Earth Abides

Someone cut in with another question before Bob could even finish his answer. There were half a dozen questions, each one canceling out the one before. In the hubbub, Ish caught Ezra’s eye. In that glance he seemed momentarily to sense danger, and he knew that Ezra too was watching Charlie.

Ish felt himself both reassured and justified. Ezra knew people, Ezra liked people. If Ezra was so quickly perturbed at Charlie, there must be something about which to be wary. Ish trusted Ezra in such a case much better than he trusted himself.

“Come on,” he thought again. “You don’t really know at all what Ezra’s thinking. Maybe he’s disturbed because he senses what you’re thinking. And what’s that? Maybe I’m only thrown off because I’m like any small tribesman, and fear the horrible stranger with his new ideas and his new gods to fight against mine.”

He brought himself back to what was being said. “… wear funny clothes,” he heard Dick’s voice saying. “Long white gowns, sort of, I don’t know what you call them, and they have long white sleeves in them. The men and the women both wear them. They threw stones at us. They yelled, ’Unclean, unclean!’ They kept crying, ’We are the people of God!’ They made us keep away.”

Then Em spoke. The rich roll of her voice, deep but feminine, seemed to cut in beneath the high-pitched almost yelping noises of the excited little crowd. Any of the others would have had to pound on the table and shout for attention. For her, the room grew quickly quiet, even though she did not raise her voice and the words were common-place:

“It’s late,” she was saying. “Time for dinner. The boys are hungry….”

Half-witted Evie gave one last little senseless giggle, and then she too was quiet.

Em was saying that everyone should go home now, and come back later. Ish watched Charlie, and saw that Ezra was still watching him too. Charlie’s eyes looked at Em, perhaps a moment too long. His glance shifted to Evie’s blond hair, and took on, it might have been, an appraising look. Then everyone was getting up, starting to go. Dick took Charlie off to dinner at Ezra’s.

After dinner had been got on the table and they were seated, there were a great many questions to ask. Ish let Em do most of the talking with Bob. She had all the mother’s worries to settle. Had they been sick? Found plenty to eat? Slept warm? Discussion of the trip itself was being reserved until the others returned after dinner, and Ish felt also that he should not pump Bob about Charlie. Yet he could not resist the temptation entirely, and Bob showed no reticence.

“Oh,” he said. “Charlie? Sure, we just picked him up about ten days ago, down near Los Angeles. There are quite a few people, I guess, living around Los Angeles. There are some all together, like us, and a few just scattered. Charlie was by himself.”

“Did you ask him to come along, or did he just come with you?”

Ish watched, carefully. He saw that Bob was surprised by the question, but apparently not disturbed.

“Oh, I don’t just remember. I don’t know that I asked him. Maybe Dick did.”

Ish dived into his thoughts again. Perhaps Charlie had reasons for wanting to get from Los Angeles to some other place. No, that was merely slandering a man out of prejudice without trial, and then he heard Bob going on.

“He tells lots of funny stories, Charlie does. He’s a very good guy.” Funny stories, yes, and one could imagine what kind. They were frank enough in all their language, these days; the concept of obscenity, you might say, had disappeared, largely because there was only one word for things in their vocabulary, at least among the younger ones. Obscenity seemed to have died a natural death, possibly as a counterpart to the death of romantic love. But Charlie—he might still be able to tell a dirty story. Although Ish had never been a prude about stories, still he felt his original resentment shifting to a kind of righteous indignation, in spite of his continually telling himself that he really knew nothing about Charlie, except the boys’ opinions that he was a very fine person. Ish felt himself wishing that the water had never gone off, and shocked them into doing something about the future, and thus bringing an outsider in among them.

After dinner, they all built up a big bonfire on the hillside, and gathered about it. There was much singing and skylarking of the youngsters. It was a time of celebration.

There was much excitement, but the boys gradually got their story told…. They had encountered only a few minor washouts and landslides on the highway to Los Angeles, nothing that the jeep could not negotiate in four-wheel drive. The group of religious fanatics, wearing white nightgowns and calling themselves the People of God, lived in Los Angeles. They had focused upon religion, Ish assumed, under the influence of some strong leader who had happened to survive, just as in The Tribe for lack of such a leader, they had developed almost no interest in such things.