tutelaries, numerous dogs, some cats, and even one pet parrot that had been taught some scraps of Emily Dickinson but no T. S. Eliot.
In the lowlands, where many millions had lived-and died-Molly expected to encounter suburbs that had become charnel houses stacked with corpses, the air thick with the stench of decomposition. But they saw not one cadaver, and the air was sweet.
Each of the other caravans had its own destination, and in time the Black Lake group proceeded on its own again, all the way to the Pacific coast and Newport Beach, where two of the tutelaries had family about which they were concerned.
Like the children of the mountains, the children of the coast had survived. The only adults were those who had rescued and protected the young. Many were parents whose sense of responsibility extended beyond their own families.
The residents of the coast welcomed newcomers. There were empty cities to be filled, a vast loneliness of streets and parks and malls and suburbs.
That Friday evening, Molly walked hand in hand with Neil to the beach and stood near the surf line to watch the sunset. A few ships lay broken along the shoreline, but none were visible on the sea.
What of China? Europe? England? Empires gone. And yet Earth abides.
Knowing the comfort that she took from the poet, Neil quoted two lines of Eliot: ' 'Between the conception and the creation.' '
She continued: ' 'Between the emotion and the response.' '
' 'Falls the Shadow,' ' he finished.
The sun painted a benediction on the western sky, first gold and orange, then fiery red, then purple, which ushered in, but only for a few hours, the night.
66
SHE AND NEIL, VIRGIL, TWO OTHER DOGS, AND EIGHT children took for themselves an abandoned house on a bluff above the sea.
In the early weeks of this new life, they had little time for contemplation, for puzzling out what had happened to them and to the world.
Supermarkets and warehouses stocked with canned food would last the reduced population for years, though not forever. Strategies for long-term survival had to be devised, and much hard work had to be done to implement those plans.
Remarkably (or perhaps not), the only adult survivors, the tutelaries, proved to be a diverse lot with a surprising breadth and depth of knowledge and experience for such a small number. They were doctors, dentists, nurses, engineers, architects, carpenters, skilled mechanics? When a complete directory was compiled of those living on this immediate section of the coast, it seemed as though every surviving adult had been chosen not just to save the children but for the talents he or she could bring to this larger purpose.
In mere days, selected public gathering places had electricity provided by portable generators. The grand scheme promised electrical service to some neighborhoods within a year.
Medical clinics were established. Drugs were scavenged from pharmacies, to be rationed until a simple pharmaceutical industry could be reestablished.
The millions of dead could not be found, nor any smallest example of the alien ecology that had flourished so briefly.
For a long time, the stars would be regarded with suspicion, and perhaps for even longer, dogs would be treated less like pets than like family.
Every day, in a thousand small ways, civilization was pulled back from the brink.
In October of that year, hardly a month after Armageddon, Molly became a teacher and discovered greater joy in this work than she had ever known on the other side of books.
Once a priest, Neil had left the Church when he reported his rector for child molestation and discovered that his bishop lacked the wisdom, the will, and the strength of faith to purge the offender from the priesthood. Here along the coast, he first served this new community as a first-rate cabinetmaker, but by Christmas he found himself with a congregation again.
Molly had met him on the last day of his priesthood. On an afternoon when her heart had been troubled, she'd gone into a church just to sit, to think. Eventually she'd gone forward in the deserted nave to light a votive candle in her mother's memory. Quietly saying goodbye to his church, Neil had been standing in the chancel, in the complicated geometry of colorful light from a stained-glass window. His face had been so perfect, his eyes so kind, that she had mistaken him for a statue of St. John the Divine, until he moved.
The New Year came and was marked by only quiet celebrations in respect of the dead, but there was pleasure in life, more by the day.
Through the winter and into the spring, Molly continued to be intrigued with the healthy psychology of the children. They had not forgotten their loved ones, and spoke of them often, but they seemed to be under a dispensation from grief. And from nightmares. They did remember the terrible things they had witnessed, but almost as if they had seen them in movies. More so than the adults, they were able to live in the moment, at the still point of the turning world, where the dance of life occurred.
In April, Molly learned that she was pregnant.
67
ON A WARM DAY IN JULY, IN HER FOURTH MONTH with child, when school was in recess until September, Molly sat on her patio overlooking the sea, in the shade of a whispering phoenix palm.
On the glass-top table before her was one of her mother's books, which the world had forgotten even before the world had ended, but which she treasured and reread from time to time.
She had set the book aside after discovering a reference to Noah and the ark.
When Neil appeared with glasses of iced tea on a tray, she said, ' 'The flood, the ark, the animals loaded two by two, all that Old Testament bullshit
He raised an eyebrow.
'I'm quoting Render in the lavatory at the tavern. But Neil? besides sin and selfishness and stone idols and that sort of thing, does the story of Noah suggest any special reason that the world was wiped clean?'
Settling into a chair with his own glass of tea and a biography of W. B. Yeats, he said, 'In fact, yes. A tolerance of murder.'
She wasn't sure she understood.
'Most people had become too tolerant of murder,' he elaborated, 'punished it too lightly, even excused it when it was in the service of Utopian visions. Why?'
'There's a reference in Mother's book.' She indicated the volume on the table. 'I was just wondering.'
He sipped his tea and lost himself in the life of Yeats.
For a time, Molly stared at the sea.
Hitler killed more than twenty million. Stalin fifty million. Mao Tse-tung as many as a hundred million. More recently, two million had been murdered in Sudan, another two million in Rwanda. The list of holocausts went on and on.
In the name of religion or political justice, in the pursuit of a better world through one ideology or another, mass graves had been filled, and who among the murderers had ever been punished, aside from a few Nazis convicted at the Nuremberg trials more than half a century ago?
No clouds were gathered over the sea. Blue met blue at a nearly invisible horizon.
Every day in the old world, so recently vanished, the news had been full of stories of suicide bombers, street-gang shootings, men who killed their pregnant wives, mothers who drowned their children, teenagers who
