Pressing the hard, crisp pulp from the rind of the fruit between her palms, Blossom was able to squeeze out a few oily drops of water. But it was so warm at this depth—eighty degrees or more—that she could hardly hope to revive Alice with it. She began again to massage the old woman’s thin hands, her cheeks, the sagging flesh of her arms. Mechanically she repeated the same few words of comfort: “Alice dear, please…. Try to wake up, try…. Alice, it’s Blossom…. Alice?…. It’s all right now…. Oh, please!” At last the old woman seemed to be conscious, for she groaned.
“Are you all right? Alice?”
Alice made a noise verging on speech, which was terminated by a hissing intake of breath. When she did speak, when she could speak, her voice was unnaturally loud and strangely resolute. “My hip. I think… yes, it’s broken.”
“Oh no! Oh, Alice! Does it… does it hurt?”
“Like hell, my dear.”
“Why did he do it? Why did Neil—” Blossom paused; she dared not say what it was that Neil had done. Now that Alice was conscious, her own fear and agitation settled over her again. It was as though she had revived Alice only that she might be able to tell her, Blossom, that the Monster wasn’t real, just something she’d imagined.
“Why did he throw me down here? Because, my dear, the bastard murdered your father, and because I knew it and was fool enough to say so. And then, I fancy, he never has liked me very much.”
Blossom said she would not believe it, that it was absurd. She made Alice tell her how she knew, called for the evidences, refuted them. She made her, suffering as she was, repeat each detail of the story, and still she would not believe it. Her brother had faults, but he was not a murderer.
“He murdered me, didn’t he?” It was a difficult question to answer.
“But why would he do such a thing? Why kill a man who’s almost dead? It makes no sense. There was no reason.”
“It was on your account, my dear.”
Blossom could almost feel the Monster breathing down her neck. “What do you mean?” She grabbed Alice’s hand almost angrily. “Why on my account?”
“Because he must have found out that your father was intending for you and Jeremiah Orville to be married.”
“Daddy intended—I don’t understand?”
“He wanted Jeremiah to be the new leader, to take his place. He didn’t want it, but he saw that it would have to be that way. But he put off telling anyone about it. That was my doing. I told him to wait. I thought it would keep him going. I never thought…”
Alice talked on, but Blossom had stopped listening. She understood now what her father had wanted to tell her and why he had hesitated. Grief and shame flooded over her: she had misjudged him; she had left him all those days to suffer alone. And he had only wanted her happiness, the happiness she wanted for herself! If only she could return to beg his forgiveness, to thank him. It was as though Alice, by those few words, had turned on all the lights in the house and restored her father to life.
But Alice’s next words dispelled this illusion. “You’d better watch out for him,” she said grimly. “You dare not trust him. Especially you.”
“Oh no, no, you don’t understand. I love him. And I think he loves me too.”
“Not Orville. Of course he loves you. Any fool can see that. It’s Neil you’d better watch out for. He’s crazy.”
Blossom did not protest this. She knew, better than Alice, though less aware till now, how true this was.
“And part of his craziness has to do with you.”
“When the others know what he’s done, when I tell them…” Blossom did not have to say more than this. When the others knew what Neil had done, he would be killed.
“That’s why I told you. So they would find out.”
“You’ll tell them yourself. We’ve got to get back. Now. Here—put your arm around my shoulder.” Alice protested, but Blossom would not listen. The old woman was light. Blossom could carry her, if need be.
An agonized cry parted the old woman’s lips, and she tore her arm away from Blossom. “No! no, the pain… I can’t.”
“Then I’ll get help.”
“What help? Whose help? A doctor? An ambulance? I couldn’t help your father recover from a rat bite, and this is—” The sound that intruded upon her speech was more eloquent than any words she might have intended.
For a long while, Blossom bit her lip to keep silent. When she felt Alice was ready to listen, she said, “Then I’ll just sit here with you.”
“And watch me die? It will take a while. No more than two days, though, and most of the time I’ll be making these awful noises. No—that would be no comfort to me. But there is something you can do. If you’re strong enough.”
“Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
“You must promise.” Blossom’s hand tightened over hers in assurance. “You must do for me what Neil did for your father.”
“Murder you? No! Alice, you can’t ask me to—”
“My dear, I’ve done it in my time for those who have asked. Some of them had less reason than I. A hypodermic of air, and the pain is—” She did not, this time, cry out. “—gone. Blossom, I beg you.”
“Someone may come. We’ll make a stretcher.”
“Yes, someone may come. Neil may come. Can you imagine what he would do if he finds me still alive?”
“No, he wouldn’t—” But immediately she knew he would.
“You must, my dear. I’ll hold you to your promise. But kiss me first. No, not like that—on the lips.”
Blossom’s trembling lips pressed against Alice’s that were rigid with the effort to hold back the pain. “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you like my very own mother.”
Then she did what Neil had done. Alice’s body twisted away in instinctive, unthinking protest, and Blossom let loose her grip.
“No!” Alice gasped. “Don’t torture me—do it!”
Blossom did not let loose this time until the old woman was dead.
