did to make himself feel more comfortable, although it had no real meaning?
Yes, he reluctantly concluded, this matter of the children’s beliefs was extremely serious. In the Old Times the beliefs held by the children of any family or small group of families might be momentous enough, but still those children on growing up would come into contact with other beliefs and make adjustments. Besides, there had been a great, even overwhelming, mass of tradition—the tradition of Christianity, or of Western civilization, or of Indo- European folkways, or of Anglo-American culture. Call it what you wished, it was still so tremendous that you might say it was omnipotent, for good or bad absorbing the individual.
But now their little community had lost much of the tradition. Part of it had been lost because no seven survivors (Evie did not count) could preserve and transmit all of it. Part had been lost because for so long a time there had been no big children to pass on the tradition to the small ones. The oldest of the younger generation had been taught games by their parents, not by older comrades. The community should therefore be plastic to an unprecedented degree. This was an opportunity, but also a responsibility—and a danger.
It would be a danger—and he shuddered at the thought—if any evil force, such as a demagogue, should begin to work.
To be sure, he recollected wryly, he had not found the children particularly plastic as regards learning to read! Yet that might be only that a stronger force—the whole environment—was already working against his efforts.
But take now again this matter of superstition. Perhaps this all had grown up because, as it happened, there was no one in The Tribe who was creatively religious. Perhaps there was some kind of vacuum in the childish mind, and it had to be filled up with supernatural beliefs. Perhaps all this represented some kind of subconscious straining toward an explanation of the basis of life itself.
Years ago they had organized those church services, and then discontinued them as meaningless. That discontinuance might have been a mistake.
Now, more certainly even than before, he knew that he had the opportunity to be the founder of a religion for a whole people. What he told the children in school, they would probably believe. He could insure their memory of it by mere insistence and iteration. He could tell them that the Lord God created the world in six days, and found it good. They would believe. He could tell them a local Indian legend that the world was the work of Old Man Coyote. They would believe.
Yet what could he really tell them in honesty? He might tell them any one of half a dozen theories of cosmogony which he remembered from his old studies. Probably they would believe these too, although their complications did not make for quite as good a story as one of those others.
Actually, no matter what he said, it might easily be twisted and made into some kind of religion. Again, as years before, he revolted from the idea, for he treasured the honesty of his own skepticism.
“It’s better,” he thought in words, remembering some bit of reading, “to have no opinion of God at all than to have one that is unworthy of Him.”
He lighted another cigarette, and settled back into the chair again… Yet this matter of the vacuum! It worried him. Unless it could be positively filled, his own descendants at the third or fourth generation might be practicing primitive rites of incantation, trembling in terror of witchcraft, and experimenting with ritualistic cannibalism. They might believe in voodoo, in shamanism, in taboo…!
He started, almost guiltily. Yes, already there were beliefs in The Tribe which approached the intensity of taboo, and he himself was inadvertently their chief author.
There was the matter of Evie, for instance. He and Em and Ezra had talked it over long ago. They wanted no half-witted children of Evie’s—to be a care and drag. So they had made her, at least for the boys, a kind of untouchable. Evie, with her blond hair and startled blue eyes, was perhaps the best-looking girl of them all. But Ish was sure that none of the boys had even seriously considered her. Probably they had no specific idea that anything would happen to them if they did, but such action was merely outside their scope of imagination. The prohibition was stronger than law. Such a one you could only call taboo.
Again, there was all the allied matter of fidelity. Always fearing the disruption of quarrels arising from jealousy, the older men had not so much taught marital fidelity as assumed it. Young people had been married at the earliest possible moment. Ezra’s bigamy, having always been present, was not questioned. Although Ish did not doubt the utility of this practice for their particular situation, still its acceptance as a matter of faith rather than of reason seemed to come close to taboo. The first violation—and there would surely be one—might bring a tremendous shock.
A third possible example of taboo, though a minor matter perhaps, was the turning of the University Library into a sacrosanct building. Once, when the oldest boys were youngsters, Ish had gone with them on a long walk which had taken them to the campus. While he was napping, two of them had worked loose a board which, long before, he had nailed across the broken window; they had gone into the stacks, and started throwing books onto the floor. Horror-stricken with a sense of the violation of that great treasure house, Ish had followed them. He had been ashamed of himself later, but at the moment he had been outraged beyond reason and had beaten the boys. The very unreasoning quality of his rage and horror must have impressed them much more than the beating. They had certainly passed this impression on to the younger children. The Library had been safe, and Ish had been pleased. But this might also be called an example of taboo, and now he wondered.
There was a fourth one too, of course—but this brought him back to where he had started. He got out of the chair and went to the mantelpiece.
The hammer was there, as he himself had replaced it. He had not asked any child to take it back, not even Joey. He had preferred not to raise the issue again.
There it stood, balanced on its four-pound head of dull, rust-pitted steel. The hammer had been with him a long time. He had found it just before the rattlesnake had struck him, and so it might be called his oldest friend. It had been with him longer than Em or Ezra.
He looked at it curiously, considering it carefully and selfconsciously. The handle was actually in bad shape. It had weathered from lying so long in the open, and even before the hammer had been left to lie, the handle had apparently been banged accidentally against a rock and cracked a little. What was the wood? He really did not know. Ash or hickory, he supposed. Hickory, most likely.
The simplest thing, he concluded impetuously, would be to get rid of the hammer. He could throw it into the Bay. No, he reconsidered, that would be merely treating the symptom, not the disease. With the hammer removed, the children’s tendency to superstition would still remain, and would merely fix upon something else, and perhaps take some more sinister form.
He thought of destroying the hammer, as a symbolical lesson to the children that it had no strength in itself. But he remembered that he did not actually have the power to destroy it. The handle he could burn easily, but the steel head was next to indestructible by any means at his disposal. Even if he found a carboy of acid and dissolved the steel in it, to go to so much trouble would make the children think that the hammer must really have possessed some deep-seated power.
So he looked at the hammer with new interest, as something which was coming to have a life and power of its own. Yes, it had the qualities which went toward the making of a good symbol—permanence, entity, strength. Its phallic suggestion was obvious. Curiously, as he thought now, he had never named it, though men were likely to give names to weapons, which also were symbols of power—Madelon and Brown Bess and Killdeer and Excalibur. Hammers had been signs of godhead before this; Thor had carried a hammer, probably other gods too. Among kings there had been that old Frankish one who drove back the Saracens—Martel, they had called him, Charles of the Hammer!
Thus, for one reason or another, when the children reassembled in school the next morning, Ish said nothing about superstition. It would be better, he told himself, to bide his time a little, to observe more closely for a day or two, or a week. Most of all, he wished to learn more about Joey.
As the result of this observation, over a period of some weeks, Ish came to the conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, that Joey had many of the qualities of a first-class brat. He had passed his tenth birthday during the summer. His precocity was sometimes painful; he was, in the old phrase, “too big for his britches.” In age, he was half way between Walt and Weston, who were twelve, and Chris, who was eight. But Joey’s precocity put him naturally into the company of the two older boys, and he and the younger one had nothing in common. This must be hard on Joey, Ish concluded, because he was always overreaching to attain the physical power of boys two years older and naturally stronger as well. Josey, his own twin, he neglected also, for he was at a stage when boys had
