“We must pray.”
“You must pray, Mr. Anderson. You know I don’t hold with those things.”
Anderson smiled, and it was not, for a wonder, a really unpleasant expression. Dying seemed to mellow the old man; he had never been nicer than now. “You’re just like my wife, just like Lady. She must be in hell for her sins and her scoffing, but hell can’t be much worse than this. Somehow, though, I can’t imagine her there.”
“Judge not lest ye be judged, Mr. Anderson.”
“Yes, Lady would always hark on that one too. It was her favorite Scripture.”
Buddy interrupted them: “Time now, Alice.”
“Go on, go on, don’t dally here,” Anderson urged. Unnecessarily, for she was already gone, taking the lamp with her. The darkness began to cover him like a woolen blanket, like a comforter.
If it’s a boy, Anderson thought, I can die happy.
It was a boy.
Anderson was trying to say something. Neil could not make out quite what. He bent his ear closer to the old man’s dry lips. He couldn’t believe that his father was dying. His father! He didn’t like to think about it.
The old man mumbled something. “Try and talk louder,” Neil shouted into his good ear. Then to the others standing around: “Where’s the lamp? Where’s Alice? She should be here now. What are you all standing around like that for?”
“Alice is with the baby,” Blossom whispered. “She said she’d be only another minute.”
Then Anderson spoke again, loud enough for Neil but no one else to hear. “Buddy.” That was all he said, though he said it several times.
“What’d he say?” Blossom asked.
“He said he wants to talk to me alone. The rest of you, go away and leave us together, huh? Dad’s got things he wants to tell me alone.”
There were shufflings and sighs as the few people who were not yet sleeping (the waking period having ended many hours ago) walked off into other areas of the tuber to leave father and son together. Neil strained to hear the least sound that would have meant that one of them remained nearby. In this abysmal darkness, privacy was never a sure thing.
“Buddy ain’t here,” he said at last, assured that they were alone. “He’s with Maryann and the baby. So’s Alice. There’s some kind of problem about the way it breathes.” Neil’s throat was dry, and when he tried to make saliva and swallow it, it hurt. Alice, he thought angrily, shouldn’t be off somewhere else now. All people talked about, it seemed to Neil, was the baby, the baby. He was sick of the baby. Did anybody care about his baby?
Curiously, Greta’s lie had made its most lasting impression on Neil. He believed in it with the most literal, unquestioning faith, just as Maryann believed in Christ’s virgin birth. Neil had the ability to brush aside mere, inconvenient facts and considerations of logic like cobwebs. He had even decided that his baby’s name was to be Neil Junior. That would show old Buddy-boy!
“Then get Orville, will you?” Anderson whispered vexedly. “And bring the others back. I have something to say.”
“You can tell it to me, huh? Huh, Dad?”
“Get Orville, I said!” The old man began to cough.
“Okay, okay!” Neil walked some distance from the small hollow in the fruit where his father was lying, counted to a hundred (skipping, in his haste, everything between fiftynine and seventy), and returned. “Here he is, Dad, just like you said.”
Anderson did not think it extraordinary that Orville should not greet him. Everyone, these last days, was mute in his presence, the presence of death. “I should have said this before, Jeremiah,” he began, speaking rapidly, afraid that this sudden renewal of strength would desert him before he could finish. “I’ve waited too long. Though I know you’ve been expecting it. I could tell by your eyes. So there was no need to—” He broke off, coughing. “Here,” (he gestured feebly in the darkness) “take my revolver. There’s only one bullet left, but some of them see it as a sort of symbol. It’s just as well to let them. There were so many things I wanted to tell you, but there was no time.”
Neil had grown more and more agitated during his father’s valedictory, and at last he could not contain himself: “What are you talking about, Dad?”
Anderson chuckled. “He doesn’t understand yet. Do you want to tell him, or shall I?” There was a long silence. “Orville?” Anderson asked in a changed voice.
“Tell me what, Dad? What don’t I understand?”
