bodies were properly disposed of.
Maryann didn’t speak unless spoken to, but in their three years together Buddy had picked up enough bits and pieces of her background to convince himself that her depths were no more interesting than her surfaces.
Her father had been a bank clerk, scarcely more than a teller, and she had worked for one month in a stenographic pool before the world had entirely collapsed. Though she had gone to a parochial grade school and later to St. Bridget’s, where she took the commercial course, het Catholicism had never been more than lukewarm at best, with hot flashes around the holidays. In Tassel she was able to adopt Anderson’s homemade and apocalyptic brand of Congregationalism without a qualm.
But Maryann’s special distinction was not her conversion from papistry: it was the new skill she had brought to Tassel. Once, almost by chance, she had taken a night course in basket-weaving at the CYO. Something in Maryann, something quite fundamental, had responded to the simplicities of that ancient craft. She experimented with the thicker rushes and with swamp grasses, and when the shortages began, Maryann went out on her own and began stripping the smooth green boles of the Plants and shredding their great leaves into raffia. Right to the end, to that day when the Government trucks failed to show up in the city for the morning dole, she went on making her baskets and bonnets and sandals and welcome mats. People thought it silly, and Maryann herself considered it a weakness. That it was the one thing that the poor mouse had ever done well or found more than passing satisfaction in escaped their attention and hers.
In Tassel, Maryann’s light was no longer hidden, as it were, beneath a bushel. Her basketry quite transformed the village’s way of life. After the fatal summer when the Plants invaded the fields, the villagers (the five hundred who were left) had picked up as many pieces as they could carry and took themselves to the shore of Lake Superior, a few miles away down Gooseberry River. The lake had been receding at a prodigious rate, and in several areas the water was two or three miles from the old, rock-strewn shore line. Wherever the water retreated, the thirsty seedlings sprang up, sank roots, and the process accelerated.
That fall and through the winter, the survivors (their number, like the lake, was always shrinking) worked at clearing as large an area as they could hope realistically to maintain for their own fields the next year. Then they began to sink their own roots. There was little timber but what they could scavenge from the old town. The wood of the Plant was less substantial than balsam, and most of the trees native to the area had already rotted. The villagers had the clay but not the skill to make brick, and quarrying was out of the question. So they spent the winter in a great grass hut, whose walls and roof were woven under Maryann’s supervision. It had been a cold, miserable November, but a person could keep his fingers warm weaving. There was a week in December when the panels of the commonroom were blown halfway back to the old village. But by January they had learned to make a weave that was proof against the worst blizzard, and by February the commonroom was downright cozy. It even had a welcome mat at each of the doors.
No one had ever regretted admitting the clever mouse to the village. Except, occasionally, the mouse’s husband.
“Why isn’t there any dinner?” he asked.
“I was all day with Lady. She’s awful upset about Jimmie Lee. Jimmie was her favorite, you know. Your father didn’t help much either. He talked all the time about the Resurrection of the Body. He must know by now she doesn’t believe the same as he does.”
“A person has to eat just the same.”
“I’m fixing it, Buddy. As fast as I can. Buddy, there’s something—”
“Father’s feeling better then?”
“—I wanted to tell you. I never know how your father is feeling. He’s acting the same as ever. He never loses control. Neil’s going to be whipped tonight—I suppose you heard about that?”
“Serves him right. If he’d fixed the gate shut, that whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”
“What whole thing, Buddy? How can a person be burnt to ashes like that in the middle of the forest? How can that be?”
“You’ve got me. It doesn’t seem possible. And those cows and Studs, besides. Seven tons of beef turned to ash in less than ten minutes.”
“Was it lightning?”
“Not unless it was the lightning of the Good Lord. I suspect it’s marauders. They’ve invented some new kind of weapon.”
“But why would they want to kill cows? They’d want to steal cows—and kill people.”
“Maryann,
“There was something I wanted to tell you.”
“Maryann!”
Glumly, she went back to stirring the suppawn in the earthenware pot that nestled in the hot embers; to the side, wrapped in cornhusks, were three sunfish that Jimmie Lee had caught that morning at the lake shore.
From now on, with neither milk nor butter to add to the corn meal, they’d have to settle for mush, with an occasional egg whipped in it. One of the nice things about being married to an Anderson had always been the extra food. The meat especially. Maryann hadn’t questioned too closely where it all came from; she just took what Lady, Anderson’s wife, offered her.
Maryann was talking about something, which was almost an event in itself, but Buddy’s mind, after a day like this, didn’t seem to focus on things very well. He was thinking of Greta again: the curve of her neck when she’d thrown her head back out on the church steps. The slight protuberance of her Adam’s apple. And her lips. Somehow she still had lipstick. Had she worn it just for him?
“What’d you say?” he asked Maryann.
“Nothing. Oh, just nothing.”
Buddy had always thought that Maryann would have made the ideal wife for Neil. She had the same chin, the same lack of humor, the same stolid industriousness. They both had front teeth like a rabbit’s or a rat’s. Neil, who was abject before Greta, would not have found fault with Maryann’s passivity. With Maryann in bed, Buddy was always reminded of tenth-grade gym class, when Mr. Olsen had had them do fifty pushups every day. But apparently that aspect of things didn’t mean so much to Neil.
It had been a shock to come back and find Greta Pastern married to his half-brother. Somehow he’d been counting on finding her waiting for him. She’d been so large a part of the Tassel he’d left behind.
It had been a touchy situation all around, those first weeks. Buddy and Greta had been anything but secretive during Buddy’s last year in Tassel. Their carryings-on were discussed in every bar and over every back fence in town. Greta, the pastor’s only child, and Buddy, the eldest son of the richest—and most righteous—farmer in the township, in all Lake County. So it was common knowledge that Greta was a hand-me-down in the Anderson family, and a common expectation that something bad would come of it.
But the prodigal who had returned to Tassel was not the same as the prodigal who had left. In the meantime he had starved a third of his weight away, worked on the Government’s pressed-labor crews, and butchered his way to Tassel from Minneapolis, joining the human wolf packs or fighting them as the occasion offered. By the time he got to Tassel, he was much more interested in saving his own hide than in getting under Greta’s skirts.
So, besides being a humanitarian gesture, it had been prudent to marry Maryann. Buddy as a husband seemed much less likely to breach the village peace than Buddy as a bachelor, and he could pass Greta on the street without causing a storm of speculation.
“Buddy?”
“Tell it to me later!”
“The suppawn’s ready. That’s all.”
