meetings, more and more with every year, those who spoke and took action were young men. Ish, to be sure, presided. He sat facing all the others, and those wishing to speak rose and addressed him respectfully. He sat there, holding his hammer or balancing it beside him. When argument between two of the young men became too heated, Ish pounded with the hammer, and the young men were suddenly quiet and deferential. But if he himself spoke, though they listened intently, often they paid no attention to his ideas afterward.
So the years flowed—The Year 23 “Of the Mad Wolf,” the Year 24 “Of the Blackberries,” the Year 25 “Of the Long Rain.”
Then came the Year 26, and old George was with them no more. He had been painting on a ladder. Whether his heart stopped and he fell, or whether he fell accidentally and killed himself by falling, no one ever knew. But he was gone, and after his death the roofs were never in such good repair, and the trim was never painted. Maurine lived on, for a while, in the neat house where the pink-fringed bridge-lamps would not light and the console radio would not play and the scarves were crumpled on the tables. But she too was old, and she died before the year was out. So they called it the Year when George and Maurine Died.
And still they ran on—27, 28, 29, 30. It was hard to remember now the names, and how they came. Was the Good-Corn Year, before the Red-Sunset Year, and did that come after the Year When Evie Died?
Poor Evie! They buried her next to the others, and in her grave at least she was no different. All those years she had lived with them, and whether she had been happy no one knew, and whether they had done well to keep her living. Only once in all those years had she mattered much, and yet for that little time, when Charlie had come, she had seemed very important. Now that she was gone, the young people scarcely missed her; nevertheless the older ones remembered that her going marked still another broken link with the Old Times.
With Evie gone, only five of the original ones remained. Jean and Ish were the youngest of these five, and age showed least in them, although Ish limped more and more from his old wound. Molly complained of vague illnesses and wept often. Ezra coughed with his dry cough. Even Em walked with a less sure and regal grace. Yet actually they all enjoyed amazingly good health for people of their years, and their various decrepitudes sprang chiefly from approaching old age.
The Year 34—that was an important one! They had known for some time that there was another but smaller group of people living across north of the Bay, but in this year the surprise was that the other people sent a messenger with the proposal of a union. Ish made the young man keep distance, for he wanted no repetition of that business of Charlie. Having got all the information he could from the messenger, he called a meeting.
Ish sat with his hammer, for it was a time of great state. There was a hot argument. Reinforcing the fear of disease was a prejudice against strangers and all their strange ways. On the other hand, a kind of fascination in the very strangeness combatted the prejudice. Besides, there was the strong desire to strengthen the numbers of The Tribe, and particularly to obtain wives. For, in late years, fewer girls than boys had been born and some of the young men had nowhere to look. To Ish also there was the argument that the in-breeding of The Tribe might be dangerous, for now blood-relationship was universal and everyone had to marry his cousin.
But Ish himself, along with Ezra, opposed the union. In overwhelming fear of disease, and Jack and Ralph and Roger, the oldest of the younger men, remembered the Year 22, and supported Ish and Ezra. But the still younger men, especially the unmarried ones, clamored for the union, and Ish could see that the thought of the girls of that other tribe excited them.
Then Em spoke. Her hair was wholly gray now, but her calm voice held them. “I have said it before,” she said. “Life is not lived by denying life. Our sons and grandsons will need wives. Perhaps death will come also, but that too we must face.”
Not so much by what she said as by the spirit that flowed out from her, they all had courage. They voted without dissent to admit the others.
This time luck was with them, for the only epidemic was that The Others contracted measles, and soon were well again.
After that time there was always a division within The Tribe, as of two clans—The First Ones and The Others. When they intermarried, the children were of their father’s clan, although Ish had wondered whether mother-lineage might not prevail, as with many primitive people. But the old tradition of the Americans was too strong.
Then in the next year Ish realized more than ever that Em walked no longer with that regal grace; suddenly when he looked at her, he saw strange lines in her face, not the lines of old age, but the lines of pain. Behind the darkness of the cheeks there was not the glow of red but an ashy gray. Deep within him he felt chill and fear, and he knew that this also had come close to its end.
Sometimes, in those grim months that followed, he thought to himself, “This may be merely appendicitis, The pain is in that place. Why can I not operate? I can read the books. I could find out how it is done. One of the boys could manage the ether. At worst, I would only end the pain.”
But always he realized that it could not be—for his hands were no longer young and sure, and his courage too perhaps had grown weak, so that he dared not draw the knife-edge across the side of her whom he loved. So he knew that Em must face the future alone.
Before long, too, he knew that this was not appendicitis. As the sun swung southward again, she weakened and walked no more. He hunted in the ruinous drug stores, and found powders and syrups, so that at least she suffered little. After she had taken the medicine, she would sleep or lie quietly, smiling. Then after a while, when the pain again began to make her toss, he would think: “Perhaps I should make the dose larger still, and bring a finish to all pain.”
But he did not. For she, he knew, had always reached out toward life, and her courage would not fail.
So he sat long hours by the bed, holding her hand, and now and then they talked.
As it always had been, she was the one who comforted him, although she was the one who lay in pain and was going. Yes, he realized, she had been mother as well as wife.
“Don’t worry,” she said once, “about the children, I mean—and the grandchildren and all those that will come after. They will be happy, I think. At least, they may be as happy as they would have been otherwise. Don’t care too much about that civilization. They will go on!”
Had she known all along? He wondered. Had she known that he would fail? Had she sensed how it would be? Perhaps because she was a woman? Perhaps because within her veins ran a different strain of blood? And again he puzzled over what made greatness—either in man or woman.
Josey cared for the house now, and for her mother—Josey, herself a mother, straight and full-breasted and walking with easy grace. Of them all, she had grown to be most like Em.
The others came also to the bedside—the tall sons and the strong daughters and the grandchildren. Already the oldest grandsons were shooting up tall and on bodies of the granddaughters the fullness of their womanhood was showing.
Looking at them, as they passed the bedside, Ish knew that Em was right. “They will go on!” he thought. “The simple ones are also the strong ones. They will go on!”
At last one day he sat, again holding her hand. She was very weak, and then suddenly he knew that a third and dark presence was there beside them. She spoke no more and only once he felt a light flutter of her fingers within his hand.
“Oh, Mother of Nations!” he thought. “Her sons shall praise, and her daughters call her blessed!”
Then where there had been three, now there was only one, for Death had gone and she too. He sat there bowed and dry-eyed. That too was finished. They would bury her, Mother of Nations, and place no marker, for that was their custom. And, as it was in the beginning, since love first and sorrow with it came to the world, he sat with his dead. And he knew that greatness had passed from them.
Yet still the years flowed, and the sun swung from north of the mountain to south, past the Golden Gate, and back again. More years were carved into the rock.
One spring Molly died suddenly of what they took to be heart-failure. That same year a great tumor grew within Jean—swiftly, like a nightmare growth. There was no one who knew how to help her, and when she had died by her own hand, there was no one who blamed her.
“We are going, we are going!” thought Ish. “We Americans are old, and are dropping like last spring’s leaves.” So sometimes he was sad. Yet, as he walked along the hillside, he saw many children playing busily, and young men shouting to one another, and mothers nursing their babies—and little sadness, and much merriment.
