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.
Maurine herself was a Catholic, and so was Molly. They could still cross themselves and say a
Of the others, George had been a Methodist, and a deacon. But he was too inarticulate to turn preacher, and not enough of a leader to organize a congregation. Ezra was tolerant of everyone’s beliefs, but never let himself be pinned down as to his own, and so probably lacked any convictions. Jean had been a member of some loud-praying modern sect called Christ’s Own. But she had seen the congregation pray in vain at the time of the Great Disaster, and now she had turned definitely anti-religious. Em, who never liked to turn toward the past, was reticent. As far as Ish could tell, she never prayed. Now and then, apparently without thinking of religious implications, she sang hymns or spirituals in her full throaty contralto.
George and Maurine, sinking the Methodist-Catholic differences, were the ones who suggested church services—“for the sake of the children.” They appealed to Ish, who was something of a leader, especially in things intellectual, Maurine, broad-mindedly, even told him that she would not object to the use of “the Skeptic form of services.”
Ish felt the temptation. He could easily piece together some harmless bits of religion, give comfort and confidence to people who might often need it badly, and supply a core of solidity and union to the community. George, Maurine and Molly would welcome it; Jean should be easy to convert again; Ezra would not stand in the way. But Ish himself hated building upon a foundation of insincerity, and he knew that Em would see through the sham.
In the end they held a service each Sunday—George had kept track of Sunday, or at least thought so. They sang hymns, and read from the Bible, and stood uncovered for silent prayer, each for himself.
But Ish never prayed during the period of silence, and he did not think that Em or Ezra did either. Moreover, Jean maintained her hostility stoutly, and never attended. Ish felt that if he had more fervor, or more hypocrisy, he could have argued Jean over. As it was, however, the church services were cultivating disunion rather than unity of feeling, and sham more than true religion. One day, on the spur of the moment, Ish put an end to them. He did it rather neatly, he thought, ending his speech with the idea that they were not really giving up the services but merely extending the period of silent prayer indefinitely—“letting each one of us carry on in his heart as he wishes.”
Molly wept a little at what seemed to her such a lovely thought, and so the experiment with the church at least was ended in harmony.
At the beginning of the Year 9 there were seven adults, and Evie, and thirteen children, ranging in age from new-born babies up to Molly’s Ralph, who was nine, and Ish and Em’s Jack, who was eight.
Everybody had a pleasant sense of confidence and security in the growth of the community, or of The Tribe, as they now said more often. The birth of each baby was a time of real rejoicing, as the shadows seemed to draw back a little and the circle of light to enlarge.
Soon after the beginning of that year, a decent-looking oldish man came up to George’s house one morning. He was one of those wanderers who still occasionally, though less and less often, passed through.
They received him hospitably, but like the others he showed little reaction to what they did for him. He stayed only over one night, and then went off again, without even saying good-bye, in the aimless way of those shocked ones.
He had scarcely gone, it seemed, before people began feeling irritable. All the babies started crying. Then soon there were sore throats and running noses and aching heads and swollen eyes, and The Tribe was suddenly in all the throes of an epidemic.
This was all the more remarkable because throughout the preceding years the general health had been so unbelievably good. Ezra and some of the others had suffered with bad teeth; George, who was the oldest, had complained of various aching joints which he described under the old-fashioned term “rheumatism”; occasionally a scratch became infected. But even the common cold seemed to have vanished entirely, and there were only two diseases that remained active. One of these struck each of the children sooner or later; it was a great deal like measles in its symptoms, and doubtless it was measles, and that was what they called it, lacking any doctor to make them sure. The other began with a violent sore throat, but yielded so quickly to sulfa pills that no one really knew its full course. As long as there were sulfa pills in any drug store and they kept potent in spite of age, Ish saw no need to find out experimentally just how this sore throat would develop, if left untreated.
Why so few diseases remained—this seemed miraculous to people like George and Maurine, and they were inclined to be superstitious about the matter. They felt that God in some great anger had nearly wiped out the human race in one vast plague, and thus being satisfied, had seen fit to remove the minor plagues as a kind of compensation—just as, after Noah’s flood, he had set the rainbow in the sky as a sign that there would never again be another such flood.
To Ish, however, the explanation was plain. Since so large a proportion of the people had died, the chain of most infections had been broken, and many individual diseases had, you might say, “died” when their particular
