Not This August (13 page)

Bald young Mr. Farish was behind his soda fountain making and serving coffee mechanically. When he got to Justin, Betsy, and Mr. Selwin, he twinkled: “Little break in the monotony, eh?”

Mr. Selwin said: “I ought to be in the sorting room. I’ve been late before this year, no fault of my own. It’s going to look awfully bad.”

The coffee was some terrible synthetic or other.

Betsy said from the window: “They’re arresting the SMGU men—I think.” Everybody crowded up to see a couple of regular-detachment people being marched along by MVD troops. The green-uniformed young men had taken the regulars’ tommy guns.

“It’s something like a visit from the inspector general,” said a man who actually took a short step through the door onto the sidewalk to see better. “Only—Russian.” One of the MVD men posted like traffic cops yelled at him and brandished his rifle. He grinned and ducked back into the store.

“Russians don’t scare me any more,” he announced. “You know what I mean. I thought it was the end of the world when they came, but I learned. They’re G.I.s, and so what?”

A woman looked around, scowled, and said: “Speak for yourself.”

It precipitated a ten-minute debate in the crowded little store. Chiunga Center had not yet decided on the relationship between itself and the Russians. “We might be across the Mississippi,” said somebody. “How’d you like to have a bunch of Chinks swaggering around? Yeah, the Russians aren’t so different from Americans. It says in the
Times
they both have characters shaped by frontiers…” A Toynbeean’s view was that the occupiers would be softened and democratized by their contact with the occupied.

Through it all Justin and Betsy stood in a rear corner, their hands nervously entwined. Mr. Selwin left them long enough for a worried glance through the window. While the old man was gone, Justin had time to mutter: “Have you got a blade? I could buy one for you.”

“I have one,” she said, barely moving her lips.

Mr. Selwin came back. “I believe it’s all over,” he said. “The streets are clear and those soldiers are just standing there and I ought to get to the sorting room.”

“Better not, Mr. Selwin,” Betsy said.

“You don’t understand, Miss Cardew. You just took a mail job because you had to work at something. I’ve got thirty-two years in and absences don’t look good when a man’s my age. They start to say you’re slipping. Young people don’t understand that. I believe I’m going to ask that soldier if I can go now.”

“I wouldn’t, Mr. Selwin,” Justin told him.

Selwin went anyway. He shouted from the doorway at the pair of riflemen: “Is it all right now? We go? Free?” They stared at him.

Some of the other Americans stranded in the store called out hopefully in Russian. The faces of the young men in green didn’t change. “Better not,” a man told Mr. Selwin.

Mr. Selwin said: “I’ll try a few steps out. It all seems to be over anyway.”

He stepped out tentatively, keeping his eye on the Russians. They simply watched incuriously. The postman turned and grinned for a moment at the people in the store and took a couple of cautious steps down the street, then a couple more.

One of the Russians raised his rifle and shot Mr. Selwin in the chest. The big bullet blasted a grunt out of the old man, but after he fell he was silent. Apparently the sentry had been waiting for Mr. Selwin to step past the glass window of the drugstore to brick wall that would provide a backstop.

The man who wasn’t scared any more said slowly: “I think this is a different kind of Russian we have here.”

A middle-aged woman began to whoop and sob with hysteria. Mr. Farish yelled: “Don’t let her knock those bottles over, please! I’ll get some ammonia spirits—”

He fed them to her from a glass, nervously stroking his bald head. She calmed down, took the glass in her own hands and gulped, coughing.

They heard the boom of the sound truck in the distance again, and another sound: machine guns, a pair of them firing short, carefully spaced bursts. “It isn’t combat firing,” Justin said in bewilderment. “It sounds as if they’re shooting for badges on a range.”

Then a spattering of rifle shots confused the sound and then the truck rolled down High Street and drowned out the small arms with its yammer.

“All persons registered with the 449th Soviet Military Government Unit are ordered to report at once to the athletic field. Stragglers will be fired on. All persons registered…”

After the case of Mr. Selwin they did not hesitate. The shops along High Street erupted civilians who streamed toward the field, some of them running.

