New Year's Day

New Year's Day is The Tribe’s annual rite of marking a year on a smooth rock near San Lupo Drive. Ish inscribes the number with his hammer and chisel, and the community gathers around the act: a practical calendar becomes a shared ceremony, preserving continuity after the Old Times have vanished and giving each generation a part in naming what it remembers.

The Rock and the First Mark

The ceremony takes place at a former small public park near the house on San Lupo Drive. Its hillside rocks include a high, narrow cave formed where two tops lean together, and a broad, smooth surface sloping gently enough to sit on. Small holes in the stone remain from people of an earlier age who pounded acorns there to make mash. The site therefore carries traces of human use older even than the period later called the Old Times, before it becomes The Tribe’s own record of time.

After a full circuit of the seasons, Ish and Em climb the hill on a calm, sunny midwinter afternoon. Em carries their baby, and she is pregnant again; Princess starts out with them, then runs after a rabbit. While Em sits in the sun and nurses the child, Ish works with his hammer and a cold chisel, cutting the first numeral into the hard surface. He gives the upright line a serif and a small hook so it resembles the printed figure 1 he remembers. When the mark is finished, the family sits together, and Ish declares, “Well, that was the Year One!” Em offers a different name, the Year of the Baby, because names are easier to remember than numbers. From its beginning, then, the custom holds two ways of remembering a year together: an ordered count and a human experience that gives the count its meaning.

A Calendar Becomes a Tradition

The idea of keeping time matters to Ish beyond the convenience of knowing a date. He comes to recognize that time carries history, history carries tradition, and tradition is part of civilization. Losing continuity risks losing something that may not be recoverable. Even the seven-day week, he reflects, has value beyond religious observance. The annual inscription answers that anxiety with a durable, visible sequence: each new figure joins the ones already cut into the rock.

The marking is not only a private act by Ish. At the end of the twenty-second year, the whole community gathers, including mothers with their youngest babies. Ish cuts 22 below 21; afterward, those old enough to speak call out “Happy New Year,” as people had done in the Old Times and still do. The repeated words and the accumulating numerals make the ceremony legible across generations: children who were not present at the first mark can stand beside the record and take part in its continuation.

Naming the Years and Keeping the Holiday

The number records sequence, but the name records what The Tribe chooses to remember. In Year 10, when no remarkable event seems to have settled the question, children propose the Year of the Fishing. During that year the Bay has swarmed with striped bass, and fishing has brought both variety to the diet and enjoyment to the community. The annual naming therefore does more than label time: it selects a shared experience and gives it a place in collective memory.

By the time of the later ceremonies, the day has become The Tribe’s greatest holiday, combining Christmas and New Year’s from the Old Times with customs of its own. Other observances have changed unevenly: Thanksgiving remains a big dinner, while patriotic holidays such as the Fourth of July have lapsed. The children still keep April Fool’s Day and Halloween, having learned their traditions from their parents. Against this shifting calendar, the annual gathering at the rock persists, joining inherited practices to a ritual that belongs specifically to The Tribe.

The Hammer and the Meaning of Continuity

The hammer is both the tool of inscription and an object with a longer, more troubling history. Ish carries the same weathered hammer each New Year’s Day, though it has little practical use for him and a lighter tool could serve for the carving. Its familiar weight comforts him; it is the hammer he picked up shortly before a rattlesnake bit him. The yearly mark thus depends on an object whose importance exceeds its utility, as the ceremony itself exceeds the mere numbering of years.

After the events of the twenty-second year, Ish places the hammer on his mantelpiece, head down and handle upright. Remembering first using it to break into a pool-room in Hutsonville to read a newspaper, he contrasts the years that seemed like a Garden of Eden with the years of anarchy, when no strong force protected individuals. The recollection makes the annual instrument resonate beyond the ceremony: the same hammer that preserves an ordered count recalls a time when the larger order of the United States had disappeared. New Year's Day gives The Tribe a repeated way to make history tangible, but the record also stands beside Ish’s awareness that continuity depends on more than marks in stone.