The Stilled Patter

I am not George Washington. My name is Andrew Jones, and it is because of me there will be no more Joneses in the world. There will be, in fact, no more anybody.

This is the end of the world.

It did not come through fire or ice, with a bang or a whimper, from solar catastrophe or man's suicidal mis-use of atomic power or any of the other fearful possibilities with which the Sunday-supplement writers once terrified us. It came through the exposure of an age-old conspiracy.

I did it. My excuse is the eternal excuse of the scientist: I sought the truth. How it was used was not my concern.

But that it should have led to the depopulation of the Earth concerns me, as it must concern every man, and I have an unshakable feeling of guilt.

Perhaps I write this now in the hope that I may somehow purge myself. I know that it will never be read.

The linen wick gutters in the saucer of melted tallow. It casts strange shadows on the cellar wall. Sometimes I think that they are the ghosts of children come to haunt me, the ghosts of all the little children who will never be born.

But this is not what I sat down to write while I waited for Lindsay to return. What is keeping Lindsay? He should be back by now.

I will begin again.

My name is Andrew Jones, and today, by my figures, is October 3, 1969. The weather is turning cold here, and soon we must go looking for another hiding place. My joints are getting old; the damp has seeped into them. I long for the year-long warmth of California or Florida, but those areas are still crowded and deadly.

Someone would recognize me.

I think we will try a powerhouse again this winter. Often they have supplies of coal large enough to last us through the cold weather without extra foraging.

* * * * *

Cataclysm began in 1954, June 13 to be exact. That was the day my second child was born, a boy we named Kevin.

It is surprising that a man who was the father of two children should accuse himself of depopulating the Earth. And yet it is because I was the father of two children that it happened.

Pre-natal care of mothers and post-natal care of infants were subjects of compelling interest in those days, arriving monthly in the burgeoning women's magazines and annually in the proliferous child-care manuals. Pediatricians and mothers besieged parents with advice, and we consumed everything with catholic appetite: logical, illogical, sensible, insensible, nonsensical, self-contradictory.

They kept us on our toes, strung as taut as Stradivarius violins, afraid to act for fear we would do the wrong thing, afraid not to act for fear inaction would be disastrous. Pediatricians and mothers, always the same authors. Never were there any articles on the care of mother and child by a father, only by what I came to think of as the vested interests.

I was slow, I admit; but what father has not been slow? Who, if he had not been slow, would be a father?

The books and the articles would have been troublesome enough if the information they imparted had been accurate. But slowly I became aware that they were subtly interwoven with mis-statements.

I raveled them out, I categorized them. I counted five different kinds before I convinced myself.

A mother published this: "One baby takes up all your time--two can't take any more."

The fallacy was obvious. A certain amount of housework was inescapable. If the mother was unable to do the work, what happened to it?

Answer: somebody else did it.