The Genocides

NINE The Worm Shall Feed Sweetly

When they had ventured down the branch root a further twenty-five feet (where, as Orville had promised, it was tolerably warm), they reached a sort of crossroads. There were three new branches to choose from, each as commodious as the one through which they had been traveling. Two descended, like proper roots, though veering off perpendicularly to the right and left of their parent; the other shot steeply upward.

“That’s strange,” Buddy observed. “Roots don’t grow up.”

“How do you know that’s up?” Orville asked.

“Well, look at it. It’s up. Up is… up. It’s the opposite of down.”

“My point exactly. We’re looking up the root, which may be growing down to us—from another Plant perhaps.”

“You mean this thing could be just one big Plant?” Anderson asked, moving into the circle of lamplight, scowling. He resented each further attribute of the Plant, even those that served his purpose. “All of them linking up together down here this way?”

“There’s one sure way to find out, sir—follow it. If it takes us to another primary root—”

“We don’t have time to be Boy Scouts. Not until we’ve found the supplies we dropped down that hole. Will we get to them this way? Or will we have to backtrack and climb down the main root on the rope?”

“I couldn’t say. This way is easier, faster and, for the moment, safer. If the roots join up like this regularly, maybe we can find another way back to the main root farther down. So I’d say—”

“I’ll say,” Anderson said, repossessing, somewhat, his authority. Buddy was sent ahead with the lamp and one end of the rope; the thirty others followed after, Indian file. Anderson and Orville bringing up the rear had only the sounds of the advance party to guide them: both the light and the rope were played out this far back.

But there was a plenitude of sound: the shuffle of feet over the vines, men swearing, Denny Stromberg crying. Every so often Greta inquired of the darkness: “Where are we?” or “Where the hell are we?” But that was only one noise among many. There were, already, a few premonitory sneezes, but they went unnoticed. The thirty-one people moving through the root were still rather shell-shocked. The rope they held to was at once their motive and their will.

Anderson kept stumbling on the vines. Orville put an arm around the old man’s waist to steady him. Anderson tore it loose angrily. “You think I’m some kind of invalid?” he said. “Get the hell out of here!”

But the next time he stumbled, he went headlong into the rough vines of the floor, scratching his face. Rising, he had a dizzy spell and would have fallen again without Orville’s help. Despite himself, he felt a twinge of gratitude for the arm that bore him up. In the darkness, he couldn’t see that Orville was smiling.

Their path wound on down through the root, passing two more intersections such as the one above. Both times Buddy turned left, so that their descent described, approximately, a spiral. The hollow of the root gave no sign of diminishing; if anything it had been growing larger for the last few yards. There was no danger of becoming lost, for the shattering of the root’s lacy interior blazed an unmistakable trail through the labyrinth.

A commotion at the head of the line brought them to a halt. Anderson and Orville pushed their way to the front.

Buddy handed the lamp to his father. “It’s a dead end,” he announced. “We’ll have to go back the way we came.”

The root’s hollow was much enlarged at this point, and the cobwebby stuff filling it more condensed. Instead of shattering glassily under the force of Anderson’s blow, it tore off in handfuls, like rotted fabric. Anderson pressed one of these pieces between his hands. Like the pink candy floss at carnivals or like the airiest kind of white bread, it wadded into a little ball less than an inch round.

“We’ll push our way through,” Anderson announced. He took a step back, then threw his shoulder like a football tackle into the yielding floss. His momentum gave out two and a half yards ahead. Then, because there was nothing solid beneath his feet, he began, slowly, to sink out of sight. Inexorably, under his weight, the candy floss gave way. Buddy stretched his hand forward, and Anderson was able barely to catch hold, fingertips hooked in fingertips. Anderson pulled Buddy into the mire with him. Buddy, falling in a horizontal position, served somewhat as a parachute, and they sank more slowly and came to a stop, safely, some ten feet below.

As they fell, a powerful sweetness, like the odor of rotting fruit, filled the air behind them.

Orville was the first to realize their good fortune. He wadded a mass of the floss to medium density and bit into it. The Plant’s characteristic anise flavor could be discerned, but there was besides a fullness and sweetness, a satisfaction, that was quite new. His tongue recognized it before his mind did and craved another taste. No, not just his tongue—his belly. Every malnourished cell of his body craved more.

“Throw us down the rope,” Anderson shouted hoarsely. He was not hurt, but he was shaken.

Instead of playing out the rope, Orville, with a happy, carefree shout, dove into the flossy mass. As he was swallowed into its darkness, he addressed the old man below: “Your prayers have been answered, sir. You’ve led us across the Red Sea, and now the Lord is feeding us manna. Taste the stuff—taste it! We don’t have to worry about those supplies. This is the reason for the Plants. This is their fruit. This is manna from heaven.”