“That Jeremiah Orville is taking over from now on. So bring him here!”
“Dad, you don’t mean that.” Neil began to chew fretfully on his lower lip. “He ain’t an Anderson. He ain’t even one of the village. Listen, Dad, I’ll tell you what—I’ll take over, huh? I’d do a better job than him. Just give me a chance. That’s all I ask, just one chance.”
Anderson didn’t reply. Neil began all over again, in a softer, more persuasive tone. “Dad, you gotta understand—Orville ain’t one of us.”
“He will be soon enough, you little bastard. Now bring him here.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean I’m marrying him to your sister. Now cut out the crap and bring him here. And your sister too. Bring every. body here.”
“Dad, you can’t mean that, Dad!”
Anderson wouldn’t say another word. Neil showed him all the reasons it was impossible for Orville to marry Blossom. Why, Blossom was only twelve years old! She was his sister—Neil’s sister! Didn’t he understand that? And who was this Orville character anyhow? He wasn’t anybody. They should have killed him long ago, along with the other marauders. Hadn’t Neil said so at the time? Neil would kill him now, if Anderson only said the word. How about it?
No matter what arguments Neil offered, the old man just lay there. Was he dead? Neil wondered. No, he was still breathing. Neil was in misery.
His keen ears picked up the sounds of others returning. “Leave us alone!” he shouted at them. They went away again, unable to hear Anderson’s orders to the contrary.
“We’ve got to talk this thing over, you and me, Dad,” Neil pleaded. Anderson wouldn’t say a word, not a word.
With tears in his eyes, Neil did what he had to do. He pinched together the old man’s nostrils and held his other hand down tightly over the old man’s mouth. He wiggled around a little at first, but he was too weak to put up much of a struggle. When the old man was very, very quiet, Neil took his hands away and felt if he was still breathing.
He wasn’t.
Then Neil took the holster and pistol off the old man arm, strapped it about his own thicker body. It was a sort of symbol.
Shortly afterward Alice came, with the lamp, and felt the dead man’s wrist. “When did he die?” she asked.
“Just a minute ago,” Neil said. It was bard to understand him, he was crying so. “And he asked me—he told me I should take his place. And he gave me his pistol.”
Alice looked at Neil suspiciously. Then she bent over the face of the corpse and studied it attentively under the lamp. There were bruises on the sides of his nose, and his lip was cut and bleeding. Neil was bending over behind her. He couldn’t understand where the blood had come from.
“You murdered him.” Neil couldn’t believe his ears: she had called him a murderer!
He hit Alice over the top of the head with the butt of the pistol. Then he wiped away the blood trickling down his father’s chin and spread fruit pulp over the cut lip.
More people came. He explained to them that his father was dead, that he, Neil Anderson, was to take over his father’s place. He also explained that Alice Nemerov had let his father die when she could have saved him. All her talk about looking after the baby was so much hogwash. It was just as bad as if she’d killed him outright. She would have to be executed, as an example. But not right away. For now they’d just tie her up. And gag her. Neil attended to the gag himself.
They obeyed him. They were accustomed to obeying Anderson, and they had been expecting Neil to
take over from him for a long time—for years. Of course, they didn’t believe Alice was in any way guilty, but then neither had they believed a lot of things Anderson had told them, and they’d always obeyed him anyhow. Maybe if Buddy had been there, he would have put up more of a fuss. But he was with Maryann and his newborn son, who was still weakly. They didn’t dare bring the baby near his grandfather for fear of infection.
Besides, Neil was waving the Python around rather freely. They all knew there was a bullet left, and no one wanted to be the first to start an argument.
When Alice was securely bound, Neil asked where Orville was. Nobody, as it turned out, had seen or heard from him for several minutes.
“Find him and bring him here. Right now. Blossom! Where’s Blossom? I saw her here a minute ago.” But Blossom too was nowhere to be found.