The darkness grew darker, and Blossom thought she could hear someone climbing down the vines of the root overhead. There was a loud terrible noise as his body came down into the fruit pulp. Blossom knew what the Monster would look like: he would look like Neil. She screamed and screamed and screamed.
The Monster had an axe.
“Return soon,” she begged.
“I will, I promise.” Buddy bent down to his wife, missing her lips in the darkness (the lamp, by Neil’s authority, was to remain with the corpse) and kissing her nose instead. She giggled girlishly. Then, with an excess of caution, he touched one finger to the tiny arm of his son. “I love you,” be said, not bothering to define whether he was addressing her or the infant or perhaps both. He did not know himself. He only knew that despite the terrible events of the last months, and especially of the past hour, his life seemed meaningful in a way that it had not for years. The somberest considerations could not diminish the fullness of his hopes nor dampen the glow of his satisfaction.
In even the worst disaster, in the largest defeats, the machinery of joy keeps on grinding for a lucky few.
Maryann seemed more aware than he that their charmed circle was of very small circumference, for she murmured, “Such a terrible thing.”
“What?” Buddy asked. His attention was taken up with Buddy Junior’s teeny-tiny toe.
“Alice. I can’t understand why he.”
“He’s crazy,” Buddy said, moving reluctantly outside the circle. “Maybe she called him a name. She has—she had a sharp tongue, you know. When he gets back, I’ll see that something’s done. There’s no teffing what rotten thing he’ll do next. Orville will help, and there are others, too, who’ve let a word drop. But in the meantime he has a gun and we don’t. And the important thing now is to find Blossom.”
“Of course. That must come first. It’s just that it’s such a terrible thing.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” he agreed. He could hear Neil calling to him again. �
��I have to go now.” He began to move away.
“I wish the lamp were here, so I could see you one more time.”
“You sound like you don’t think I’ll return.”
“No! Don’t say that—even as a joke. You will come back. I know you will. But, Buddy—?”
“Maryann?”
“Say it one more time.”
“I love you.”
“And I love you.” When she was quite sure he was gone, she added: “I’ve always loved you.”
The several members of the descending search party threaded their way through the labyrinth of divergent roots on a single slim rope, braided by Maryann from the fiber of the vines. When any member of the party separated from the main body, he attached the end of his own reel of rope to the communal rope that led back to the tuber where Anderson was lying in state beside the vigilant lamp.
Neil and Buddy descended the farthest along the communal rope. When it gave out, they were at a new intersection of roots. Buddy knotted one end of his rope to the end of the main line and went off to the left. Neil, having done likewise, went to the right, but only for a short distance. Then he sat down and thought, as hard as he could think.
Neil did not trust Buddy. Never had. Now, with their father passed on, wouldn’t he have to trust him still less? He thought he was so smart, Buddy did, with that brat of his. Like he was the only man in the world ever had a son. Neil hated his guts for other reasons too—which his mind shied from. It would not do for him to be too consciously aware that the presumable Neil Junior, if he existed at all, existed most probably as a result of other seed than his own. That was a thought that he had best not think at all.
Neil was worried. He sensed in several of the men who’d gone out on the search a resistance to his authority, and this resistance seemed strongest in Buddy. A leader can’t afford to let his leadership be challenged. Their father had always harped on that. It didn’t seem to make any difference to Buddy that Anderson had wanted Neil to take over for him. Buddy had always been a wild one, a rebel, an atheist.
That’s what he is! Neil thought, astonished at how perfectly the word defined everything dangerous in his brother. An atheist! Why hadn’t he realized that before?
One way or another, atheists had to be stomped out. Because atheism was like poison in the town reservoir; it was like…. But Neil couldn’t remember how the rest of it went. It had been a long time since his father had given a good sermon against atheism and the Supreme Court.
On the heels of this perception another new idea came to Neil. It was, for him, a true inspiration, a revelation—almost as though his father’s spirit had come down from heaven and whispered it in his ear.
He would tie Buddy’s line in a circle!
Then, when Buddy tried to get back, he’d just keep following the rope around and around the circle. Once you grasped the basic concept, it was a very simple idea.
There was one hitch, however, when you thought about it carefully. One part of the circle would be here at this intersection, and Buddy could feel around, maybe, and discover the end of the main line where it was still knotted to Neil’s.
But he wouldn’t if the circle didn’t touch this intersection!
Chuckling to himself, Neil unknotted Buddy’s rope and began following Buddy, winding the rope up as he went along. When he figured he’d taken up enough of it, he turned off along a minor branch of the root, unwinding the rope as he crawled along. This small root connected to another equally small, and this to yet another. The roots of the Plant were always circling around on themselves, and if you just kept turning the same direction, you usually came back to the point you started from. And sure enough, Neil soon was back in the larger root, where he caught hold of Buddy’s line, stretched taut, a foot off the floor. Buddy was probably not far away.
Neil’s trick was working splendidly. Having nearly reached the end of the length of rope, he knotted it to the other end and formed a perfect circle.
Now, Neil thought, with satisfaction, let him try and find his way back. Let him try and make trouble now! The lousy atheist!
Neil began to crawl back the way he had come, using Buddy’s rope as a guide, laughing all the way. Only then did he notice that there was some kind of funny slime all over his hands and all over his clothing, too.
