Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  Another small hand went into the air. "What happened to Mr. Hitler when the war was over?"

  "Nothing happened to him after that, because right before the war ended, he killed himself."

  "Now that's what I call a Final Solution," said one of the older girls in the back.

  Charlinder couldn't help but smile at this answer. "Thank you. Other questions?"

  Another small hand went up, from a little boy who'd been trying to get Charlinder's attention all morning. "What's a homa-sek-shul?"

  He waited for the laughter in the back to subside, then explained, "a homosexual is a person who likes to do sex with people of the same gender. It means a guy who likes guys in that way, or a girl who likes girls. Like Dr. Darrell, for example," he said, referring to their current village medic. Thus given a known example, the children didn’t ask for further details.

  "So why did Mr. Hitler want them to die?" asked the boy.

  "That is a tough question. A lot of people at the time thought homosexuals were evil because their religion said so, and Hitler grew up in one of those religions, too. But a lot of historians tried to figure out just what Hitler believed and between World War II and the Plague, they were still arguing about it, so no one can really answer that."

  A ten-year-old boy raised his hand. "How many people were in Europe before the war?"

  "I'm not sure about that, either. There were a lot more than thirteen million, but after the war ended, there weren't many Jews left since six million of them died in the camps."

  That much got the class quiet. Charlinder waited for another student to ask a question, or else he would break them off into age groups and start math lessons.

  One of the little ones raised his hand again. "How much people live in our village now?"

  The question had nothing to do with the lesson, but if the kids wanted to see a staggering comparison of numbers, they could see it.

  "The last time someone counted, there were about a hundred-fifty of us here," he answered, drawing a 150 in the clay, just below the last three zeros in the 12,000,000. "So as you can see, that's a lot of villages all gone."

  There was another hand in the air from a 6-year-old. "Is that how come there's so little of us now?" he inquired.

  Charlinder had to think a moment before he realized the scale of what this child was asking. He was only in his first year of school, but Charlinder assumed all children learned something of the Plague from their families.

  "No, no, no, not at all," he began while taking his position at the world map he'd been studying so obsessively for weeks. "World War II happened almost two-hundred years ago, and the Holocaust happened in Europe. We're in North America, so none of our people were in the camps. There were still many, many more people left in Europe when the war was over.

  "Then about a hundred-twenty years ago, there were six and a half billion people in the world, and they started dying, very fast, of a terrible disease called the Plague. After just two years, there was hardly anyone left. That's why there are so few of us here now, and why we have so little."

  Another small hand brought another knotty question. "Why'd everyone die from the Plague?"

  "It was a very contagious disease. You know how, when one of you has a cold and comes to school, some other kids get the cold, too? Well, with the Plague, everyone in the school would get it, only it didn't just make them sniffly, it killed them."

  The same child spoke again. "How come people got the Plague?"

  "For the same reason they get any other disease; when a new germ develops, people get infected until they develop an immunity to it, but that's a lesson for science class. Come on, let's do math lessons."

  Another little boy stood up, smiling brightly. "My Uncle Taylor says a higher power named God made people get sick with the Plague because they were being bad!" he announced happily.

  “That is a very interesting perspective from your Uncle Taylor, and I’m sure he can tell you all about it after school. Now it’s time for math lessons, so let’s get into groups,” ushered Charlinder. His older students, already whispering to each other for a few minutes, stood up and began heading toward their corners of the room. The little ones also stood up, but they weren't sure whether to go to their math areas or mill around the Plague session.

  Another boy of the same age stood up and addressed Michael. "It was not a higher power," he sneered. "Everyone got the Plague because they didn't wash their hands or eat enough vegetables!"

  Charlinder thought whoever had supplied the boy with that explanation was working on just as shaky a ground as the Faithful with their fire-and-brimstone fearmongering, but no matter, he simply wanted the class to change the subject.

  "They did not!" objected the first one. "It was from God! Uncle Taylor told me so!"

  "Your Uncle Taylor is stupid!"

  "He is not!"

  "He's a squirrel-brain and you are too!" proclaimed the second child. Taylor’s nephew responded by lunging at him.

  The other little ones squealed in excitement as the two boys rolled around on the floor, growling and pummeling each other. “That’s enough, both of you!" barked Charlinder, but the children completely ignored him. The older ones rushed forward to watch the fight, and some even shouted, "Get him, runt!" though Charlinder couldn't tell which one they were cheering. He waded through the sea of small bouncing bodies and pulled the second boy off from on top of the first one, who scrambled up and tried to claw at his opponent up in Charlinder's arms.

