Thomas Disch - The Genocides

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.

“Or the wild life is being eliminated the way your cows were last summer, the way Duluth was in August.”

“You can’t prove it,” Neil shouted. “I’ve seen those piles of ashes in the woods. They don’t prove a thing. Not a thing!” He took a long swallow from the jug and stood up, waving his right hand to show that it couldn’t be proved. He did not estimate the position or inertia of the concrete table very well, so that, coming up against it, he was knocked back to his seat and then drawn by gravity to the ground. He rolled in the gray dirt, groaning. He had hurt himself. He was very drunk. Greta, clucking disapproval, got up from the table to help.

“Leave him lay!” Anderson told her.

“Excuse me! ” she declaimed, exciting grandly. “Excuse me for living.”

“What ashes was he talking about?” Orville asked Anderson.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” the old man said. He took a swallow from the jug and washed it around in his mouth. Then he let it trickle down his throat, trying to forget the flavor by concentrating on the sting.

Little Denny Stromberg leaned across the table and asked Alice Nemerov if she was going to eat any more of her sausage. She’d taken only a single bite.

“I think not,” Alice replied.

“Can I eat it then?” he asked. His blue-green eyes glowed from the liquor he had been sneaking all through the meal. Otherwise, Alice was sure, his were not the sort of eyes to glow. “Please, huh?”

“Don’t mind Denny, Miz Nemerov. He doesn’t mean to be rude . Do you, sweet?”

“Eat it,” Alice said, scraping the cold sausage off onto the boy’s plate.

Eat it and be damned! she thought.

Mae had just observed that they had been thirteen at the table. “…so if you believe the old superstitions, one of us will die before the year’s out,” she concluded with a gay little laugh, in which only her husband joined. “Well, I do believe it’s getting awfully cold here,” she added, raising her eyebrows to show that her words bore more than a single meaning. “Though what can you expect at the end of November?”

Nobody seemed to expect anything.

“Mr. Orville, tell me, are you native to Minnesota? I ask because of your accent. It sounds sort of English, if you know what I mean. Are you an American?”

“Mae—really!” Lady scolded.

“He does talk funny, you know. Denny noticed it too.”

“Really?” Orville stared at Mae Stromberg intently, as though to count each frizzled red hair, and with the strangest smile. “That’s odd. I was raised all my life in Minneapolis. I suppose it’s just the difference between the city and the country.”

“And you’re a city person at heart, just like our Buddy. I’ll bet you wish you were back there right now, eh? I know your kind.” She winked lewdly to indicate just what kind that was.

“Mae, for heaven’s sake—”

But Denny succeeded where Lady could not in bringing Mrs. Stromberg to a stop. He vomited all over the table. The heavings splashed onto the four women around him—Lady, Blossom, Alice, and his mother—and there was a great Commotion as the women tried to escape the danger that was threatening anew on Denny’s face. Orville couldn’t help himself—he laughed. He was joined, fortunately, by Buddy and little Dora, whose mouth was filled with sausage. Even Anderson made a noise that might charitably have been interpreted as laughter.

Buddy excused himself, and Orville rose only a moment later, with more compliments for the cook and a scarcely perceptible gesture in Blossom’s direction, which, however, Blossom perceived. Stromberg took his son off into the woods, but not far enough to prevent the rest of them from hearing the whipping.

Neil was asleep on the ground.

Maryann, Dora, and Anderson were left alone at the table. Maryann had been crying off and on all day. Now, since she too had had something to drink, she started to talk: “Oh, I can remember the time…”

“Excuse me,” said Anderson, leaving the table, and taking the jug with him.

“…in the old days,” Maryann went on. “And everything was so beautiful then—the turkey and the pumpkin pie—and everybody so happy…”

Greta, after quitting the table, had gone roundaboutly to the church. Before vanishing into the dark vestibule, she and Buddy, who had watched her all the while, had exchanged a glance and Buddy had nodded yes. When the dinner broke up, he followed her there.

“Hello there, stranger!” Apparently she had settled on this gambit permanently.

“Hello, Greta. You were in high form today.”