The Genocides Read online

  Damn them! he thought. May God damn them! But this curse lost much of its forcefulness from the conviction that God had sent them in the first place. Let others talk about Outer Space as much as they liked: Anderson knew that the same angry and jealous God who had once before visited a flood upon an earth that was corrupt had created the Plants and sown them. He never argued about it. When God could be so persuasive, why should Anderson raise his voice? It had been seven years that spring since the first seedlings of the Plant had been seen. They had come of a sudden in April of ’72, a billion spores, invisible to all but the most powerful microscopes, sown broadcast over the entire planet by an equally invisible sower (and where was the microscope or telescope or radar screen that will make God visible?), and within days every inch of ground, farmland and desert, jungle and tundra, was covered with a carpet of the richest green.

  Every year since, as there were fewer and fewer people, there were more converts to Anderson’s thesis. Like Noah, he was having the last laugh. But that didn’t stop him from hating, just as Noah must have hated the rains and rising waters.

  Anderson hadn’t always hated the Plants so much. In the first years, when the Government had just toppled and the farms were in their heyday, he had gone out in the moonlight and just watched them grow. It was like the speeded-up movies of plant growth he’d seen in Ag School years ago. He had thought then that he could hold his own against them, but he’d been wrong. The infernal weeds had wrested his farm from his hands and the town from the hands of his people.

  But, by God, he’d win it back. Every square inch. If he had to root out every Plant with his two bare hands. He spat significantly.

  At such moments Anderson was as conscious of his own strength, of the force of his resolve, as a young man is conscious of the compulsion of his flesh or a woman is conscious of the child she bears. It was an animal strength, and that, Anderson knew, was the only strength strong enough to prevail against the Plants.

  His oldest son ran out of the forest shouting. When Buddy ran, Anderson knew there was something wrong. “What’d he say?” he asked Neil. Though the old man would not admit it, his hearing was beginning to go.

  “He says Studs got out into the cows. Sounds like a lotta hooey to me.”

  “Pray God it is,” Anderson replied, and his look fell on Neil like an iron weight.

  Anderson ordered Neil back to the village to see that the men did not forget to bring ropes and prods in their hurry to give pursuit. Then with Buddy he set off on the clear trail the herd had made. They were about ten minutes behind them, by Buddy’s estimate.

  “Too long,” Anderson said, and they began to run instead of trotting.

  It was easy, running among the Plants, for they grew far apart and their cover was so thick that no underbrush could grow. Even fungi languished here, for lack of food. The few aspens that still stood were rotten to the core and only waiting for a strong wind to fell them. The firs and spruce had entirely disappeared, digested by the very soil that had once fed them. Years before, the plants had supported hordes of common parasites, and Anderson had hoped mightily that the vines and creepers would destroy their hosts, but the Plants had rallied and it was the parasites who had, for no apparent reason, died.

  The giant boles of the Plants rose out of sight, their spires hidden by their own massive foliage; their smooth, living green was unblemished, untouched, and like all living things, unwilling to countenance any life but their own.

  There was in these forests a strange, unwholesome solitude, a solitude more profound than adolescence, more unremitting than prison. It seemed, in a way, despite its green, flourishing growth, dead. Perhaps it was because there was no sound. The great leaves overhead were too heavy and too rigid in structure to be stirred by anything but gale winds. Most of the birds had died. The balance of nature had been so thoroughly upset that even animals one would not think threatened had joined the ever-mounting ranks of the extinct. The Plants were alone in these forests, and the feeling of their being set apart, of their belonging to a different order of things was inescapable. It ate at the strongest man’s heart.

  “What’s that smell?” Buddy asked.

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  “It smells like something burning.”

  Anderson felt small stirrings of hope. “A fire? But they wouldn’t burn at this time of year. They’re too green.”

  “It’s not the Plants. It’s something else.”

  It was the smell of roasting meat, but he wouldn’t say so. It would be too cruel, too unreasonable to lose one of the precious cows to a party of marauders.

  Their pace slowed from a run to a trot, from a trot to a cautious, stalking glide. “I do smell it now,” Anderson whispered. He withdrew from its holster the Colt Python .357 Magnum that was the visible sign of his authority among the citizens of Tassel. Since his elevation to his high office (formally, he was the town’s mayor, but in fact he was much more), he had never been known to be without it. The potency of this weapon as a symbol (for the village had a goodly stock of guns and ammunition yet) rested upon the fact that it was only employed for the gravest of purposes: to kill men.

  The smell had become very strong; then at a turn in the path they found the twelve carcasses. They had been incinerated to ash, but the outlines were clear enough to indicate which bad been Studs. There was also a smaller patch of ash near them on the path.

  “How—” Buddy began. But he really meant what, or even who, something that his father was quicker to understand.

  “Jimmie!” the old man screamed, enraged, and he buried his hands in the smaller pile of still-smoking ashes.

  Buddy turned his eyes away, for too great sorrow is like drunkenness: it was not fitting that he should see his father then.

  There’s not even any meat left, he thought, looking at the other carcasses. Nothing but ashes.

  “My son!” the old man cried. “My son!” He held in his finger a piece of metal that had once been the buckle of a belt. Its edges had been melted by the heat, and the metal’s retained heat was burning the old man’s fingers. He did not notice. Out of his throat came a noise, deeper than a groan, and his hands dug into the ashes once more. He buried his face in them and wept.

  After a while, the men of the village arrived. One had brought a shovel to use as a prod. They buried the boy’s ashes there, for already the wind was beginning to spread them over the ground. Anderson kept the buckle.

  While Anderson was speaking the words over his son’s shallow grave, they heard the moo of the last cow, Gracie. So as soon as they’d said amen, they went running after the surviving cow. Except Anderson, who walked home alone.

  Gracie led them a merry old chase.

  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.
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br />   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 sim
ply 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.