But take now again this matter of superstition. Perhaps this all had grown up because, as it happened, there was no one in The Tribe who was creatively religious. Perhaps there was some kind of vacuum in the childish mind, and it had to be filled up with supernatural beliefs. Perhaps all this represented some kind of subconscious straining toward an explanation of the basis of life itself.
Years ago they had organized those church services, and then discontinued them as meaningless. That discontinuance might have been a mistake.
Now, more certainly even than before, he knew that he had the opportunity to be the founder of a religion for a whole people. What he told the children in school, they would probably believe. He could insure their memory of it by mere insistence and iteration. He could tell them that the Lord God created the world in six days, and found it good. They would believe. He could tell them a local Indian legend that the world was the work of Old Man Coyote. They would believe.
Yet what could he really tell them in honesty? He might tell them any one of half a dozen theories of cosmogony which he remembered from his old studies. Probably they would believe these too, although their complications did not make for quite as good a story as one of those others.
Actually, no matter what he said, it might easily be twisted and made into some kind of religion. Again, as years before, he revolted from the idea, for he treasured the honesty of his own skepticism.
"It's better," he thought in words, remembering some bit of reading, "to have no opinion of God at all than to have one that is unworthy of Him."
He lighted another cigarette, and settled back into the chair again... Yet this matter of the vacuum! It worried him. Unless it could be positively filled, his own descendants at the third or fourth generation might be practicing primitive rites of incantation, trembling in terror of witchcraft, and experimenting with ritualistic cannibalism. They might believe in voodoo, in shamanism, in taboo...!
He started, almost guiltily. Yes, already there were beliefs in The Tribe which approached the intensity of taboo, and he himself was inadvertently their chief author.
There was the matter of Evie, for instance. He and Em and Ezra had talked it over long ago. They wanted no half-witted children of Evie's—to be a care and drag. So they had made her, at least for the boys, a kind of untouchable. Evie, with her blond hair and startled blue eyes, was perhaps the best-looking girl of them all. But Ish was sure that none of the boys had even seriously considered her. Probably they had no specific idea that anything would happen to them if they did, but such action was merely outside their scope of imagination. The prohibition was stronger than law. Such a one you could only call taboo.
Again, there was all the allied matter of fidelity. Always fearing the disruption of quarrels arising from jealousy, the older men had not so much taught marital fidelity as assumed it. Young people had been married at the earliest possible moment. Ezra's bigamy, having always been present, was not questioned. Although Ish did not doubt the utility of this practice for their particular situation, still its acceptance as a matter of faith rather than of reason seemed to come close to taboo. The first violation—and there would surely be one—might bring a tremendous shock.
A third possible example of taboo, though a minor matter perhaps, was the turning of the University Library into a sacrosanct building. Once, when the oldest boys were youngsters, Ish had gone with them on a long walk which had taken them to the campus. While he was napping, two of them had worked loose a board which, long before, he had nailed across the broken window; they had gone into the stacks, and started throwing books onto the floor. Horror-stricken with a sense of the violation of that great treasure house, Ish had followed them. He had been ashamed of himself later, but at the moment he had been outraged beyond reason and had beaten the boys. The very unreasoning quality of his rage and horror must have impressed them much more than the beating. They had certainly passed this impression on to the younger children. The Library had been safe, and Ish had been pleased. But this might also be called an example of taboo, and now he wondered.
There was a fourth one too, of course—but this brought him back to where he had started. He got out of the chair and went to the mantelpiece.
The hammer was there, as he himself had replaced it. He had not asked any child to take it back, not even Joey. He had preferred not to raise the issue again.
There it stood, balanced on its four-pound head of dull, rust-pitted steel. The hammer had been with him a long time. He had found it just before the rattlesnake had struck him, and so it might be called his oldest friend. It had been with him longer than Em or Ezra.
He looked at it curiously, considering it carefully and self-consciously. The handle was actually in bad shape. It had weathered from lying so long in the open, and even before the hammer had been left to lie, the handle had apparently been banged accidentally against a rock and cracked a little. What was the wood? He really did not know. Ash or hickory, he supposed. Hickory, most likely.
The simplest thing, he concluded impetuously, would be to get rid of the hammer. He could throw it into the Bay. No, he reconsidered, that would be merely treating the symptom, not the disease. With the hammer removed, the children's tendency to superstition would still remain, and would merely fix upon something else, and perhaps take some more sinister form.
He thought of destroying the hammer, as a symbolical lesson to the children that it had no strength in itself. But he remembered that he did not actually have the power to destroy it. The handle he could burn easily, but the steel head was next to indestructible by any means at his disposal. Even if he found a carboy of acid and dissolved the steel in it, to go to so much trouble would make the children think that the hammer must really have possessed some deep-seated power.
So he looked at the hammer with new interest, as something which was coming to have a life and power of its own. Yes, it had the qualities which went toward the making of a good symbol—permanence, entity, strength. Its phallic suggestion was obvious. Curiously, as he thought now, he had never named it, though men were likely to give names to weapons, which also were symbols of power—Madelon and Brown Bess and Killdeer and Excalibur. Hammers had been signs of godhead before this; Thor had carried a hammer, probably other gods too. Among kings there had been that old Frankish one who drove back the Saracens—Martel, they had called him, Charles of the Hammer! Ish of the Hammer!
