by Alyson Miers
The next time Charlinder went to the Square, Ruth was there again, in the middle of Charlinder's friends, but this time, Miriam caught him before he could pretend he was going somewhere else.
"Char!" she called out, waiting until he came up to her. “Would you like to help us out?” she asked, gesturing towards the wheel Ruth was using.
"Excuse me!" Ruth protested. "I'm still here!"
"Only when Ruth is finished," said Charlinder.
"Good. Ruth, you’ve done enough here, you can go,” ordered Miriam.
"No, really," said Charlinder, noting the look on Ruth's face. "I'll come back later."
"No, you won't," Miriam declared. "Ruth, Char will relieve you so you can do something else.”
“Why can’t Char just pull up another wheel?” Ruth demanded, while Charlinder looked for the nearest escape route.
"He's a better spinner than you," said Miriam, which Charlinder was not so sure was true, "and you've been here long enough. I think your grandmother could use some help with the cooking."
"Yeah, at least my grandmother won't treat me like this," snarled Ruth, letting the end of her yarn disappear into the flyer as she stomped off.
Charlinder sat down at the wheel only after Ruth was out of sight. Meredith, Sunny and Phoebe had been looking studiously at the ground during the exchange between Miriam and Ruth, and there was a generalized breath of relief when she was gone. "I guess she was bothering you," Charlinder said lamely.
“How could you tell?” Phoebe said acidly.
“Fill me in; was she being rude?" he asked.
"If she was rude, I would have chased her out of here long ago," Miriam reminded him.
"They're always really polite, have you noticed?" Meredith pointed out. "When they want to preach, they're always just as sweet as honey."
“Yeah, so, on that note, we couldn't talk about anything without her telling us why we should go to her next Sermon," Sunny explained.
Charlinder was surprised that Miriam hadn’t chased her away. “Glad I wasn’t here for that.”
"We tried telling her we weren't interested, but that just encouraged her,” said Phoebe.
"She was so pathetic, how she kept on with her, 'Oh, I'm not attacking you, I'm just trying to help,'" Sunny imitated. "The only thing that worked was for all of us to shut up altogether."
"So where have you been, Char?" demanded Miriam. "Why haven't you been here?"
"I was just here a few days ago," he said.
"And in those few days, you haven’t been around for the Faithful to launch their campaign to convert the heathens," Miriam growled.
“No, I noticed something like that, too," said Charlinder. He told them about his conversations with Taylor and Robert.
"Ruth was telling us something about that,” said Sunny, after he finished. "I mean, about how the St. Paul’s lot all get together to worship and pray all the time. As if that was supposed to tempt us."
"Besides, their whole village does not meet to worship once a week," said Miriam. "It's more like half of them worship once every lunar cycle, and they pray maybe once or twice a week."
There was chuckling at this. "I guess that doesn't sound as impressive as what Taylor told Char," said Phoebe.
"I wish I knew what started this campaign, at least," said Charlinder when the laughter died down. "Have they ever tried this hard before?"
"I don't care what got them started on this shine-the-light-of-God kick," Miriam sighed. "I just want to know how long it'll take before they get it out of their systems."
"I'd like to know why this is so important to them," said Meredith.
"Why which part is so important?" asked Sunny.
"Why it means so much to them to make us see it their way. It's one thing if they want to believe in God, but why do they care so much about what we believe? Like, the Plague, for instance--why does that matter anymore?" Meredith explained.
"Because some people have too much time on their hands to stop obsessing over a disease that happened over a hundred years ago," Miriam grumbled.
"The Plague is simple," said Charlinder. "If they can prove the Plague was beyond science, they can establish two things. One, that God exists, and two, that we should fear Him. If they can get us to fear God, they can also get us to change our behavior to keep God happy. I'm still not sure why they have such a problem with our behavior, though."
"I see you've been thinking about this," said Sunny after a pause.
"I'm trying to give it some more thought."
"I say don't waste your time on their preaching and think more about how to take care of this village," said Miriam.
It was their custom that the whole village took their meals together. They ate in the meeting square in front of the kitchen and the main vegetable garden. Everyone brought their own bowls and forks, ate the meal that the elderly women prepared for the village, and then washed their dishes in the river. That night, Charlinder went for dinner with his uncle as usual.
"Eleanor looks like she's angry at me about something," said Roy when he returned from the line. "Though I can't imagine what." Eleanor was Ruth and Robert's grandmother.
"It's nothing you've done," said Charlinder from above his dish of stew and cornbread. "It's because Miriam kicked Ruth out of Spinners' Square when I showed up today."
"Then it's because of what Miriam did, that she's looking at me that way?"
Charlinder shrugged. "Maybe Eleanor doesn't approve of me doing 'women's work.' And Mom isn't around to blame anymore."
"Whatever it is, I’m sure she'll get over it," said Roy.
"Or maybe she's in a bad mood at me because of what I said to Robert the other day," Charlinder said after a moment.
"It's a thought. I don't think you were rude to him, but he might see it differently."
Just then, Kenny sat down in front of them and addressed himself to Charlinder.
"Hey, Char, you're not teaching tomorrow, are you?" he asked.
