Earth Abides

by George Rippey Stewart

  And then for a while, in the way of very old men, he merely sat quietly, not sleeping, and yet not quite thinking either.

  Again, in that day each little tribe will live by itself and to itself and go its own way, and their differences will soon be more than they were even in the first days of Man, according to the accidents of survival and of place….

  Here they live always in awe of the Other-world, and scarcely dare make water without a prayer. They have skill with boats among tidal channels. To eat, they catch fish and dig clams, and gather seeds of wild-grasses….

  Here they are darker-skinned and talk another language, and worship a dark-skinned mother and child. They keep horses and turkeys, and grow corn in the flat by the river. They catch rabbits in snares, but have no bows….

  Here they are still darker. They speak English, but say no r’s, and their speech is thick. They keep pigs and chickens, and raise corn. Also they raise cotton, but make no use of it, except to offer a little to their god, knowing it from of old to be a thing of power. Their god has the form of an alligator, and they call him Olsaytn….

  Here they shoot with the bow, skillfully, and their hunting-dogs are trained to give tongue. They love assembly and debate. Their womenfolk walk proudly. The symbol of their god is a hammer, but they pay him no great reverence….

  Many others there are too, each differing. In the distant years after these first years, the tribes will grow more numerous and come together, and cross-fertilize in body and in mind. Then, doubtless, blindly and of no one’s planning, will come new civilizations and the new wars.

  After a while they grew hungry and very thirsty. Since the fire had now died down in places, one of the young men sallied out. When he came back, he was carrying an old aluminum tea-kettle. Ish recognized it as the one which had been kept at the near-by spring. The young man offered it first to Ish, and he took a long drink of the cool water. Then the others drank.

  Afterwards the same young man pulled a flat tin can out of the hip-pocket of his blue jeans. The label had long since fallen away from the can, and the metal was well rusted. The three discussed vigorously among themselves whether they should eat whatever might be in the can. Some people had died, one of them argued, from eating out of cans. They argued vigorously, but did not ask Ish’s advice. If there was a picture of a fish or some fruit on the outside of the can, then you knew that that kind of food was inside. But even, one of them declared, a rusty can might be dangerous when you knew what was in it, for in some way, if the rust went clear through the can, then what was inside might be spoiled.

  As Ish, who was not in the argument, could have told them, the obvious thing to do was to open the can and see in what condition the food inside might be. But being a very old man and having gained some wisdom with life, he realized that they were arguing merely for the fun of it, and that eventually they would get around to a decision.

  After a while, indeed, they hacked the can open with one of the knives, and inside was some reddish brown material. To Ish it was obviously a can of salmon. They smelled at it inquisitively, and decided that it was not spoiled. Also they inspected the inside of the can, and found that no rust had penetrated through it. They divided the salmon, and gave a share to Ish.

  Ish had not seen or eaten any canned salmon for a long time. The meat looked much darker to him than it should look and it was lacking in flavor. But its taste—or lack of taste—he decided, might be partly the result of his own dullness of palate at his age. If it had not been so much trouble to talk, he would have liked to deliver a lecture to the young men about all the miracles that lay behind their eating this little snack of salmon. The fish must have been caught many years before, probably off the coast of Alaska, a thousand miles and more from the place where they were now eating it. But even if it had not been so much trouble to talk, still he recollected he could not even have made the young men understand what he was talking about. They had seen the ocean, perhaps, because it was not very far from where they lived, but they would have no conception of a great ship sailing the ocean, and they would have not known what he meant when he talked of a thousand miles.

  So he ate quietly, and let his eyes rove from one of the young men to another. More and more often, however, his eyes came to rest upon that particular one who was called Jack. Life could not have been altogether easy for Jack. He had a scar on his right arm, and, unless Ish’s eyes deceived him, the left hand had suffered some kind of accident and was a little twisted. Yes, Jack must have suffered, and yet his face, like those of the others, was clear of lines and free in all its movements.

  Again Ish felt his heart yearn toward the young man, for in spite of the scar and the twisted hand the young man seemed child-like and innocent, and Ish was afraid that at some time the world would strike back hard against him and find him unprepared. Once Ish recollected that he had asked a question of this young man named Jack. He had asked him, “Are you happy?” And the young man had answered in such a strange way that Ish had doubted whether he had understood what the words meant. That was the way the things happened over all these years; though the language itself had not changed more than a little, yet there were ideas and differences that had gone out of people’s thought. No longer perhaps did they make that sharp distinction between pleasure and sorrow that people had once made in the times of civilization. Perhaps other distinctions too had faded out.

  So Jack may not even have understood the question exactly when he had replied then: “Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them.”