Thus, for one reason or another, when the children reassembled in school the next morning, Ish said nothing about superstition. It would be better, he told himself, to bide his time a little, to observe more closely for a day or two, or a week. Most of all, he wished to learn more about Joey.
As the result of this observation, over a period of some weeks, Ish came to the conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, that Joey had many of the qualities of a first-class brat. He had passed his tenth birthday during the summer. His precocity was sometimes painful; he was, in the old phrase, "too big for his britches." In age, he was half way between Walt and Weston, who were twelve, and Chris, who was eight. But Joey's precocity put him naturally into the company of the two older boys, and he and the younger one had nothing in common. This must be hard on Joey, Ish concluded, because he was always overreaching to attain the physical power of boys two years older and naturally stronger as well. Josey, his own twin, he neglected also, for he was at a stage when boys had no interest in girls, and Josey, besides, was not nearly so bright as he.
There was thus, Ish saw, always a kind of strain about what Joey was doing or trying to do. Again and again Ish thought of that little incident in which the other children had been afraid to pick up the hammer, but had acquiesced in Joey's doing something that they themselves did not dare to do. Obviously, in their minds, there was some kind of power inherent in Joey. Ish thought far back to the times of his studies, and he remembered the wide-spread belief that certain members of a tribe had a special power within them. Mana, the anthropologists had called it. Perhaps the
children believed that Joey had mana; possibly Joey himself believed it.
Yet, though Ish recognized Joey's limitations and disabilities and bad qualities, still he kept his thought centered more on Joey than on any of the others. Joey held the hope for the future. Only by the power of intelligence, Ish believed firmly, had mankind ever risen to civilization, and only by further exercise of that same power, would mankind ever rise again. And Joey possessed intelligence. Possibly also he possessed that other power. Mana might be a fallacy of simple minds, but even the most civilized peoples had realized that certain individuals carried within them some strange power that went for leadership. Had anyone ever explained why certain men became leaders, and others, though they seemed better qualified, did not?
How much of all this did Joey realize? Many times Ish asked himself the question, but he could not as yet answer it. Yet more and more, as the summer progressed, he felt that in Joey lay the hope of the future.
All mysticism aside! All idea of mana discounted! Still, only Joey could keep the light burning through this dark time. Only he could store up and transmit the great tradition of mankind!
But mere acquisition of knowledge was not all in which Joey excelled. Even though he was only ten, he was beginning to branch out for himself, to experiment, to discover things on his own. Indeed, that was the way he had really taught himself to read in the beginning. To be sure, all this development was still at a childish level.
There was that matter of the jig-saw puzzles, for instance. The children had developed a sudden craze for the puzzles, and had set about rifling some of the stores. Ish had watched them at their play, and at first Joey had not been as good as the others. He seemed to lack some basic spatial sense. Sometimes he tried to join pieces which obviously did not fit, and the others indignantly told him so. Joey had been irked at his inferiority, and for a while had withdrawn from the game.
Then Joey had suddenly got a new idea of how to go about it. He collected himself a number of pieces bearing the same shade of yellow, and thus was able to put them together more rapidly and make better progress than the other children.
When he proudly displayed what he had done, the others were impressed. But even after he had explained his system, they did not want to adopt it.
"What's the use anyway!" Weston had argued. "We might be able to do it faster your way, but it wouldn't be any more fun, and nobody cares how soon we get this finished."
Betty had agreed. "Yes, it's no fun just going through all the work, picking up the yellow pieces and the blue pieces and the red pieces, and putting them in different places!"
Joey, Ish noticed, could not put up a good argument for his method, and yet Ish could understand his motives. In the first place, granted there was no need to finish the puzzle in a hurry, still to work efficiently was just as natural and as pleasant for Joey as not to crawl when he could walk. Besides, he had the competitive spirit, the old-time drive, so characteristic of Americans, for getting to the front. Lacking a native gift for distinguishing shapes, really as much a physical endowment as having strong muscles, he had seen the way to take the lead by intellectual means. He had "used his head," as they once had liked to say.
Though the "discovery" was at all remarkable only because made by so young a child, still Ish was pleased to note that it was the discovery of one phase of classification, that basic tool of man's progress. Logic rested upon classification; language, too—by its nouns and verbs grouping things and actions into neat workable compartments. Only by his discovery of classification had man been able to impose some workable degree of order upon the infinite apparent disorder of the natural world.
Ish saw Joey's experimental mind also at work with language. To him language was not merely a practical matter, an unconscious implement used to express wants and feelings. Language to him was also a wonderful plaything. He had, for instance, a sense of puns and of rhymes, although none of the other children showed much interest in such things. He liked riddles.
One day Ish heard him asking a riddle of the other children. "I made this one up myself," Joey was saying proudly. "Why are a man, a bull, a fish, and a snake all alike?"
The other children were not much interested.
