The Genocides

“No,” he said, pushing her away. “It’s over. It’s been over for years. That was eight years ago. We were kids then. Teenagers.”

“Oh brother, have you lost your guts!”

He slapped her hard enough to knock her to the ground, though in fairness it must be said that she seemed to cooperate and even to relish the blow.

“That,” she said, the old music quite gone for her voice, “is all the best that Neil can do. And I must say that between the two of you he does that better.”

Buddy laughed a solid, good-humored laugh and left her, feeling some of the old stallion blood rising in him. Ah, he had forgotten what a magnificent wit she could muster. Absolutely the only one left with a sense of humor, he thought. And still the best-looking. Maybe they would get together again.

Eventually.

Then he remembered that it was not a day to be in a good humor, and the smile left his lips and the stallion quieted and went back to his stall.

THREE A Bundle of Joy

There was something of the mouse about Maryann Anderson. Mouse was the color of her hair: a lusterless gray-brown. There was a mousy tendency, when her mind was on other things, for her lips to part, revealing largish, yellowed incisors. Worse, she had, at the age of twenty-three, a faint, downy mustache. She was short, no more than five feet two, and thin: Buddy’s thumb and middle finger could completely encircle her upper arm.

Even her good qualities were mousy: She was perky, industrious and content with scraps. Though she would never be a beauty, she might once have been thought cute. She was submissive. She did not intrude.

Buddy didn’t love her. There were times when her very passivity infuriated him. He had been used, on the whole, to something more. Still, it was as hard to find fault with Maryann as it was to find anything particularly to admire. Buddy was comfortably sure that she would never be unfaithful, and as long as his wants were looked after, he didn’t really resent Maryann for being his wife.

Maryann, for her part, could not reciprocate this indifference. She was slavishly devoted to her husband and hopelessly, girlishly in love with him. Buddy had always been able to elicit a species of self-sacrificing devotion, though he had usually called for a different sort of sacrifice, and his altars, so to speak, were dark with the blood of his victims. But be had never tried to exert this influence on Maryann, who had only interested him for one brief moment and then not amorously but by her pitiableness.

It had been during the fall of the fourth year after the Plants had come, and Buddy had only just returned to Tassel. A party of marauders, Maryann among them, had somehow worked their way up from Minneapolis. Instead of raiding, they’d been foolish enough to come to the village and ask for food. It was unheard of. The invariable rule was for marauders to be executed (hunger could turn the lambs to wolves), but a small controversy arose in this case, because of the seeming good-will of the prisoners. Buddy had been among those in favor of releasing them, but his father— and the majority of the men—insisted on execution.

“Then at least spare the women,” Buddy had pleaded, being still rather sentimental.

“The only woman that goes free is the one you take to wife,” Anderson had proclaimed, extemporizing the law, as was his way. And quite unexpectedly and out of pure cussedness Buddy had gone and chosen one of them, not even the best-looking one, and made her his wife. The other twentythree marauders were executed, and the 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.