Earth Abides

The three older men turned to each other again after the younger ones had gone.

“Let’s get Em back in,” said Ezra. She joined them, and then there were four.

They stood for a minute in silence as if under the actual threat of danger. There was a feeling of death in the air, not of clean death in the open, but of a mean and defiling death.

“Well, what about it?” said Ish, knowing that he must take the lead again.

Once the silence was broken, they discussed the situation fully. They were agreed, first of all, that The Tribe had the right to protect itself and must do so. They would look for no more law or precedent than the primary one of self-defense, which could be applied to a community, as well as to a person.

Granted the right, however, and the necessity, what could be the means? Mere warning, “Do this or else!” they all agreed, would probably be useless and would certainly offer no sure protection. Once the thing was done, the punishment which they could mete out to Charlie would be mere social vengeance, and no avail against the spread of the diseases. They had no means of actually imprisoning Charlie, and the weight of all that responsibility, if they should improvise a jail of bars and locks, would be too much for a small community to enforce indefinitely. The obvious thing was banishment. They could merely take him away from the community and tell him to go on. He could manage to live well enough. If he returned, the penalty would be death.

Death—they stirred uneasily even at the mention of it! Now it had been a long time since there had been either war or execution. That their society might have to inflict such a final penalty, the very thought was strangely disturbing to all their minds.

“But what about it?” Em seemed to voice all their fears. “What if he sneaks back somewhere? After all, there are only a few of us older people, and he makes friends easily with the younger ones. What if he makes friends with some of the boys and they protect him? And he could make friends with some of the girls, too, not necessarily Evie.”

“We might take him a long way down the road,” said Ezra. “We could take him in the jeep and drop him off fifty miles, maybe a hundred miles, away.” And then after a pause, he corrected his own judgment. “Yes, but still, he could get back easy in a month or so—and then… well, I was just thinking, what would keep him from hanging round with a rifle and bushwhacking one of us. Oh, maybe the boys could run him down with the dogs afterwards, but one of us would be good and dead anyway! I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being afraid to get within rifle-range of every clump of bushes.”

“You can’t punish a man for something he ain’t done yet,” said George stolidly.

“Why not!” said Em sharply. They all turned quickly toward her, but she was silent.

“Why… you can’t… of course, you can’t.” George was laboriously stating the case. “He’s got to do something, and then there’s… a joo-rie. It says so… the law.”

“What law?”

There was a pause, and then the talk shifted away, as if no one quite had the courage to follow Em.

Ish, feeling that he must be fair, brought up another matter.

“Of course we don’t know he really has any diseases at all. We’ve no doctor to find out. Maybe he had something a long time ago. Maybe he’s just boasting. Some men would!”

“That’s just it!” said Ezra. “Not having a doctor, we don’t know. Yes, he might be just boasting. Do we want to take a chance? If this thing ever gets started…. Besides, I think the guy is sick. He moves slow, like something was wearing on him.”

“They say sulfa pills work,” said Ish, trying still to be fair, to suppress that deep feeling of triumph.

Then, as he looked at George, he was almost appalled at the horror and revulsion that he saw—George, the middle-class citizen, full of superstitions against the “social diseases”; George, the deacon, remembering that text about “the sins of the fathers.” But Em was speaking:

“I asked ‘What law’?” she said. “There are the laws in the old law-books still, I guess. They don’t mean much to us, now that things are different. That old law, like George said—it waited till somebody did something, and then it punished. But the thing was done. Can we take that responsibility now? There are all the children.”

Suddenly there seemed nothing more to say. They all sat silent, each considering possibilities.

“No,” Ish found himself thinking, she does not have a philosophy. She mentions the children and makes it a special case, Yet there is perhaps something deeper even than a philosophy in her. She is the mother; she thinks close to all the basic things of life.

Probably it was not so much a long time that passed as what seemed a long time. Then Ezra spoke.