Year of the Coming

Year of the Coming, also called Year 4, is the year Ezra returns to San Lupo Drive with a car full of people and possessions, transforming a household that had stopped expecting him into a growing community. His arrival brings new family ties, including the only known case of two members of one family surviving the Great Disaster, and helps set the stage for the residents’ first name for themselves: The Tribe.

The return

The decisive scene comes in early spring, around noon. Princess suddenly leaps up barking and runs toward the street; a car horn follows. Ezra has been gone for more than a year, and the household has stopped thinking about him. Now he appears in a battered-looking car overflowing with people and household goods. The abundance is practical, but it also makes the arrival resemble a remnant of the Old Times: Ish thinks of an Okie outfit reaching California. The comparison gives the newcomers the scale of a migrating household, not merely a lone survivor’s return.

Ezra introduces the older woman as Molly and the younger as Jean, calling each one his wife without embarrassment. The group also includes a frightened, half-grown girl and a little boy. Ish is only mildly shocked by Ezra’s bigamy. He reasons that plural marriage had been accepted in past civilizations and might be accepted again, and regards it as practical in a world with two available women and one man—particularly a man as able as Ezra to live comfortably among people in varied circumstances. His response measures how far the survivors’ assumptions have shifted: the old social rule is no longer self-evidently binding when a small community must make a life from whoever remains.

Survivors and disrupted childhoods

The boy is Ralph, Molly’s son. Born only a few weeks before the Great Disaster, he has apparently survived through inherited immunity or protection from his mother’s milk. The household knows of no other case in which two members of one family survived. His presence therefore gives the return a significance beyond Ezra’s reunion with Ish: survival, previously encountered as individual escape, appears here as a bond between mother and child.

The girl is called Evie, though no one knows whether that is her real name. Ezra found her living alone in squalor, opening cans for food and digging for worms and snails. She must have been five or six when the Great Disaster occurred; no one can tell whether she had already been intellectually disabled or whether death and solitude caused her condition. She cowers and whimpers, and even Ezra can draw a smile from her only occasionally. After people treat her kindly for a long time, she gradually speaks more, but she never becomes what the others consider normal. Her arrival makes the disaster’s effects visible not only in missing adults and ruined institutions, but in a childhood shaped by isolation and deprivation.

A household becomes a community

Year of the Coming is measured not by one reunion alone, but by the household’s expanding composition. Toward the end of the year, Em gives birth to her second son, Roger. By then, San Lupo Drive is home to seven adults and four children, with Evie counted besides. These numbers register a fragile return of ordinary household life—births, spouses, children, and shared residence—without suggesting that the old world has returned with it.

At first as a joke, the residents begin calling themselves The Tribe. The name turns an informal collection of survivors into a group with a shared identity. Its appearance follows Ezra’s return and the household’s growth, but it does not erase the differences among its members or the losses that brought them together. The group’s humor matters precisely because it is tentative: a name can give a scattered household a sense of belonging before any formal structure exists.

The year’s place in the new calendar

The title makes arrival, rather than a battle or a death, the event that defines this year. The return also stands against the evening routine Ish has built with Em: reading, knitting, sleeping babies upstairs, and Princess by the fire. At such moments, he can imagine his parents’ evenings as much the same, until the gasoline lamp and the dead electric bulbs remind him that the resemblance is incomplete. The Old Times persist as comparison and memory, while the people gathering at San Lupo Drive make a different kind of family in the present.

The following year acquires another name, Year of the Bulls, as cattle multiply until encounters with charging bulls become a regular nuisance and a sport called bull-dodging. That change of annual name suggests the community’s developing habit of marking time through what most distinctly shapes its shared experience. In Year of the Coming, the defining change is human: Ezra returns, new survivors join the household, Roger is born, and the residents begin to think of themselves as The Tribe.