numeral 2, Ezra was still in their minds, though he was gone and they did not expect to see him again. He would have been, they thought, a good helper, a good person to have around. To his memory they called it the Year of Ezra.
The Year 3 was the Year of the Fires. Just after mid-summer the smoke suddenly drifted over everything, and it stayed, lighter and heavier, through three months. The babies sometimes woke up coughing and choking, their eyes watering.
Ish could realize what was happening. The western forests were no longer primeval woodlands of big trees through which a fire could sweep and do little damage. On the contrary, because of logging and man-caused fires, the forests consisted mostly of thick and highly inflammable second-growth, made all the worse by slash-piles and brush-fields. Man had produced this kind of forest, and it was dependent upon him, surviving only because of his vigorous efforts at fire-suppression. Now the hoses lay neatly coiled and the bull-dozers reddened with rust, and in this summer, a very dry one, over all northern California, and doubtless in Oregon and Washington too, the lightning-set fires were raging uncombatted through the tangled second-growth and blazing up in the tinder-dry slash-piles. One horrible week they even saw the fires burning brightly in the night, all along the north side of the Bay, sweeping the slopes of the mountain from bottom to top, and dying out only when there was nothing left to burn. The broad arms of the Bay fortunately kept the fire on the north side, and there were no lightning storms on the south side to start new fires. When it was all over, Ish believed that there must be very few forests left unburned in California, and centuries would be required to grow them again.
In this year also Ish really settled down to reading—another sign that he was finally adjusting to the situation. He got his books from the City Library, and kept the million volumes of the University as a great reserve to be tapped when the time was ripe. Although he often thought that he should use his reading to make himself skillful in such fields as medicine and agriculture and mechanics, he found that what he actually wanted to read was the story of mankind. He plunged through innumerable volumes of anthropology and history, and went on into philosophy, particularly the philosophy of history. He read novels and poems and plays, which also were the story of mankind.
Sometimes in the evening, when he was reading and Em was knitting, and the babies were asleep upstairs and Princess was lying lazily in front of the fire—sometimes then Ish would look up and think that his father and mother had passed many evenings in just the same way. But then he would see the gasoline lamp and turn his eyes up to the dead electriclight bulbs in the ceiling-fixture.
The Year 4 was the Year of the Coming…. One day in early spring, about noon, Princess leaped up barking wildly and dashed for the street, and then they heard a car-horn tooting. Ezra had been gone for more than a year, and they had stopped thinking about him. But there he was—in a jalopylooking car, overflowing with people and household goods. Ish couldn’t help thinking of an Okie outfit arriving in California in the Old Times.
Besides Ezra, there crawled out of the car a woman of about thirty-five, a younger woman, a frightened- looking half-grown girl, and a little boy. Ezra introduced the older woman as Molly, and the younger as Jean, and after each name he added calmly and without embarrassment, “My wife.”
Ish suffered only mild shock at the fact of bigamy. He had been through a great many experiences already, and he reacted quickly to realize that plurality of wives had been an accepted part of many great civilizations in the past and might well be again in the future. It was certainly a practical situation when there were two women available and only one man, especially when the man was like Ezra, able to live comfortably with people under all sorts of conditions.
The little boy was Ralph, Molly’s son. He had been born only a few weeks before the Great Disaster, and had presumably either inherited immunity or absorbed it through his mother’s milk. This was the only case, so far as they knew, of two members of the same family surviving. The half-grown girl they called Evie, but nobody really knew her right name. Ezra had found her living in squalor and solitude, opening cans to find what she needed, grubbing for worms and snails. She must have been five or six years old at the time of the Great Disaster. Whether she had always been half-witted, or whether the shock of death and solitude had rendered her so, no one knew. She cowered and whimpered, and even Ezra could win a smile from her only now and then. She knew a few words, and after they had been kind to her for a long time, she gradually came to talk more, but she never grew normal.
Later in the same year Ish and Ezra went off together for a few days in Ish’s old station-wagon. The trip was not a pleasant one; they had tire-trouble and engine-trouble, and the roads were rough. Nevertheless they accomplished what they had set out to do.
They located George and Maurine, whom Ezra had found on one of his wanderings. George was a big shambling fellow, gray around the temples, good-natured, uncertain in speech but deft in his trade, which was carpentry. (“Too bad!” thought Ish. “A mechanic or a farmer would have been better for us!”) Maurine was his female counterpart, except that she was some ten years younger, around forty probably. She loved housekeeping as George loved carpentry. As for their mental processes, you might call George dull, but you would have to call Maurine stupid.
Privately Ish and Ezra discussed George and Maurine, and decided that they were good solid people, comfortable to have around, more a source of strength than of weakness. (It was a little, Ish thought wryly, like deciding whether you would give someone a bid to your fraternity, and when there were so few to choose from, you couldn’t be too choosy.) In the end George and Maurine came along back in the station-wagon.
Ish and Maurine found that they had one experience in common. As a little girl in South Dakota, she had been bitten by a rattlesnake.
Toward the end of this year Em bore her second son, whom they named Roger. So by that time the people living on San Lupo Drive numbered seven adults, and four children, and Evie besides. About then they began, at first as a joke, to talk of themselves as The Tribe.
The Year 5 supplied no very startling occurrence. Both Molly and Jean had babies, and Ezra was as pleased as a two-time father should be. In the end they called it the Year of the Bulls. This was because there was a plague of cattle that year, just as from the first months they all remembered the plagues of the ants and the rats. Cattle had gradually got to be more and more numerous. Very rarely did anyone see a horse; never, a sheep. But it was good country for cattle, and they reached a climax in this year, and became a nuisance. To be sure, you easily got all the steak you wanted, though it was tough. But you had continual trouble running into a cross bull when you were merely wanting to walk here or there. You could always shoot a bull, but shooting one near the houses either meant that you had to go to all the trouble of burying the carcass, or of dragging it away, or else you suffered from the smell. They all had to become adept at stepping quickly out of the way when a bull charged, and they came to make something of a sport of this, and to call it “bull-dodging.”
The Year 6 was an eventful one. During its course all four of the women bore children—even Maurine, who had seemed too old. There was, however—now that Em had led the way—a strong drive toward the having of many children. Each of the adults had for a time lived alone, had experienced what they now called the Great Loneliness, and the strange dread that went with it. Even now their little group was only a tiny candle against the pressure of surrounding darkness. Each new-born baby seemed to give the uncertain flame a stronger hold and to push the darkness of annihilation back a little. At the end of this year the number of children, which was ten, exceeded the number of adults—and then of course there was Evie, who was hardly to be counted in either group.
But it was an eventful year for other reasons too. It was a year of drought and of little grass, and the too numerous cattle grew thin and wandered everywhere, searching food. Driven madly by hunger, they crashed the strong fence around the little vegetable plot one night. The aroused men emptied rifles into the milling cattle at short range, but before they could be driven off, the garden was utterly ruined—ironically, by being trampled out, for in the confusion of the milling herd no animal had been able to eat.
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
