kinds of bacteria became extinct. Of course there would still be the diseases which might spring from the mere deterioration of the human body, such as heart-failure and cancer, and George’s “rheumatism,” and there might also be animal-borne infections, like tularemia and tick-fever. Also there could be, here and there, individual survivors who carried some disease in chronic form, but could still pass it on to others, just as someone of themselves had probably been responsible for the survival of “measles.”
The old man, everyone remembered too late, had blown his nose occasionally. Doubtless he had an infected sinus, and so had infected them all with what used to be called “die common cold,” although lately it had been so uncommon as to seem extinct.
In any case there was something almost comic in the way so many disgustingly healthy people were suddenly transformed into sneezers and coughers and hawkers and noseblowers.
Fortunately, the cold ran its course without complications, and in a few weeks everyone was ivell again. Throughout the rest of that year Ish lived in fear of another outbreak. There was a good chance, he knew, that the infection might be quiescent in one of them, and then break loose again when die short-time immunity of the others had worn off. But the long dry summer (it was particularly sunny that year) doubtless helped everyone to throw. off the last vestiges of the infection. That was great luck! Ish had been highly susceptible in the Old Times. He had sometimes said, not altogether as a joke, that the loss of the common cold compensated for the accompanying loss of civilization.
That autumn, however, the good luck ran out. No one ever knew exactly what happened, but three of the children fell ill with violent diarrhoea, and died. Most likely they had been wandering about at play in one of the near-by uninhabited houses, and had found some poison—ant-poison, perhaps. Tasting it curiously they had found it sweet, and shared it. Even when dead, civilization seemed to lay traps.
One of the children had been Ish’s own son. He had always worried, not about himself, but about Em, in such a case. Yet, though she moumed for the child, he saw that he had underestimated her strength. Her hold on life was so strong that, paradoxically, she could accept death also as a part of life. Both Molly and Jean, the other bereaved mothers, grieved hysterically, and were much more stricken.
That year two children were born, but nevertheless the total number of The Tribe for the first time was smaller at the end than at the beginning of a year. They called it the Year of the Deaths.
The Year 10 had no remarkable events, and no one was convinced as to what it should be called. But when they sat on the flat rock and Ish poised his hammer and began to cut with the chisel, for the first time some of the children spoke up, and they said it should be called the Year of the Fishing. This was because during this year they had discovered that the Bay was swarming with beautiful striped bass, and they had a great deal of fun going fishing and catching them. Besides supplying a very fine variety to the diet, the fishing had also been a real source of amusement to everybody. But in general, Ish was surprised how little actual necessity they had to seek amusement. In the kind of life that they lived there always seemed to be a good deal to do just to get food and to support oneself in comfort and there was in it a great deal of satisfaction which did not call for anything as definite as amusement.
In the Year 11, Molly and Jean bore children, but Molly’s died at birth. This was a great disappointment, because it was the first one that they had lost at childbirth, and in the course of the years the women had become very skillful at helping one another. They thought that perhaps this death was caused from Molly’s being old now.
When it came to naming the year, however, there was a dispute between old and young. The older ones thought it should be called the Year when Princess Died…. She had been ailing, an old dog, for some time. No one knew just how ancient she was, because she might have been anywhere from one year to three or four when she first picked up Ish. She had remained the same—always the princess, expecting the best of treatment, always unreliable, always ready to disappear on the trail of an imaginary rabbit just when you wanted her. But for all you might say against her, she had shown a very real character, and the older people could remember the time when she seemed very important along San Lupo Drive, almost another person.
By now there were dozens of dogs around. Nearly all of them must be children or grandchildren or great- grandchildren of Princess, who on various occasions had disappeared for a day or two and apparently met an old friend among the wild dogs or picked up a new one. As the result of a lot of inbreeding and out-breeding and cross-breeding, these present dogs were very little like beagles, but varied tremendously in size and color and temperament.
But to the children Princess had been an old and not very interesting dog of uncertain temper. They said that this should be the Year of the Wood-Carving, and after a momentary hesitation Ish supported them, even though Princess had meant more to him than to anyone else. She had taken him out of himself in those first bad days and let him free himself of fear, and her wild barking dash had taken him into the house where he found Em, when otherwise he might have hesitated and driven on. But also, he thought, Princess was over and done with, and only a link with the past, to be remembered by people who were growing older and older. Soon the younger children would not remember her at all. After a while she would be wholly forgotten. (Then the icy thought came to him: “So too I may grow old, and older, and be merely a link to the past, and be an unregarded old duffer, and then die and be soon forgotten—yet that is as it should be!”)
Then, as the others argued, he thought of the wood-carving. It had swept over them as a kind of fad or craze, like bubble-blowing or mah-jongg in the Old Times. Suddenly all the children were raiding lumber yards for good boards of soft sugar-pine, and were trying to carve running designs of figures of cattle or dogs or people. They worked awkwardly at first, but soon some of them grew skillful. Though, like all fads, it had fallen off, still the children worked at it on rainy days.
Ish had studied enough anthropology to know that any healthy people should have creative outlets, and he was worried that The Tribe had not developed artistically but was still living under the shadow of the past, listening to old records on the wind-up phonographs and looking at old picture books. Accordingly he had been pleased at the fad for wood-carving.
At a pause in the argument he spoke up, supporting the children. So it came to be known as the Year of the Wood-Carving, and in Ish’s mind the Year 11 had a symbolic value, as a breaking with the past and a turning to the future. Yet the naming was a small matter, and he was not sure that he should attach any significance to it.
In the Year 12, Jean lost a child in childbirth, but Em made up for it by bearing the first pair of twins, whom they called Joseph and Josephine, or more commonly, Joey and Josey. So this was the Year of the Twins.
The Year 13 saw the birth of two children who both lived. It was a quiet and comfortable year, with nothing to mark it especially. So, for lack of anything better, they merely called it the Good Year.
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
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 wind-up 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.
