The Genocides

these little lectures on the wonders of science (and there had been more than a few) had but a single purpose: to lead them to despair.

But he did know more science than anyone else, and Anderson grudgingly respected him for it. If nothing else, he’d stopped Clay and Joel from arguing about the weather, and for that small blessing Anderson could not help but give thanks.

It was not as bad yet as it would become in February and March, but it was very bad: the close quarters, the silly quarrels, the noise, the stench, the abrasion of flesh on flesh and nerve on nerve. It was very bad. It was well nigh intolerable.

Two hundred and fifty people lived in 2,400 square feet, and much of that space was given over to storage. Last winter when there had been almost double the number in the same room, when every day witnessed a new death, every month a new epidemic of the deadly common cold, it had been measurably worse. The more susceptible types-those who couldn’t bear up—had run amok, singing and laughing, into the deceiving warmth of the January thaws; these were gone this year. This year the walls were firmly anchored and tightly woven from the start; this year the rationing was not so desperately tight (though there would be less meat). Yet for all these improvements, it was still an intolerable way to live and everyone knew it.

The thing that Buddy could not stand, the very worst thing, was the presence of so much flesh. All day it rubbed against him, it displayed itself, it stank in his nostrils. And any of the hundred women in the room, even Blossom, would by the simplest gesture, by the tamest word, trigger his lust. Yet for all the good it did him, he might as well have been watching the bloodless phantasms of a movie. There was simply no place, day or night, in the cramped commonroom for sex. His erotic life was limited to such occasions as he could impose upon Maryann to come with him to visit the freezing outhouse by the pig sty. Maryann, in her seventh month and prone at any time to sniffles, seldom accommodated him.

It did not help that, as long as there was daylight in the room, Buddy could look up from whatever he was doing (or more likely—whatever he wasn’t doing) and see, probably no more than twenty feet away, Greta.

More and more, he found himself seeking the refuge of Jeremiah Orville’s company. Orville was the sort of person, familiar to Buddy from the university, whom he had always liked much more than they had liked him. Though he never once told a joke in Buddy’s hearing, when the man talked-and he talked incessantly—Buddy couldn’t keep from laughing. It was like the conversations in books and movies or the way people talked on the old Jack Paar show, people who could take the most commonplace thing and, in the telling, make it funny. Orville never tried to clown; his humor was in the way he looked at things—with a certain, sly irreverence (not so much that someone like Anderson could object), an oblique mockery. You never knew where you stood with him, so that most folks—the authentic grassroots hicks like Neil—were reluctant to get into conversations with him, though they listened gladly. Buddy found himself imitating Orville, using his words, pronouncing them his way (gen-uine instead of genu- wine), adopting his ideas.

It was a constant source of wonder how much the man knew. Buddy, who considered his own education barely sufficient to judge the scope of another person’s, considered Orville encyclopedic.

Buddy fell so thoroughly under the older man’s influence that it would not be unjust to say he was infatuated. There were times (for instance, such times as Orville would talk too long with Blossom) when Buddy felt something like jealousy.

He would have been surprised to learn that Blossom felt much the same way when Orville spent undue time with him. It was quite evidently a case of infatuation, of conventional puppy-love.

Even Neil had a good word to say for the newcomer, for one day Orville had taken him aside and taught him a whole new store of dirty jokes.

The hunters hunted alone; the fishermen fished together. Neil, a hunter, was grateful for the chance to be alone, but the lack of game that December aggravated him almost as much as the shove and clamor of the commonroom. But, the day the blizzard stopped, he found deer tracks cutting right through the still-uncrusted snow of the west cornfield. He followed them four miles, stumbling over his own snowshoes in his eagerness. The tracks terminated in a concavity of ash and ice. No tracks led away from or approached the area. Neil swore loudly. Then he screamed for a while, not really aware that he was screaming. It let off the pressure.

No use hunting now, he thought, when he began to think again. He decided he would rest for the rest of the day. Rest… rest! Ha! He’d have to remember that. With the other hunters and fishermen still out of the commonroom, maybe he’d get a little privacy.

That’s what he did—he went home and drank a pot of cruddy licorice-flavored tea (that’s what they called it, tea) and he got to feeling drowsy and hardly knew what he was looking at or what he was thinking (he was looking at Blossom and thinking of her) when all of a sudden Gracie started making an uproar like he’d never heard before. Except he had heard it before: Gracie was calving.

The cow was making grunting noises like a pig. She rolled over on her side and squirmed around in the dirt. This was Gracie’s first calf, and she wasn’t any too big. Trouble was only to be expected. Neil knotted some rope into a noose and got it over her neck but she was thrashing around so that he couldn’t get it over her legs so he let that go. Alice, the nurse, was helping him, but he wished his father was there anyhow. Old Gracie was bellowing like a bull now.

Any cow that goes more than an hour is a sure loss, and even half an hour is bad. Gracie was in pain like that and bellowing for half an hour. She kept squirming backward to try and escape the shooting pains. Neil hauled on the rope to keep her from doing that.

“I can see his head. His head’s coming out now,” Alice said. She was down on her knees in back of Gracie, trying to spread her wider open.

“If that’s all you can see, how do you know it’s a her?”

The calf’s sex was crucial, and everyone in the commonroom had gathered around to watch the calving. After each bellow of pain, the children shouted their encouragement to Gracie. Then her squirming got worse, while her bellowing quieted. “That’s it, that’s it!” Alice was calling out, and Neil hauled all the harder against the rope.

“It’s a boy!” Alice exclaimed. “Thank God, it is a boy!”

Neil laughed at the old woman. “It’s a bull is what you mean. You city slickers are all alike.” He felt good because he hadn’t made any mistakes and everything was hunkydory. So he went over to the barrel and got the top off and dipped himself a drink to celebrate. He asked Alice if she wanted one, but she just looked at him funny-like and said no.

He sat down in the room’s single easy chair (Anderson’s) and watched the little bull-calf sucking at Gracie’s full udder. Gracie hadn’t got up. She must have been exhausted by the birthing. Why, if Neil hadn’t been around, she probably wouldn’t of lived through it probably. The licorice flavor wasn’t so bad once you got used to it. All the women were quiet now, and the children too.

Neil looked at the bull-calf and thought how someday it’d be a big horny bull mounting Gracie—his own mother! Animals, he thought foggily, are just like animals. But that wasn’t exactly it.

He had some more to drink.

When Anderson got home he looked like he’d had a bad day (was the afternoon gone already?), but Neil got up from the warm chair and called out happily: “Hey, Dad, it’s a bull!”

Anderson came up, and he looked the way Neil remembered him looking Thanksgiving night, all dark and with that ugly smile (but he hadn’t said a word, then or later, about Neil drinking too much at dinner), and he hit Neil in the face, he just knocked him right down on the floor.

“You goddam stupid asshole!” Anderson yelled. “You dumb turd! Don’t you know that Gracie’s dead? You strangled her to death, you son of a bitch!”

Then he kicked Neil. Then he went over and cut Gracie’s neck where the rope was still tight around it. Most of the cold blood went into the basin Lady was holding, but some of it spilled out in the dirt. The calf was pulling at the dead cow’s udder, but there wasn’t any more milk. Anderson cut the calf’s throat too.

It wasn’t his fault, was it? It was Alice’s fault. He hated Alice. He hated his father too. He hated all those bastards who thought they were so goddam smart. He hated all of them. He hated all of them.

And he cupped his pain in his two hands and tried not to scream from the pain in his hands and the pain in