The Genocides

“What’s everyone waiting for?” Anderson demanded. “There’s food on the table.”

Alice’s attention drifted toward Orville, who was sitting there with knife and fork in hand, and that strange smile of his. He caught Alice’s look—and winked at her. Of all things! Or was it at her?

Orville cut off a piece of the sausage and chewed it consideringly. He smiled beamishly, like a man in a toothpaste ad. “Mrs. Anderson,” he announced, “you are a marvelous cook. How do you do it? I haven’t had a Thanksgiving dinner like this since God knows when.”

Alice felt Blossom’s fingers relax and pull out of hers. She’s feeling better, now that the worst is over, Alice thought.

But she was wrong. There was a heavy noise, as when a bag of meal is dropped to the ground, and Mae Stromberg screamed. Blossom had fainted.

He, Buddy, would not have allowed it, much less have originated and insisted upon it, but then very probably he, Buddy, would not have been able to bring the village through those seven hellish years. Primitive, pagan, unprecedented as it was, there was a rationale for it.

It. They were all afraid to call it by its right name. Even Buddy, in the inviolable privacy of his own counsel, shied away from the word for it.

Necessity might have been some justification. There was ample precedent (the Donner party, the wreck of the Medusa), and Buddy would have had to go no further than this for an excuse-if they had been starving.

Beyond necessity, explanations grew elaborate and rather metaphysical. Thus, metaphysically, in this meal the community was united by a complex bond, the chief of whose elements was complicity in murder, but this complicity was achieved by a ritual as solemn and mysterious as the kiss by which Judas betrayed Christ; it was a sacrament. Mere horror was subsumed into tragedy, and the town’s Thanksgiving dinner was the crime and the atonement, so to speak, in one blow.

Thus the theory, but Buddy, in his heart, felt nothing but the horror of it, mere horror, and nothing in his stomach but nausea.

He washed down another steadfast mouthful with the licorice-flavored alcohol.

Neil, when he had polished off his second sausage, began to tell a dirty joke. They had all, except for Orville and Alice, heard him tell the same joke last Thanksgiving. Orville was the only one to laugh, which made it worse rather than better.

“Where the hell is the deer?” Neil shouted, as though this followed naturally from the punch line.

“What are you talking about?” his father asked. Anderson, when he drank (and today he was almost keeping up to Neil), brooded. In his youth he had had a reputation as a mean fighter after his eighth or ninth beer.

“The deer, for Christ’s sake! The deer I shot the other day! Aren’t we going to have some venison? What the hell kind of Thanksgiving is this?”

“Now, Neil,” Greta chided, “you know that has to be salted down for the winter. There’ll be little enough meat as it is.”

“Well, where are the other deer? Three years ago those woods were swarming with deer.”

“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Orville said, and again he was David Niven or perhaps, a little more somberly, James Mason. “Survival is a matter of ecology. That’s how I’d explain it. Ecology is the way the different plants and animals live together. That is to say—who eats whom; The deer—and just about everything else, I’m afraid—are becoming extinct.”

There was a silent but perceptible gasp from several persons at the table who had thought as much but never dared say so in Anderson’s presence.

“God will provide,” Anderson interposed darkly.

“Yes, that must be our hope, for Nature alone will not. Just consider what’s happened to the soil. This used to be forest soil, podzol. Look at it—” He scooped up a handful of the gray dust on the ground. “Dust. In a couple years, with no grass or brush to hold it down, every inch of topsoil will be in the lake. Soil is a living thing. It’s full of insects, worms—I don’t know what all.”

“Moles,” Neil put in.

“Ah, moles!” said Orville, as though that cinched it. “And all those things live on the decaying plants and leaves in the soil—or on each other, the way we do. You’ve probably noticed that the Plants don’t shed their leaves. So, except where we plant crops, the soil is dying. No, it’s dead already. And when the soil is dead, plants-our plants—will not be able to live in it again. Not the way they used to.”

Anderson snorted his contempt for so preposterous a notion.

“But deer don’t live underground,” Neil objected.

“True—they are herbivores. Herbivores need to eat grass. For a while, I suppose, they must have lived on the young Plants springing up near the lakeshore, or else, like rabbits, they can eat the bark from the older Plants. But either that was an inadequate diet nutritionally, or there wasn’t enough to go around, or—”

“Or what?” Anderson demanded.