Earth Abides

So Ish was left with little Joey—spiritually, and sometimes also physically. For, when the other children ran out of school whooping loudly, Joey often made a point of not going, but of sitting with some biggish-looking book, and even seeming a little superior in his attitude.

Physically, the other boys were stalwart young giants, and Joey lagged at all sports and outdoor adventures. His head seemed big for his body, though that might be, Ish realized, because you thought of it as containing an undue amount of knowledge. His eyes also were big for his head, and exceptionally quick and alert. Alone among the children, he suffered from sick spells, with an upset stomach. Ish wondered whether these attacks were truly physical or sprang from some emotional disturbance, but since there was no chance of sending Joey to either a doctor or a psychiatrist, the actuality would never be known. In any case, Joey remained underweight, and often came home exhausted after playing with the other boys. “It’s not good!” said Ish to Em.

“No,” said Em, “but still, you like him interested in books and geometry. That’s merely the other side of his not being as strong as the others.”

“Yes, I suppose so. He has to find his satisfaction somewhere. But still I wish he would get to be stronger.”

“You wouldn’t really have him different, would you?”

And, as she went away about some other matter, Ish thought that again she had been right.

“No,” he thought, “we have plenty of galumphing young huskies. Still I wish he were stronger. Yet, even if he is something of a weakling, and even a freak and a pedant, we must have one person like that, to carry on intellectually.”

And so, of all his children, his heart went out to Joey. He saw in Joey the hope of the future, and he talked often with him, and taught him many things.

Thus the school dragged along through those weeks while they waited for Dick and Bob to return. Even Ish could hardly use a more optimistic word than “dragged.” Altogether there were eleven children whom he taught, or tried to teach, that summer.

He held school in the living-room, and the eleven children came there from all the houses. The session lasted only from nine to twelve, with a long recess. Ish realized that he must ride them with a light rein.

He taught them arithmetic, now that he had failed in his attempt to sugar-coat the pill of geometry. He tried to make practical applications of arithmetic, and found it surprisingly difficult. “If A builds 30 feet of fence…” the old book read. But nobody built any fences now, and he found himself having to start by explaining why people once had built them—a much more complicated matter to explain than you would think, until you tried it. He thought of emulating the progressive school again by setting up a shop where the pupils could buy and sell and keep accounts. But this was not practical, for there were no more store-keepers now. He would have had to start with a whole exposition of ancient economics.

Then he tried valiantly to present to them some of the wonders of pure number. For himself, indeed, he was successful, and the more he tried to tell it to the children the more he himself felt the basic quality of mathematics to all that had been civilization. At the same time, he felt more and more, even though he could not express it, all the wonder that lay in the relations of one number to another. “Why is it,” he would think, “that two and two eternally make four—and not, sometimes, five? That has not changed! Even though wild bulls bellow and fight in Union Square!” Thus too, he played games with triangular numbers, showing the way they built up one on top of the other. But except for Joey the children showed no sense of wonder, and Ish saw their sidelong looks toward the windows when he tried to impress them with it all.

He attempted geography also. This, his own subject, he should at least be well qualified to teach. The boys enjoyed drawing maps of the near-by country. But neither boys nor girls were interested in the geography of the world as a whole. Who could blame them? Perhaps when Dick and Bob came back in the jeep, there might be more interest. But just now the children’s horizon was limited to the few miles round about. What to them was the shape of Europe with all of its peninsulas? What to them, the islands of the sea?

He made a somewhat better case for history, although what he taught was more anthropology than history. He told them of all the growth of man, that struggling creature, who had gradually learned this, learned that, learned to develop himself here, and restrain himself there, and through infinite error and trouble and foolishness and cruelty, at last had achieved so spectacularly before the end came upon him. They were mildly interested.