"No, tomorrow's off from school, why?"
"Some of us are going for a hunt; you wanna go with us? We could use another guy."
"What are you going after; deer?"
"Yeah, and any spare meat is for pemmican. You in?"
Charlinder thought about it for a moment. "Yeah, I'm in. Come by the cabin for me in the morning."
"Good," said Kenny, and left them.
"What's this?" asked Roy after Kenny left. "Since when do you have any interest in hunting?"
"I don't really," said Charlinder. "But there's no harm in doing something different once in a while, right?" Charlinder had gone hunting several times in his life. It was not an activity he particularly enjoyed, nor was it among his greatest talents, but something was different this time. He didn't tell his uncle, because he didn't understand it himself, but for some reason, pemmican sounded like a very good thing to make all of a sudden.
They didn't have much to say for the rest of dinner. Only after they were back in their cabin did Charlinder bring up his question.
"Hey, Uncle," he said. "How much does Faithfulness run in families?" Only after he heard it out of his mouth did he realize what a tricky question it could be.
Roy looked at him like he had the same thing on his mind. "Are you thinking of Robert and Ruth?"
"Mostly them. Is their whole family Faithful?"
"I don't know," said Roy. "Eleanor is, and they probably got it from her. I know Eleanor is especially interested in family structure."
"Does that mean she wants us to have marriages instead of avuncular families?"
"She'd like to see at least some of the younger generations try it," said Roy. He began to explain how one of Eleanor’s sisters didn’t get along with their brother. Apparently she could always be seen picking a fight with him, well beyond what was typical for young adult siblings. "I mean, Lydia and I had our moments but your grandmother would have kicked both our asses if things ever got that bad between us," he elaborated. And once Eleanor’
s sister had children to look after, matters only got worse. The rapport between other family members was just fine, but something was never right between those two. It was a source of constant anxiety for the whole family. Roy said no one knew where the anger came from, but whatever happened couldn’t be undone, and only when the family’s children were all grown did the siblings figure out how to fight where everyone else couldn’t see it.
"But anyway, when Eleanor saw another community, and saw that they had all nuclear families, you can imagine how she thought that was a really good idea."
Though he was loath to say so out loud, Charlinder couldn’t think of how he would answer the question that Eleanor raised. He and his friends and their families, the rest of their neighbors, were so comfortable in their sibling-run system that he didn’t often remember it had begun essentially by accident. The Paleola founders had been a small group of people spread out over a wide age range who hadn’t chosen so much as found each other. They had nothing in common except that they were still alive. They had no one else to choose from and nowhere else to go, and in those conditions, they accepted that the lifelong marriages and stable nuclear families they saw as the ideal in their former lives were not possible for them. Their goal was to raise their children to adulthood in good health, and they found that the simplest way to do that was to assume that everyone was responsible for supporting the children’s mothers, and if paternity was ambiguous, they would not make an issue of it. The first descendant generation had slightly more in common with each other, but were still a limited number of people spread out over many years in age, and they found that the least complicated way to arrange their families was based on the sibling relationship. It worked out well and became a habit they never broke. Some shortcomings, they worked around; their custom of adoption referred not to parents taking on orphaned children but to men without sisters and women without brothers choosing each other as their family mates, but it only worked if they were very close already. Other problems, such as the dysfunction in Eleanor’s family, were risks that Paleolans accepted because they rarely ever escalated to that degree.
"Yeah, I guess I can see how that would appeal to her," said Charlinder. "What about God, then? What would that have to do with anything?"
"That part, I'm not so sure about. In stressful times, the idea of God is very comforting to believers, so maybe that's how her Faith started."
"How does that work?" asked Charlinder, completely bewildered. "How is God comforting to someone under stress?"
“Think of a parent figure who’s always there, always listening, always has the right answer, and will never die,” said Roy. “Ever notice how they often refer to God as the Father?”
That much gave Charlinder pause. He had always preferred the presence of his mother checking his homework after every school day to something invisible and infallible, and he preferred the solidity of his uncle sitting across the room and answering his questions to something all-knowing and omnipotent. Surely, though, the Faithful would disagree strenuously with those comparisons.
“I guess that would be fine, if only they didn’t expect the rest of us to see Him as Our Father. Besides," Charlinder continued, "isn't all of life a stressful time?"
"Yeah, it is, come to think of it," said Roy. "So consider what you're up against." He blew out the candle lighting the room at that nighttime hour. "Good night, Char."
"Good night, Uncle."
