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."
Through all of history it runs as a plaint. "If the young king had not fallen ill.... If the prince had lived.... If the general had not so recklessly exposed himself.... If the president had not overworked...."
Between the plan and the fulfillment stands always the frail barrier of a human life.
Once more the fogs thinned out, and then came the first hot days. "I have seen it again," Ish thought to himself. "The great pageant of the year! Now is the time of dryness and death. Now the god lies dying. Soon the rains will come, and then the hills will be green. At last one morning I shall look out westward, here from the porch, and I shall see the sun setting far to the south. Then we shall all go together, and I shall carve the number into the rock. What shall we call this Year, I wonder!"
By now also it was time to be expecting Dick and Bob to return from their expedition in the jeep. Ish still worried and felt guilty sometimes at having allowed the boys to go, but now they had been gone so long that he was somewhat accustomed to the idea and did not feel the strain so much as he had earlier. And at the same time he had another worry and sense of guilt that tended to counteract this one.
The children! Their superstition and their ideas about religion! He had said to himself that all this would be easy to counteract; he had said that he would do something that next day. Yet all summer he had been flinching.
Was it actually that he did not want to do anything? Did he really want the children to think of Joey as the possessor of some special power? Deep within himself, did he want the children to think of him, Ish, as a god? Not every day or every year could a man have reason to play with the intoxicating idea that he was becoming a god. Oh, well—say, at least a demi-god, a being of some degree of special power!
Ever since the incident of the hammer, he had been studying curiously the children's attitude toward him. It was changeable and uncertain. Sometimes, he sensed that feeling of awe which he had seen on that day of the incident with the hammer. He, like Joey, but even more so, had mana within him. He could perform strange feats. He knew the meanings of the puzzling words. He knew the curious ways of numbers. He knew, by some strange power, what the world was like, away beyond the horizon, out through the Golden Gate, that there were islands far in the ocean beyond the little rock-tips of the Farallones, that they sometimes saw standing up above the horizon on clear days.
The children, he came to realize, were not only children, but they were also unsophisticated and inexperienced as children in the Old Times had rarely been. None of them had ever seen more than a few dozen people. Though their lives, he believed, had been happy, they had been happy with the simplicity of a few satisfying experiences, repeated again and again. They had not suffered the continual shock of change which had so affected children in the old days, both for good and for bad, making them nervous on the one hand, and yet alert on the other.
Children so unsophisticated might easily come to feel a certain dread of him, to regard him as a being with powers different from their own, not altogether earthly. At times he sensed this feeling and even saw definite evidences of it.
Yet at other times, indeed generally, he was merely their own father or grandfather, or Uncle Ish, a person they had known all their lives, with whom they had romped on the floor when they were little. They had no more respect for such a person than children ever had. In fact the bigger ones already showed the adolescent feeling that the older man was blundering and quite obtuse. Perhaps they stood in some awe, but still they played tricks on him.
Once, not a week after the incident of the hammer, they had set a tack for him in his chair, though that was one of the oldest of all tricks to play on a teacher. And again, after they had left the room with much suppressed giggling, Ish discovered that someone had worked that other old trick of pinning a strip of cloth to his rear, so that it hung down like a white tail behind.
Ish accepted such tricks in good spirit, and did not attempt to find out which one of the children had done them or to inflict any punishment. In some ways the tricks pleased him, for they showed him that children considered him one of themselves. But the tricks also chagrined him a little. His ego was not above being pleased with the belief that he was a folk-hero or demi-god. Was this a way to treat a demi-god, by putting tacks on his chair or pinning a tail on him, behind? Yet, as he thought farther, he realized that the two attitudes were not incompatible or altogether unprecedented.
