Free The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch Page A

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,