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

smooth, easy, he walked. The nervous cattle lifted their beautiful heads, pointed their tipped white ears and muzzles and looked at him. He remembered vaguely Homer and the lines of “cow-eyed”; was it cow-eyed dawn or cow-eyed Diana? Large, brown, beautiful eyes of these animals; immense eyelashes; Homer was right. The cattle sniffed, backed away, ran a little. He worked through them, crossed the creek. The cattle circled, some went ahead, some behind, and that was strange, he thought, for he expected them to go on to the other end of the pasture as they always had done, far away from the farm buildings, but today they did not, hung close, sniffing with that heavy challenging but frightened way and then running a little, circling, and coming back to study him.
    Leonard walked along the edge of the creek, the creek itself about forty feet wide in that area, but the water at its bottom only six inches deep and two feet wide, a nice creek with minnows andfrogs in abundance. The grass was tall already, pale green and heavy with occasional giant burdocks lifted like watchers. Some of the cattle went ahead of him, splashed through the mud and up the slippery far bank where he would follow. Most of the bank was too steep to be crossed at all, the straight slice of black dirt, caved off in chunks at intervals, and down there the ribbon of water in the sand, the curling motion. He looked for raccoons, knew he would see none now, and remembered, not so certain, how he had seen one in broad daylight up on the farm one spring, and watched, looked at the placid water reflecting reeds, the smear of sky, himself.
    Four weeks before he had come (he and his wife) to visit his mother; in the best of health, he thought, except for that persistent new back ache, something clamped on him that wouldn’t let go, and he’d lost weight, everyone noticed that right away, and he’d said it was his diet, one that had never worked before, some slight fevers, dizziness. And now confirmed in the ancient certainty of his own mortality, yes truly that over the easy optimism of the others—oh if you find it soon enough they can get it, can work miracles, great doctors nowadays, and so on—but he knew the statistics on this one, most assuredly, two years or three. In three weeks, in a moment really after that first biopsy, from healthy man to dying man. He had not thought of death, before, coming to him, no healthy person of thirty-three would except perhaps melodramatically when having flu or a cold or driving a car fast. He had thought much on it these last three weeks.
    He went through the grove of willows, young trees near the creek bed. He was tired now, but he told himself he would not be, not yet. He was though, as he had told himself the cancer could not spread, but it had. He could feel the cut on his neck burning, and the cold lump in him on his side. The young green grass there on the other side of the creek was very heavy, and helooked down at his shoes, hearing as if for eternity the shuff with each step of the grass—shuff, shuff, shuff, not watchful now, knowing he was drifting, bitter and drifting.
    The jackrabbit took him by surprise, gave him that sudden striking jolt in his heart region, the flash and movement. The big rabbit had fled the brush, bounded easily up past the spring there on the pasture hillside, a big old jackrabbit, gray with age and remnant of winter coat. Leonard waited, trailing it with the points of the rifle sights. When the animal stopped, as he thought it might, dropped to a pause, let its tall ears fall over its back, Leonard shot it, a good long shot. The rabbit gave a spasm and frantically kicked in a circle when it hit the ground again. Leonard was in no rush getting there. The rabbit was dead, of course, head covered with dust, the dead film on the eyes already. Knobbed feet, old powerful legs, blistered haunches. Tiny bullet, smallest penetration not even to be found but by someone who knew, a fragment of