The Genocides

More and more, he found himself seeking the refuge of Jeremiah Orville’s company. Orville was the sort of person, familiar to Buddy from the university, whom he had always liked much more than they had liked him. Though he never once told a joke in Buddy’s hearing, when the man talked-and he talked incessantly—Buddy couldn’t keep from laughing. It was like the conversations in books and movies or the way people talked on the old Jack Paar show, people who could take the most commonplace thing and, in the telling, make it funny. Orville never tried to clown; his humor was in the way he looked at things—with a certain, sly irreverence (not so much that someone like Anderson could object), an oblique mockery. You never knew where you stood with him, so that most folks—the authentic grassroots hicks like Neil—were reluctant to get into conversations with him, though they listened gladly. Buddy found himself imitating Orville, using his words, pronouncing them his way (gen-uine instead of genu-wine), adopting his ideas.

It was a constant source of wonder how much the man knew. Buddy, who considered his own education barely sufficient to judge the scope of another person’s, considered Orville encyclopedic.

Buddy fell so thoroughly under the older man’s influence that it would not be unjust to say he was infatuated. There were times (for instance, such times as Orville would talk too long with Blossom) when Buddy felt something like jealousy.

He would have been surprised to learn that Blossom felt much the same way when Orville spent undue time with him. It was quite evidently a case of infatuation, of conventional puppy-love.

Even Neil had a good word to say for the newcomer, for one day Orville had taken him aside and taught him a whole new store of dirty jokes.

The hunters hunted alone; the fishermen fished together. Neil, a hunter, was grateful for the chance to be alone, but the lack of game that December aggravated him almost as much as the shove and clamor of the commonroom. But, the day the blizzard stopped, he found deer tracks cutting right through the still-uncrusted snow of the west cornfield. He followed them four miles, stumbling over his own snowshoes in his eagerness. The tracks terminated in a concavity of ash and ice. No tracks led away from or approached the area. Neil swore loudly. Then he screamed for a while, not really aware that he was screaming. It let off the pressure.

No use hunting now, he thought, when he began to think again. He decided he would rest for the rest of the day. Rest… rest! Ha! He’d have to remember that. With the other hunters and fishermen still out of the commonroom, maybe he’d get a little privacy.

That’s what he did—he went home and drank a pot of cruddy licorice-flavored tea (that’s what they called it, tea) and he got to feeling drowsy and hardly knew what he was looking at or what he was thinking (he was looking at Blossom and thinking of her) when all of a sudden Gracie started making an uproar like he’d never heard before. Except he had heard it before: Gracie was calving.

The cow was making grunting noises like a pig. She rolled over on her side and squirmed around in the dirt. This was Gracie’s first calf, and she wasn’t any too big. Trouble was only to be expected. Neil knotted some rope into a noose and got it over her neck but she was thrashing around so that he couldn’t get it over her legs so he let that go. Alice, the nurse, was helping him, but he wished his father was there anyhow. Old Gracie was bellowing like a bull now.

Any cow that goes more than an hour is a sure loss, and even half an hour is bad. Gracie was in pain like that and bellowing for half an hour. She kept squirming backward to try and escape the shooting pains. Neil hauled on the rope to keep her from doing that.

“I can see his head. His head’s coming out now,” Alice said. She was down on her knees in back of Gracie, trying to spread her wider open.

“If that’s all you can see, how do you know it’s a her?”

The calf’s sex was crucial, and everyone in the commonroom had gathered around to watch the calving. After each bellow of pain, the children shouted their encouragement to Gracie. Then her squirming got worse, while her bellowing quieted. “That’s it, that’s it!” Alice was calling out, and Neil hauled all the harder against the rope.

“It’s a boy!” Alice exclaimed. “Thank God, it is a boy!”

Neil laughed at the old woman. “It’s a bull is what you mean. You city slickers are all alike.” He felt good because he hadn’t made any mistakes and everything was hunkydory. So he went over to the barrel and got the top off and dipped himself a drink to celebrate. He asked Alice if she wanted one, but she just looked at him funny-like and said no.