Earth Abides

by George Rippey Stewart

  He planned one more experiment, but he was in no hurry. Now that they had bows he could make a bow-drill and teach the children its use. Then after the matches were exhausted, The Tribe would still know how to kindle fire.

  Yet, as with the children, his own enthusiasm too grew cool through the passing of the weeks. He thought less upon his own triumph in inventing the bow and tricking the children into enjoying it. He thought rather upon all the disasters of the year. Joey was gone, and that loss could never be redeemed.

  Also a kind of fresh innocence had faded from the world when the four of them had written that word upon their ballots. And also a great confidence and trust had gone from himself when he had realized at last that he must give up his dream of re-establishing the ways of civilization.

  Now the sun was so near the limit of its southern course that a day or two would bring its turning. Everyone was making ready for the holiday, and the carving of the number in the rock and the naming of the year. This was their great holiday of all, combining as it did, both Christmas and New Years of the Old Times, and yet including along with those two something of their individual own. Like so much else the holidays had suffered strange transitions in the passage of one world to the other. They still observed Thanksgiving Day with a big dinner, but the Fourth of July and all the other patriotic holidays had lapsed. George, who was a traditionalist and had been a good union man, always knocked off whatever he was doing and wore his best clothes when he judged it should be Labor Day. But no one else celebrated it with him. Curiously, or perhaps rather it was natural enough, the old folk-holidays survived better than those established by law. The children still celebrated April Fool’s Day and Halloween with great enthusiasm and with much of the traditional ceremony, although they had to learn such things from their fathers and mothers. Also six weeks after the winter solstice, they talked about Ground-squirrel Day and whether the squirrel could see his shadow, for there were no ground-hogs in this area and they had substituted the ground-squirrel instead. Yet all these were nothing, compared with their own great festival when they cut the number in the rock and named the year.

  Now Ish began to hear the children discussing the matter and speculating upon what the name would be. The younger ones were saying that it should be called the Year of the Bow and Arrow. But the slightly older ones, who could remember more vividly the whole year, said that rather it should be called the Year of the Journey. But those who were still older thought of other things also, and often they grew quiet and seemed embarrassed, and Ish knew that they were thinking of Charlie and of all the other deaths. Ish himself thought first of all about Joey, and then of all the changes of attitude which he himself had to make during the year.

  Then finally, as they looked out one evening, they saw that the sun set in the same place or perhaps a little to the north from where it had set the night before, and the older ones said, to the great excitement of the children, that tomorrow would be the day.

  So again, at the end of the twenty-second year, they gathered at the rock, and Ish with his harnmer and cold-chisel cut 22 into the surface of the rock just below 21. They were all there at the rock, because the day was fair, and warm for winter, and the mothers had brought even the youngest babies. Then after the numeral had been cut, all those who were old enough to talk called out Happy New Year as it had been in the Old Times, and as it was still at this time.

  But when Ish asked, following the ritual set in the last years, what should be the name of the year, there came only sudden silence.

  At last the one to speak was Ezra, the good helper, who knew the ways of men:

  “Too much has happened this year, and whatever name we give the year will have a bad sound to us. People find comfort in numbers, and no bad thoughts. Let us give this year no name, but remember it only as the Year 22.”

  Here ends Part II. The second inter-chapter called Quick Years follows, without time-interval.

  QUICK YEARS

  Once again the years flowed quickly, and now no longer he struggled and threshed, but instead, floated easily with the current.

  In these years they grew a little corn, not much, but enough to harvest a small crop and to keep the seeds alive. Every autumn—as if the falling of the first rain gave a signal—the children played with bows and arrows for a while before they tired of the game. Now and then all the adults drew together to a conference, like a town-meeting, and what was decided there, each one knew, was binding upon them all.

  “These things at least!” Ish thought. “These things at least, I have assured for the future.” Yet in the meetings, more and more with every year, those who spoke and took action were young men. Ish, to be sure, presided. He sat facing all the others, and those wishing to speak rose and addressed him respectfully. He sat there, holding his hammer or balancing it beside him. When argument between two of the young men became too heated, Ish pounded with the hammer, and the young men were suddenly quiet and deferential. But if he himself spoke, though they listened intently, often they paid no attention to his ideas afterward.

  So the years flowed—The Year 23 “Of the Mad Wolf,” the Year 24 “Of the Blackberries,” the Year 25 “Of the Long Rain.”

  Then came the Year 26, and old George was with them no more. He had been painting on a ladder. Whether his heart stopped and he fell, or whether he fell accidentally and killed himself by falling, no one ever knew. But he was gone, and after his death the roofs were never in such good repair, and the trim was never painted. Maurine lived on, for a while, in the neat house where the pink-fringed bridge-lamps would not light and the console radio would not play and the scarves were crumpled on the tables. But she too was old, and she died before the year was out. So they called it the Year when George and Maurine Died.

