Ervin Krause - You Will Never See Any God - Stories

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.