  But at least merriment had not gone out of the world. As Ish rested beneath the rock-overhang, he saw the others playing with their dogs or joking with one another. They laughed easily and often. And, as that one still carved at his wooden figurine, he whistled a tune. It was a gay tune, and Ish remembered its lilt but not its name or the words to sing with it. Yet it brought to him a feeling of small bells, and snow, and little glowing red and green lights, and festivity. Yes, that must have been a gay song even in the Old Days, and now it sounded gayer than ever. Gaiety—that had survived the Great Disaster!

  The Great Disaster! Ish had not thought of those words for a long time. Now they seemed to have lost meaning. Those people who had died then would now be dead anyway, from mere passage of time. Now it seemed to make little difference whether they had all died in one year, or slowly over many years. And as for the loss of civilization—about that too he had long doubted.

  The young man still whistled gaily, and Ish thought that he could remember the words “Oh, what fun it is…” He could ask the young man about the words. As he sat there in the deep cleft between the two rocks, however, Ish still found himself too tired to bother asking questions. Nevertheless his mind was clear. It was frighteningly clear, and he could not remember when before he had been able to think so deeply in behind the surface of things.

  “What is all this?” he thought to himself. “Why is my mind so keen today?” He thought that perhaps it might be from the shock of being pulled out of bed so roughly and forced to leave the burning house. But he was not sure. All he knew was that he thought more clearly than he had been able to do since he could remember.

  Still he wondered at the faces of the young men and their confidence, when outside everything was burning. Though Ish could not solve that problem, yet he thought much about it, and had various ideas. Perhaps, he thought, the difference lay somewhere in the difference between civilization and the times in which they now were living. In civilization, he thought, these young men would have all been considering one another as rivals, because in the days of civilization there were many men. They did not think much about the world outside of them because man seemed to be greatly stronger than all that outside world. So they thought mostly about how they could get the better of other people, and so they were likely not to trust each other altogether, not even brother and brother. But now, he thought, when men are very few, each of these young men wanders freely with his bow
in hand and his dog at heel, but needs his comrade close at call. Nevertheless Ish did not know, and though his mind thought very clearly and very deeply in those hours, still he was not sure.

  By mid-afternoon the fire had swept past them, and was burning far off to the south. They left the shelter of the rocks; avoiding places where the fire was still smouldering and where embers lay hot, they made their way southward down the slope of the hill gradually, without much difficulty. Evidently the young men knew what they were doing. Ish did not bother to ask questions because he needed all his strength merely to keep moving. They waited for him patiently, and often they helped him, letting him rest his arms across their shoulders. Toward evening, when his strength was failing, they made camp near a stream. Because of some freak of the wind and also because of the greater growth there, the fire had left a small spot unburned.

  A little water was running in the streambed. The larger game all seemed to have run before the flames, but many quail and rabbits had taken shelter along the streambed, and the young men, scattering with their bows, soon came back with plenty of food.

  One of them, apparently out of mere habit, began to make a fire with a bow-drill. But the others laughed at him, and soon gathered together some still glowing and smouldering sticks from where the fire had swept through.

  After he had eaten a little and felt stronger, Ish looked around, and saw by the gutted ruins of a great building that they had camped on what had long ago been the campus of the University. Though he was still tired, he stood up curiously, and made out the shape of the Library a hundred yards or so distant. The trees around it had burned, but the building itself was still intact. Nearly all of its volumes, the whole record of mankind, would probably be still available. Available for whom? Ish did not try to answer the question that rose so spontaneously in his mind. In some way, the rules of the game had changed. He would not say whether they had changed for better or for worse. In any case, the Library—its preservation or its destruction—seemed to make very little difference in his thoughts now. Perhaps, this was the wisdom of old age. Perhaps, it was only despair and resignation.

  “This will be a strange place for me to sleep tonight,” Ish thought. “Will the ghosts of my old professors move before me after all these years? Will I dream of a million books passing in endless procession, looking reproachfully upon me because after so long I have begun to have doubts in them and all they stood for?”

  That night, however, though he often woke and was cold and envied the young men sleeping soundly, yet between times of waking he slept well and had no dreams, because he was very tired from all that had happened during the day.

  Chapter 3

  In the dawn, when he awoke finally, he was weak but clear-headed.

  “This is very strange,” he thought, “because in the last few years I know that frequently I have not been wholly conscious of what was happening, and that is the way a very old man often is. But now, as it was yesterday, I see everything very clearly. I wonder what this can mean?”

  He watched the young men making breakfast ready. That same one was whistling gaily at the same tune, and again it brought to Ish the thought of little bells and happiness, although he could not remember its name. But still his mind was clear—“clear as a bell,” the old words came to him, since the idea of bells was already with him.

  “I have heard,” he thought, putting the thoughts into silent sentences, as he had always had a habit of doing, and now as an old man was more prone than ever to do. “Yes, I have heard, or more likely I have read it in one of all those books—at least, from somewhere I have got the idea that a man’s mind becomes clear just before he is to die. Well, I am very old, and it is likely enough, and nothing certainly to be unhappy about. If I were a Catholic now and if things were different, I should wish to confess.”

