The Genocides

TWO Desertion

They had to abandon Tassel, the old Tassel that they still thought of as their proper home, the spring before last. The Plants had flung out their seedlings (though exactly how this was done remained a mystery, for the Plants exhibited not the slightest sign of flowers or fruiting bodies) over the surrounding fields with a profligacy that had finally conquered every human effort. They, the humans, had been extended too far: their town and the farms about it had not been laid out with a siege in view.

For the first three years, they had held their own well enough—or so it had seemed—by spraying the seedlings with poisons that the Government had developed. Each year, for as long as the Government and its laboratories lasted, it was a new poison, for the Plant developed immunities almost as quickly as the poisons were invented. But even then they had sprayed only the fields. In marshes and along the wild lake shore, in forests and along the roads, the seedlings shot up beyond the reach of any enemy but the axe—and there were just too many Plants and too few axes to make that a conceivable enterprise. Wherever the Plants grew, there was not light enough, nor water enough, nor even soil enough for anything else. When the old trees and bushes and grasses were crowded out and died, erosion stripped the land.

Not the farmlands, of course—not yet. But in only three years the Plants were crowding the fields and pastures, and then it was only a matter of time. Of very little time, really: the Plants nibbled, they bit, and, during the summer of their fifth year, they simply overran.

All that was left was this shadowy ruin. Buddy took a certain elegiac pleasure in coming here. There was even a practical side to it: scavenging in the debris he was often able to find old tools and sheet metal, even occasional books. The time for edibles was past, though. The rats and marauders working their way up from Duluth had long ago cleaned out the little that had been left behind after the move to New Tassel. So he gave up looking and went to sit on the steps of the Congregationalist Church, which thanks to his father’s continued efforts was one of the last buildings in the town to remain intact.

There had been, he remembered, an oak, a tall archetypal oak, over to the right of the Plant that had broken through the sidewalk at the edge of what used to be the town park. During the fourth winter, they had used the oak as firewood. And many elms, too. There had certainly been no lack of elms.

He heard, distantly, Gracie’s lugubrious plaint as she was pulled back to town at the end of a rope. The chase had been too much for Buddy. His legs had given out. He wondered if the Hereford was now extinct. Perhaps not, for Gracie was pregnant, she was still young, and if she bore a bull calf, there would be hope for her race, though it were but a glimmer. What more could one ask than a glimmer?

He wondered, too, how many enclaves had held out as long as Tassel. For the last two years, captured marauders had been the village’s only link with the outside, but the marauders had been growing fewer. It was likely that the cities had come to their end at last.

He was thankful he had not been there to witness it, for even the little corpse of Tassel could make him melancholic. He would not have thought he could have cared so. Before the advent of the Plants, Tassel had been the objectification of everything he despised: smallness, meanness, willful ignorance and a moral code as contemporary as Leviticus. And now he mourned it as though it had been Carthage fallen to the Romans and sown with salt, or Babylon, that great city.

It was not perhaps the corpse of the town that he mourned, but all the other corpses of which it was compounded. Once a thousand and some people had lived here, and all but a paltry two hundred and forty-seven of them were dead. How invariably the worst had survived and the best had died.

Pastern, the Congregationalist minister, and his wife Lorraine. They had been good to Buddy during the years before he’d left for the University, when life had been one long feud with his father who had wanted him to go to the Ag School in Duluth. And Vivian Sokulsky, his fourth-grade teacher. The only older woman in town with a sense of humor or a grain of intelligence. And all the others too, always the best of them.

Now, Jimmie Lee. Rationally you couldn’t blame the Plants for Jimmie’s death. He had been murdered—though how or by whom, Buddy could not imagine. Or why. Above all, why? Yet death and the Plants were such close kin that one could not feel the breath of one without seeming to see the shadow of the other.

“Hello there, stranger.” The voice had a strong musical timbre, like the speaking voice of the contralto in an operetta, but to judge by Buddy’s reaction one would have thought it harsh.

“Hello, Greta. Go away.”

