Earth Abides

To crown all this, came the grasshoppers. They descended suddenly, and ate up everything that the cattle could not reach. They ate the leaves from the trees and the flesh from the ripening peaches, so that the bare seeds hung from the ends of the leafless branches. Then the grasshoppers died, and their stench was everywhere.

After a while the cattle also lay dead by hundreds in the dry stream-beds and muddy waterholes, and their stench too filled the air. By now the land was stripped bare, as if it would never recover.

A horror fell upon the people. Ish tried to explain to them that it was all a part of the jostling for readjustment after the loss of human controls. There was bound to be, for instance, a plague of grasshoppers during the first year when conditions favored them, now that their breeding-grounds were not disturbed by cultivation. But with the stench in the air and the whole earth looking dead, he could not be very convincing. George and Maurine took to prayer. Jean made fun of them openly, saying that what had happened in the last few years didn’t give her confidence in this god-business. Molly went into depressions, and wept loudly at times. In spite of his rationalistic explanations even Ish was despondent for the future. Of the adults only Ezra and Em showed the capacity for taking things as they came.

The older children seemed to be little affected. They gulped their canned milk greedily, even when the stench was thickest. John (they already were calling him Jack) held his father’s hand with confidence, and looked with mild six-year old interest at a cow which had tottered along the street and lay dying in the sun. He obviously accepted it as just part of his world.

But the nursing babies, except Em’s, absorbed a sense of disaster through their mothers’ milk. They wailed fretfully. Thus disturbing their mothers all the more, they set up a vicious circle. October was a month of horror.

Then came the miracle! Two weeks after the first rain they looked out, and the hills were a faint green with sprouting grass. Everyone was suddenly happy, and Molly and Maurine wept with pleasure. Even Ish was relieved, for in the last weeks the despair of the others had shaken his confidence in the basic recuperative powers of the earth itself, and he had begun to doubt whether any seed remained.

When, at the time of the winter solstice, the people all gathered once more at the smooth expanse of rock to cut the numeral into the surface and to name the year, they were uncertain what they should call it. It might be, for good omen, the Year of the Four Babies. But it might be the Year of the Dead Cattle, or the Year of the Grasshoppers. In the end the evilness of the year prevailed in their thoughts. So they called it simply the Bad Year.

The Year 7 was a strange one also. The mountain-lions suddenly seemed to be everywhere. You hardly dared to walk between houses without carrying a rifle, and having a dog at heel to give warning, and the dog kept usually very close at heel also. The lions never quite dared attack a man, but they picked up four dogs, and you were never quite sure whether one of them might not just suddenly leap from a tree. The children had to be kept indoors. What had happened was again obvious enough to Ish. During the years when there had been so many cattle, the lions must have bred rapidly, and now that the cattle had perished, in the drought, the lions were left without food and ravenously were closing in.

In the end there was bad luck, because Ish missed his shot and instead of killing a lion merely raked it across the shoulders, and it charged and mauled him before Ezra could get another shot home. After that he walked with a little limp, and became very bred when he had to sit long in the same position, as in driving a car. (But by now the roads had gone to pieces badly and the cars were unreliable and there were few places to go anyway, so that there was very little car-driving.) Naturally, they called it the Year of the Lions.

The Year 8 was comparatively uneventful. They called it the Year We Went to Church. (The name amused Ish, for its wording implied that that experiment was over and done with.)

This had happened in this way…. Being merely seven ordinary Americans, they were of varied religious affiliations or of none at all, and even among the church-members no one had felt any creative religious drive. Ish had gone to Sunday School as a child, but when Maurine asked him what church he belonged to, he had to say that he was a skeptic. Maurine did not know the word, and jumping to the wrong conclusion she always referred to Ish thereafter as being a member of the Skeptic Church.