Thomas Disch - The Genocides

Lady and Blossom, who sat together at the end of the table nearest the brick barbecue, began serving the soup. It was faintly reminiscent of rabbit and poorly seasoned with weeds from the lake.

“Dig in!” she said cheerily. “There’s plenty more coming.”

What else could you say on Thanksgiving?

Since it was an important holiday, the whole family, on both sides, was together. Besides the seven Andersons, there was Mae, Lady’s younger sister, and her husband Joel Stromberg, formerly of Stromberg’s Lakeside Resort Cabins, and the two little Strombergs, Denny, age ten, and Dora, eight. There were, moreover, the Andersons’ special guests (still on probation), Alice Nemerov, R.N., and Jeremiah Orville.

Lady could not help but regret the presence of the Strombergs, for she was certain that Denny and Dora would only remind her husband more forcibly of him who was absent from the table. Then, too, the years had not dealt kindly With her dear sister. Mae had been admired as a beauty in her youth (though probably not to the degree Lady had been), but at forty-five she was a frump and a troublemaker. Admittedly, she still had her flame-red hair, but that only pointed up the decay of what else remained. The only virtue that remained to her was that she was a solicitous mother. Too much so, Lady thought.

Lady had always hated the brassy reverence of the holidays. Now, when there was not even the ritual gluttony of a turkey dinner to alleviate the gloom that underlay the holiday cheer, one’s only hope was to be out of it as quickly as possible. She was grateful, at least, to be occupied with the serving. If she were carefully inefficient, she might get out of eating altogether.

“Neil,” Greta whispered. “You’re drinking too much. You’d better stop.”

“Huh?” Neil replied, peering up at his wife (he had the habit, when he ate, of bending down over his food, especially if it was soup).

“You’re drinking too much.”

“I wasn’t drinking at all, for gosh sakes!” he said, for the whole table to hear. “I was eating my soup!”

Greta cast up her eyes to heaven, a martyr to truth. Buddy smiled at the transparency of her purpose, and she caught his smile. There was a flicker of eyelashes, no more.

“’N any case, it ain’t any business of yours how much I drink or don’t drink. I’ll drink just as much as I want.” To demonstrate this, he poured himself some more of the liquor distilled from the pulpy leaves of the Plant.

It didn’t taste like Jim Beam, but Orville had testified to its purity from his own experience of it in Duluth. It was the first use, as food, that Anderson had been able to find for the Plants, and since he was by no means a teetotaler himself, he’d given the project his blessing. Anderson wanted to frown at the way Neil was swilling it down, but he said nothing, not wanting it to look as though he were taking Greta’s side. Anderson was a firm believer in male supremacy.

“Anyone want more soup?” Blossom asked.

“I do,” said Maryann, who was sitting between her husband and Orville. She ate all she could get now, for the baby’s sake. For her little Buddy.

“And I do,” said Orville, with that special smile of his.

“I do, too,” said Denny and Dora, whose parents had told them to eat all they could at the dinner, which Anderson was providing.

“Anybody else?”

Everybody else had returned to the whiskey, which tasted unpleasantly like licorice.

Joel Stromberg was describing the progress of his disease to Alice Nemerov, R.N. “And it doesn’t really hurt—that’s the funny thing. It’s just that whenever I want to use my hands they start to shaking. And now my head’s the same way. Something’s got to be done.”

“But I’m afraid, Mr. Stromberg, that nothing can be. There used to be some drugs, but even they didn’t work very well. Six months, and the symptoms would reappear. Fortunately, as you say, it doesn’t hurt.”

“You’re a nurse, aren’t you?”

He was going to be one of those! Very carefully, she began to explain everything she knew about Parkinson’s disease, and a few things she didn’t. If only she could involve someone else in the conversation! The only other soul within speaking distance was the greedy Stromberg boy, who was snitching drinks from the glass of that foul liquor (one taste bad been enough for Alice) sitting before Lady’s empty plate. If only Lady or Blossom would stop serving food and sit down for a minute, she could escape from the intolerable hypochondriac. “Tell me,” she said, “when did it all start?”

The fish were all eaten, and Blossom began gathering the bones. The moment everyone had been waiting for—the dreadful moment of the main course—could be put off no longer. While Blossom brought round the bowl of steaming polenta into which were stirred a few shreds of chicken and garden vegetables, Lady herself distributed the sausages. A hush fell over the table.

Each of them had a single sausage. Each sausage was about nine inches long and three-quarter inch in diameter. They had been crisped over the fire and came to the table still sizzling.

There is some pork in them , Alice reassured herself. I probably won’t be able to tell the difference .

Everyone’s attention turned to the head of the table. Anderson lifted his knife and fork. Then, fully aware of the solemnity of the moment, he sliced off a piece of hot sausage, put it in his mouth, and began to chew. After what seemed a full minute, he swallowed it.

There, but for the grace of God …. Alice thought.

Blossom had turned quite pale, and under the table Alice reached for her hand to lend her strength, though Alice didn’t feel an excess of it just then.

“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.