You Will Never See Any God: Stories Read Free

“And while the magazine itself is expendable,” Shapiro continued in his Library of Congress presentation, “the book, no matter how bad, is not. It is practically impossible to lose or destroy a book; the Library knows this only too well.”
    Though Shapiro might have overstated the unlikelihood of a book’s expendability (even Shapiro’s own acclaimed, award-winning collections of poetry are currently in a state of neglect), the literary hierarchy of the twentieth century was shaped and ordered according to the prominence of an author’s books among readers, publishers, and scholars. And in losing Ervin Krause’s voice, we lost a graphic and captivating representation of post-Depression farm life.
    With this collection, Krause’s stories—no longer confined tothe archives of middle-twentieth-century literary journals—can enter a new level of consideration. The stories included here are only a fraction of Krause’s complete body of work; some of his stories exist only in handwritten form in his many spiral-bound notebooks. (“Old Schwier,” a story included in this collection, a folktale about maniacal power and devastating regret, is one that Krause never typed nor submitted to journals.)
    The stories Krause tells are bleak but they’re exciting in their raw poetic vigor, and they’re vital to our understanding of these rural men and women and their paradoxical nature of a complicated simplicity. These are the larger-than-life legends of a small locality, stories of personal defeat and ruination that most often went untold in a God-fearing community. While gossip and suspicion rend apart these characters’ lives, the narrative is driven by the reader’s very same desire to learn of the intimate transgressions of the sinners and the sinned against.
    “Mythic,” Richard Poirier said of Krause’s story “The Snake,” which he selected for Prize Stories 1963: The O. Henry Awards . In his introduction to the anthology (which awarded “The Snake” second place; first prize went to Flannery O’Connor’s classic “Everything That Rises Must Converge”), Poirier writes, “[Krause] is a writer with great meditative dignity of address. . . . [His images and symbols] are necessarily the most obvious he could borrow from literature and the Bible. He is not in the least complacent about this symbolism, however, making of its contemporary relevance more a mystery than an assumption and showing how it comes into being within the blood stream of people who are not aware of the Biblical analogies for what they are doing.”

You Will Never See Any God
     

Spring Flood
     
    On a hot Thursday afternoon in late May the rain began to fall, warmly at first, spreading gently over the Iowa farmland like warm congealed humidity. The chillness came the next day with the darkening clouds, and the lightning strokes had the cold malevolence of snakes’ tongues. The sullen gullies and the little creeks filled and raged, and the black water sluiced into the placid river, the river itself altering, becoming plugged with dirt and carcasses, a black mucus. Animals floated dead on the roiling water, a sheep or a calf twisted, bloated and huge, and drawn down again, ghost-like, into the black. Muskrats, like pockets of furry mud, paddled without panic, reaching for the banks. Perceptibly the river rose.
    Already by Friday evening, or what the people along that river thought to be evening in the somber gloom of rain, the banks of the river were at last overlapped and the levees topped, and the water pulsed through the breaks suddenly with quick and ugly movement like that of an angry reptile’s head. After that first rush of water there was the steady ooze upward, seeping across the rich bottom land, isolating farmyards and drowning the new cropsin the lowlands, and the flooded river began to back water up the little, rain-heavy creeks.
    The water carried with it fallen trees and the muck of a thousand Iowa farms, the litter