Earth Abides

There came a time when even talking seemed a labor. So mostly now Ish merely sat comfortably in the sun, and beside him sat an even older man who coughed and grew thinner. It was hard to tell just how the days passed and how they ran into weeks, and even the years seemed to flow with a man’s scarcely noticing them. Yet Ezra remained, and sometimes Ish thought to himself, “Though he coughs and coughs and grows thinner, yet he will outlive me.”

But now, since even talking was a labor, the mind turned inward on itself, and Ish thought of all this strange life. What was the difference in the end? Even if there had been no Great Disaster, he would now be a very old man. Now doubtless, if it had not happened otherwise, he would be Professor Emeritus, puttering around, taking some books out of the Library and intending to do some research, a little of a nuisance to the younger men in their fifties and sixties who now ran the Department—though they might say loyally to the graduate students, “That’s Professor Williams—a great scholar, once. We’re very proud of him.”

Now the Old Times were deeper buried than Nineveh or Mohenjodaro. He himself had seen everything crash and go under. Yet curiously, too, all that crash had not been able to destroy his personality. He was still the same person he would have been as Professor Emeritus, even though now the shadows were closing in on his mind while he sat on a lonely hillside as the dying patriarch of a primitive tribe.

At some time in those years something else strange began to happen. The younger men had always come to Ish for advice, but now—even though the shadows were closing in on his mind—they began to come in a different way. Whether he sat on the hillside in the sun, or whether, during rain and fog, he sat in the house, still they began to come to him bearing little gifts—a handful of ripe berries of which he was fond, or a bright stone or piece of colored glass to flash in the sun. Ish did not care for the glass or stones, even though the stones were sometimes sapphires or emeralds taken from a jewelry store, but he appreciated the gifts because he realized that the young men were giving him things by which they themselves would be pleased.

Having given him something, they would formally ask a question, while he sat holding his hammer. Sometimes they asked about the weather, and then Ish was glad to answer. He could still look at his father’s barometer, and so he could often say—what the young men could not know—whether the low clouds would soon vanish before the sun’s heat or they indicated an approaching storm.

But sometimes they asked him other questions—as, for instance, in which direction they should go for good hunting. Then Ish did not wish to answer, for he knew nothing of such matters. But when he did not answer, the young men were displeased, and then they would pinch him roughly. Because he was in pain he answered them, even though he knew nothing. He would cry out, “Go south!” or “Go beyond the hills!” Then the young men were pleased and went off. Ish sometimes feared that they would come back and pinch him because they had not found good hunting, but they never did.

During those years, there were days when he thought clearly, and other days when a fog seemed to hang in all the corners of his brain. But one day when they came to ask him a question and he was clear-minded, he realized that he must have become a god, or at least an oracle by which a god spoke. Then he remembered that time long ago when the children had been afraid to carry the hammer and when they had nodded knowingly at his saying he was an American. Yet he had never wished to be a god.

One day Ish sat on the hillside in the sun, and after a while he looked at his left side, and saw that no one sat there. Then he realized that at last Ezra, the good helper, was gone, and that no one would ever sit there beside him on the hillside again. At that thought he gripped the handle of the hammer, which in these days was very heavy for him to lift, even with both hands.

“It is called a single-jack,” he thought, “but now it is too heavy for my one hand. Yet now it has become the symbol of a tribal god, and it is still with me, though all the others, even Ezra, have gone.”

Then, because the shock of that sudden knowledge about Ezra had made him think and see more clearly, he looked alertly about him, and observed that he was sitting on the slope of the hill where many years before there had been a neat garden and was now only a trampled place of tall grass in the midst of overgrown bushes and high trees, with a half-ruined house standing up from among the tangle.