The Genocides

juice of the Plant that he had been chewing.

He hated the Plants, and that hatred gave him strength.

They worked, sweating in the sun, till noonday. Buddy’s legs were trembling from the strain and from hunger. But each trip down the rows of corn was shorter, and when he returned to the Plant there was a moment (and each a little longer than the last) before the buckets filled, when he could rest.

Sometimes, though he did not like the vaguely aniselilce taste, he would stick his finger into the bucket and lick off the bittersweet syrup. It did not nourish, but it allayed for a while the worst of his hunger. He might have chewed the pulp carved from the phloem of the trunk, as his father and Neil did, but “chewing” reminded him of the life he had tried to escape ten years before, when he had left the farm for the city. His escape had failed, as surely as the cities themselves had failed. At last, just as in the parable, he would have been content with the husks the swine ate, and he had returned to Tassel and to his father’s farm.

True to form, the fatted calf had been killed, and if his return had been a parable, it would have ended happily. But it was his life, and he was still, in his heart, a prodigal, and there were times when he wished he had died during the famine of the cities.

But in a contest between the belly’s hunger and the mind’s variable predilections, the belly is likelier to win. The prodigal’s rebeffion had been reduced to catchwords and petty crochets: an obstinate refusal to use the word ain’t, an abiding contempt for country music, a distaste for “chewing,” and a loathing for the hick, the hayseed, and the dumb cluck. In a word, for Neil.

The heat and his body’s weariness conspired to direct his thoughts to less troubled channels, and as he stood gazing into the slowly filling buckets, his mind surged with the remembered images of other times. Of Babylon, that great city.

He remembered how at night the streets would be swiftflowing rivers of light and how the brilliant, antiseptic cars had streamed down those rivers. From hour to hour the sound would not abate nor the lights dim. There had been the drive-ins, and when there was less money, the White Castles. Girls in shorts waited on your car. Sometimes the shorts were edged with little, glittering fringes that bounced on tan thighs.

In the summer, when the hicks had worked on the farms, there had been flood-lit beaches, and his parched tongue curled now remembering how—in the labyrinth of empty oil drums supporting the diving raft—he would have kissed Irene. Or someone. The names didn’t matter so much any more.

He made another trip down the row, and while he fed the corn he remembered the names that didn’t matter now. Oh, the city had swarmed with girls. You could stand on a street corner, and in an hour hundreds would walk past. There had even been talk about a population problem then.

Hundreds of thousands of people!

He remembered the crowds in the winter in the heated auditorium on the university campus. He would have come there in a white shirt. The collar would be tight around his neck. In his imagination, he fingered the knot of a silk tie. Would it be striped or plain? He thought of the stores full of suits and jackets. Oh, the colors there had been! the music, and, afterward, the applause!

But the worst of it, he thought, resting by at the Plant again, is that there isn’t anyone to talk to any more. The total population of Tassel was two hundred and forty- seven, and none of them, not one of them, could understand Buddy Anderson. A world had been lost, and they weren’t aware of it. It had never been their world, but it had been, briefly, Buddy’s, and it had been beautiful.

The buckets were full, and Buddy grabbed hold of the handles and made his way back to the field. For the hundredth time that day, he stepped over the cankerous knob of tissue that had formed on the stump of the Plant that had irrigated these rows last year. This time his bare foot came down on a patch of the slick wood where there was a puddle of slippery sap. Weighted down by the buckets, he couldn’t recover his balance. He fell backward, the sap in the buckets spilling out over him. He lay in the dirt, and the sap spread across his chest and down his arms, and the myriad flies settled to feed.

He didn’t try to get up.

“Well, don’t just lay there,” Anderson said. “There’s work to do.” He stretched out a hand, kinder than his words, to help Buddy up.

When he thanked his father, there was a just-perceptible quaver in his voice.

“You all right?”

“I guess so.” He felt his coccyx, which had struck against a knob of the stump, and winced.

“Then go down to the stream and wash that crap off. We’re about ready to go and eat anyhow.”

Buddy nodded. Grabbing the buckets (it was amazing how automatic the work had become, even for him), he set off down a forest path that led to the stream (once, farther inland, it had been Gooseberry River) from which the village drew its water. Seven years ago, this whole area—fields, forest and village—had been under ten to fifteen feet of water. But the Plants had siphoned off the water. They were still at it, and every day the North Shore of Lake Superior moved a few inches farther south, though the rate of its retreat seemed to be lessening, as all but the newest of the Plants reached the limits of their growth.

He stripped and lay down full length in the stream. The tepid water moved languidly over his bare limbs, washing away sap and dirt and the dead flies that had caught on him as on flypaper. He held his breath and lowered his head slowly into the flowing water until he was totally submerged.

With the water in his ears, he could hear slight sounds more distinctly: his back scratching against the pebbles in the bed of the stream, and, more distantly, another sound, a low rumbling that grew, too quickly, to a pounding. He knew the sound, and knew he shouldn’t be hearing it now, here.

He lifted his head out of the water in time to see the cow running full-tilt toward him—and in time for her to see him. Gracie jumped, and her hind hooves came down within inches of his thigh. Then she ran on into the forest.

More followed. Buddy counted them as they splashed across the stream: eight… eleven… twelve. Seven Herefords and five Guernseys. All of them.

The yearning bellow of a bull sounded in the air, and Studs came into view—the village’s great, brown Hereford, with his flaring white topknot. He stared at Buddy with casual defiance, but there was more urgent business than the settling of old scores. He hurried on after the cows.

That Studs had gotten out of his pen was bad news, for the cows were all of them half-gone with calves, and it would do them no good to be mounted by an eager bull. The news would be even worse for Neil, who was responsible for Studs. It could mean a whipping. This was not a thought to sadden Buddy deeply, but still he was concerned for the cattle. He hurried into his overalls, which were still sticky with sap.

Before he’d gotten the straps over his shoulders, Jimmie Lee, the younger of Buddy’s two half-brothers, came running out of the forest on the bull’s trail. His face was flushed with the excitement of the chase, and even as he announced the calamity—“Studs broke out!”—a smile touched his lips.

All children—and Jimmie was no exception—feel a demonic sympathy with those things that cause disorder in the grown-up world. The young thrive on earthquakes, tornadoes and escaped bulls.

It would not do, Buddy realized, to let their father see that smile. For in Anderson the secret sympathy for the powers of destruction had been metamorphosed by the agency of time into a stern, humorless opposition to those same powers, a magnificent, raw willfulness as ruthless in its way as the enemy it opposed. Nothing could more surely elicit that ruthlessness than seeing this hectic flush in the cheeks of his youngest and (it was commonly supposed) dearest.

“I’ll tell Father,” Buddy said. “You go on after Studs. Where’s everyone else?”

“Clay’s getting together all the men he can find, and Lady and Blossom and the women are going out to scare the cows away from the corn if they go that way.” Jimmie shouted the information over his shoulder as he trotted along the broad trail blazed by the herd.

He was a good boy, Jimmie Lee, and bright as a button. In the old world, Buddy was sure, he would have become another prodigal. It was always the bright one who rebelled. Now he’d be lucky to survive. They all would.

The morning’s work accomplished, Anderson looked across his field and saw that it was good. At harvest the ears would not be large and juicy, as in the old times. They had left the bags of hybridized seed moldering in the abandoned storerooms of old Tassel. Hybrids gave the best yield, but they were sterile. Agriculture could no longer afford such fripperies. The variety he was using now was much closer hereditarily to the ancient Indian maize, the Aztec zea mays. His whole strategy against the usurping Plants was based on corn. Corn had become the life of his