The voice laughed, a full, husky laugh that would have reached the last rows of any balcony, and Greta herself came forward, as full and husky in the flesh as in her laughter, which now abruptly ceased. She stood herself before Buddy as though she were presenting a grievance before the court. Exhibit A: Greta Anderson, arms akimbo and shoulders thrown back, full hips jutting forward, her bare feet planted in the dirt like roots. She deserved better clothing than the cotton chemise she wore. In richer fabrics and brighter colors and given better support, the type of beauty Greta represented could excel any other; now she seemed just slightly overripe.

“I hardly ever see you any more. You know we’re practically next-door neighbors—”

“Except that we don’t have doors.”

“—yet I don’t see you from one week to the next. Sometimes I think you try to avoid me.”

“Sometimes I do, but you can see for yourself it doesn’t work. Now, why don’t you go fix your husband’s dinner like a good wife? It’s been a bad day all around.”

“Neil’s in a blue funk. I expect he’ll be whipped tonight, and I’m not going to be around the house—or should I say the tent?—when he comes home from that. When he went back to town, he fooled with the rope on Studs’s pen to try and make it look like it wasn’t his fault—that Studs had jumped over the bar. I can just see Studs clearing an eightfoot fence. But it didn’t do him any good. Clay and half a dozen others saw him doing it. He’ll just get whipped a little harder now.”

“That idiot!”

Greta laughed. “You said it, not me.”

With a feigned casualness, she sat on the step below his. “You know, Buddy, I come here a lot too. I get so lonely in the new town—it’s not really a town at all, it’s more like summer camp with the tents and having to carry water from the stream. Oh, it’s so boring. You know what I mean. You know it better than me. I always wanted to go live in Minneapolis myself, but first there was Daddy, and then…. But I don’t have to tell you.”

It had grown quite dark in the ruined village. A summer shower began to fall on the leaves of the Plants, but only a few droplets penetrated their cover. It was like sitting in spray blown in off the lake.

After a considerable silence (during which she had leaned back to rest her elbows on Buddy’s step, letting the weight of her thick, sun-whitened hair pull her head back, so that as she talked she gazed up into the faraway leaves of the Plant), Greta let loose another well modulated laugh.

Buddy couldn’t help but admire her laugh. It was as though that laughter was a specialty of hers—a note she could reach that other contraltos couldn’t.

“Do you remember the time you put the vodka into the punch at Daddy’s youth meeting? And we all started doing the twist to those awful old records of his? Oh, that was precious, that was such fun! Nobody but you and me knew how to twist. That was an awful thing to do. The vodka, I mean. Daddy never knew what happened.”

“Jacqueline Brewster could twist well, as I recall.”

“Jacqueline Brewster is a pill.”

He laughed, and since it had become so much less customary for him, the laughter was rough-edged and a little shrill. “Jacqueline Brewster’s dead,” he said.

“That’s so. Well, I guess next to the two of us she was the best dancer around.” After another pause, she began again with a great show of vivacity. “And the time we went to old man Jenkins’ house, out on County Road B—do you remember that?”

“Greta, let’s not talk about that.”

“But it was so funny, Buddy! It was the funniest thing in the world. There we were, the two of us, going at it on that squeaky old sofa a mile a minute. I thought it would fall to pieces, and him upstairs so dead to the world he never knew a thing.”

Despite himself, Buddy snorted. “Well, he was deaf.” He pronounced the word in the country way, with a long e.

“Oh, we’ll never have times like that again.” When she turned to look at Buddy, her eyes gleamed with something more than reminiscence. “You were the wild one then. There wasn’t anything that stopped you. You were the king of the heap, and wasn’t I the queen? Wasn’t I, Buddy?” She grabbed one of his hands and squeezed it. Once her fingernails would have cut his skin, but her fingernails were gone and his skin was tougher. He pulled his hand away and stood up.

“Stop it, Greta. It won’t get you anywhere.”

“I’ve got a right to remember. It was that way, and you can’t tell me it wasn’t. I know it’s not that way any more. All I have to do is look around to see that. Where’s Jenkins’ house now, eh? Have you ever tried to find it? It’s gone; it’s simply disappeared. And the football field—where is that? Every day a little more of everything is gone. I went into MacCord’s the other day, where they used to have the nicest dresses in town, such as they were. There wasn’t a thing. Not a button. It seemed like the end of the world, but I don’t know—maybe those things aren’t so important. It’s people that are most important. But all the best people are gone, too.”

