The Genocides

He is mean, Buddy thought, and he is dangerous. Buddy set off down the row of corn, a full bucket of sap in either hand and his heart brimming with ill-will. It gave him a sort of strength, and he needed all the strength he could muster, from whatever source. His breakfast had been light, and lunch, he knew, wouldn’t be quite enough, and there’d be no dinner to speak of.

Even hunger, he had learned, provided its own kind of strength: the will to wrest more food from the soil and more soil from the Plants.

No matter how much care he took, the sap splattered his pants legs as he walked, and the tattered fabric stuck to his calf. Later, when the day was hotter, his whole body would be covered with sap. The sap would bake dry, and when he moved, the stiffened cloth would tear out the crusted hairs of his body, one by one. The worst of that was over now, thank heaven—the body has a finite number of hairs—but there were still the flies that swarmed over his flesh to feed on the sap. He hated the flies, which did not seem to be finite.

When he had reached the foot of the decline and was in the middle of the field, Buddy set one bucket down and began to feed the thirsty young plants from the other. Each plant received about a pound of thick green nutrient— and to good effect. It wasn’t the Fourth yet, and already many plants were up over his knees. Corn would have grown well in the rich lake-bottom soil in any case, but with the additional nourishment they drew from the stolen sap, the plants throve phenomenally—as though they were in central Iowa instead of northern Minnesota. This unwitting parasitism of the corn served another purpose besides, for as the corn throve, the Plants whose sap they had drunk died, and each year the limit of the field could be pushed a bit farther.

It had been Anderson’s idea to pit the Plant against itself this way, and every corn plant in the field was a testimony to his, judgment. Looking down the long rows, the old man felt like a prophet in full view of his prophecy. His regret now was that he hadn’t thought of it sooner—before the diaspora of his village, before the Plants had vanquished his and his neighbors’ farms.

If only…

But that was history, water under the bridge, spilt milk, and as such it belonged to a winter evening in the commonroom when there was time for idle regrets. Now, and for the rest of that long day, there was work to do.

Anderson looked about for his sons. They were straggling behind, still emptying their second buckets over the roots of the corn.

“Get the lead out!” he yelled. Then, turning back up the hill with his two buckets empty, he smiled a thin, joyless smile, the smile of a prophet, and spat out, through the gap between his front teeth, a thin stream of the 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.