried to set his legs when he got back, without the girl. The pain was terrible and the boy howled day and night even when under the threat of the whip, and after three days Old Schwier took him to town to see a doctor. The doctor broke his legs again and reset them, but it was no use. He was always crippled.

He managed to walk a little after a year, and eventually he could discard the crutches and canes, but the walking was always laborious and shambling. Old Schwier made fun of his son when he saw him walking and he would laugh and copy the boy’s steps.

“Walk right, young fool,” he shouted, laughing. “Walk so.” And he tapped the young boy on the breast. “At least you won’t leave, will you, ah?”

When the Depression came, Schwier dug up some of the money he’d hoarded—he had never trusted banks—and he bought the bankrupt creamery, and then he moved to town. He bought the house on the hill and a brand new 1932 Packard. It was a gigantic car, and it was the only new car sold in Charleston that year. Old Schwier didn’t want anyone to know he couldn’t drive a car, since he had never had one, so he sent Diedrich crippling down the hill to the Packard garage to take lessons, and after that the son was Old Schwier’s chauffeur. The old man always sat in
the backseat when they drove; they never drove far, usually only out to a tenant’s place to see how things were going, or to Sioux City to a whorehouse.

The town began to see Old Schwier then as the farmers always had. The townspeople could never before believe the farmers, who were always complaining about something. But they, too, found that he was cold and tyrannical and mean. He finagled his way into the feed mill and within a year he owned it all. He had too much money to distrust banks and he was named a director of the Charleston Savings Bank. The foreclosures increased, rates went up, and when Old Schwier got through, his bank was the only one in town. They whispered about him, and the low-paid men cursed him and made vague threats, but that was all they could do. Old Schwier employed almost half of Charleston.

When he came downtown in the Packard he would be dressed in overalls and the buttons at the side would be unbuttoned, and sometimes the fly, too, and he would walk down to the bank. He chewed tobacco and would spit on the sidewalk and on the bank floor or wherever it was convenient. Everyone hated Old Schwier, but everyone was also timid.

Old Schwier always liked his hair cropped short, in a crisp, Kraut style, as everyone in town said, and when Old Schwier walked in, the barber would hurry with the man he was working on so Schwier would not have to wait too long. He held the mortgage on the barbershop, too.

Diedrich would never get out of the car on those weekly trips from the hill to the bank or to the barbershop. He sat behind the wheel and said nothing and did nothing, even when the weather was hot and the sun was full on him. Only the black eyes in his face would ever move much, and they hardly ever at all.

They were an odd pair, the town decided. The town hated and feared them both. They hated the father because he was rich and
powerful and ruthless, and the son they hated because he was his father’s servant.

The talk was always of wickedness and scandal concerning Old Schwier. Everyone hated him and avoided him if they could and they talked of him, unless he was there among them and then they fell silent. A young new Lutheran minister went up to the house on the hill one afternoon to carry his missionary zeal to the root of the evil of the town, and he got thrown out bodily by the fierce and wicked old man. The minister walked around with a cane for a few weeks after that, and he preached against evil from the pulpit, and he prayed openly for Old Schwier’s soul.

When Schwier heard about it he spat a glob on the sidewalk and laughed.

The war came and went and nothing changed with the old man and the son. The house grew more shabby, but there was always a Prussian cleanliness and neatness about the yard and the porch and as much as one could see of the inside of the house itself—Old Schwier saw to it that the housekeeper took care of that. There was still the 1932 Packard, immaculate and polished on the outside, but a garage man reported once he had seen the interior of the backseat where Old Schwier always sat, and the floor was covered with the slime of the old man’s spitting. Old Schwier did not change, he was still erect and although there were lines on his face he did not look older. His hair was still a cropped steel-gray and his eyes were a cold metallic color. Old Schwier was always the same, and the new generation came to fear and hate him as much as the old. Only Diedrich had changed; his back had bent, his face was old, his mouth was hard and dry and lipless and there were wrinkles on his thin, cold face. Some said he looked older than his father.

The first attack came very suddenly. Old Schwier and Diedrich had driven out to one of the farms south of town and Old Schwier
was walking through the hog yard with the farmer and Diedrich was hobbling after them when Old Schwier gave a kind of howl and he fell and lay writhing in the manure. There was spittle around his chin when they pulled him up and he was clutching his chest.

