You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause Read Free Book Online

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 recognized 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 notwalk, 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