Ish and Joey

Ish and Joey’s relationship joins intimate fatherly affection to the work of transmitting knowledge after The Great Disaster. Ish becomes Joey’s guide to books, mathematics, and the material past, while Joey’s questions give Ish a living focus for hopes about the future. Their bond is marked by a tension Ish cannot resolve: he wants his youngest son to inherit the capacity to think and build, yet worries that Joey’s mind is advancing faster than his body and emotional strength can sustain.

A Father and an Unusual Son

Joey is Ish’s youngest son, and Ish’s attachment to him grows from a recognition that he differs sharply from the other children. Where they readily turn to physical play and practical handwork, Joey is drawn toward books and abstract ideas. Ish does not mistake this difference for uncomplicated superiority. Joey is underweight, often exhausted after playing, and prone to sick spells involving an upset stomach; he lags behind the other boys in sports and outdoor adventures. His large, alert eyes seem to Ish to hold an exceptional amount of knowledge, but the boy’s physical frailty remains an ongoing source of concern.

Ish sees both a gift and a cost in this precocity. He thinks the community has plenty of robust young boys, but needs someone able to carry its intellectual inheritance forward. That judgment is not a rejection of Joey’s weakness: Ish wishes he were stronger, and wonders whether his stomach troubles are physical or emotional, though there is no doctor or psychiatrist available to settle the question. His care therefore takes the form of close attention without certainty. He watches Joey’s limits even as he encourages the qualities that set him apart.

The Library and the Limits of Inheritance

The relationship takes visible shape when Ish brings Joey to the City Library. Joey runs ahead on the way there, eager for a place Ish realizes he should have shown him earlier. For years, Ish has used this library for his own purposes while keeping the University Library in reserve; he has forced the lock on the main entrance, and now opens the heavy door proudly for his son. In the reading room and among the stacks, Joey says little, but Ish sees him intently taking in the book titles.

Joey asks whether the library contains all the books in the world and whether he can read them. Ish tells him he may read what he wants, provided he returns the books and puts them back in place. When Joey declares his intention to read everything, Ish’s happiness is checked by a warning: no one could read it all, and many books are dull, foolish, or bad. He offers to help Joey choose worthwhile ones. The exchange makes Ish’s role more than that of a custodian opening a door. He wants to give Joey access to knowledge, but also to teach him that learning requires judgment and selection, not simply appetite.

Ish is relieved that he has not yet taken Joey to the much larger University Library. The sudden abundance of books seems almost too stimulating for the frail child. His caution is not a wish to diminish Joey’s ambition; rather, Ish is trying to pace an awakening he himself has helped set in motion. Joey’s curiosity, in Ish’s eyes, is already moving rapidly, and the father must decide not only what knowledge to offer but how much the boy can absorb at once.

Curiosity, Ambition, and Vulnerability

On the walk away from the library, Joey stays beside his father instead of running ahead. He asks about the shiny white spheres on the ceilings of their rooms, which Ish identifies as electric lights, and wonders whether reading books might enable him to make them work again. Ish feels pleasure at the question, followed immediately by fear that Joey is moving too fast. He answers cautiously: perhaps the lights could be restored, perhaps not; such work would take time and many people acting together. His insistence on going slowly expresses a central difficulty in their relationship. Ish wants Joey to inherit the old world’s knowledge, but he knows that knowledge alone cannot instantly restore the systems on which that world depended.

The question also reveals how readily Joey has absorbed Ish’s own hopes. Ish feels proud and triumphant, yet worries that intellect may be racing ahead of the rest of the boy’s personality. The ambition to make electric lights shine again belongs to a future requiring collective labor, physical endurance, and patience as well as books. Ish tries to keep those conditions in view rather than allowing his son’s brilliance to become an expectation Joey must meet immediately. The visit ends not with an achievement but with Joey vomiting on a pile of rubble, a sharp reminder that intellectual excitement does not remove bodily vulnerability.

