The Genocides

SIX Thanksgiving

Gray clouds were massing overhead. The ground was dry, bare, gray; no grass, no trees, only the Plants, folded for the winter like parasols, grew here. The dull, autumnal light would thicken at times, and a breeze would pass through the park, picking up the dust. Sitting at the concrete picnic tables on the cold benches, a person could see his own breath. Bare hands grew numb and stiff in the cold. All through the park, people exercised their freezing toes inside their shoes and wished that Anderson would finish saying grace.

Across from the park stood what remained of the Congregationalist Church. Anderson had not let his own people cannibalize the wood from the church, but last winter marauders had stripped off the doors for firewood and broken the windows for fun. The winds had filled the church with snow and dust, and in the spring the oak floor had been covered with a lush green carpet of young Plants. Fortunately it had been discovered in time (for the which they were to be thankful), but even so the floor would probably soon collapse of its own weight.

Buddy, wearing his single surviving suit, shivered as the prayer dragged out its slow length. Anderson, standing at the head of the table, was also wearing a suit for the occasion, but Neil, sitting on his father’s left hand and facing Buddy, had never owned a suit. He was bundled in woolen shirts and a denim jacket, enviably snug.

It was the custom of the townspeople, like expatriates who return home on brief visits to establish their legal residence, to celebrate all festive occasions except Christmas here in the old town park. Like so many of the unpleasant and disheartening things they had to do, it was necessary for their morale.

Anderson, having at length established the principle that God Almighty was responsible for their manifold blessings, began to enumerate them. The most salient of these blessings was never directly referred to—that, after seven and a half years, they were all still alive (all of them that were), while so many others, the great majority, were dead. Anderson, however, dwelt on more peripheral blessings, local to that year: the abundance of the harvest, Gracie’s continued health in her tenth month with calf (not referring to associated losses), the two recent litters of pigs, and such game as the hunters had come home with. Unfortunately, this had been little (one deer and several rabbits), and a surly, scolding note crept into the prayer. Anderson soon rallied and came to a graceful close, thanking his Creator of the wealth of his great Creation and his Savior for the promise of Salvation.

Orville was the first to respond. His amen was reverent and at the same time manly. Neil mumbled something with the rest of them and reached for the jug of whiskey (they called it whiskey), which was still three-quarters full.

Lady and Blossom, who sat together at the end of the table nearest the brick barbecue, began serving the soup. It was faintly reminiscent of rabbit and poorly seasoned with weeds from the lake.

“Dig in!” she said cheerily. “There’s plenty more coming.”

What else could you say on Thanksgiving?

Since it was an important holiday, the whole family, on both sides, was together. Besides the seven Andersons, there was Mae, Lady’s younger sister, and her husband Joel Stromberg, formerly of Stromberg’s Lakeside Resort Cabins, and the two little Strombergs, Denny, age ten, and Dora, eight. There were, moreover, the Andersons’ special guests (still on probation), Alice Nemerov, R.N., and Jeremiah Orville.

Lady could not help but regret the presence of the Strombergs, for she was certain that Denny and Dora would only remind her husband more forcibly of him who was absent from the table. Then, too, the years had not dealt kindly With her dear sister. Mae had been admired as a beauty in her youth (though probably not to the degree Lady had been), but at forty-five she was a frump and a troublemaker. Admittedly, she still had her flame-red hair, but that only pointed up the decay of what else remained. The only virtue that remained to her was that she was a solicitous mother. Too much so, Lady thought.

Lady had always hated the brassy reverence of the holidays. Now, when there was not even the ritual gluttony of a turkey dinner to alleviate the gloom that underlay the holiday cheer, one’s only hope was to be out of it as quickly as possible. She was grateful, at least, to be occupied with the serving. If she were carefully inefficient, she might get out of eating altogether.

“Neil,” Greta whispered. “You’re drinking too much. You’d better stop.”

“Huh?” Neil replied, peering up at his wife (he had the habit, when he ate, of bending down over his food, especially if it was soup).