  Charlinder looked for Elizabeth, his best and most helpful student. She was standing at the back of the room, watching the pandemonium but clearly waiting for it to end. Charlinder made eye contact with her. "Get him, will you?" he requested, gesturing towards the furious little boy attacking his waistline. Elizabeth ran up and grabbed the child around the waist, holding him sideways and carrying him to the other side of the room. The rest of the children were still out of control. Charlinder looked for something small and hard that he could bang against the wooden bookshelves to make a loud sound. There was nothing. In one furious motion, he doubled over at the waist to put his face at the children's eye level and roared, "SIT DOWN!"

  Every body in the room dropped to the floor, including Elizabeth, still with the now-compliant six-year-old in her arms. The other one, whom Charlinder still held, also went limp. Every mouth was still, every face watched Charlinder with big, round eyes.

  "Groups D and E, please start passing around the blank paper and writing ink on the shelf. The rest of you, get into your math groups and I don't want to hear a peep until I've told you what to do."

  He couldn't wait for the school day to end. He tried to give them a good session of math lessons, but all he could do was switch between groups and keep telling the children when they were getting the answers wrong. His concentration was shot. When it was finally time for everyone to leave for lunch, Charlinder didn't even stay to tidy the place up. He had to get out.

  He usually took his meals with his uncle, but this time, he waited in a different line, where he hoped those close to him wouldn't see him. He snagged a bowl of stew and a square of cornbread and then snuck out of the meeting square to find a private place to eat. He didn't have anything to hide, but he needed to be alone.

  "There he is," said a familiar voice when he was partway through his lunch on the riverbank. His uncle and Miriam were headed to his spot with their lunches in hand.

  "I wondered where you were," said Roy.

  "Char, darling, what's the matter?" asked Miriam, never one to beat around the bush.

  "Nothing."

  "So why are you avoiding us?" she asked.

  "Listen, Char, you don't need to tell us what's going on right now, but the next time you want to eat alone, just say so, don't sneak off," said Roy.

  "There was a fight at school today," said Charlinder.

  When he was finished explaining, he was less than pleased with their reactions. Roy snickered unbecomingly when Charlinder de
scribed the language the children used together, and Miriam laughed out loud at one point. "Children do fight, you know," she reminded him.

  “They’ve never fought in my class before," said Charlinder.

  "And if you can teach for going on two years before you see any fighting, then you're doing an excellent job,” chuckled Roy, "but everyone has a bad day eventually. The kids will be fine tomorrow, and you'll feel better."

  "So, what, did I do something wrong with them?" Charlinder demanded.

  "Darling, no one is saying anything was your fault today," said Miriam. “Just that these things happen. Kids are little animals and sometimes they get violent. I remember when Robert lost his front two baby teeth early, do you?"

  "He shouldn't have said that about my mother," Charlinder pointed out.

  "And you didn't need to punch him," Miriam laughed. "So how can you be surprised when other children fight?"

  "I didn't hit Robert at school."

  "And it's hardly news that most other children are nowhere near as interested in their education as you were, so getting violent at school is no different from anywhere else," said Roy.

  Charlinder only shook his head, at a loss for what to say. There was something missing here, something his uncle and Miriam didn't grasp. There was just something about that fight that felt off-balance, or more extreme than the scuffles that Charlinder had witnessed as a schoolboy. Was his memory of childhood faulty, or had Miriam and Roy simply not seen what had happened in the schoolroom?

  “Am I the only one here,” he asked, “who finds it kind of odd that when the class gets on the topic of the Plague, suddenly some kid brings up God’s holy wrath and next thing we know there’s a fisticuff on the schoolroom floor?”

  “Well, kids tend to talk about what they hear from their families,” said Roy, “and then they come home and tell their families about what they saw at school. I don’t blame you for being uncomfortable at the message, but the end of the world isn’t happening again.”

  “But to ‘talk about what they hear from their families’ isn’t the same thing as trying to kill each other in the middle of the school day,” Charlinder said.

  Miriam put her arm around Charlinder’s shoulders. “Some day,” she said, “you will forgive yourself for allowing a couple of six-year-olds to get into a fisticuff on the schoolroom floor,” she said, obviously trying not to laugh. “And now, I am going back to the square to join my children for lunch.” She stood up.

  Maybe he was being ridiculous; perhaps he was just upset about his luck running out, or he'd forgotten what it was like to be a small child with poor impulse control. "Can I join you later in Spinners' Square?" he asked.

  "Of course. I'll save you a wheel," she said.

  "Would it make you feel better," Roy began after Miriam left, "to track down Taylor's older siblings and tell them to smack some sense into their boy? And then we'll go find the other family and ask them to rein in the kid's fondness for calling people 'squirrel-brain'?"

  Charlinder didn't want to talk to Taylor's siblings just yet. It would surely open up a can of worms leading to yet another discussion he would rather avoid. "I'll see how they are tomorrow," he said. "If they're still out of sorts, I'll talk to the families."