  Then by the little stream, with the smell of smoke still in his nostrils and with the old University buildings looming up around him, he thought for a moment of his life, and considered what he had piled up of sins and of virtues. For he realized that a man should make peace with himself, even though all conditions changed, and that a man should face the question of whether in his life he had satisfied the ideas which he had built up within himself as to what he should be, and that all this was not a matter of priests and religion but of a man himself.

  After he had considered his life, he did not feel perturbed. He had made mistakes, but also he had sometimes done the right thing, as always—or at least in general—he had tried to do. The Great Disaster had placed him in a position for which he had no training; still he had accomplished certain things, and had lived, he trusted, not altogether ignobly.

  Just then one of them brought him a morsel of something that had been roasted on a stick before the fire.

  “This is for you,” said the young man. “It is the breast of a quail as you yourself, Ish, well know.”

  Ish thanked him politely, and chewed at the meat, being glad that he had teeth left. The smoky tang of the open fire was in the meat, and the taste was delicious.

  “Why should I consider dying?” he thought. “Life is still good, and I am the last American.”

  But he did not bother to comment on anything that was happening or to ask questions as to what they would do that day. He felt in some strange way drawn from the world, although he was still so fully conscious of it.

  After breakfast there came a shouting from farther down the stream, and soon a newcomer arrived. There was a long talk then, but Ish did not pay much attention. He gathered, in general, that the whole tribe was moving toward a place where there were some lakes and where the fire had not swept. It was very good country, according to what the newcomer said. The three young men who had been with Ish were at first inclined to argue about this, because they had not been consulted in the decision. But the other explained that the whole question had been put up before the assembly of The Tribe, and so decided. The three then yielded, granting that what The Tribe had decided was binding upon them also.

  Though this was doubtless a very small incident, Ish found it particularly gratifying. That was something which he had taught them long ago. But the thought, though it was pleasant, also brought him sorrow and even embarrassment when he remembered Charlie.

  Soon they made preparations to begin the march, but Ish was so weak that he could hardly walk at all. The young men then decided that they would carry him pickaback by turns, and so they started. Carrying him, they managed to move more rapidly than they had moved on the preceding day when he had walked. They made jokes, one with another, about how light an old man grew to be—happy jokes with a lusty vein running through them, as to why an old man was so light. But Ish at least was glad that he was no great burden upon them; in fact, one of them said that to carry the hammer was as heavy a load as to carry Ish himself.

  Once they were moving in this fashion, perhaps the joggling of being carried pickaback affected Ish, and he found the fog again creeping in upon his brain. He did not even know just where they were going or in what direction they were moving. Only, now and then, some incident stood out clearly before him.

  After a while they passed out of the burned area, and came to a part of the city past which the fire had swept, leaving it uninjured. From the dampness in the air which made him shiver a little Ish realized that the wind had changed and that this area must be close to the Bay. There were ruins of factory buildings in this section. Once he noticed the paralleled rust lines of a railroad track. Everything was much grown up with bushes and some tall trees, but the long dry summers had prevented the country from returning to forest, and so there was always a good deal of grassy expanse through which the young men had no difficulty in finding a way. Often, moreover, they followed the actual lines of streets where the asphalt still showed in places, in spite of the weeds growing up through its cracks and the grass encroaching upon its sides where the blown dust of all these years had supplied a skin of soil to the surface. But generally the you
ng men seemed to steer more by the position of the sun or by some distant landmark than to make their way along the lines of streets.

  As they were passing a thicket, something caught Ish’s eye, and he reached out his hand and cried for it, suddenly, as a child might. The young men saw what he was doing. They stopped, laughing merrily, to humor him. One of them went to get the thing for which he had cried out. When they brought it, Ish was delighted, and now they laughed at him as if he really were a child, good-naturedly.

  Ish did not mind. He had what he wanted. It was a scarlet flower—a geranium, which had adapted itself to the new life and lived through these years. It was not the flower but the color, Ish realized, that had given him that sudden pang and made him cry out. There was not enough red in the world anymore. Being old, he could remember a world in which dyes and lights flamed with scarlet and vermilion. But now the world had sunk back into a quiet harmony of blues and greens and browns—and reds no longer blazed everywhere.

  But as he jogged along pickaback, he lost the sense of what was happening, and when he came to himself again, they were all seated on the ground taking a rest, and somewhere he had dropped the flower. Now, as he looked up, his eyes saw something a little distance away, and when he focused, he saw that it was a road-marker. It was shield-shaped, and he read U.S. and CALIFORNIA, and in large numerals, 4 and 0. He was so unused to seeing numerals that it was a moment before he could put the two together and form on his tongue the word “Forty.”

  “This, then,” he thought, “this road which I can barely make out because of all the things growing on it, this is old U.S. 40—the East Shore Highway. It used to be six lanes wide. We must be heading toward the Bay Bridge.” And then again he did not remember clearly anything more.