“His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him”

The expression “His hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him” gives language to Ish’s late recognition of what vanished with the old national order: protection that no individual or small circle could provide for itself. Recalled after twenty-two years, it turns his history with the hammer into a measure of the difference between living as an apparently independent person and living without a larger force of collective security.

Recalled at the House on San Lupo Drive

After returning from a grave beneath an oak, Ish enters his house and places Ish’s hammer on the mantelpiece, its head down and its handle upright. The sight prompts him to reconsider the twenty-two years since he first used it. They may have seemed like a Garden of Eden, but they were also years of anarchy: no strong power stood between an individual and whatever danger might arise.

His memory reaches back to Hutsonville, where he had stopped in the street after driving down from the mountains. He knew that breaking into the pool-room was illegal, irrevocable, and terrible; then he deliberately used the hammer to smash its flimsy door and entered to read a newspaper. The remembered line gives retrospective weight to that decision. Ish had acted as a strong individual, but his apparent self-sufficiency depended on a social order whose protection he had scarcely noticed.

Individual Freedom and Collective Protection

Before the Disaster, Ish had taken the United States for granted, much as he took the air around him for granted. He had noticed its taxes and regulations more readily than the protection its existence represented. Once it was gone, the balance described by the expression became painfully recognizable: each person might have to face every other person without any reliable authority to defend them.

George and Ezra had been with Ish, and life among them had been comfortable and pleasant. But friendship and routine were not, in themselves, a battle-tested bond of unity. Ish cannot be sure that the years went well because the small group possessed lasting security; they may simply have been fortunate. The expression therefore complicates his recollection of an almost Edenic past: ease and vulnerability had coexisted, even when the latter was easy to overlook.

The Outside World and the Limits of Explanation

Ish also tests the saying against the chain of events that has just unsettled the community. The water failed; losing it led the group to send the boys on an expedition; the expedition brought Charlie; and Charlie, as part of the outside world, set further consequences in motion. The sequence makes the community’s fortunes appear shaped not only by individuals acting from within but also by external conditions that arrive without warning.

That causal chain does not settle Ish’s question about where action begins: in the person or in the world outside. Instead, the remembered expression sharpens the stakes of the uncertainty. Individuals remain responsible for what they do, as Ish’s deliberate blow against the pool-room door shows, yet their safety and choices are conditioned by forces beyond them. The saying marks the absence of collective protection as a fact of life, not a guarantee that every encounter must end in violence.