One day Ezra came to him, saying: “You should take another wife.” Ish looked at him with questioning eyes. “No,” said Ezra, “I am too old. You are younger. There is a young woman of The Others, and no man to marry her. Except for an old man, it is better not to be alone. And there should be more children.”
He felt no love, but he took her. She comforted him in the long nights, for he was still a man in his strength. She bore him children, though the children seemed always a little strange to him—scarcely his, because they were not also Em’s.
More years were carved in the rock. Except for Ish and Ezra, all the Americans now were gone, and Ezra was a little dried-up wrinkled man who coughed and grew thinner and thinner. Ish himself was wholly gray-haired now. Though he was not heavy, his paunch stuck out, and he was thin-legged in the manner of old men. His side hurt him where the mountain-lion had clawed him years back; so he walked little. Yet still his young wife bore him a child in the Year 42. He was not greatly interested in that child, and also now he had great-grandchildren.
On the day when the Year 43 had ended, Ish did not feel like walking as far as the flat rock where they carved the numerals, and Ezra was too frail. So they put off carving the date in the rock or giving a name. They said to each other now and then that really they must do it, or else arrange with some of the younger men to carve the numerals, and sometimes also the younger men and even the children talked of it. But in a way that such things go, once it had been put off, still it was put off again. “Today is rainy,” or “It is too cold,” or “We are going fishing, and shall do it later.” So the numerals were not carved, and the name was not given, and life went on with no one caring greatly. After that, no one knew how many years passed.
Now no more children were born to Ish’s young wife. Then one day she came to him with a younger man, and the two asked, respectfully, that Ish should give her to that one.
Then at last Ish realized that in this his curious life, he had now come close to the last stage of all. More and more often, after that, he and Ezra sat together as two old men.
There was nothing strange that two old men should sit together and talk, but what was strange here was that there were no other old people at all. Elsewhere everything was youth, at least by comparison. There were births and there were deaths, but always there were more births than deaths, and because everyone was youthful, there was much laughter.
As the quick years passed and the two old men sat on the hillside in the sun, they began to talk more and more about what had happened long ago. There was little that anyone—they, at least—could talk about as far as these years now were concerned. Some years were called good years and some were called bad years, but there was not much difference. So chiefly the two old men talked about things of long ago, and occasionally they speculated about life.
Often, when they talked, Ish realized that there was still wisdom and help in Ezra.
“A tribe is like a child,” he said once, in that thin piping old-man’s voice, which every day seemed more like a bird’s—and then he coughed. When he recovered, he spoke again, “Yes, a tribe is like a child. You can show it the way by which it should grow up, and perhaps you can direct it a little, but in the end the child will go his own way, and so will the tribe.”
“Yes,” he said again on some other day, “time makes all things clear. Everything seems plainer to me now than it once did, and if I should live for a hundred years more, perhaps everything that has happened so far would seem very plain and simple.”
Often they talked of the other Americans, those who now were gone. They laughed, remembering good old George, and Maurine with her fine radio that would never play. They smiled when they recalled Jean, and her refusal to go to church.
“Yes,” said Ezra, “it is all clearer now with time. Why each of them survived the Great Disaster—that I still do not know. But I think I can see why each of them survived the shock that came afterwards, when so many went under. George and Maurine, and perhaps Molly too, they lived on and did not go crazy because they were stolid and had no imagination. And Jean survived because she had her temper and fought back at life; and I, because I went out from myself and shared the lives of other people. And you and Em…”
But here Ezra paused, so that Ish himself could speak.
“Yes,” said Ish, “you are right, I think…. And I, I could live because I stood at one side and watched what was happening. And as for Em…”
There he too paused, and Ezra spoke again.
“Well, as we were, so The Tribe will be. It will not be brilliant because we were not like that. Perhaps the brilliant ones were not suited to survive…. But as for Em, there is no need to explain, for we know that she was the strongest of us all. Yes, we needed many things. We needed George and his carpentry, and we needed your foresight, and perhaps we needed my knack of making one person work better with another, even though I did little by myself. But most of all, I think, we needed Em, for she gave us courage, and without courage there is only a slow dying, not life.”
Almost while they sat there, it seemed to Ish, a fast-growing tree sprang up on the hillside below them, and grew until it cut off the view across the Bay, where the rust-red towers of the great bridge still stood high. And then after a while the tree seemed to sicken and die and fall. Again, from where he liked to sit in the sun on the hillside, he could look out and see the bridge. And once, as he looked, there was great fire raging in the ruinous city beyond the Bay, and he remembered that far, far back—even before he had been born—that city had burned before. Now it burned for a week, with the dry north wind driving the flames; there was no one to put it out, and no one even to care whether it burned. When the flames died down, nothing was left to burn.
There came a time when even talking seemed a labor. So mostly now Ish merely sat comfortably in the sun, and beside him sat an even older man who coughed and grew thinner. It was hard to tell just how the days passed and how they ran into weeks, and even the years seemed to flow with a man’s scarcely noticing them. Yet Ezra remained, and sometimes Ish thought to himself, “Though he coughs and coughs and grows thinner, yet he will outlive me.”
But now, since even talking was a labor, the mind turned inward on itself, and Ish thought of all this strange life. What was the difference in the end? Even if there had been no Great Disaster, he would now be a very old man. Now doubtless, if it had not happened otherwise, he would be Professor Emeritus, puttering around, taking some books out of the Library and intending to do some research, a little of a nuisance to the younger men in their fifties and sixties who now ran the Department—though they might say loyally to the graduate students, “That’s Professor Williams—a great scholar, once. We’re very proud of him.”
Now the Old Times were deeper buried than Nineveh or Mohenjodaro. He himself had seen everything crash and go under. Yet curiously, too, all that crash had not been able to destroy his personality. He was still the same person he would have been as Professor Emeritus, even though now the shadows were closing in on his mind while he sat on a lonely hillside as the dying patriarch of a primitive tribe.
At some time in those years something else strange began to happen. The younger men had always come to Ish for advice, but now—even though the shadows were closing in on his mind—they began to come in a different way. Whether he sat on the hillside in the sun, or whether, during rain and fog, he sat in the house, still they began to come to him bearing little gifts—a handful of ripe berries of which he was fond, or a bright stone or piece of colored glass to flash in the sun. Ish did not care for the glass or stones, even though the stones were sometimes sapphires or emeralds taken from a jewelry store, but he appreciated the gifts because he realized that the young men were giving him things by which they themselves would be pleased.
Having given him something, they would formally ask a question, while he sat holding his hammer. Sometimes they asked about the weather, and then Ish was glad to answer. He could still look at his father’s barometer, and so he could often say—what the young men could not know—whether the low clouds would soon vanish before the sun’s heat or they indicated an approaching storm.
But sometimes they asked him other questions—as, for instance, in which direction they should go for good hunting. Then Ish did not wish to answer, for he knew nothing of such matters. But when he did not answer, the young men were displeased, and then they would pinch him roughly. Because he was in pain he answered them, even though he knew nothing. He would cry out, “Go south!” or “Go beyond the hills!” Then the young men were pleased and went off. Ish sometimes feared that they would come back and pinch him because they had not found good hunting, but they never did.
During those years, there were days when he thought clearly, and other days when a fog seemed to hang in all the corners of his brain. But one day when they came to ask him a question and he was clear-minded, he realized that he must have become a god, or at least an oracle by which a god spoke. Then he remembered that
