The Genocides (8 page)

But she was wrong. There was a heavy noise, as when a bag of meal is dropped to the ground, and Mae Stromberg screamed. Blossom had fainted.

He, Buddy, would not have allowed it, much less have originated and insisted upon it, but then very probably he, Buddy, would not have been able to bring the village through those seven hellish years. Primitive, pagan, unprecedented as it was, there was a rationale for it.

It. They were all afraid to call it by its right name. Even Buddy, in the inviolable privacy of his own counsel, shied away from the word for it.

Necessity might have been some justification. There was ample precedent (the Donner party, the wreck of the
Medusa
), and Buddy would have had to go no further than this for an excuse—if they had been starving.

Beyond necessity, explanations grew elaborate and rather metaphysical. Thus, metaphysically, in this meal the community was united by a complex bond, the chief of whose elements was complicity in murder, but this complicity was achieved by a ritual as solemn and mysterious as the kiss by which Judas betrayed Christ; it was a sacrament. Mere horror was subsumed into tragedy, and the town’s Thanksgiving dinner was the crime and the atonement, so to speak, in one blow.

Thus the theory, but Buddy, in his heart, felt nothing but the horror of it, mere horror, and nothing in his stomach but nausea.

He washed down another steadfast mouthful with the licorice-flavored alcohol.

Neil, when he had polished off his second sausage, began to tell a dirty joke. They had all, except for Orville and Alice, heard him tell the same joke last Thanksgiving. Orville was the only one to laugh, which made it worse rather than better.

“Where the hell is the deer?” Neil shouted, as though this followed naturally from the punch line.

“What are you talking about?” his father asked. Anderson, when he drank (and today he was almost keeping up to Neil), brooded. In his youth he had had a reputation as a mean fighter after his eighth or ninth beer.

“The
deer
, for Christ’s sake! The deer I shot the other day! Aren’t we going to have some venison? What the hell kind of Thanksgiving is this?”

“Now, Neil,” Greta chided, “you
know
that has to be salted down for the winter. There’ll be little enough meat as it is.”

“Well, where are the other deer? Three years ago those woods were swarming with deer.”

“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Orville said, and again he was David Niven or perhaps, a little more somberly, James Mason. “Survival is a matter of ecology. That’s how I’d explain it. Ecology is the way the different plants and animals live together. That is to say—who eats whom; The deer—and just about everything else, I’m afraid—are becoming extinct.”

There was a silent but perceptible gasp from several persons at the table who had thought as much but never dared say so in Anderson’s presence.

“God will provide,” Anderson interposed darkly.

“Yes, that must be our hope, for Nature alone will not. Just consider what’s happened to the soil. This used to be forest soil, podzol. Look at it—” He scooped up a handful of the gray dust on the ground. “Dust. In a couple years, with no grass or brush to hold it down, every inch of topsoil will be in the lake. Soil is a living thing. It’s full of insects, worms—I don’t know what all.”

“Moles,” Neil put in.

“Ah,
moles!”
said Orville, as though that cinched it. “And all those things live on the decaying plants and leaves in the soil—or on each other, the way we do. You’ve probably noticed that the Plants don’t shed their leaves. So, except where we plant crops, the soil is dying. No, it’s dead already. And when the soil is dead, plants—our plants—will not be able to live in it again. Not the way they used to.”

Anderson snorted his contempt for so preposterous a notion.

“But deer don’t live underground,” Neil objected.

“True—they are herbivores. Herbivores need to eat grass. For a while, I suppose, they must have lived on the young Plants springing up near the lakeshore, or else, like rabbits, they can eat the bark from the older Plants. But either that was an inadequate diet nutritionally, or there wasn’t enough to go around, or—”

“Or what?” Anderson demanded.

“Or the wild life is being eliminated the way your cows were last summer, the way Duluth was in August.”

“You can’t prove it,” Neil shouted. “I’ve seen those piles of ashes in the woods. They don’t prove a thing. Not a thing!” He took a long swallow from the jug and stood up, waving his right hand to show that it couldn’t be proved. He did not estimate the position or inertia of the concrete table very well, so that, coming up against it, he was knocked back to his seat and then drawn by gravity to the ground. He rolled in the gray dirt, groaning. He had hurt himself. He was very drunk. Greta, clucking disapproval, got up from the table to help.