“Yes,” Buddy said, “yes, they are.”

“Except a very few. When you were away, I saw it all happen. Some of them, the Douglases and others, left for the cities, but that was only at the very beginning of the panic. They came back, the same as you—those who could. I wanted to go, but after Momma died, Daddy got sick and I had to nurse him. He read the Bible all the time. And prayed. He made me get down on my knees beside his bed and pray with him. But his voice wasn’t so good then, so usually I’d end up praying by myself. I thought it would have looked funny to somebody else—as though it was Daddy I was praying to and not God. But there wasn’t anybody left by that time who could laugh. The laughter had just dried up, like Split Rock River.

“The radio station had stopped, except for the news twice a day, and who wanted to hear the news? There were all those National Guard people trying to make us do what the Government said. Delano Paulsen got killed the night they got rid of the National Guard, and I didn’t know about it for a week. Nobody wanted to tell me, because after you left, Delano and I went steady. I guess maybe you never knew that. As soon as Daddy got on his feet, he was going to marry the two of us. Really—he really was.

“The Plants seemed to be everywhere then. They broke up the roads and water mains. The old lake shore was just a marsh, and the Plants were already growing there. Everything was so terribly ugly. It’s nice now, in comparison.

“But the worst part was the boredom. Nobody had time to have fun. You were gone and Delano was dead and Daddy—well, you can imagine. I shouldn’t admit this, but when he died, I was sort of glad.

“Except that was when your father was elected mayor and really started organizing everybody, telling them what to do and where to live, and I thought: ‘There won’t be room for me.’ I was thinking of Noah’s ark, because Daddy used to read that one over and over again. I thought: ‘They’ll take off without me.’ I was scared. I suppose everybody was scared. The city must have been scary, too, with all those people dying. I heard about that. But I was really scared! How do you explain that?

“And then your brother started coming to visit me. He was about twenty-one then and not really bad-looking from a girl’s point of view. Except for his chin. But I thought: ‘Greta, you’ve got a chance to marry Japheth.’”

“Who?”

“Japheth. He was one of Noah’s sons. Poor Neil! I mean, he really didn’t stand a chance, did he?”

“I think you’ve reminisced enough now.”

“I mean, he didn’t know anything about girls. He wasn’t like you. He was twenty-one, just three months younger than you, and I don’t think he even thought about girls. He said later it was your father who recommended me! Can you imagine that! Like he was breeding a bull!”

Buddy started walking away from her.

“What should I have done? You tell me. Should I have waited for you? Put a candle burning in the window?”

“You don’t need a candle, when you’re carrying a torch.”

Again the lyric laugh, but barbed with undissimulated shrillness. She rose and walked toward him. Her breasts, which had been noticeably slack before, were perceptibly less so.

“Well, do you want to know why? You don’t. You’re afraid to hear the truth. If I told you, you wouldn’t let yourself believe it, but I’ll tell you anyway. Your brother is a two-hundred pound noodle of wet spaghetti. He is completely and totally unable to move.”

“He’s my half-brother,” Buddy said, almost automatically.

“And he’s half of a husband for me.” Greta was smiling strangely, and somehow they had come to be standing face to face, inches apart. She had only to stand on tiptoe for her lips to reach his. Her hands never even touched him.

“No,” he said, pushing her away. “It’s over. It’s been over for years. That was eight years ago. We were kids then. Teenagers.”

“Oh brother, have you lost your guts!”

He slapped her hard enough to knock her to the ground, though in fairness it must be said that she seemed to cooperate and even to relish the blow.

“That,” she said, the old music quite gone for her voice, “is all the best that Neil can do. And I must say that between the two of you he does that better.”

Buddy laughed a solid, good-humored laugh and left her, feeling some of the old stallion blood rising in him. Ah, he had forgotten what a magnificent wit she could muster. Absolutely the only one left with a sense of humor, he thought. And still the best-looking. Maybe they would get together again.

Eventually.

Then he remembered that it was not a day to be in a good humor, and the smile left his lips and the stallion quieted and went back to his stall.