Earth Abides

Men had built roads and drains and walls and thousands of other obstructions to the natural flow of water. These could survive and function only because men were constantly at hand to repair and clean the thousands of little breaks and blockages which showed up at every change of the weather. Ish himself could have cleaned out that clogged drain in two minutes by merely scraping the leaves back from the grating where they had plugged it. But he saw no point to stretching out his hand. There were thousands, millions, of spots where the same thing must be happening. The roads and the drains and the walls had been constructed only for man’s convenience, and now that man was gone there was no need of them. The water might just as well follow its natural courses, and cut back through the rose-garden. Soaked and muddy, the Harts’ rugs would begin to rot where they lay. No matter! To think of that as something bad was merely to think in terms of what had once been and no longer existed.

As he walked back home, he suddenly came upon a large black billy-goat calmly eating the hedge which Mr. Osmer used to clip so carefully. Ish looked at the billy-goat in amusement and in some curiosity, wondering where he could have come from. (No one kept goats anywhere near such a respectable sum as San Lupo.) The goat desisted from eating the hedge, and looked at Ish. Perhaps, thought Ish, the animal was looking also at the man in amusement and some curiosity. Men now had rarity-value. Having looked for a few seconds, as if it right be equal to equal, the goat again returned to the more profitable business of eating the long shoots which had grown out from the hedge. Doubtless they were very succulent.

Princess suddenly returned from some expedition of her own, and flew at the strange animal in a frenzy of barking. The goat put down his horns and made a sudden dash at the dog. Princess, who seldom had much stomach for a fight, turned quickly with her rabbit-like dodge, and raced back to her man. The goat resumed eating.

A few minutes later Ish saw the goat walking calmly along the sidewalk, as if he owned it and all of San Lupo Drive.

“Well, why not?” thought Ish. “Perhaps he does. This is certainly a New Deal.”

During this time, when the ram kept lurk mostly indoors, his thoughts turned a little toward religion, as they had when he walked through the Cathedral. This time he found a large annotated Bible on his father’s bookshelves, and tried browsing here and there in it.

The Gospels seemed strangely unsatisfying, probably because they dealt mostly with the problems of a man involved in the social group. “Render unto Caesar…” was a strangely unprofitable text when there was no more Caesar, and not even a Collector of Internal Revenue.

“Sell whatever thou hast, and give to the poor… As ye would that men should do unto you… Love thy neighbor as thyself”—all these presupposed a functioning society of many people. As the world now was, a Pharisee or Sadducee might perhaps still follow the set rites of formalized religion, but the very humanity of the teachings of Jesus rendered them obsolete.

Turning back to the Old Testament, he began Ecclesiastes, and found himself suddenly more at home. The old fellow “The Preacher”—Koheleth, as the notes called him, whoever he might have been—had a curious way of striking the naturalistic note, of sensing the problem of the individual against the universe. Sometimes it was almost as if he had imagined what Ish was now experiencing: “And if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.” Ish thought of that tree in Oklahoma which had fallen to block Highway 66. And again he read, “Two are better than one… for if they fall, the one win lift up his fellow, but woe unto him that is alone when he falleth.” And Ish thought of the great fear that had been upon him when he was left alone, and he had felt all too vividly that there would be none, to help him up, if he fell. He read through, marveling at the clear-eyed naturalistic acceptance of the universe. There was even a line, “Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment.”

He came to the end of the last chapter, and his eyes fell to the lines which began on the lower part of the page. “The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.” He read, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.”

Ish stirred uneasily. In all these long months he had rarely had such feelings. Now again he realized that, more than he thought from day to day, the shock of the whole catastrophe had affected him. It was all like some old story of enchantment in which a king sat and watched life pass by, unable to mingle with it. Other men had done differently. Even those who had drunk themselves to death had, in a sense, been partaking of life. But he himself, in observing what happened, had merely been rejecting life.