"Because they all eat things," Betty suggested languidly.
"That's too simple," said Joey. "Everything eats things. Birds eat things too."
They made one or two other suggestions, and then there came up a suggestion to run off and do something else. Joey saw that he was in immediate danger of losing his audience; to prevent complete anticlimax, he had to come out with his own answer. "Why, they're all alike because not one of them can fly!"
At the moment Ish was not impressed with the riddle, but as he thought about it afterwards he felt that it was a highly developed and curious kind of ten-year-old mind which could evolve the idea of negative likeness. And into Ish's mind popped suddenly an old definition: "Genius is the capacity for seeing what is not there." Of course, like every other definition of genius, that one could be shot to pieces also, because it obviously included the madman, as well as the genius. Yet there might be something in it, too; the great thinkers of the world must necessarily have made their reputations by sensing what was not there and looking for it and discovering it, but the first requisite for making the discovery, unless it depended upon mere luck, was the realization that something unseen was there to be discovered, something lacking in the picture.
This was Joey's summer for experiment apparently, and one day he came home reeling strangely and with a strong smell of liquor on his breath. The story came out that he, along with Walt and Weston, had visited one of the liquor-stores in the nearest business district. This was a problem that Ish had often considered. He had once even gone into one of the stores and started opening and emptying the bottles. After an hour's work, however, he had found that he had made too little progress; the project was obviously impossible, and the children must take their chances with an unlimited liquor supply. And yet, when he thought about it, the situation for his children was not so different from that which he himself had experienced. In those days his father had always had a shelf holding a bottle or two of whiskey and brandy and sherry, and there would have been nothing to stop Ish from carrying on a clandestine experiment of his own. He had not, and so also his own children and grandchildren apparently were not greatly attracted by the unlimited stores available to them. In fact, drunkenness had never been a problem in the community at all. Perhaps the simpler life they were leading took away the need for such stimulation, or perhaps the mere fact that alcohol, like air, was free to everyone, removed the lure of difficulty which had previously surrounded it.
As for Joey, Ish was pleased to see that the little fellow had still been sufficiently clever to drink only a small amount—not enough to make him really sick or even to make him pass out. He had obviously again been showing off before the older boys, and had again succeeded in impressing them; they had come home in worse shape than he.
Nevertheless Joey was definitely tipsy, and made no objection to being put immediately to bed. Ish took the opportunity to sit at the bedside, and to deliver a lecture on the dangers of too much and too reckless experimentation, particularly if it was designed chiefly to show off before others. He looked down at the small face in the bed, with its big eyes. There was intelligence in the eyes, and he knew that in spite of being tipsy, Joey was comprehending. There was also sympathy in the eyes, as if they were again saying to Ish, "We understand together. We both know things. We are not like these others."
In a sudden flood of affection for his youngest son, Ish reached down and took one of the little hands in his own. He saw an answering look of affection come into the big eyes, and suddenly Ish knew that behind all the boyish bumptiousness, Joey was really a timid, sensitive child, just as he himself had once been. In fact, Joey's brashness was only the expression of timidity gone too far the other way.
"Joey, boy," he said impulsively, "why do you
keep straining so hard? Weston and Walt—they're two years older than you are. Why don't you go easier? In ten years—twenty years—you'll be away ahead of anything they can do."
He saw the boy smile slightly, happily. But Ish knew that the happiness was merely at a new-found sympathy with his father, not at an impression that the words might have made. Any child, even a precocious one like Joey, lived in the present; to talk of ten years away was merely, for a child, to talk of centuries.
Ish looked at the little face again, and he saw the eyes roll slightly outward with drunkenness and sleepiness, and there was incongruity in the two. Yet Ish felt this love for his son welling up more strongly than ever within him. "This one, this one," he thought, "is the Child of the Blessing! This one will carry on!"
He saw the eyes lose focus, and the eyelids drop shut, and so he spoke no more, but he sat there by the bed, holding the hand in his own. Then, perhaps because sleep is so like death, a horrible fear swept in upon him. "Hostages to fortune!" he thought. When a man loved greatly, he laid himself open. He himself had had good luck. He had loved greatly with Em, and now, again perhaps, with Joey. With Em he had had the luck—but then one could never even think of Em in terms of death. She was the stronger. With Joey it was different. Holding the hand, he could feel the faint throb of the pulse in the wrist, and it seemed very close to the surface. A mere scratch would be enough. What were the chances for a little boy, not strong of body, driven on always by too powerful a mind?
Yet, this might be the one who could shape the whole future. He had only to grow in stature and in mind, to gain wisdom with the years, and to live.
Between the plan and the fulfillment lies always the hazard. Heart-beat flutters, knife flashes, horse stumbles, cancer grows, more subtle foes invade....
Then they sit around the fire at the cave-mouth, and say, "What shall we do? Now that he is no longer here to lead us!" Or, while the great bell tolls, they gather in the courtyard, and say, "It should not have happened so. Who is there now to give us counsel?" Or they meet at the street-corner, and say sadly, "Why did it have to be this way? Now there is no one to take his place."
Earth Abides Page 26
