Earth Abides

No, Ish decided again as he had decided long before, they were not a very musical group. Years before, he had tried bringing home records of symphonies and playing them on the wind-up phonograph. Such rendition of course was not very good; even so, you could follow the themes. But he never got the children interested. At some melodic passage they might leave off their own playing or wood-carving and look up, listening with pleasure for a moment. As soon, however, as the development became a little complicated, the children went back to their own play. Well, what could you expect of merely a few average people and their descendants? (No, a little better than average, he insisted—but possibly not in musical appreciation.) In the Old Times one American in a hundred might have had a deep or real appreciation of Beethoven, and those few were probably just among those more sophisticated and intense people who, like the more highly bred dogs, had apparently been less able to survive the shock of the Great Disaster.

As an experiment, he also tried jazz records. At the loud blare of the saxophones, the children again left off their own enterprises, but again the interest had been momentary. Le jazz hot! It too, with all its involuted rhythms, had been a sophistication; it appealed, not to a simple and primitive mind, but to one that was highly developed and specialized, at least along that particular line. You might as well expect the children to appreciate Picasso or Joyce.

In fact—and this was something that encouraged him—the younger generation showed little interest in listening to the phonograph at all; they preferred to do their own singing. He took this as a good sign: that they would rather participate than listen, rather be actors than audiences.

They failed, however, to take the next step and compose tunes and words of their own. Ish himself occasionally tried making up a verse with topical references, but either he had no knack for it or else his efforts met with unconscious resistance as being a violation of tradition.

So they sang in unison against the background of the standardized chords and bumping bass of the accordion. The simpler tunes, he observed, they liked the best. The words seemed to make little difference. They sang “Carry me back to old Virginny” although they had no idea what “Virginny” was or who was asking to be carried back. They sang “Hallelujah, I’m a bum!” without caring what a bum was. They sang plaintively of Barbara Allen although none of them had even known of unrequited love.

Often, in those weeks, Ish thought of the two boys in the Jeep. Perhaps the children would call for “Home on the Range,” and as his left hand shifted to the G-buttons, he would have a sudden thought, and a pang with it. Just now Bob and Dick might be somewhere far out in the old range country.

Playing mechanically, he would wonder. Were the deer and the antelope playing there now? Or was it cattle? Or had the buffalo come back?

More often, however, thoughts of the boys came to him in the dark hours of the night when some dream, caused by his very anxiety, brought him out of sleep in sudden terror to lie nervously considering possibilities.

How could he ever have let them try it? He thought of all the dangers of flood and storm. And the car! You could never trust young fellows with a car, and even though there was no danger from traffic, they might run off the road. There would be many bad places. The boys would take chances.

There would be mountain-lions and bears and bad-tempered bulls. Bulls were worst of all, because they never seemed to have lost a certain contempt for men, sprung perhaps from age-old familiarity.

No—more likely, the car would break down. Then they would be marooned, hundreds or even thousands of miles away!

But what raised the worst shivers in Ish at such moments in the night was the thought of men! What people might the boys encounter? What strange communities—warped and perverted by curious circumstances, unrestrained by any flywheel of tradition! There might be communities with universal and death-dealing hostility to the stranger. Outlandish religious rites might have developed—human sacrifice, cannibalism! Perhaps, like Odysseus himself, the two youngsters would encounter lotus-eaters and sirens and unspeakable Laestrygonians.

This community of their own; here on the hillside, might be stodgy and dull and uncreative, but it had at least preserved the human decencies. That was no guarantee that other communities had done the same.