The Genocides Read Online Free PDF

considered it a weakness. That it was the one thing that the poor mouse had ever done well or found more than passing satisfaction in escaped their attention and hers.
    In Tassel, Maryann’s light was no longer hidden, as it were, beneath a bushel. Her basketry quite transformed the village’s way of life. After the fatal summer when the Plants invaded the fields, the villagers (the five hundred who were left) had picked up as many pieces as they could carry and took themselves to the shore of Lake Superior, a few miles away down Gooseberry River. The lake had been receding at a prodigious rate, and in several areas the water was two or three miles from the old, rock-strewn shore line. Wherever the water retreated, the thirsty seedlings sprang up, sank roots, and the process accelerated.
    That fall and through the winter, the survivors (their number, like the lake, was always shrinking) worked at clearing as large an area as they could hope realistically to maintain for their own fields the next year. Then they began to sink their own roots. There was little timber but what they could scavenge from the old town. The wood of the Plant was less substantial than balsam, and most of the trees native to the area had already rotted. The villagers had the clay but not the skill to make brick, and quarrying was out of the question. So they spent the winter in a great grass hut, whose walls and roof were woven under Maryann’s supervision. It had been a cold, miserable November, but a person could keep his fingers warm weaving. There was a week in December when the panels of the commonroom were blown halfway back to the old village. But by January they had learned to make a weave that was proof against the worst blizzard, and by February the commonroom was downright cozy. It even had a welcome mat at each of the doors.
    No one had ever regretted admitting the clever mouse to the village. Except, occasionally, the mouse’s husband.

    “Why isn’t there any dinner?” he asked.
    “I was all day with Lady. She’s awful upset about Jimmie Lee. Jimmie was her favorite, you know. Your father didn’t help much either. He talked all the time about the Resurrection of the Body. He must know by now she doesn’t believe the same as he does.”
    “A person has to eat just the same.”
    “I’m fixing it, Buddy. As fast as I can. Buddy, there’s something—”
    “Father’s feeling better then?”
    “—I wanted to tell you. I never know how your father is feeling. He’s acting the same as ever. He never loses control. Neil’s going to be whipped tonight—I suppose you heard about that?”
    “Serves him right. If he’d fixed the gate shut, that whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”
    “What whole thing, Buddy? How can a person be burnt to ashes like that in the middle of the forest? How can that be?”
    “You’ve got me. It doesn’t seem possible. And those cows and Studs, besides. Seven tons of beef turned to ash in less than ten minutes.”
    “Was it lightning?”
    “Not unless it was the lightning of the Good Lord. I suspect it’s marauders. They’ve invented some new kind of weapon.”
    “But why would they want to kill cows? They’d want to steal cows—and kill people.”
    “Maryann,
I
don’t know what happened. Don’t ask any more questions.”
    “There was something I wanted to tell you.”
    “Maryann!”
    Glumly, she went back to stirring the suppawn in the earthenware pot that nestled in the hot embers; to the side, wrapped in cornhusks, were three sunfish that Jimmie Lee had caught that morning at the lake shore.
    From now on, with neither milk nor butter to add to the corn meal, they’d have to settle for mush, with an occasional egg whipped in it. One of the nice things about being married to an Anderson had always been the extra food. The meat especially. Maryann hadn’t questioned too closely where it all came from; she just took what Lady, Anderson’s wife, offered her.
    Well
, she