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

Author:Krause, Ervin D. [Krause, Ervin D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780803254091
Publisher: UNP - Bison Original
Published: 2014-01-23T20:00:00+00:00

The Metal Sky

It was early when he brought the tractor down the hill from the farmstead to cultivate the corn. The cultivator hung on the tractor like a spider, moving and jerking and groaning with the movements of the tractor. It was cool in the hollow by the ditch, and the heavy dew hung in silent and plastic rainbow-colored droplets from the willows and from the bayonetshaped corn leaves, and when the tractor raced through, the droplets shattered and rained on the tractor and on the blue denim legs of the man who was driving. The tractor went fast and the black earth curled up and turned like something alive before the cultivator shovels.

The ditch was broad and steep. It had been part of a pasture, but the man had plowed the fertile hill and put it in crops and then he had cut a few of the willows that grew in thicket-like profusion along the bank and had planted corn there too. There were still willows growing in the ditch and struggling along the edges of the bank. There was no water there except with heavy rains, and sometimes a puddle stood for days, hidden in weeds at the bottom of the ditch and hovered over by yellow butterflies.

The noise of the tractor was very loud in the hollow and the birds in the willows scattered when the tractor came by. The man turned at the end of the field and swung back into the corn and the shovels spun the earth up, loosening the earth and shaking it, and he worked near the edge of the bank, the large hind wheel of the tractor skirting the weed cover there.

The bank gave way almost soundlessly and leisurely far behind the tractor, and the earth slid quietly down into the ditch, and the moving crust of bank ate away and pursued the tractor. The man was looking forward and he did not see it eating away behind him, and he felt it finally, the escaping earth tugging at the wheel. He looked and saw the almost casual destruction below him and he swung the wheel of the tractor hard, away from the bank, but this gesture only assisted the moving earth, for it threw the weight on the outer wheel. The front of the tractor rose and the spider arms of the cultivator sprang into the air above the corn, and the bright steel shovels glittered, and then with the sigh of the escaping earth the tractor slid and rolled and fell. The man held the wheel and he tried to move with the roll of the tractor but the steel bars caught him and pulled him in and he was held there, vised in between the wheel and the earth in the ditch.

The sun was looking at him when he recovered consciousness. It was all he could see at first, the hard and insistent yellow eye probing him. And around the sun the sky was a polished and bright metal blue.

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