The Genocides

his head, the pain of hating, but maybe he did scream, who knows?

Shortly before dark the snow began to come down again, a perfectly perpendicular descent through the windless air. The only light in the commonroom came from the single hurricane lamp burning in the kitchen alcove where Lady was scouring the well scoured pots. No one spoke. Who dared say how fine the usual mush of cornmeal and rabbit tasted flavored with the blood of cow and calf. It was quiet enough to hear the chickens fussing and clucking in their roosts in the far corner.

When Anderson went outside to direct the butchering and salting down of the carcasses, neither Neil nor Buddy was invited to participate. Buddy sat by the kitchen door on the dirty welcome mat and pretended to read a freshman biology text in the semidarkness. He had read it through many times before and knew some passages by heart. Neil was sitting by the other door, trying to screw up the courage to go outside and join the butchers.

Of all the townspeople, Buddy was probably the only one who took pleasure in Gracie’s death. In the weeks since Thanksgiving, Neil had been winning his way back into his father’s favor. Now since Neil himself had so effectively reversed that trend, Buddy reasoned that it would be only a matter of time before he would again enjoy the privileges of his primogeniture. The extinction of the species (were Herefords a species?) was not too high a price to pay.

There was one other who rejoiced at this turn of events, but he was not, either in his own estimation or in theirs, one of the townspeople. Jeremiah Orville had hoped that Gracie or her calf or both might die, for the preservation of the cattle had been one of Anderson’s proudest achievements, a token that civilization-as-we-had- known-it was not quite passe and a sign, for those who would see it, that Anderson was truly of the Elect. That the agency that would realize Orville’s hopes should be the incompetence of the man’s own son afforded Orville an almost esthetic pleasure: as though some tidy, righteous deity were assisting his revenge, scrupulous that the laws of poetic justice be observed. Orville was happy tonight, and he worked at the butchering with a quiet fury. From time to time, when he could not be seen, he swallowed a gobbet of raw beef—for he was as hungry as any man there. But he would starve willingly, if only he might see Anderson starve before him.

A peculiar noise, a windy sound but not the wind, caught his attention. It seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it. It was a sound that belonged to the city. Joel Stromberg, who was looking after the pigs, shouted: “Ah, hey!—there—— whadaya—” Abruptly, Joel was metamorphosed into a pillar of fire.

Orville saw this no more distinctly than he had heard the sound preceding it, but without taking thought he hurled himself over a nearby snowbank. He rolled in the powdery snow till he was out of sight of everything—the carcasses, the other men, the pigsty. Everything but the flames rising from the burning sty. “Mr. Anderson!” he yelled. Terrified lest he lose his intended victim to the fires of the incendiaries, he crawled back to rescue the old man.

Three spherical bodies, each about five feet in diameter, floated just above the snow at the periphery of the flames. The men (with the exception of Anderson, who was crouched behind the flank of the dead cow, aiming his pistol at the nearest sphere) stood watching the blaze, as though bewitched. Spumes of steamy breath drifted from their open mouths.

“Don’t waste bullets on armor plate, Mr. Anderson. Come on—they’ll fire the commonroom next. We’ve got to get the people out of there.”

“Yes,” Anderson agreed, but he did not move. Orville had to pull him away. In that moment of stuporous incapacity, Orville thought he saw in Anderson the seed of what Neil had become.

Orville entered the commonroom first. Since the walls were buttressed with great drifts of snow, none of them was yet aware of the blaze outside. They were, as they had been all evening, leaden with unhappiness. Several had already gotten into bed.

“Everybody—start getting your clothes on,” Orville commanded in a voice as calm as authoritative. “Leave this room as quickly as possible by the kitchen door and run into the woods. Take anything with you that’s at hand, but don’t waste time looking for things. Don’t wait for someone else to catch up. Quickly, now.”

As many as had heard Orville looked dumbfounded. It was not for him to be giving orders.

“Quickly,” Anderson directed, “and no questions.”

They were accustomed to obeying Anderson unquestioningly, but there was still much confusion. Anderson, accompanied by Orville, went directly to the area by the kitchen where his own family was quartered. They were all bundling into their heavy clothes, but Anderson bundled them faster.

Outside there were screams, brief as the whistle of a slaughtered rabbit, as the incendiary devices were turned on their spectators. A man ran into the room, flaming, and fell to the floor, dead. The panic began. Anderson, already near the door, commanded respect even in the midst of hysteria and managed to get his family out among the first. Passing through the kitchen, Lady grabbed an empty cooking pot. Blossom was burdened with a basket of laundry, which, proving too heavy, she emptied into the snow. Orville, in his anxiety to see them out of the commonroom safely, took nothing at all. There were no more than fifty people running through the snow when the far corner of the commonroom caught fire. The first flames shot up thirty feet from the roof, then began to climb as they ate into the bags of corn stacked against the wails.

It is hard to run through unpacked snow, just as it is hard to run in knee-deep water: as soon as you acquire momentum, you are apt to tumble forward. Lady and Greta had left the house wearing only straw slippers, and others streamed out the door now in their nightshirts or wrapped in blankets.

The Andersons had almost reached the forest edge when Lady threw aside her cooking pot and exclaimed: The Bible! the Bible is back there!

No one heard her. She ran toward the burning building. By the time Anderson was aware of his wife’s absence, there was no longer any way to stop her. His own scream would not be heard among so many others. The family stopped to watch. “Keep running,” Orville shouted at them, but they paid no heed. Most of those who had escaped the house had reached the wood by now.

The flames illuminated the neighborhood of the building for a hundred feet, making the snow shine with an unsteady orange glow upon which the swift, uncertain shadows of the smoke rippled, like the fires of visible darkness.

Lady entered by the kitchen door and did not re-emerge. The roof caved in; the walls fell outward, neatly as dominos. The three spherical bodies could be seen in silhouette to rise higher from the ground. In close formation they began to glide toward the wood, their hum disguised by the crackling of the flames. Within the triangle they defined, the snow melted and bubbled and rose steaming into the air.

“Why would she do a thing like that?” Anderson asked of his daughter, but seeing that she was delicately poised on the brink of hysteria, he took her in one hand and the length of rope he had taken up from a wheelbarrow outside the house in the other and hurried after the others. Orville and Neil were practically carrying barefoot Greta, who was screaming obscenities in her rich contralto.

Orville was frantic, and yet close behind the frenzy was a sense of exultation and headlong delight that made him want to cheer, as though the conflagration behind them were as innocent and festal as a homecoming game bonfire.

When he shouted Hurry on; hurry on! it was hard to tell whether he was calling to Anderson and Blossom or to the three incendiaries not far behind them.

EIGHT The Way Down

Maybe we’ll die, Maryann thought, when they had at last stopped running and she could think. But that was impossible. It was so cold! She wished to heaven she could understand what Anderson was talking about. He’d just said: “We’ll have to take inventory.” They were all standing around in the snow. It was so cold, and when she’d fallen down she’d gotten snow inside her coat, under her collar. The snow was still coming down in the dark. She’d catch a cold and then what would she do? Where would she live? And her baby— what about him?

“Maryann?” Anderson asked. “She’s here, isn’t she?”

“Maryann!” Buddy barked impatiently.

“I’m here,” she said, snuffling the wet that trickled from her nose.