“Stand up,” Diedrich hissed. “Stand up.”

The old man tried to stand and he could not and he clutched at the two of them and his eyes were dumb and terrified.

They got him back to the house and the doctor came out right away. It was a heart attack.

They took Schwier back to town in the Packard and put him in the house up on the hill. No one saw him for more than a month. When they did see him again, he had changed; his face had lost the German ruddiness, he was a ghostly gray color now, and his hands shook. When he got out of the car he walked very slowly and heavily and at the sidewalk it came on him again and he fell and had to call for help. A couple of passing boys stopped to help him up the few steps into the bank. It was like looking death in the face, one of the boys said afterwards, to look at Old Schwier. The old man was very frightened. Diedrich did not get out of the car at all.

Old Schwier had never had use for a doctor, but there was one out almost every day now. They told him he was old, he had a murmur and it looked bad. No, there was nothing they could do really. They would try, of course, to help, and to ease any pain.

Old Schwier spent the summer sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. He had no breath left and he could hardly walk without Diedrich to help him. He had stopped chewing tobacco and his voice was very soft now. The bankers and the doctors came up the hill to see him now. The town was glad to miss Old Schwier. It served the old son of a bitch right, they said.

After the third heart attack that fall, Schwier had to stay in bed
for nearly a month. When he arose again there was a visible tremor not only in his hands but in his entire body. Even his head shook now, slightly and perpetually. He was frail and he looked his full seventy-eight.

When he recovered enough to move again he had Diedrich drive him down to the minister’s house. They were there together, he and the minister, for over an hour, and when Old Schwier came out again he was weeping.

The minister made daily visitations to the house on the hill. He brought his little case along and there was the sacrament of communion there often.

The changes were many then. The old man wept and prayed most of the day, and he called Diedrich in and wanted him to pray, too, but Diedrich only looked at him and hobbled out again.

“I have sinned so much,” the old man wailed. He said he wanted his son to forgive him and for them to love each other. Old Schwier had the minister contact the Red Cross to try and locate his children but the Red Cross could not find any of them. They had probably all changed their names, the minister said.

Old Schwier threw out the housemaid he’d had and he got an elderly woman to do his cooking and cleaning. He took $40,000 and had an organ installed in the church and had a small gold plaque, “In memory of my beloved wife, Hilda,” placed on it. He went to church every Sunday then, and the minister seated him in the front pew and delivered several sermons in succession to God’s forgiveness and love. Schwier sold a couple of farms and gave the money to the church towards a new one they would build in the spring. It was a gift from God, the minister said. There was talk that even the president of the synod would be there to help with the cornerstone. Other things changed, too. Old Schwier lowered the rent on his farms, he sent out fence material and paint
and wallpaper without being asked. He had the minister say public prayers for himself and his wife and his children.

I have done such terrible things, he told the minister. I have sinned so terribly. They called Diedrich in and asked about his legs and if he wanted to go to Rochester to the Mayo Clinic to be helped, and Old Schwier said he would spend anything to help his son. Bless you, my child, he said, with love in his eyes, bless you for being with me even when I was terrible and cruel. Diedrich, who had lately taken to chewing tobacco, only spat on the floor.

When they rarely went downtown, Old Schwier tried to be benevolent and kind. He took candy and small coins with him to press on the children he saw. Everyone said he was a wonderful old man. They said he had made a mistake and he knew it and he was really fine now. Only the old-timers would sometimes recall the old Old Schwier, but they were shushed.

In the spring the church was begun with the president of the synod there and Schwier standing between the minister and the president, the old man leaning heavily on two canes. It was to be the most beautiful church in the area, the president said. A month later Schwier sold a couple more farms and gave the money to the school for a new gymnasium. It was to be called Schwier Auditorium over the protests of the generous old man. The Sioux City papers, covering the event, called him a benefactor and philanthropist.

Old Schwier gave to the hospital too, and he felt badly that he could not help more, but the town had already built a new one just after the war.

Gradually he forgot and the town forgot and he was loved and adulated and his kindness was known and his smile was common. Only with the minister did he still sometimes weep and be concerned.