Earth Abides

Or else we lay him to rest among the tree-branches, and give him to the air. Then, if the black birds come streaming from far to pluck at him, that too is right, for they are the creatures of the air.

Or else we give him to the bright and hot cleanliness of fire.

Then we go about our life as before, and soon we forget, like the beasts. But this at least we have done, and when we shall no longer do it, then we shall no longer be men.

After the ceremony at the graves was over, they all walked back to the houses through the early sunshine. Ish began to wish that he could be alone. He did not feel it right, however, to leave Em at this time. Before long she must have sensed how he was feeling, and she took the initiative.

“Go on,” she said. “It will be better for you to take a walk, and be by yourself for a while.”

He decided to go. As he had feared, the funeral service had stirred him deeply. Some people sought company in time of grief, but he was one who rather should be alone. He did not worry about Em; she was stronger than he.

He took no lunch with him, because he did not feel hungry. In any case he could always step into a store, and pick out some cans. He did not strap his pistol-belt around him, though it was routine not to go far from the houses without some kind of weapon. At the last moment, however, he hesitated uncertainly, and then took the hammer from the mantelpiece.

The very fact that he took it troubled him a little. Why was it coming to loom so large in his thoughts? It was by no means his oldest possession, because scattered throughout the house were things which he had owned and could remember even from the time of his small boyhood. But still none of them was like the hammer. Perhaps it was because he associated it particularly with his survival in the first days. And yet he did not believe what the children seemed to believe about the hammer.

He walked away from the house, not caring in what direction he wandered, so long as he could be by himself. The hammer dangling from one hand was a nuisance. He began to feel an irritation against it. Was it really coming to be a superstition in his mind too, as it was in the minds of the children?

Well, why did he not simply lay the hammer down, and pick it up on his way home? Or pick it up tomorrow? Yet, he did not lay it down.

He realized that not merely the temporary inconvenience of the hammer was irritating him against it, but rather his feeling that it was coming to be a fixation with him. He made a sudden resolve to be done with it. He would not let his mind be imposed upon. As he had once before imagined himself doing, he would walk down to the Bay, and out on the old wharf, then he would throw the hammer violently, far out into the waves. It would sink through them deep into the soft mud beneath, and that would be the end. He walked on. Then the memory of Joey flooded over him again, and as he walked, he thought no more of the hammer.

After a while he came out of his sorrow, and realized that he was actually walking and carrying the hammer. Then he knew that he was not heading toward the Bay, in spite of his decision. He was walking south, not west.

“It would be a long walk to the Bay, and I am still not strong,” he said to himself. “There is no use walking so far just to get rid of this old hammer. I can throw it into any gully among the bushes, and I shall soon forget where I threw it.”

Then he knew again that his mind was trying to deceive him and that even if he threw the hammer into a gully he would not forget where he had thrown it and would not lose it in that way. He quit his pretense, for he knew that he did not want to be separated from the hammer and that it had come to mean a great deal to him in some strange way. At the same time he realized why he was walking south and where subconsciously his mind was already directing his feet.

He was following the broad street which led toward the University campus. He had not been there for a long time. As he walked, his sorrow was still with him, but in some way now it had ceased to be so overwhelming, as if his decision about the hammer had made some change.