Earth Abides

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. 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.

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.