“Leave him lay!” Anderson told her.

“Excuse
me!”
she declaimed, exciting grandly. “Excuse me for living.”

“What ashes was he talking about?” Orville asked Anderson.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” the old man said. He took a swallow from the jug and washed it around in his mouth. Then he let it trickle down his throat, trying to forget the flavor by concentrating on the sting.

Little Denny Stromberg leaned across the table and asked Alice Nemerov if she was going to eat any more of her sausage. She’d taken only a single bite.

“I think not,” Alice replied.

“Can I eat it then?” he asked. His blue-green eyes glowed from the liquor he had been sneaking all through the meal. Otherwise, Alice was sure, his were not the sort of eyes to glow. “Please, huh?”

“Don’t mind Denny, Miz Nemerov. He doesn’t mean to be
rude
. Do you, sweet?”

“Eat it,” Alice said, scraping the cold sausage off onto the boy’s plate.

Eat it and be damned!
she thought.

Mae had just observed that they had been thirteen at the table. “… so if you believe the old superstitions, one of us will die before the year’s out,” she concluded with a gay little laugh, in which only her husband joined. “Well, I do believe it’s getting awfully cold here,” she added, raising her eyebrows to show that her words bore more than a single meaning. “Though what can you expect at the end of November?”

Nobody seemed to expect anything.

“Mr. Orville, tell me, are you native to Minnesota? I ask because of your accent. It sounds sort of English, if you know what I mean. Are you an American?”

“Mae—really!” Lady scolded.

“He does talk funny, you know. Denny noticed it too.”

“Really?” Orville stared at Mae Stromberg intently, as though to count each frizzled red hair, and with the strangest smile. “That’s odd. I was raised all my life in Minneapolis. I suppose it’s just the difference between the city and the country.”

“And you’re a city person at heart, just like our Buddy. I’ll bet you wish you were back there right now, eh? I know your kind.” She winked lewdly to indicate just what kind that was.

“Mae, for heaven’s sake—”

But Denny succeeded where Lady could not in bringing Mrs. Stromberg to a stop. He vomited all over the table. The heavings splashed onto the four women around him—Lady, Blossom, Alice, and his mother—and there was a great commotion as the women tried to escape the danger that was threatening anew on Denny’s face. Orville couldn’t help himself—he laughed. He was joined, fortunately, by Buddy and little Dora, whose mouth was filled with sausage. Even Anderson made a noise that might charitably have been interpreted as laughter.

Buddy excused himself, and Orville rose only a moment later, with more compliments for the cook and a scarcely perceptible gesture in Blossom’s direction, which, however, Blossom perceived. Stromberg took his son off into the woods, but not far enough to prevent the rest of them from hearing the whipping.

Neil was asleep on the ground.

Maryann, Dora, and Anderson were left alone at the table. Maryann had been crying off and on all day. Now, since she too had had something to drink, she started to talk: “Oh, I can remember the time…”

“Excuse me,” said Anderson, leaving the table, and taking the jug with him.

“… in the old days,” Maryann went on. “And everything was so beautiful then—the turkey and the pumpkin pie—and everybody so happy…”

Greta, after quitting the table, had gone roundaboutly to the church. Before vanishing into the dark vestibule, she and Buddy, who had watched her all the while, had exchanged a glance and Buddy had nodded yes. When the dinner broke up, he followed her there.

“Hello there, stranger!” Apparently she had settled on this gambit permanently.

“Hello, Greta. You were in high form today.”

In the vestibule they were out of the line of sight from the picnic grounds. The floor was reassuringly solid. Greta took the nape of Buddy’s neck firmly in her two cold hands and pulled his lips to hers. Their teeth gnashed together, and their tongues renewed an old acquaintance.

When he began to pull her closer, she drew back, laughing softly. Having gained what she wanted, she could afford to tease. Yes, that was the old Greta.

“Wasn’t Neil drunk?” she whispered. “Wasn’t he just stinko?”

