You Will Never See Any God: Stories by Ervin D. Krause Page A

terrible. Stark must have gone into the shack after something, I don’t know what, and we found him in what used to be the bedroom. We could smell him a hundred yards away.”
    “Was he dead?” the boy asked, leaning forward suddenly.
    “There was hardly anything left of him,” the father said, “or of the house either. It was awful.”
    The boy felt a great warmness ride him, cover him as if honey or an anointment bathed him, as if some great evil had lifted from him, from everyone now. He would not need to go down there again; it was all finished, there was no longer anything for him to do. He closed his eyes and luxuriated in the rich, good feeling it gave him.
    “It was some fire,” one of the brothers said. “You should have been there to see it.”
    “It was terrible,” the father said.
    “I was studying my catechism,” the boy said.

The Shooters
     
    The brother brought the news of the killings even before dawn; he had been in to Charleston to deliver a butcher hog to the locker plant for slaughtering that day, and had run into Gavin Terrell, the young town marshal, his friend, and had heard of it—how the whole family up by Craig, not ten miles away, Jung he believed their name was (it would be on the news pretty soon), was shot to death by .22 rifle, the father of past forty, the wife, the eighty-two-year-old mother-in-law, the eleven-year-old boy, and the young hired man to boot, all shot and dumped like sacks of potatoes into the entrance of the storm cellar. Done the day before, the previous afternoon, the coroner had reported.
    The brother spoke carefully, looking at the mother who was old and suffered from high blood pressure, wanting not to frighten her, but better to tell her now than wait for the hysterical news reports.
    “Na, na,” the mother said, “has the world gone crazy?” She sat at the kitchen table and rubbed the top with a wet cloth, preparing it for breakfast with elaborate care, as she did every day. “Why would anybody do such a thing? Crazy, that’s what.”
    The brother shrugged.
    “Do they know who did it?” Leonard’s wife asked.
    “No. Of course not,” Leonard said, looking to the brother for verification.
    “I’ll bet it was a neighbor,” the brother, Melvin, said. “Went off his head. Probably mad about something. Some of these neighbor troubles go back for years.”
    “It’s common enough nowadays, people being crazy,” the mother said. She began to tell of the farmers and wives who had needed psychiatrists in recent years, or had been sent up to Cherokee for a time, all from that area alone.
    The young wife frowned above the frying pans on the kitchen stove where she stood preparing their early breakfast. “Do you suppose it’s really just a neighbor who went mad? Or somebody on the loose? Somebody who’s a killer? It seems so terrible for someone to kill five people. Just a neighbor couldn’t do that, I would think.”
    The brothers looked at each other. Melvin, the farmer, cap on, wrestled with his hands. “Whoever it was, they’ll catch him today. Might have got him already, as far as anybody knows.”
    “And how many were there?” the mother asked, rubbing carefully in circles on the smooth artificial table top.
    “Five. Even the hired man, a kid of seventeen. Stayed there overnight because of haying. He didn’t even belong there.”
    “Why would a neighbor take him too? I mean if it were a neighbor doing the shooting? Why the kid too?” Leonard asked.
    There was a pause, a reflective moment, and the brother thinking of this new aspect that had not occurred to him.
    “Yeh,” he muttered, not wanting to say more.
    “It’s somebody crazy is all,” the old mother said, finished then with the table, arising and going to the sink, collecting potatoes in a gray enameled pan, and the knife, sitting down again and beginning to peel them for the noon meal, their dinner.
    “Are you going to Sioux City today?” Melvin asked.
    “Yes. Every