“She’s gotten lost!” Neil exclaimed, in a flash of understanding. “She’s lost in the roots. We’ll get up a search party. But first, find Orville. No—first help me with this.” Neil grabbed up Alice by the shoulders. Somebody else took her feet. She didn’t weigh more than a feedbag, and the pearest taproot where there was a sheer vertical drop wasn’t two minutes away. They dropped her down the shaft. They couldn’t see how far she fell, because Neil had forgotten to sting the lamp. No doubt, she fell a long, long way.
Now his father was revenged. Now he would look for Orville. There was only one bullet left in his father’s Colt Python .357 Magnum. It was for Orville.
But first he must find Blossom. She must have run off somewhere when she heard her father was dead. Neil could understand that. The news had upset him too, upset him something terrible.
First, they’d look for Blossom. Then they’d look for Orville. He hoped, how he hoped, that he wouldn’t find them together. That would be too awful for words.
TWELVE
Ghosts and Monsters
You’d better hide, she thought, and that was how she got lost.
Once, when Blossom was seven, her parents had gone to Duluth for the weekend, taking the baby, Jimmie Lee with them, leaving her alone in the big two-story house on the outskirts of Tassel. It was their eighteenth wedding anniversary. Buddy and Neil, both big boys then, had gone away—one to a dance, the other to a baseball game. For a while she had watched television, then she played with her dolls. The house became very dark, but it was her father’s rule never to turn on more than one lamp at a time. Otherwise, you wasted current.
She didn’t mind being a little scared. There was even something nice about it. So she turned off all the lights and pretended the Monster was trying to find her in the dark. Hardly daring to breathe and on the tips of her toes, she found safe hiding places for all her children: Lulu, because she was black anyway, in the coal bin in the basement; Ladybird, behind the cats’ box; Nelly, the oldest, in the wastebasket by Daddy’s desk. It got scarier and scarier. The Monster looked everywhere in the living room for her except the one place she was—behind the platform rocker. When he left the living room, Blossom crept up the stairs, keeping close to the wall so they wouldn’t creak. But one did creak, and the Monster heard it and came gallumphing up the stairs behind her. With an excited shout she ran into the first room and shut the door behind her. It was Neil’s bedroom, and the big horned moosehead glowered down at her from his place over the chest of drawers. She had always been afraid of that moose, but she was even more afraid of the Monster, who was out there in the hall, listening at every door to hear if she was inside.
She crept on hands and knees to Neil’s closet door, which was ajar. She hid among the smelly old boots and dirty blue jeans. The door to the bedroom creaked open. It was so dark she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but she could hear the Monster snuffling all over. He came to the door of the closet and stopped. He smelled she was inside. Blossom’s heart almost stopped beating, and she prayed to God and to Jesus that the Monster would go away.
The Monster made a loud terrible noise and threw open the door, and for the very first time Blossom saw what the Monster looked like. She screamed and screamed and screamed.
Neil got home first that night, and he couldn’t understand what Blossom was doing in his closet with his dirty blue jeans pulled down over her head, whimpering like she’d been whipped with the strap, and trembling like a robin caught in an April snowstorm. But when he picked her up, her little body became all rigid, and nothing would content her but that she sleep that night in Neil’s bed. The next morning she’d come down with a fever, and her parents had to cut their trip short and come home and take care of her. No one ever understood what had happened, for Blossom didn’t dare tell them about the Monster, whom they couldn’t see. Eventually the incident was forgotten. As Blossom grew older, the content of her nightmares underwent a gradual change: the old monsters were no more terrifying now than the moosehead over the chest of drawers.
Darkness, however, is the very stuff of terror, and Blossom, running and creeping through the roots, descending depth after depth, felt the old fear repossess her. Suddenly all the lights in the house had been turned off. The darkness filled itself with monsters, like water pouring into a tub, and she ran down stairs and down hallways looking for a closet to hide in.