The expression in her eyes was not exactly as he remembered it, and he could not tell, of the body beneath her winter clothes, whether it had changed likewise. It occurred to him to wonder how much he had changed, but the desire mounting within him overrode such irrelevancies. Now it was he who kissed her. Slowly, in an embrace, they began to sink to the floor.

“Oh no,” she whispered, “don’t.”

They were on their knees thus, when Anderson entered. He did not say anything for a long time, nor did they rise. A strange, sly look came over Greta’s face, and Buddy thought that it had been this, nothing but this, which Greta had hoped for. She had chosen the church for that very reason.

Anderson made a gesture for them to get up, and he allowed Greta to leave, after only spitting in her face.

Was this compassion, that he did not demand the punishment that the law—his own law—exacted of adulterers: that they be stoned? Or was it only parental weakness? Buddy could read nothing in the old man’s grimace.

“I came here to pray,” he said to his son when they were alone. Then, instead of finishing his sentence, he swung his booted foot hard at him, but too slowly—perhaps it was the liquor—for Buddy twisted aside in time and received the kick safely in his hip.

“Okay, boy, we’ll take care of this later,” Anderson promised, his voice slurring the words. Then he went into the church to pray.

It seemed that Buddy was no longer to enjoy the position he had inherited last June of being foremost in his father’s favor. As he left the church, the first snowflakes of the new season drifted down from the gray sky. Buddy watched them melting on the palm of his hand.

Gracie the cow lived right there in the commonroom with everybody else. The chickens, likewise, had a corner to themselves, but the pigs were housed in a sty of their own, outside.

For four days, beginning that Thanksgiving, the snow had drifted down, slowly, ponderously, like snow settling on the miniature town inside a glass paperweight. Then for one week of bright wintry weather the children went sledding down the old lakeshore. After that the snow came down in earnest, driven by gale winds that made Anderson fear for the walls, bolstered though they were by the high drifts. Three or four times a day the men went outside to wind back the “awning” that formed the roof of the commonroom. As the half of the roof heavy with snow was cleared off and rolled up, the other half emerged from its weathertight cocoon to replace it. Aside from this chore and the care of the pigs, the men were idle during a blizzard. The rest of the work—cooking, weaving, looking after the children and the sick—was for women. Later, when the weather cleared, they could hunt again or, with more hope of success, fish through the ice of the lake. There were also plenty of Plants to chop down.

It was hard to get through these idle days. Drink wasn’t allowed in the commonroom (there were enough fights as it was), and poker soon lost its appeal when the money in the pot was no more valuable than the money the children played with at their unending games of Monopoly. There were few books to read, except Anderson’s calf-bound Bible (the same that once had graced the lectern of the Episcopal Church), for indoor space was at a premium. Even if there had been books, it was doubtful that anyone would have read them. Orville might have—he seemed a bookish sort. Buddy would have. And Lady had always read a lot too.

The conversation, such as it was, never rose above the level of griping. For the most part, the men imitated Anderson, who sat immobile on the edge of his bed, chewing the pulp of the Plant. It is questionable, however, whether they spent this time, like Anderson, in thought directed to useful ends. When spring came, all the ideas, the projects, the innovations came from Anderson and no one else.

Now, it appeared, there was someone else capable of thought. He, by contrast, preferred to think aloud. To the old man, sitting there listening to Jeremiah Orville, the ideas that were put forth seemed positively irreligious at times. The way he talked about the Plants, for instance—as though they were only a superior laboratory specimen. As though he admired their conquest. Yet he said many things, in almost the same breath, that made good sense. Even when the weather was the subject of conversation (and more often than not it was), Orville had something to say about that.

“I still maintain,” Clay Kestner had said (this was on the first day of the bad blizzard, but Clay had been maintaining the same thing for several years), “that it’s not the weather getting colder but us getting out in the cold more. It’s psychosomatical. There ain’t no
reason
for the weather to get colder.”

“Damn it, Clay,” Joel Stromberg replied, shaking his head reprovingly (though it might have been just palsy), “if this winter ain’t colder than the winters in the sixties and fifties I’ll eat my hat. It used to be that we’d worry whether we was going to have a white Christmas. And I say it’s the way the lake has gone down causes it.”