In the brief stampede over the edge, Mae Stromberg sprained her ankle. Anderson knew better than to pit his authority against raw hunger. He hesitated to eat the fruit himself, for it could be poisonous, but his body’s need strained against an overcautious will. If the rest of them were to be poisoned, he might as well join them.

It tasted good.

Yes, he thought, it must seem like manna to them. And even as the sugary floss condensed on his tongue into droplets of honey, he hated the Plant for seeming so much their friend and their deliverer. For making its poison so delicious.

At his feet the lamp burned unnaturally bright. The floor, though hard enough to hold him up, was not rock-solid. He took out his pocket knife, brushed away the matted floss, and cut a slice of this more solid substance from the fruit. It was crisp, like an Idaho potato, and juicy. It had a blander and less acid taste than the floss. He cut out another piece. He could not stop eating.

Around Anderson, out of range of the lamp, the citizens of Tassel (but was there still a Tassel of which they could be said to be citizens?) snuffled and ate like swine at a trough. Most of them did not bother to press the floss into comfortable mouthfuls but pushed it blindly into their mouths, biting their own fingers and gagging in their greedy haste. Strands of the pulp adhered to their clothes and tangled in their hair. It stuck to the lashes of their closed eyes.

An upright figure advanced into the sphere of lamplight. It was Jeremiah Orville. “I’m sorry,” he said, “if I started all this. I shouldn’t have spoken out of turn. I should have waited for you to say what to do. I wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s all right,” Anderson assured him, his mouth full of half-chewed fruit. “It would have happened the same no matter what you did. Or what I did.”

Orville sat down beside the older man. “In the morning…” he began.

“Morning? It must be morning now.” In fact, they had no way to know. The only working timepieces—an alarm clock and two wristwatches—had been kept in a box in the cornmonroom for safety. No one escaping the fire had thought to rescue the box.

“Well, when everyone’s fed full and they’ve got some sleep—that’s what I meant—then you can set them to work. We’ve lost a battle, but there’s still a war to fight.”

Orville’s tone was politely optimistic, but Anderson found it oppressive. To have come to sanctuary after a disaster did not erase the memory of the disaster. Indeed, Anderson, now that he had stopped running from it, was only just becoming aware of its magnitude. “What work?” he asked, spitting out the rest of the fruit.

“Whatever work you say, sir. Exploring. Clearing out a space down here to live in. Going back to the main root for the supplies we dropped there. Pretty soon, you might even send a scout back to see if anything can be salvaged from the fire.”

Anderson made no reply. Sullenly he recognized that Orville was right. Sullenly he admired his resourcefulness, just as, twenty years earlier, he might have admired an opponent’s fighting style in a brawl at Red Fox Tavern. Though to Anderson’s taste the style was a little too fancy, you had to give the bastard credit for keeping on his feet.

It was strange, but Anderson’s whole body was tensed as though for a fight, as though he had been drinking.

Orville was saying something. “What’d you say?” Anderson asked in a jeering tone. He hoped it was something that would give him an excuse to smash his face in, the smart punk.

“I said—I’m very sorry about your wife. I can’t understand why she did that. I know how you must be feeling.”

Anderson’s fists unclenched, his jaw grew slack. He felt the pressure of tears behind his eyes, the pressure that had been there all along, but he knew that he could not afford to give in to it. He could not afford the least weakness now.

“Thank you,” he said. Then he cut out another large wedge of the solider, more succulent fruit, split it in two, and gave part to Jeremiah Orville. “You’ve done well tonight,” he said. “I will not forget it.”

Orville left him to whatever thoughts he had and went looking for Blossom. Anderson, alone, thought of his wife with a stony, dumb grief. He could not understand why she had, as he considered it, committed suicide.

He would never know, no one would know, that she had turned back for his sake. He had not yet taken thought of the Bible that had been left behind, and later, when he would, he would regret it no more nor less than Gracie’s death or the hundred other irredeemable losses he had suffered. But Lady had foreseen quite accurately that without that one artifact, in which she herself had had no faith, without the sanction it lent his authority, the old man would be bereft, and that his strength, so long preserved, would soon collapse, like a roof when the timbers have rotted. But she had failed, and her failure would never be understood.

More than one appetite demanded satisfaction that night. A satiety of food produced, in men and women alike, an insatiable hunger for that which the strict code of the cornmonroom had so long denied them. Here, in warmth and darkness, that code no longer obtained. In its stead, the perfect democracy of the carnival proclaimed itself, and liberty reigned for one brief hour.

Hands brushed, as though by accident, other hands—exactly whose it made little difference. Death had not scrupled to sort out husband and wife, and neither did they. Tongues cleaned away the sweet, sticky film from lips that had done feasting, met other tongues, kissed.

“They’re drunk,” Alice Nemerov stated unequivocally.

