Earth Abides

The Year 14 was much like it, so they called that the Second Good Year.

The Year 15 was also excellent, and they considered calling it the Third Good Year, but there was a difference. Ish and the older people again felt that first loneliness and the drawing in of the darkness. Not to grow more numerous was essentially to grow fewer, and this was the first year since the very beginning when there had been no children born. All the women—Em, Molly, Jean and Maurine—were now getting old, and the younger girls were not yet quite old enough to marry, except for Evie, the half-witted one, who should never be allowed to have children. So they did not like to call this the Third Good Year, because it was not wholly good. Instead, the children remembered that this year could be thought remarkable because Ish had got out his old accordion and to its wheezing they had sung songs together—old songs like Home on the Range or She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain, and so they called this, at the children’s prompting, the Year That We Sang. (No one except Ish seemed to think that anything was wrong with the grammar.)

The Year 16, however, was remarkable because the first marriage actually took place. Those married were Mary, who was Ish and Em’s oldest daughter, and Ralph, who had been born to Molly just before the Great Disaster. They were younger than would have been thought suitable or even decent for marriage in the Old Days, but in this also standards had changed. Ish and Em, when they discussed the matter privately, were not even sure that Mary was especially fond of Ralph, or Ralph of Mary. But everyone had always assumed that the two of them would get married because there was nobody else available whom either of them could take, just as it once was with princes and princesses. So perhaps, as Ish concluded, romantic love had merely been another necessary casualty of the Great Disaster.

Maurine and Molly and Jean were all for “a real wedding,” as they said. They hunted up a Lohengrin record for the windup phonograph, and were making a wedding costume in white with a veil, and everything to go with it. But, to Ish, all this seemed a horrible parody of things that had once been; Em, in her quiet way, supported him. Since Mary was their daughter, they controlled the wedding. In the end, they had no ceremony at all, except that Ralph and Mary stood before Ezra, and he told them that now they were being married and that they would assume a new responsibility to the community and that they must try to fulfill it well. Mary bore a child before the year was out, and so for that reason, it was called the Year of the Grandchild.

The Year 17 they called, mostly at the children’s prompting, the Year the House Busted. The reason was that one of the nearby houses had suddenly collapsed and crashed down with a great noise just in time for some of the children to see it as they came running out at the first crack. On investigation, the matter proved simple enough, because termites had had a chance now to work in the house for seventeen years undisturbed, and had eaten through the underpinning. But the incident had made a great impression upon the children, and so it gave the name to the year, although it was not really a matter of importance.

In the Year 18, Jean bore still another child. This was the last of all that were born to the older generation, but by this time there were two marriages of the second generation, and two more grandchildren were born.

This was called the Year of the Schoolteaching…. Ever since the first children had been old enough, Ish had tried, in a more or less desultory way, to give them some kind of teaching, so that they could at least read and write and do a little arithmetic, and know something of geography. But it had always been difficult to get the children together, and there seemed to be so many things that they wanted to do, either in play or in earnest, and the schoolteaching had never accomplished very much, although most of the older children could read after a fashion. At least they had once been able to read, but Ish doubted whether some of them—such as Mary, who was now a mother with two babies—could at the present moment do more than spell out words of one syllable. (Though she was his own beloved oldest daughter, he admitted to himself that Mary was not intellectual—no need to say she was stupid.)

In this Year 18, however, Ish really tried to get together all of the children who were of proper age, so that they would not grow up completely ignorant. It worked for a while, and then again it lapsed, and it was hard to say whether he had accomplished anything or not, and he felt a sense of frustration.