Ervin Krause - You Will Never See Any God - Stories

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.”