At school, Ish’s attempt to stimulate intellectual interest through wood-carving does not work as he intended. Walt proves the finest carver, shaping cattle in relief without reading fluently or relying on geometry, while Joey has no talent for carving. Yet Joey alone becomes absorbed in the enduring truths of line and angle. Ish finds him cutting differently shaped triangles from paper, trimming their ends, and arranging them into a straight line. Joey cannot explain why he repeats the demonstration that Ish has taught him will always work. Ish nevertheless understands it as a kind of homage to a truth that survives chance and change: the boy tests whether the rule can be made to fail, and finds that it cannot.

Affection and Mutual Recognition

Joey’s intellectual isolation is accompanied by social and physical differences. When the other children leave school noisily, he often stays behind with a large-looking book, sometimes seeming almost superior in his manner. Ish sees that appearance alongside a more vulnerable child: Joey is small among the sturdier boys, gets tired, and is sometimes unwell. His schoolroom presence makes Ish feel that he is left with Joey spiritually, and at times physically, while the other children run off to play. Ish’s response is protective, but it is also founded on kinship: he recognizes a sensitive, inward child beneath the effort to appear exceptional.

That recognition becomes especially clear after Joey drinks a little whiskey, brandy, and sherry with the older boys. Joey has been clever enough to drink less than they do, though he is tipsy and has apparently been showing off to impress them. Ish puts him to bed and lectures him about reckless experimentation undertaken for display. Then, looking into Joey’s big eyes, Ish sees not only intelligence but sympathy, as if father and son share an understanding that separates them from the others. Ish takes one of Joey’s hands, and the boy answers his affection with a look of his own.

In that moment, Ish understands Joey’s brashness differently: beneath it is timidity, pushed so far in the opposite direction that it resembles swagger. The insight makes their likeness personal rather than merely intellectual. Ish recalls that he himself was once timid, and his tenderness deepens as he sees how Joey’s striving may be a way of managing the very sensitivity that makes him vulnerable. He urges the boy not to strain so hard against older children who are two years ahead of him. Joey smiles, not because he can fully grasp the distant future Ish describes, but because he recognizes his father’s sympathy in the present.

A Future Planted in Small Things

As Ish sits beside the sleeping Joey, still holding his hand, his affection turns toward fear. He feels the pulse close beneath the boy’s wrist and thinks how little it might take to harm a child so slight, driven forward by such a powerful mind. Love makes Joey precious, and therefore exposes Ish to the possibility of loss. Ish cannot know whether the boy will live to acquire the strength and wisdom he imagines; his hope for the future is inseparable from his awareness of how fragile its bearer is.

Later, the recovery of Pueblo corn seeds gives their relationship another concrete form. Ish recognizes the small red and black kernels as a primitive variety, unlike the larger yellow or white corn he had expected. The seeds offer the community another chance after it had delayed trying to grow corn until Ish could no longer find living seed. He calls Joey over and explains what has been found. Together they take two dozen kernels to the kitchen, light a burner on the gasoline stove, and parch them in a frying pan. Ish knows this uses up precious seed, but believes showing Joey immediately matters; the parched corn turns out poorly and is barely edible.

The demonstration connects a surviving crop to the old frontier and to the long history of people and cultivated plants. Joey listens with evident appreciation as Ish explains how parched corn once served as food. Ish regrets wasting the two dozen kernels, yet hopes the lesson has planted something more important in his son’s mind. The scene echoes the library visit: in each, Ish does not merely preserve an object or recite information but brings Joey close to a possible future. Books, electric lights, geometric truths, and corn seeds are different kinds of inheritance, and Ish tries to make each intelligible to a child who may carry it onward.

Ish’s conviction reaches its most explicit form when he calls Joey, in his thoughts, the Child of the Blessing and imagines that this one will carry on. The phrase expresses a father’s hope, not proof that Joey’s future is assured. Ish sees in him the possibility of intellectual continuity after catastrophe, while the boy’s frailty repeatedly resists any easy certainty. Their relationship thus makes inheritance both personal and precarious: knowledge can be taught, demonstrated, and cherished, but its passage into the future depends on the vulnerable life of the child who receives it.