Earth Abides

eyes.

In spite of their obvious reluctance, Ish looked around their place. Although all the houses of the town must have been open to them, they still lived in the crude cabin where the woman had lived before the disaster. Ish did not go in, but through the open door he saw the rickety bed and chairs and the sheet-iron stove, and the oil-cloth- draped table with the flies buzzing about the uncovered food. The outside looked better. They had a luxuriant garden and a good corn-patch, and were actually tending a small field of cotton, although what in the world they expected to do with the cotton was more than Ish could figure out. Apparently they had merely carried on, doing the things that people in their world were supposed to do, and thus gaining a sense of security.

They had chickens in a pen, and some pigs. Their painfully naive embarrassment when Ish saw the pigs was only too plain advertisement that they had appropriated them from some farmer’s pen and now felt that the white man would hold them accountable.

Ish asked for some fresh eggs, and for a dozen gave them one of his dollar bills. They seemed to be delighted with the exchange. After a quarter of an hour, having exhausted all the possibilities of the situation, Ish got into the car, much to the relief of the reluctant hosts.

He sat in the front seat for a moment, thinking to himself, “Here,” he reflected, “I might be a king in a little way, if I remained. They would not like it, but from long habit they would, I think, accept the situation—they would raise vegetables and chickens and pigs for me, and I could soon have a cow or two. They would do all the work that I needed to have done. I could be a king, at least, in a little way.”

But the idea was only fleeting, and as he drove on, he began to think that the Negroes had really solved the situation better than he. He was living as a scavenger upon what was left of civilization; they, at least, were still living creatively, close to the land and in a stable situation, still raising most of what they needed.

Of half a million species of insects only a few dozen were appreciably affected by the demise of man, and the only ones actually threatened with extinction were the three species of the human louse. So ancient, if not honorable, was this association that it had even been used as an argument for the single origin of man, anthropologists noting that all isolated tribes scratched and picked at the same parasites and therefore inferring that the original ape-men must have carried the original insect-ancestors outward with them from their point of dispersal.

Since that first departure, throughout hundreds of millennia, the lice had adjusted their life nicely to their world, which was the body of man. They existed as three tribes, taking as their domains, respectively, the head, the clothing, and the private parts. Thus, in spite of racial differences, they amicably maintained a tripartite balance of power, setting for their host an example which he might well have followed. At the same time, becoming so exactly adapted to man, they lost the capacity of existing upon any other host.

The overthrow of man was therefore their overthrow. Feeling their world growing cold, they crawled off in search of some new warm world to inhabit, found none, and died. Billions perished most miserably.

At the funeral of Homo sapiens here will be few mourners. Canis familiaris as an individual will perhaps send up a few howls, but as a species, remembering all the kicks and curses, he will soon be comforted and run off to join his wild fellows. Homo sapiens, however, may take comfort from the thought that at his funeral there will be three wholly sincere mourners.

He came to the long bridge across the great brown rolling river, and a truck was stalled, blocking the narrow single lane which led across to Memphis.

Feeling like a bad boy, who is doing something forbidden and will be punished for it, he went against all the traffic signs, took the narrow single lane on the left-hand side of the railroad tracks, and headed across toward Tennessee on the road which should lead to Arkansas.

But he met no one, and before long he came to the Tennessee side, and drove out (still in the wrong direction) through the bridge approach. Memphis was as, empty as other cities had been, but a south wind was blowing, and it brought a fetid reek from what had been the teeming districts around Beale Street. If this was any indication of what Southern cities would be like, Ish wanted no more of them. He headed fast toward the country again.

Before he had gone far, however, the south wind brought steady rain. Since driving became dull and wearisome, and since he was certainly in no hurry to get anywhere, he holed up in a tourist-court at the edge of a small town, the name of which he did not even bother to ascertain. The gas pressure was still working at the stove in the kitchenette, and he made the fresh eggs his chief dish for dinner. They were a real treat, and yet he ended by being in, some way still unsatisfied. “I wonder” he thought, “if I’m getting all the things I should to eat.” Perhaps he should raid a drug store for some vitamin tablets. Later, he let Princess out for a run, and she suddenly vanished into the rain with a long yapping which ended in a bay as she struck on the trail of some animal. He was disgusted, since he knew that he might have to wait up an hour for her pleasure to return. She was back sooner, however, smelling woefully of a skunk. He shut her in the garage, and she complained bitterly with her yapping, at the disgraceful way she was being treated.

Ish went to bed, still with the unsatisfied feeling. “Must be suffering from shock more than I realize consciously,” he thought. “Or else the loneliness is getting me, or maybe good old sex is raising its ugly head.”

Shock could do strange things, he knew. He remembered hearing the story of a man who had seen his wife killed before his eyes in an accident and who had felt no desire for months.

He thought of the Negroes whom he had seen that day. The woman—middle-aged, far gone in pregnancy, no beauty at any time—could scarcely have thus disturbed him. When he thought of the incident, his memories turned chiefly to the way in which they had found a kind of security by keeping close to the soil. Then Princess bayed from the garage, and he cursed her, and went to sleep.

In the morning he still felt unsatisfied and restless. The storm was not yet over, but at the moment no rain was falling. He decided not to leave, but to take a walk down the road. Before going he looked into the station- wagon, and saw the rifle lying on the middle seat. He had hardly touched it since leaving California; now, without any definite thought, he took it, tucked it under his arm, and walked down the road.

Princess followed him a few yards, then discovered a new trail, and in spite of the last night’s experience was off upon it, vanishing over the hill in a series of delighted yelps and bays. “Better luck this time!” he called after her.

Ish himself walked along with no more definite idea than to stretch his legs a little or perhaps find a tree with ripe fruit. He was scarcely thinking of anything when he saw a cow and a calf in a field. There was nothing remarkable in that; he could see a cow and a calf in nearly any field in Tennessee. The remarkable fact was that now the loaded rifle was under his arm, and suddenly he knew what must somewhere have been in his mind.

Carefully resting the rifle on a fence-post he saw the sights come clearly into line with the redness of the calf’s shoulder. The range was butcher’s distance. He squeezed the trigger, and the rifle spoke and kicked back against him. As the sound died, he heard the calf give a long choking wheeze; it stood with legs braced but shaky, a thin stream of blood bursting from the nostrils. Then it collapsed and fell.

The cow had run a few yards after the shot, and now she stood and turned uncertainly. Ish did not know what she might do in the defense of her calf. Taking good aim again, he put a bullet just behind her shoulder. He fired twice more, for mercy, as she toppled.

He had to walk back to the cabin for the hunting-knife. When he returned, he carried the reloaded rifle. He felt his own reaction as curious. Before this time he had never thought much about weapons, but now it was as if he had declared war upon creation and should look for retaliation upon himself. Yet, when he came to where the cow and the calf were lying, and climbed over the fence, he met no resistance or opposition. The calf, to his dismay, was still breathing. Not liking the job, he cut its throat. He had never been a hunter, and had never butchered an animal; so he made a bad haggling job of it. Getting himself well bloodied in the process, he managed to hack out the liver, when he had got it, he realized that he had no way to carry it, except in his hand. He had to lay the bloody mass back among the entrails of the calf, and go back again to the cabin to get a pan. When he returned to the calf, a crow was already at work upon the eyes.

When he finally had the liver safely at the cabin, he was so covered with blood and dirt that he had lost all