She, Maryann and Blossom sat in a separate cove dug from the pulp of the fruit, listening, trying not to listen. Though each couple tried to observe a decorous silence, the cumulative effect was unmistakable, even to Blossom.

“Drunk? How can that be?” Maryann asked. She did not want to talk, but conversation was the only defense against the voluptuous sounds of the darkness. Talking and listening to Alice talk, she did not have to hear the sighing, the whispers—or wonder which was her husband’s.

“We’re all drunk, my dears. Drunk on oxygen. Even with this stinking fruit stinking things up, I know an oxygen tent when I smell it.”

“I don’t smell anything,” Maryann said. It was perfectly true: her cold had reached the stage where she couldn’t even smell the cloying odor of the fruit.

“I worked in a hospital, didn’t I? So I should know. My dears, we’re all of us higher than kites.”

“High as the flag on the Fourth of July,” Blossom put in. She didn’t really mind being drunk, if it was like this. Floating. She wanted to sing but sensed that it wasn’t the thing to do. Not now. But the song, once begun, kept on inside her head: I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy.

“Sssh!” Alice ssshed.

“Excuse me!” Blossom said, with a wee giggle. Perhaps her song had not after all been altogether inside her head. Then, because she knew it was the correct thing to do when tipsy, she hiccoughed a single, graceful hiccough, fingertips pressed delicately to her lips. Then, indelicately, she burped, for there was gas on her stomach.

“Are you all right, my dear?” Alice asked, laying a solicitous hand on Maryann’s full womb. “I mean, everything that’s happened—”

“Yes. There, you see! He just moved.”

The conversation lapsed, and through the breach the assault was renewed. Now it was an angry, persistent sound, like the buzzing of a honeycomb. Maryann shook her head, but the buzzing wouldn’t stop. “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh!”

“There, there,” Alice soothed.

“Who do you think is with him?” Maryann blurted.

“Why, you’re all upset for no reason at all,” Blossom said. “He’s probably with Daddy and Orville this very minute.”

Blossom’s obvious conviction almost swayed Maryann. It was possible. An hour ago (or less? or more?) Orville had sought out Blossom and explained that he was taking her father (who was naturally very upset) to a more private spot, away from the others. He had found a way into another root, a root that burrowed yet deeper into the earth. Did Blossom want to go there with him? Or perhaps she preferred to stay with the ladies?

Alice had thought that Blossom would prefer to stay with the ladies for the time being. She would join her father later, if he wished her to.

Anderson’s departure, and the departure with him of the lamp, had been the cue for all that followed. A month’s danmed energy spilled out and covered, for a little while, the face of sorrow, blotted out the too-clear knowledge of their defeat and of an ignominy the features of which were only just becoming apparent.

A hand reached out of the darkness and touched Blossom’s thigh. It was Orville’s hand! it could be no other. She took the hand and pressed it to her lips.

It was not Orville’s hand. She screamed. Instantly, Alice had caught the intruder by the scruff of his neck. He yelped.

“Neil!” she exclaimed. “For pity’s sake! That’s your sister you’re pawing, you idiot! Now, get! Go look for Greta. Or, on the other hand, maybe you’d better not.”

“You shut up!” Neil bellowed. “You ain’t my mother!”

She finally shoved Neil away. Then she laid her head down in Blossom’s lap. “Drunk,” she scolded sleepily. “Absolutely stoned.” Then she began to snore. In a few minutes, Blossom slept too—and dreamed—and woke with a little cry.

“What is it?” Maryann asked.

“Nothing, a dream,” Blossom said. “Haven’t you gone to sleep yet?”

“I can’t.” Though it was as quiet as death now, Maryann was still listening. What she feared most was that Neil would find his wife. And Buddy. Together.

Buddy woke. It was still dark. It would always be dark now, here. There was a woman beside him, whom he touched, though not to wake her. Assured that she was neither Greta nor Maryann, he gathered his clothes and sidled away. Strands of the sticky pulp caught on his bare back and shoulders and melted there, unpleasantly.

He was still feeling drunk. Drunk and drained. Orville bad a word for the feeling—what was it?

Detumescent.

The grainy liquid trickled down his bare skin, made him shiver. But it wasn’t that he was cold. Though he was cold, come to think of it.

Crawling forward on hands and knees, he bumbled into another sleeping couple. “Wha?” the woman said. She sounded like Greta. No matter. He crawled elsewhere.

He found a spot where the pulp had not been disturbed and shoved his body into it backward. Once you got used to the sticky feeling, it was quite comfortable: soft, warm, snuggly.

He wanted light: sunlight, lamplight, even the red, unsteady light of last night’s burning. Something in the present situation horrified him in a way he did not understand, could not define. It was more than the darkness. He thought about it and as he dropped off to sleep again it came to him:

Worms.

They were worms, crawling through an apple.