Earth Abides

But in the morning light, all these bug-a-boos of the darkness lost their reality. Then he thought of the two boys as enjoying themselves, stimulated by new scenes, perhaps by new people. Even if the car should break down and they were unable to start another one, still they could walk back over the same road they had driven. There would be no lack of food. Twenty miles a day, at least a hundred a week—even if they had to walk a thousand miles, they should be home before fall. Actually, if they kept a car running, they should be home a great deal sooner. When he thought of it, he could scarcely contain himself for excitement at the thought of all the news they would bring.

So the weeks passed, and the rains were over. The grass on the hills lost its fresh greenness, and then seeded and turned brown. In the mornings the low summer clouds hung so close that the towers of the bridges sometimes reached up into them.

Chapter 5

As time passed, Ish stopped thinking, and dreaming, so much about the two boys. Their being gone so long seemed to show that they had traveled far. It was barely time to expect their return from a transcontinental journey, and certainly not time to begin worrying over their failure to return. Other thoughts, and worries, occupied his mind.

He had reorganized the school, and was back at what he felt to be his essential work of teaching the young ones to read and write and work a little arithmetic, and thus to maintain for The Tribe some hold on the basic skills of civilization. But the young ones, ungratefully, fidgeted on their chairs, and looked restlessly toward the windows, and he knew that they wanted to be outside, running on the hillside, and playing at bulldodging, fishing. He tried various lures, attempting the techniques which in the old days he remembered had been called “progressive education.”

Wood-carving! Curiously to Ish, wood-carving had become the chief means of artistic expression. Obviously this was a heritage from old George. Perhaps, stupid as he was, George had unconsciously managed to pass along to the children his love of wood-working. Ish himself had no interest in it, and no knack.

No matter what it had come from! Could he, Ish, as a teacher, make use of this hobby to stimulate an intellectual interest?

So he began to teach them geometry, and to show them how with compass and ruler they could lay out designs on the surface of the wood.

The bait took, and soon with great enthusiasm everyone talked of circles and triangles and hexagons, and had laid out a geometrical design, and was eagerly carving. Ish himself became interested. He felt the fascination of the work as the mellow sugar-pine block—aged for almost a quarter century—began to peel off from his knife-edge.

But even before the first geometrical designs were executed, the children were losing interest. To draw your knife along the edge of a steel square and thus get a straight line that was easy and uninteresting. To follow the outline of a circle-that was difficult enough, but was mechanical and dull. And the designs when finished, even Ish had to admit, looked like bad imitations of old-time machine-work.

The children reverted to free-running handwork, often improvising as they went. It was more fun to do, and in the end it looked be tter also.

Best of them all at carving was Walt, although he could never read, except in a halting stammer. But when it came to doing a frieze of cattle on the smooth surface of a plank, Walt carved with sure touch. He did not have to measure things out ahead, or to use the tricks of geometry. If his row of three cows did not quite fill up the space, he merely carved a calf at the end of the line to take up what was left. And yet, when he finished, it all looked as if he had planned it from the beginning. He could work in low relief, or in three-quarters, or even sometimes in the full round. The children admired his work, and him, tremendously.

So, Ish realized, he had failed in what had seemed his shrewdly planned attempt at using a hobby to stimulate an intellectual interest, and again he was left with little Joey. Joey had no talent at wood-carving, but of them all, only he had kindled at those eternal truths of line and angle which had survived even the Great Disaster. Once Ish found him cutting different-shaped triangles from pieces of paper and then recutting the ends from each triangle and placing them together to form a straight line.

“Does it always work?” Ish asked.

“Yes, always. You said it always would.”

“Why do you do it then?”

Joey could not explain why he did it, but Ish shared enough of the workings of his son’s mind to be sure that Joey must be really paying a kind of homage to universal and unchangeable truth. He was as much as saying to the powers of chance and change: “Here, make this one come out different, if you can!” And when those dark powers could not prevail, it was again a triumph for intellect.