All through these last, long days of her father’s dying, and even before, Blossom had been too much alone. She had felt that there was something he wanted to say to her but that he wouldn’t let himself say it. This restraint humiliated her. She had thought that he did not want her to see him dying, and she had forced herself to stay away. Alice and Maryann, with whom she would customarily have passed her time, had no concern now but the baby. Blossom wanted to help them, but she was too young. She was at that age when one is uncomfortable in the presence of either birth or death. She haunted the fringes of these great events and pitied herself for being excluded from them. She imagined herself dying: how sad they would all be, how sorry they had neglected her!
Even Orville had no time for Blossom. He was either off by himself or at Anderson’s side. Only Neil seemed more upset at the old man’s death. Whenever Orville’s path had crossed Blossom’s he looked at her with such deadly intensity that the girl turned away, blushing and even slightly scared. No longer did she feel she understood him, and this, in a way, made her love him more—and more hopelessly.
But none of these things would have caused her to take flight, except into fantasies. It was only after she had seen the expression on Neil’s face, the almost somnambulistic cast to his features, when she had heard him speak her name in that particular tone of voice—it was then that Blossom, like a doe catching scent of a hunter, panicked and began to run: away, into the deeper, sheltering dark.
She ran blindly, and so it was inevitable that she would go over one of the dropoffs into a primary root. It could happen, in the dark, even if you were careful. The void swallowed her whole.
Her bent knees first entered the pulp of the fruit, then her body pitched forward into the soft, yielding floss. She sank deep, deep into it. She landed unhurt, only a few inches away from the broken but still breathing body of Alice Nemerov, R.N.
He had delayed, had Jeremiah Orville, altogether too long. He had meant to revenge, and he had instead assisted. Day by day he had observed Anderson’s death, his agony, his humiliation, and he knew that he, Jeremiah Orville, had had nothing to do with them. It was the Plant and mere happenstance that had brought Anderson low.
Orville had stood by, Hamletlike, and said amen to Anderson’s prayers—had deceived only himself by his subtleties. He had been so greedy that all Anderson’s sufferings proceed from himself alone and none from the Plant that he had led the old man and his tribe to a land of milk and honey. And now his enemy lay dying by the merest accident, by an infected bite on a vestigial toe.
Orville brooded, alone, in that deep darkness, and an image, a phantasm, took shape in the vacant air. Each day, the apparition took on greater definition, but he knew even from the first white shimmering that it was Jackie
Whythe. But this was a Jackie who had never been: younger, lither, sweeter, the very essence of female grace and delicacy.
She made him, by all her familiar wiles, declare his love for her. He swore he loved her, but she was not satisfied, she would not believe him. She made him say it again and again.
She reminded him of the nights they had been together, of the treasures of her young body… and the horror of her death. Then she would ask again: Do you love me?
I do, I do, he insisted. I do love you. Can you doubt it? He was in an agony of desire to possess her once again. He craved a final kiss, the slightest touch, a breath merely, but he was refused.
I am dead, she reminded him, and you have not revenged me.
“Who will you have?” he asked aloud, grabbing up the axe, which he had been whetting on the palm of his hand all this while. “Give me the name, and with this same axe…”
Blossom, the phantasm whispered eagerly, not without a hint of jealousy. You’ve abandoned me for that child. You court an infant.
No! it was only that I might betray her. It was all for the sake of you.
Then betray her now. Betray her, and I will return to you. Then, only then, will I kiss you. Then, when you touch me, your hand will feel flesh. With those words she disappeared.
In the same instant he knew she had not been real, that this was, quite possibly, the inception of madness. But he did not care. Though she was not real, she was right.
Immediately he went in search of his victim. He found her standing on the edge of a group gathered about her father’s corpse. Alice Nemerov was lying bound near the corpse, and Neil Anderson was there too, raving. Orville paid no heed to any of this. Then Blossom, as though sensing his purpose, ran madly into the dark tunnels of the Plant. He followed her. This time he would do what must be done—do it neatly, expeditiously, and with an axe.
The Genocides Page 12