That is a strange thing—to be a god! They bring the fat ox with the gilded horns, and at your altar they strike him down with the pole-ax. You are proud of the sacrifice. But then they take head and horns and tail and hide, and in the hide they wrap the entrails. All this noisomeness they burn before your altar, and then go to feast themselves on the fat haunches! You see the deceit, and you are angry with a god's anger. You gather the thunderbolts, and your black clouds assemble. But, no, you think then, "They are my people!" This year they are fat and proud and insolent—but who would wish his people to be mean and meeching? Next year, if there is pestilence, they will really burn the ox—nay, many oxen! So you pass it off, with only a little thunder, scarcely noticed in the pleasant confusion of the feasting. "I am not stupid," you say to The Son, "but there are times when a god should seem stupid!" Then you wonder if you should have shared with him any secret of godship, but rather have looked for a convenient mountain to pile upon him. He is altogether too handy with a sickle these days....
Even you terrible ones who call for human sacrifice, you too must wink! Ah, it is magnificently horrible! The shrieks of his wife and the moans of the victim and the flailing axes of the killers! There he lies, covered with blood, his tongue hanging out, a picture of loathsome death! Yet soon, in the confusion of the dance, he rises suddenly and dances with the others and the red mulberry juice mingles with his sweat and disappears. Then you, the terrible one, must be a wise god and remember only the horror of the seeming death, though every child in the village knows you are tricked....
"No, there is no need to grovel and rub the face in the dirt. Merely bow the head, as you enter, ever so slightly."
Yet in the end, though he half feared the test, Ish could not resist an experiment. Perhaps the incident of the hammer had really meant nothing. He was curious.
He picked the time carefully—late one morning, when it was only a few minutes before dismissal. He was preparing himself a retreat, if things got too embarrassing. There was no difficulty, since he was the teacher, in bringing a discussion around to the point where he could put the question casually enough.
"How was it, do you think, that all these things..." he gestured widely with his hands, "how was it that the world happened to be made?"
The answer came quickly. Weston was the spokesman, although apparently any of the children could have answered: "Why, the Americans made everything."
Ish caught his breath. Yet, immediately, he saw how the idea had arisen. After all, if a child asked who made the houses or the streets or the canned food, any of the older ones would have said naturally that the Americans did. He followed up with another question.
"And the Americans—what about them?"
"Oh, the Americans were the old people."
This time Ish found it a little harder to adjust quickly. In "the old people" he sensed not merely a reference to time, but also something close to superstition. "The old people"—that had once meant fairies, people of the Other-world. That might be its meaning now again. Here was something he should work to counteract.
"I was..." He began simply. Then he paused and corrected himself, seeing no reason to use the past tense.
"I am an American."
When he spoke, though they were the simplest of words, he had a curious feeling of pride come over him, as if flags were flying and bands playing. It had been a great thing, in those Old Times, to be an American. You had been deeply conscious of being one of a great nation. It was no mere matter of pride, but also there went with it a profound sense of confidence and security in life, and a comradeship of millions. Yet now he had hesitated to speak in the present tense.
In the silence of his pause he saw the children looking at him, and then suddenly he sensed that his explanation had missed fire. He had merely been trying to explain that there was nothing supernatural in those old people who had been the Americans. He had tried merely to say, "Look at me, I'm Ish, father of some of you, granddad of one. I've rolled on the floor with you. You've mussed my hair. Yes, I'm only Ish. And now when I say, 'I'm an American,' I mean that there is nothing supernatural about Americans. They were only people too."
This was what he had thought they would understand, but it had gone the other way round. When he had said, "I am an American," they had nodded inwardly, interpreting, "Yes, naturally, you are an American. You have many strange knowledges which we simple ones do not have. You teach us reading and writing. You tell tales about the world being round. You talk about numbers. You carry the hammer. Yes, it is plain that people like you made all the world, and you are merely one who lingers over from the Old Times. You are one of the Old People. Yes, naturally you are an American!"
As he looked about, almost wildly at this new thought, the silence was deep, and he saw Joey smiling at him. It was a knowing smile, as if Joey was saying, "We two have something in common. I am like one of the Old People who has been left over. I can read; I understand those things. Without being hurt, I carry the hammer."
Ish was glad that he had had the foresight to ask his question just before noon. There was nothing he could muster now, either for question or reply. "School dismissed," he said. "School dismissed!"