  And still they ran on—27, 28, 29, 30. It was hard to remember now the names, and how they came. Was the Good-Corn Year, before the Red-Sunset Year, and did that come after the Year When Evie Died?

  Poor Evie! They buried her next to the others, and in her grave at least she was no different. All those years she had lived with them, and whether she had been happy no one knew, and whether they had done well to keep her living. Only once in all those years had she mattered much, and yet for that little time, when Charlie had come, she had seemed very important. Now that she was gone, the young people scarcely missed her; nevertheless the older ones remembered that her going marked still another broken link with the Old Times.

  With Evie gone, only five of the original ones remained. Jean and Ish were the youngest of these five, and age showed least in them, although Ish limped more and more from his old wound. Molly complained of vague illnesses and wept often. Ezra coughed with his dry cough. Even Em walked with a less sure and regal grace. Yet actually they all enjoyed amazingly good health for people of their years, and their various decrepitudes sprang chiefly from approaching old age.

  The Year 34—that was an important one! They had known for some time that there was another but smaller group of people living across north of the Bay, but in this year the surprise was that the other people sent a messenger with the proposal of a union. Ish made the young man keep distance, for he wanted no repetition of that business of Charlie. Having got all the information he could from the messenger, he called a meeting.

  Ish sat with his hammer, for it was a time of great state. There was a hot argument. Reinforcing the fear of disease was a prejudice against strangers and all their strange ways. On the other hand, a kind of fascination in the very strangeness combatted the prejudice. Besides, there was the strong desire to strengthen the numbers of The Tribe, and particularly to obtain wives. For, in late years, fewer girls than boys had been born and some of the young men had nowhere to look. To Ish also there was the argument that the inbreeding of The Tribe might be dangerous, for now blood-relationship was universal and everyone had to marry his cousin.

  But Ish himself, along with Ezra, opposed the union. In overwhelming fear of disease, and Jack and Ral
ph and Roger, the oldest of the younger men, remembered the Year 22, and supported Ish and Ezra. But the still younger men, especially the unmarried ones, clamored for the union, and Ish could see that the thought of the girls of that other tribe excited them.

  Then Em spoke. Her hair was wholly gray now, but her calm voice held them. “I have said it before,” she said. “Life is not lived by denying life. Our sons and grandsons will need wives. Perhaps death will come also, but that too we must face.”

  Not so much by what she said as by the spirit that flowed out from her, they all had courage. They voted without dissent to admit the others.

  This time luck was with them, for the only epidemic was that The Others contracted measles, and soon were well again.

  After that time there was always a division within The Tribe, as of two clans—The First Ones and The Others. When they intermarried, the children were of their father’s clan, although Ish had wondered whether mother-lineage might not prevail, as with many primitive people. But the old tradition of the Americans was too strong.

  Then in the next year Ish realized more than ever that Em walked no longer with that regal grace; suddenly when he looked at her, he saw strange lines in her face, not the lines of old age, but the lines of pain. Behind the darkness of the cheeks there was not the glow of red but an ashy gray. Deep within him he felt chill and fear, and he knew that this also had come close to its end.

  Sometimes, in those grim months that followed, he thought to himself, “This may be merely appendicitis, The pain is in that place. Why can I not operate? I can read the books. I could find out how it is done. One of the boys could manage the ether. At worst, I would only end the pain.”

  But always he realized that it could not be—for his hands were no longer young and sure, and his courage too perhaps had grown weak, so that he dared not draw the knife-edge across the side of her whom he loved. So he knew that Em must face the future alone.

  Before long, too, he knew that this was not appendicitis. As the sun swung southward again, she weakened and walked no more. He hunted in the ruinous drug stores, and found powders and syrups, so that at least she suffered little. After she had taken the medicine, she would sleep or lie quietly, smiling. Then after a while, when the pain again began to make her toss, he would think: “Perhaps I should make the dose larger still, and bring a finish to all pain.”

  But he did not. For she, he knew, had always reached out toward life, and her courage would not fail.

  So he sat long hours by the bed, holding her hand, and now and then they talked.

  As it always had been, she was the one who comforted him, although she was the one who lay in pain and was going. Yes, he realized, she had been mother as well as wife.

  “Don’t worry,” she said once, “about the children, I mean—and the grandchildren and all those that will come after. They will be happy, I think. At least, they may be as happy as they would have been otherwise. Don’t care too much about that civilization. They will go on!”

  Had she known all along? He wondered. Had she known that he would fail? Had she sensed how it would be? Perhaps because she was a woman? Perhaps because within her veins ran a different strain of blood? And again he puzzled over what made greatness—either in man or woman.

  Josey cared for the house now, and for her mother—Josey, herself a mother, straight and full-breasted and walking with easy grace. Of them all, she had grown to be most like Em.

  The others came also to the bedside—the tall sons and the strong daughters and the grandchildren. Already the oldest grandsons were shooting up tall and on bodies of the granddaughters the fullness of their womanhood was showing.