The field was clear on the other side of town from High Street. The congestion as they neared it was worse than it had ever been for a Saturday football game, even the traditional rivalry of Chiunga Catamounts versus Keoka Cougars. The bellowing sound truck dimmed behind them. The queer and prissy bursts-of-four machine gunning became louder, with the occasional spatter of rifles still occurring now and then.

Green-uniformed MVD men were posted around the field, gesturing the crowd through. One man was going the wrong way; he charged out of the gate beneath the stands, stumbling and caroming off the incoming civilians. Justin dodged and yanked Betsy aside as the man leaned over and was sick. Then the crowd swept them on through the narrow gate. They popped out inside on the cinder track that circled the field; MVD men gestured them along. The small bleachers across the field from them and the small stands sloping back behind them were full; these late arrivals were to be standees.

The field itself was crowded with something Justin at first—idiotically—took to be a dress parade. As he and Betsy shuffled sideways along the cinder track under the pressure of more arrivals, his eye gradually sorted out the two thousand odd soldiers on the field.

First there were the disarmed men of the 449th rigidly at attention behind their officers. They were drawn up in a solid block of companies that stretched from the north goal line to the 30-yard line. Everybody was there, down to the medics in their hospital coats and the cooks and bakers in their whites.

Then he saw the tanks, one at each corner of the field, their machine guns and cannon depressed to fire point-blank into the 449th. Then he saw the green-uniformed MVD men with rifles and tommy guns and a pile of new dead directly before them on the 50-yard line.

Machine guns roared above his head. Betsy screamed and clapped her hands to her head. The muzzle blast was terrific—

He turned and saw where they were coming from. A pair of them was mounted in the little press box hung from the roof of the stands, the box where the
Valley News
used to cover the games and WVC-TV used to broadcast the traditional rivalry each year. The guns hammered with that firing-range artificiality for a while and then stopped. Justin noticed that directly in front of them in midfield five soldiers of the 449th lay butchered.

Somebody in the field bawled: “
Roh-tah—gay!
”

MVD men began to hustle officers and men from one of the company blocks. All the officers, one enlisted man in four. The uneven rifle shots were explained while the selection was going on. One of the enlisted men broke loose and ran, screaming, when a green-uniformed youth tapped his chest. He was shot down as he sprinted sweatily toward the bleachers. The rest moved like zombies to the killing ground. In a few seconds they too were sprawling and screaming while the plunging fire from the press box hacked up the carefully tended sod of the stadium.

The word was traveling from early arrivals in the stands to those who had come late and were jammed onto the track. “They made a big speech in Russian and English first,” a man next to Justin reported after whispers with
his
neighbors. He spoke to Justin, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the charnel heap in the infield. His face and voice were just a little insane. “Fella says they called the 449th traitors to international socialism. Stuff about sloth, negligence, corruption, disgrace to the Army. Then they shot all the top brass, starting with Platov. Say, did you hear about Platov and Mrs.—?”

“I heard,” Justin said. He turned away.

“
Rohtah gay
,” Betsy whispered. “Company G. That’s only the fourth in their alphabet. They’ll be busy all morning.”

They were.

At noon the last of the job was done. The weeping, or blank-faced, or madly grinning survivors of the 449th were loaded onto trucks and the field PA system cleared its throat.

“Proclamation. To the indigenous population of the area formerly under control of the 449th Soviet Military Government Unit. You are ordered to inform all persons unable to attend the foregoing demonstration of what has happened. You are advised that this is the treatment that will be accorded to all such betrayers of international socialist morality as the late Platov and his gang of bourgeois-spirited lackeys. You are advised that henceforth this area will be under the direction of the
Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl
, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. You are advised that all laws and rules of the occupation will be rigidly enforced from this moment on. You are ordered to disperse within ten minutes. Troops will fire on stragglers.”

This might have been intended to precipitate a panic and an excuse for slaughter. It did not. Justin, sated with the horror of the morning’s work, still had some room for pride in him when the people in stands and bleachers rose and slowly filed from the stadium, turned their backs on the green-uniformed young monsters and their pile of carrion without cringing.

Justin walked with Betsy to the post office and left her there with a silent squeeze of the hand.

