You Will Never See Any God: Stories Read Free Page A

of cornstalks and dry hemp and tumbleweeds, driving startled living things ahead, a bedraggled deer or two, the squawking birds, the rabbits, scarred turtles, water rats, and fish too, mud-colored ancient gar and carp, transported by the flood surge beyond the levees into the dead and quiet fields of three-foot-deep water on the lowlands. The rain fell and the water rose and the farmers slogged through the mud of farmyards, sullenly, and fed the wilting cattle and retreated again to huddle in their raincoats beneath eaves.
    “She never stop pouring,” old Gerber said to young Dahlman. Gerber lived in a shack along the river. The shack was submerged already and he had taken refuge in Dahlman’s corncrib, where Dahlman always had to put him up whenever Gerber needed it. The need was usually once a year, when the rains came in the spring and the river came up, and then Gerber appeared at his place in the corncrib, stinking and mudded over like some grizzled river reptile, saying the water was up again.
    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 andthat 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 appearedlike 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