You Will Never See Any God Ervin D

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln University of Nebraska Press -- Sample Books and University of Nebraska Press Chapters 2014 You Will Never See Any God Ervin D. Krause Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/unpresssamples Krause, Ervin D., "You Will Never See Any God" (2014). University of Nebraska Press -- Sample Books and Chapters. 245. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/unpresssamples/245 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Nebraska Press at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Nebraska Press -- Sample Books and Chapters by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Buy the Book Buy the Book You Will Never See Any God Stories Ervin D. Krause Edited and with an introduction by Timothy Schaffert University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London Buy the Book © 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Friends of the University of Nebraska Press. “The Right Hand” is reprinted from Prairie Schooner 33.1 (Spring 1959) by permission of the University of Nebraska Press, copyright 1959 by the University of Nebraska Press. “The Metal Sky” and “The Snake” are reprinted fromPrairie Schooner 35.2 (Summer 1961) by permission of the University of Nebraska Press, copyright 1961 by the University of Nebraska Press. “The Quick and the Dead” is reprinted from Prairie Schooner 34.1 (Spring 1960) by permission of the Uni- versity of Nebraska Press, copyright 1960 by the University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Krause, Ervin D. [Short stories. Selections] You will never see any God: stories / Ervin D. Krause; edited and with an introduction by Timothy Schaffert. pages cm isbn 978-0-8032-4976-9 (paper : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-8032-5407-7 (pdf)—isbn 978-0-8032-5408-4 (ePub) —isbn 978-0-8032-5409-1 (mobi) I. Schaffert, Timothy. ii. Title. ps3611.r3767 a6 2014 813'.6—dc23 2013041641 Set in Arno Pro by Laura Wellington. Designed by J. Vadnais. Buy the Book For Loretta Buy the Book Buy the Book Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Spring Flood 1 The Right Hand 19 The Shooters 35 Old Schwier 60 Anniversary 71 The Metal Sky 98 The Quick and the Dead 111 The Witch 133 The Snake 151 Buy the Book Buy the Book Acknowledgments Over the years, Ervin Krause’s family and friends remained fiercely committed to the author’s memory and the work he left behind. We should all be so lucky to have such a devoted village of archi- vists. Most significant among them has been Loretta Krause, my dear friend and research partner. Loretta not only saved note- books, drafts, and correspondence but has generously shared her memories of Ervin from their life together. I’m extremely grateful for Loretta’s kindness, humor, and spirit. I’m also grateful for the time and attention that Marlene and Hank Krause have given to the project and the archives they’ve maintained— material that dates back to Ervin’s high school years. And it’s been a great pleasure to learn more about Ervin through his close friend and colleague Richard Goodman. Special thanks to Kristen Elias Rowley of the University of Nebraska Press for her shepherding of this project. Ted Kooser has provided key perspective on the period and Karl Shapiro’s role in Ervin’s work. And many thanks to Susan Belasco for her support and encouragement. Thanks also to Kurt Andersen, David Manderscheid, Judy Buy the Book Slater, Wendy Katz, Kay Walter, Leta Powell Drake, Amber Antholz, Hilda Raz, Owen King, and Rhonda Sherman. And special thanks to Rodney Rahl for his insights and his enthusiasm for all my various literary endeavors. This collection celebrates the tradition of the small literary jour- nal and its decades- long commitment to the short- story writer. Some of the stories in this collection first appeared in Prairie Schooner (“The Right Hand,” “The Metal Sky,” “The Quick and the Dead,” “The Snake”) and Northwest Review (“The Shooters,” “The Witch”). The O. Henry Awards prize stories anthology reprinted “The Quick and the Dead” and “The Snake.” Other of Krause’s stories appeared in University Review— Kansas City, Lit- erary Review, New Letters, and College English. x Acknowlegments Buy the Book Introduction In the stories of Ervin Krause, men and women are often unfor- giving of each other’s trespasses. But their fiercest grudges are with the land and the sky. The characters are troubled by floods and parched earth, battered by “vivid, hurting” snow and intense summer sun. Sometimes nature wins in these struggles and sometimes humans do, but