At the restaurant that doubled as bus station an old woman told him: “No busses been along all morning, mister. Should of been the Keoka bus at eight, ten, and twelve. And this fella in the green with the fancy belt, he walked in and he ripped down the bus schedule right off the wall. I guess he didn’t speak English, but then I guess he didn’t have to, did he?”

“I guess not,” Justin said.

He went out and started the fifteen-mile walk home under the broiling midsummer sun.

Justin was scything down the dry grass of autumn for winter feeding to the cows. Behind him Gribble followed with a rake and a hoarded ball of twine ends, making bundles they could carry to the barn.

It was October.

In the monotony of scything, the hypnotic
step—swing—slice—step—swing—slice
, Justin could almost believe in the role he was playing. Of all the roles he had played, it was the queerest. Successively he had impersonated a grownup, a soldier, a business artist, a farm front fighter. Now what he had to tell himself was: “You’re a peasant. This is what it’s like to be a peasant.”

And he was. Dirty, coarsened, tired and underfed, Justin, who had supposed himself a democrat all his life, found himself at last a member of the eternal overwhelming majority, brother at last in space and time to the stone-age grubbers of roots, the Chinese toiling with an aching back and thighs over rice shoots in the dynasty of Han or Comrade Mao, potato eaters of the Andes or the Netherlands, all those who in time past, time present, and perhaps for all time to come must dig in stubborn ground while the knees shake with fatigue. The emblem of the brotherhood was hunger and fatigue.

Three months under the
Meeneestyerstvoh Vnootrenikh Dyehl
had left him a clear choice. He could be a debased animal or he could die.

He knew of people by the dozen who had chosen to be people. They had died. There was the case of the Wehrweins of Straw Hill. The Wehrweins refused to understand that things were different now. They refused to make their quota, trusting to the farmer’s old technique of the blank stare, the Who-me-mister? and the sullen “ ‘Tain’t no business of mine.” A polite search would have shown them nothing, but the MVD searched with crowbars and found a hoard of grain.

The Wehrweins were shot for sabotage. Their children were shot for failing to report their sabotage.

The Elekinnens of Little Finland, one of those big close-knit European family complexes, were wiped out to the last man, woman, and child. Papa Gunder, their patriarch, cursed and struck an MVD Agro section inspector: unlawful violence against the occupying authority.

Mr. Konreid made no more popskull brandy from his sprawling, slovenly vineyard. Mr. Konreid had been shot for failure to obey agricultural crop-acreage regulations. His fifty-year-old son and the son’s fifty-year-old wife, workers in the feed mill, town dwellers who had not seen the old man since a bitter estrangement three decades ago, died with him in the center of the athletic field: failure to report contravention of agricultural regulations.

There was a new whispered phrase, “shipped South.” Mr. and Mrs. Lacey of Four Corners had been “shipped South.” They were back in two weeks, cringing away from questions, seemingly half insane. All their teeth had been pulled and they worked their fields with lunatic zeal. The four nearest neighbors of the Laceys were arrested shortly after by MVD teams who knew exactly where to find their hoards of grain, the eggs laid down in water glass, the secret smokehouse in the wood where hams and bacon slowly turned on strings over smoldering hickory chips. The neighbors were shot.

There were never audible complaints any more, through two milk-norm increases and two ration reductions. Everybody had taken to frantic weeding in every spare second; leisure did not exist. The smallest children were pressed into work. A three-year-old who carelessly tore out a turnip top instead of parasitic wild mustard was beaten and did not eat that night. Possibly a generation of permissive-discipline pediatricians were whirling in their graves, but the pediatricians had not expected that American parents, comfortable in mortgaged homes, secure in union contracts, nourished at glittering supermarkets, neat in their twelve ninety-eight dresses and forty-dollar suits would soon rejoin the eternal majority of hunger and fatigue.

Even the great American bathroom was a mockery. Nobody talked about it but everybody was squeezing the utmost from his land by manuring with human excrement, an Oriental practice from which the fortunate North Americans had been excused by virtue of the Haber process, Peruvian guano, and Mexican phosphate rock. But there was no fertilizer compounded of nitrates, guano, and phosphorus to be had at Croley’s store these days. Presumably it was being shipped directly to Russia and China.