Chapter Four
Good Company
The division of labor in their village, working with very little population density and even less technology, was set mainly along lines of age and gender. It was a post-Plague reversion that Eileen Woodlawn had dreaded, but had also accepted and on some levels managed to circumvent. Carpentry was exclusively men's domain; the Paleola community first learned the trade from a young man named José among the original survivors. While Eileen may have taken issue with the fact that he was only inviting the men to learn his trade, she ultimately did not interfere. Hunting was the work of young and healthy men and a few teenage girls, but the girls never continued hunting once they started having children. Clothing preparation was done by women and girls, primarily for their own families: first her brother, then her children, and her uncle if he outlived her mother. (Charlinder was responsible for his and Roy's clothing preparation since Lydia had died.) All the women of childbearing age were responsible for the spinning for the village in general, and any weaving not concerned with clothing was a generalized responsibility which the council oversaw. They could stay busy spinning, weaving, knitting and sewing all day, in between chasing after small children. Children of both genders and women of all ages helped with food preparation, but the major cooking work was the domain of elderly women, especially those whose brothers had died. Children woke up early to gather eggs and milk sheep before school. Everyone worked at the planting, plowing and harvesting when the time of year came. Women with children old enough to help tended the vegetable and herb gardens. Young men who didn't particularly care for hunting were responsible for fishing.
The sounds and moods of the village changed by area based on the type of work done. Spinners’ Square was wide open, talkative, anarchic, constant. Its height was of women sitting on stools, its movement was of feet pushing treadles, wheels turning and small children scampering about, its sound was of women talking punctuated by the occasional shout at a wayward toddler over the unbroken purr of spinning wheels. The greatest contrast to that environment was undoubtedly the hunt. It demanded the chill and low light of early morning, its height was a platform built onto a tree, its sound was restricted to footsteps and whispers, its population was a handful of men wielding bows and arrows. Its yield could be a large animal carcass or nothing at all. Its disposition was an exercise in patience and anticipation, and it required a high tolerance for frustration. Since the village farmed animals for everything except slaughter, they depended on the hunt for their red meat, but it was an endeavor whose pleasures Charlinder found elusive at best.
He left his cabin with Kenny before dawn. In the woods behind the farm, they met Kenny's brothers Jess and Theo and Yolande's brother, Bruce. Kenny sent Jess and Theo off in one direction with Bruce and asked Charlinder to accompany him in another. Charlinder looked over his shoulder and spotted Jess and Theo looking between Bruce and Charlinder, and he couldn't tell which one bothered them more.
"I think Jess and Theo are kinda peeved at me for sticking them with Bruce," Kenny explained. "But they'll just give me a hard time about it, not you."
"I thought they didn't want me here," said Charlinder.
"They didn't expect you to be here--you haven't done this in a long time, I gotta say--but they didn't know they'd have to go shoot deer with no one but Brucie, either."
"Yeah, I can understand that. Still makes me wonder, though--why did you ask me to come?"
Kenny looked around for approaching animals, or maybe just to make sure they were alone, before he answered. "For the same reason Jess and Theo don't want alone time with Bruce."
"You've noticed it, too, then?"
"I notice something," said Kenny, then looked around the trees for something else. "There's a deer stand around here somewhere, let's find it."
After some searching around trees in the dark, Kenny located the platform in question and they set themselves up. As comfortably situated as it was possible to be on a hunting trip, Kenny asked Charlinder to tell him something about the Bible.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about the Christian story about the virgin birth of Jesus," Charlinder began in a discreetly low voice, "and if you think about it, that girl Mary was in a really precarious position for a moment there."
"What do you mean by precarious?"
"I mean that in the time and place she lived, there were very strict moral codes, and if Joseph and the rest of them hadn't believed her story of the visit from an angel, she would have been in serious trouble. Maybe stoned to death, or at least shunne
d from society. And then I realized--wasn't it just too perfect that they did believe her? That's exactly the kind of story that would get a girl out of a really ugly situation."
"Okay, Char, tell me what you've worked out, just keep your voice down," Kenny prompted, grinning in anticipation while watching the forest floor.
"This is what happened: you've got Mary, living briefly B.C. in the Middle East, and young women weren't exactly first-class citizens, and Mary's no one special. She's just a regular teenager engaged to an older man, and she's not about to argue with looking forward to a life of more of the same, but she wants a little fun before she goes from being her father's burden to her husband's property, so she screws around on her fiancé, except, oops, she gets pregnant. What's a girl to do? She still wants to get married, and she doesn't want to be cast out of society, so she needs to make some crazy shit up. Fortunately, Mary is also a Jew, and they pretty much invented the concept of God as our Faithful know Him, so Mary knows whom to blame. She snorts up a little hallucinogen one night, falls asleep, and the solution comes to her in a dream: it's all from a visit by an angel who says she's having God's baby! So she crosses her fingers, goes to Joseph, and tells him this drug-induced malarkey about an immaculate conception. And maybe Joseph is just that gullible, or maybe he just doesn't want to become the laughingstock of Nazareth and then go have to find himself a new fiancée, but he accepts her story and they proceed with their engagement. Pretty soon, word gets around, and it keeps getting better for Mary: she's got a cousin, Elizabeth, who is supposedly way too old to get pregnant, but then that time period's idea of 'elderly' probably meant slightly over forty, but it's this big special surprise when Liz turns up pregnant, and she's got the same explanation as her cute little cousin Mary. So, first Mary gets her fiancé on her side, then suddenly she gets the best possible ally to help prop her story up: her grown, married, respectable cousin. Nine months later, there's a trip to Bethlehem, Mary gets her dose of indignity squatting down with a bunch of sheep to give birth, and she has a perfect little boy named Jesus."