“You’re drinking too much.”

“I wasn’t drinking at all, for gosh sakes!” he said, for the whole table to hear. “I was eating my soup!”

Greta cast up her eyes to heaven, a martyr to truth. Buddy smiled at the transparency of her purpose, and she caught his smile. There was a flicker of eyelashes, no more.

“’N any case, it ain’t any business of yours how much I drink or don’t drink. I’ll drink just as much as I want.” To demonstrate this, he poured himself some more of the liquor distilled from the pulpy leaves of the Plant.

It didn’t taste like Jim Beam, but Orville had testified to its purity from his own experience of it in Duluth. It was the first use, as food, that Anderson had been able to find for the Plants, and since he was by no means a teetotaler himself, he’d given the project his blessing. Anderson wanted to frown at the way Neil was swilling it down, but he said nothing, not wanting it to look as though he were taking Greta’s side. Anderson was a firm believer in male supremacy.

“Anyone want more soup?” Blossom asked.

“I do,” said Maryann, who was sitting between her husband and Orville. She ate all she could get now, for the baby’s sake. For her little Buddy.

“And I do,” said Orville, with that special smile of his.

“I do, too,” said Denny and Dora, whose parents had told them to eat all they could at the dinner, which Anderson was providing.

“Anybody else?”

Everybody else had returned to the whiskey, which tasted unpleasantly like licorice.

Joel Stromberg was describing the progress of his disease to Alice Nemerov, R.N. “And it doesn’t really hurt—that’s the funny thing. It’s just that whenever I want to use my hands they start to shaking. And now my head’s the same way. Something’s got to be done.”

“But I’m afraid, Mr. Stromberg, that nothing can be. There used to be some drugs, but even they didn’t work very well. Six months, and the symptoms would reappear. Fortunately, as you say, it doesn’t hurt.”

“You’re a nurse, aren’t you?”

He was going to be one of those! Very carefully, she began to explain everything she knew about Parkinson’s disease, and a few things she didn’t. If only she could involve someone else in the conversation! The only other soul within speaking distance was the greedy Stromberg boy, who was snitching drinks from the glass of that foul liquor (one taste bad been enough for Alice) sitting before Lady’s empty plate. If only Lady or Blossom would stop serving food and sit down for a minute, she could escape from the intolerable hypochondriac. “Tell me,” she said, “when did it all start?”

The fish were all eaten, and Blossom began gathering the bones. The moment everyone had been waiting for—the dreadful moment of the main course—could be put off no longer. While Blossom brought round the bowl of steaming polenta into which were stirred a few shreds of chicken and garden vegetables, Lady herself distributed the sausages. A hush fell over the table.

Each of them had a single sausage. Each sausage was about nine inches long and three-quarter inch in diameter. They had been crisped over the fire and came to the table still sizzling.

There is some pork in them, Alice reassured herself. I probably won’t be able to tell the difference.

Everyone’s attention turned to the head of the table. Anderson lifted his knife and fork. Then, fully aware of the solemnity of the moment, he sliced off a piece of hot sausage, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. After what seemed a full minute, he swallowed it.

There, but for the grace of God…. Alice thought.

Blossom had turned quite pale, and under the table Alice reached for her hand to lend her strength, though Alice didn’t feel an excess of it just then.

“What’s everyone waiting for?” Anderson demanded. “There’s food on the table.”

Alice’s attention drifted toward Orville, who was sitting there with knife and fork in hand, and that strange smile of his. He caught Alice’s look—and winked at her. Of all things! Or was it at her?

Orville cut off a piece of the sausage and chewed it consideringly. He smiled beamishly, like a man in a toothpaste ad. “Mrs. Anderson,” he announced, “you are a marvelous cook. How do you do it? I haven’t had a Thanksgiving dinner like this since God knows when.”

Alice felt Blossom’s fingers relax and pull out of hers. She’s feeling better, now that the worst is over, Alice thought.

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.