  "There you go," said Roy.

  Charlinder went to Spinners' Square after lunch to find Miriam working and chatting away with Phoebe and Yolande and keeping a spinning wheel set aside for him, as promised. Yolande occupied a stool between Phoebe and Miriam, carding wool for them while Stuart played with a ball of yarn in the grass. He walked up to the Square in the middle of a sudden burst of laughter from all three women.

  "What did I miss?" he asked as he sat down at the wheel.

  "There you are," said Miriam when she saw him. "I was just telling the girls about the little schoolroom incident today."

  "What about it?" Charlinder asked, immediately suspicious.

  "We can't get over 'squirrel-brain'!" Phoebe laughed. Stuart suddenly looked up at Charlinder and burst into high peals of laughter, too.

  Chapter Six

  Listen

  The rest of the afternoon passed so enjoyably that Charlinder soon asked himself if he had overreacted. He forgot the tension of the school day. He liked his life just where it was, and he preferred not to think about how it would be several years down the road, when all his friends would be mothers of children in his class. Stuart, for example, was a very sweet child but there was no telling how he would be as a pupil. The idea that within the next couple of years, the rest of his friends would also have babies, was a change he preferred not to imagine. The idea of “babies” was one thing, but he preferred to come up to Spinners’ Square and join the women as “my friend Char,” and without the additional layer of “my kid’s teacher.” He liked what they had just then. It didn’t need to change.

  Even when Ruth arrived late in the day with a knitting project of what appeared to be a small sock, Charlinder assumed she didn't intend to do anything except enjoy some conversation while doing her textile work.

  "Hello, Ruthie," said Miriam, in the tone she used to tell people they were expected to declare their intentions right away.

  "Hi, everyone,” Ruth responded as she sat down in the grass. "Hi, Stuey!" she cooed at Stuart, who held up the ball of yarn he was using as a toy.

  That was enough for the time being. Ruth went on knitting, the rest of them continued with their tasks, and no one said very much, but it wasn't a tense quiet. It was the kind of quiet that happens when no one needs to say anything, and they were comfortable that way, until the sun started glowing orange and sinking towards the horizon.

  "Char, who was the other little boy fighting in school today?" asked Ruth suddenly.

  "What do you mean by 'the other little boy'?" He suspected she already knew of Taylor's nephew, but wanted her to spell it out.

  "I heard from Taylor that his nephew, Michael, was in a fight with another little boy at school today. Who was the other boy?"

  "That was Khalil," said Miriam. “I’m tight with his grandmother.”

  "What were they fighting about?" asked Ruth.

  "Taylor didn't tell you?"

  "No, he just said Khalil said something that made Michael really mad, and they ended up fighting."

  Charlinder did not like where this was headed. "Khalil said Michael and Taylor were both squirrel-brains," he said, dodging the issue and making Phoebe and Yolande giggle.

  "But what would make him say that?" Ruth pressed on.

  "I don't know," he fudged. "Kids that age do a lot of things for no apparent reason. The little buggers just don't think."

  "But this is the first fight you've seen in two years of teaching school," said Ruth. "Surely it didn't just happen for no reason."

  Miriam let out an exasperated growl. "Char, you might want to leave now," she said through gritted teeth, then turned to Ruth. "Taylor probably already told you this, but just to get it back in the open so you know we're all informed, little Michael decided to share Uncle Taylor's preaching about how God punished people for behaving badly by giving them the Plague. Khalil didn't agree with him."

  "So, how did you handle that?" Ruth asked Charlinder.

  "How he handles the kids in the schoolroom is none of your business," said Miriam.

  "No, really, it's okay," Charlinder cut in. "The class got a little off the subject after a history lesson, and I just wanted to move on so we could have math time. The kids didn't drop the subject when I asked, and they ended up fighting, so I broke them up and made everyone sit down in their math groups. And then it was over."

  "Why couldn't you just let them discuss what they wanted?" asked Ruth.

  "Because if I let a few six-year-olds decide the topic of discussion every time one of them had a whim, we'd never get anything accomplished,” he answered.

  "So, you don't want them discussing the Plague?"

  "The Plague is a history lesson for another time, which I do teach,
just not today."

  "So, what, you don't want them discussing the disease that set the human race back by thousands of years, except on your terms?"

  "I'd have no right to call myself a teacher if I let the kids use school time to have any conversation at any time they wished," he pointed out. "Then I'd just be a babysitter, and while many parents figure it’s the same thing, I'm still interested in educating. And if you ever try teaching kids that young, you'll see you can't just let them run the place. So, yes, I do want them discussing the Plague on my terms only, or they can take it outside of school."