The Genocides

Well, she thought, there are still hogs and chickens and a lake full of fish. The world hasn’t come to an end. Maybe the hunters could bring in enough after the harvest to make up for the Herefords. A couple of years ago, the hunting had been so good that there’d been talk of turning nomad and following the game, like the Indians used to. Then the deer started falling off. There was a winter of wolves and bears, and then it was just like old times. Except for the rabbits. Rabbits could eat the bark off the Plants. Rabbits were cute, the way they wiggled their noses. She smiled, thinking about the rabbits. “Buddy,” she said, “there’s something I should talk to you about.”

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.”

Such a ninny, he thought. But a passable cook. Better, leastways, than Greta, and that was a consolation.

He shoveled the steaming, yellow porridge into his mouth, nodding to Maryann that he was satisfied. She watched him put down two bowls of the suppawn and the three fish, then she ate what was left.

I’ll tell him now, while he’s in a good mood, she thought. But before she could get a word in, Buddy was up off the mat on the floor of the tent and heading outside.

“It must be about time for the whipping,” he said.

“I don’t want to see it. It makes me sick.”

“Nothing says a woman has to go.” And with half a smile to cheer her up, he was out of the tent. Even if he had been squeamish (which he wasn’t), he would have had to be there, as did every male in the village over seven years old. A good whipping could instill almost as much fear of the Lord in the hearts of beholders as in the single heart about which the lash curled.

In the square before the commonhouse, Neil was already strung up to the whipping post. His back was bare. Buddy was one of the last to arrive.

Anderson, with the whip in his hand, stood spraddle legged in readiness. These was just a bit too much stiffness in his stance.. Buddy knew that it must be costing the old man to carry on as though this were no more than an ordinary fiasco, a matter of some twenty lashes.

When Anderson had to whip Buddy or Neil, he meted out the pain impartially—no more and no less than he would have doled out to anyone else for the same offense. His touch was as precise as a metronome. But tonight, after the third stroke, his knees collapsed and he fell to the ground.