in Krause’s fiction it’s never a fair fight, and it’s often brutal. In one of Krause’s most heart-wrenching and terrifying pas- sages, in “The Metal Sky,” a farmer examines the intricate beauty and flight of a butterfly as he struggles to stay alive after an acci- dent. Pinned, bleeding, beneath his own machinery, he seeks com- panionship in death while also envying the insect’s light- as- air indifference: He brought his fingers up and then very carefully and quickly snapped the fingers shut on the arched yellow wings. The butterfly struggled, but its wings were caught and its fragile black body vibrated in its writhings. The yellow dust on the wings rubbed off and filtered down, lightly. Buy the Book It will know I am not dead, the man thought. It alone, if nothing else, will know. He held the fragile wings of yellow light, with the wings so delicate he could not even feel them between his hardened hands. The butterfly tried to move and could not and the claws of its legs clasped the air. Had Krause lived to write longer, to write more, we would almost certainly have come to have a sense of the Krausian— fiction char- acterized by the stark, haunting poetry of his language, the treach- ery of his landscapes, the moral and fatal failings of his unblessed characters. His stories are tantalizing portraits of sad hamlets sur- rounded by fields of failed crops and rising rivers, grim little worlds as gritty as the settings of pulp crime. These stories aren’t so much about survival as they are about the characters’ deter- mination to outlive all the other hard-living men and women around them. Though his stories are told without sentiment, with all of pulp’s electric tension and lack of mercy, they nonetheless have the gen- tle but insistent rhythms of folktale. There’s life, then there’s death. These are tales that command retelling; they’re cautionary, while inviting you to perversely delight in every character’s every reck- less act. The stories play on our memories of shadowy figures and childhood fears, the countryside peopled with witches and skin- flints, the nights prowled by wolves and scrutinized by an “ago- nized and lamenting” moon. And above all, a legendary bad luck plagues the characters’ minor lives. “There was nothing dead that was ever beautiful,” considers the farmer of “The Metal Sky” in a last stab at philosophizing, as he perishes beneath a fallen tractor, unfound, unnoticed, in a field to which he has dedicated his life. Some of this country squalor Krause knew by heart, having grown up in poverty, among tenant farmers. The Krauses moved xii Introduction Buy the Book from plot to plot across Nebraska and Iowa in the years immedi- ately following the Depression. Krause’s fiction depicts lives and fates he strove to avoid. His characters pontificate in saloons, con- demning the morals of others as they slowly get sloshed; his men and women have extramarital affairs in old cars on winter nights; they traffic in gossip, terrorize their neighbors; they steal, they hunt, they spy. A child’s innocent curiosity can turn sinister in a minute— children see things too terrible too soon. These are stories of crimes big and small, with no law in sight. While Krause’s characters contended with all sorts of demons, both within and without, Krause himself grew up under the strong moral guidance of Lutheran parents. Krause was born in Arling- ton, Nebraska, on June 22, 1931, to German Russian immigrants and grew up with four brothers. When he was fifteen, “his father fell paralyzed from a stroke,” writes Joseph Backus, a friend of Krause’s and an early devotee of his fiction, “to linger six years unable to speak, only listening as Erv would sit and read to him. But great purpose and principle drove the boys’ mother, who kept them in line with knuckle-thunks to the head or the tweak of an ear.” Old Moder, as the boys’ mother was known, was not old at all. But stout and sturdy, her hair pulled back tight, she was an intim- idating presence. She instilled in her young men a respect for education, but she seems also to have inspired a great sense of urgency— they studied hard, they went to college, they excelled in their professions. One son became an aeronautical engineer, one a professional baseball scout, one a doctor, one a farmer. Ervin proved both poetically and mechanically minded; a popu- lar family legend has it that he was so expert in his high school science classes that the school never had to hire a substitute— Introduction xiii Buy the Book Krause readily stepped in to instruct whenever the teacher was out.

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