THIRTEEN
Cuckoo, Jug-jug, Pu-we, To-witta-wo!
There are people who cannot scream even when the occasion calls emphatically for screaming. Any drill sergeant can tell you of men, good soldiers every other way, who, when they must run forward to plant a bayonet in the guts of a sawdust dummy, cannot let loose with any sort of battle cry—or at best can manage some bloodless imitation, a half-hearted Kill Kill Kill! It is not that these men lack the primordial emotions of hatred and bloodlust; they have just become too civilized, too bound in, to experience a pure berserker rage. Perhaps a real battle will bring it out of them; perhaps nothing will.
There are emotions more primordial, more basic to survival, than hatred and bloodlust; but it is the same with them too—they can be stilled, covered over with civilized form and secondary modes of feeling. Only extreme circumstances can release them.
Jeremiah Orville was a very civilized man. The last seven years had liberated him in many ways, but they had not effaced his civilization until very lately, when events had taught him to desire the consummation of his revenge above his own happiness and safety. It was a beginning.
But as he stood beside Blossom, the axe in his hand unseen, himself unseen, hearing these heartrending cries that fear wrenched from her throat, now the more primordial emotion of love overcame him, shattered the civilized Jeremiah, and, dropping the weapon, he fell to his knees and began kissing the young body that was now the most important and beautiful thing in the world.
“Blossom!” he cried with joy. “O Blossom! Blossom!” and continued senselessly to repeat her name.
“Jeremiah! You! My God, I thought it was him!”
And he, in the same instance: “How could I have loved her, a ghost, bodiless, when all this while—Forgive me! Can you ever forgive me?”
She could not understand him. “Forgive you!” She laughed and cried, and they said many things to each other then without thinking, without caring to understand any more than the as-yet-unassimilable fact that they were in love.
Passion’s highest flights tend to be, if not completely innocent, slow. Orville and Blossom could not enjoy the happiness of gazing hours-long into each other’s eyes, but the darkness permitted as much as it denied. They dallied; they delayed. They called each other by the simple, affectionate names of schoolgirl romances (names that had never passed between Orville and Jackie Whythe, who had been given, when Orville’s hands moved over her, to cruder expressions—a certain sign of sophistication), and these sweethearts, these darlings and my very owns, seemed to express philosophies of love exact as arithmetic and subtle as music.
Eventually, as they must, a few words of common sense disturbed the perfect solitude of their love, like pebbles thrown in a still pond. “The others must be looking for me,” she said. “I have to tell them about something.”
“Yes, I know—I was listening up above as Alice spoke to you.”
“Then you know that Daddy wanted this. He was going to say so when—”
“Yes, I know.”
“And Neil—”
“I know that too. But you needn’t worry about him now.” He kissed the soft, drooping lobe of her ear. “Let’s not speak of it though. Later, we’ll do what we have to do.”
She pushed Orville away from her. “No, Jeremiah. Listen—let’s go away somewhere. Away from them and all their hating and jealousy. Somewhere where they’ll never find us. We can be like Adam and Eve and think of new names for all the animals. There’s the whole world—” She did not say any more, for she realized that there was the whole world. She stretched out a hand to draw Orville back to her—and to push the world aside for a little longer—but
instead of Orville’s living flesh her hand encountered Alice’s fractured hip.
A voice, not Orville’s, called her name. “Not yet,” she whispered. “It can’t end now.”
“It won’t end,” he promised, helping her to her feet. “We have our whole life ahead of us. A lifetime lasts forever. At my age, I should know.”
She laughed. Then, for the whole world to hear, she shouted: “We’re down here. Go away, whoever you are. We’ll find our way back by ourselves.”
But Buddy had already found them, entering the tuber by a side passage. “Who’s that with you?” he asked. “Orville, is it you? I should knock your block off for pulling a stunt like this. Don’t you know the old man is dead? What a hell of a time to elope!”
“No, Buddy, you don’t understand. It’s all right—Orville and I are in love.”
“Yeah, I understand that all right. He and I’ll have a talk about that—in private. I only hope I got here before he could put your love to the test. For Christ’s sake, Orville—this girl is only fourteen! She’s young enough to be your daughter. The way you’re going at it, she’s young enough to be your granddaughter.”
“Buddy! It’s not like that at all,” Blossom protested. “It’s what father wanted for us. He said to Alice and then—”
Buddy, moving forward with their voices as a guide, stumbled over the nurse’s dead body. “What in hell!”
“That’s Alice. If you’d only listen—” Blossom broke into tears in which frustration mingled with sorrow.
“Sit down,” Orville said, “and shut up for a minute. You’ve been jumping to the wrong conclusions, and there are a lot of things you don’t know. No—don’t argue, man, listen!”
“The question, then, is not what should be done in Neil’s case, but who’s to do it,” Orville concluded. “I don’t think I should have to bear that responsibility, nor that you should either. Personally, I’ve never liked your father’s high-handed way of being judge, jury, and law all by himself. It’s an honor to have been nominated as his successor, but an honor I’d rather decline. This is a matter for the community to act on.”
The Genocides Page 13