  Looking at them, as they passed the bedside, Ish knew that Em was right. “They will go on!” he thought. “The simple ones are also the strong ones. They will go on!”

  At last one day he sat, again holding her hand. She was very weak, and then suddenly he knew that a third and dark presence was there beside them. She spoke no more and only once he felt a light flutter of her fingers within his hand.

  “Oh, Mother of Nations!” he thought. “Her sons shall praise, and her daughters call her blessed!”

  Then where there had been three, now there was only one, for Death had gone and she too. He sat there bowed and dry-eyed. That too was finished. They would bury her, Mother of Nations, and place no marker, for that was their custom. And, as it was in the beginning, since love first and sorrow with it came to the world, he sat with his dead. And he knew that greatness had passed from them.

  Yet still the years flowed, and the sun swung from north of the mountain to south, past the Golden Gate, and back again. More years were carved into the rock.

  One spring Molly died suddenly of what they took to be heart-failure. That same year a great tumor grew within Jean—swiftly, like a nightmare growth. There was no one who knew how to help her, and when she had died by her own hand, there was no one who blamed her.

  “We are going, we are going!” thought Ish. “We Americans are old, and are dropping like last spring’s leaves.” So sometimes he was sad. Yet, as he walked along the hillside, he saw many children playing busily, and young men shouting to one another, and mothers nursing their babies—and little sadness, and much merriment.

  One day Ezra came to him, saying: “You should take another wife.” Ish looked at him with questioning eyes. “No,” said Ezra, “I am too old. You are younger. There is a young woman of The Others, and no man to marry her. Except for an old man, it is better not to be alone. And there should be more children.”

  He felt no love, but he took her. She comforted him in the long nights, for he was still a man in his strength. She bore him children, though the children seemed always a little strange to him—scarcely his, because they were not also Em’s.

  More years were carved in the rock. Except for Ish and Ezra, all the Americans now were gone, and Ezra was a little dried-up wrinkled man who coughed and grew thinner and thinner. Ish himself was wholly gray-haired now. Though he was not heavy, his paunch stuck out, and he was thin-legged in the manner of old men. His side hurt him where the mountain-lion had clawed him years back; so he walked little. Yet still his young wife bore him a child in the Year 42. He was not greatly interested in that child, and also now he had great-grandchildren.

  On the day when the Year 43 had ended, Ish did not feel like walking as far as the flat rock where they carved the numerals, and Ezra was too frail. So they put off carving the date in the rock or giving a name. They said to each other now and then that really they must do it, or else arrange with some of the younger men to carve the numerals, and sometimes also the younger men and even the children talked of it. But in a way that such things go, once it had been put off, still it was put off again. “Today is rainy,” or “It is too cold,” or “We are going fishing, and shall do it later.” So the numerals were not carved, and the name was not given, and life went on with no one caring greatly. After that, no one knew how many years passed.

  Now no more children were born to Ish’s young wife. Then one day she came to him with a younger man, and the two asked, respectfully, that Ish should give her to that one.

  Then at last Ish realized that in this his curious life, he had now come close to the last stage of all. More and more often, after that, he and Ezra sat together as two old men.

  There was nothing strange that two old men should sit together and talk, but what was strange here was that there were no other old people at all. Elsewhere everything was youth, at least by comparison. There were births and there were deaths, but always there were more births than deaths, and because everyone was youthful, there was much laughter.

  As the quick years passed and the two old men sat on the hillside in the sun, they began to talk more and more about what had happened long ago. There was little that anyone—they, at least—could talk about as far as these years now were concerned. Some years were called good years and some were called bad years, but there was not much di
fference. So chiefly the two old men talked about things of long ago, and occasionally they speculated about life.

  Often, when they talked, Ish realized that there was still wisdom and help in Ezra.

  “A tribe is like a child,” he said once, in that thin piping old-man’s voice, which every day seemed more like a bird’s—and then he coughed. When he recovered, he spoke again, “Yes, a tribe is like a child. You can show it the way by which it should grow up, and perhaps you can direct it a little, but in the end the child will go his own way, and so will the tribe.”

  “Yes,” he said again on some other day, “time makes all things clear. Everything seems plainer to me now than it once did, and if I should live for a hundred years more, perhaps everything that has happened so far would seem very plain and simple.”

  Often they talked of the other Americans, those who now were gone. They laughed, remembering good old George, and Maurine with her fine radio that would never play. They smiled when they recalled Jean, and her refusal to go to church.

  “Yes,” said Ezra, “it is all clearer now with time. Why each of them survived the Great Disaster—that I still do not know. But I think I can see why each of them survived the shock that came afterwards, when so many went under. George and Maurine, and perhaps Molly too, they lived on and did not go crazy because they were stolid and had no imagination. And Jean survived because she had her temper and fought back at life; and I, because I went out from myself and shared the lives of other people. And you and Em…”