by Alyson Miers
"Which I see your friend Taylor has already done, in any case," said Miriam.
"And does that bother you?" asked Ruth.
"If Taylor wants to give his big sister and brother a break from dealing with a six-year-old boy for just long enough to tell him that God loved His creations so much He tried to kill them all," Miriam explained, "then I'm frankly disturbed, but then I can't be everyone's mother when their mothers are alive. What bothers me is when people want to use the Plague as an excuse to pick fights with people who aren't interested," she continued. "Like you're doing now, for example."
"Picking a fight?" Ruth said disbelievingly. "Is that what I'm doing?"
"Well, you are the one who brought it up," said Phoebe.
Yolande tucked the wool cards under one arm and took Stuart in the other. "Come on, Stu-baby, time to go home," she said while making haste from the Square.
"What you call 'picking a fight' is the least that I and anyone else who cares around here has to do to get anyone to talk," said Ruth. "What are you all afraid of, anyway?"
"We're not 'afraid of' anything except giving you lot the idea that there is anything to talk about involving your God. Just who are you to decide what anyone should be talking about around here, anyway?" demanded Miriam.
"Maybe we do it out of concern for your souls," Ruth offered, still just as composed as ever above her array of slender knitting needles and two-ply yarn. "Maybe we want you to start talking about what led to the Plague because we don't want you to suffer eternal damnation in Hell for your actions."
Charlinder wanted to run home and bury himself under a pile of Eileen Woodlawn's writings, but one look at Phoebe's face showed him what he felt: they just couldn't look away.
Miriam began laughing again. "And who's going to tell us what kind of behavior is going to send us to Hell? You?" she scoffed. "That is, assuming your promises of Heaven and Hell are places that really exist, which I'm far from convinced they are, but you know how I really feel about what caused the Plague, and what your God may have had to do with it?"
"No, Miriam, tell me how you really feel," Ruth said flatly.
"I just don't care one way or the other. I don't see why anyone gives a lamb's tail about what caused a disease that snuffed itself out almost a hundred-twenty years ago, when we have much more important things to do than argue over what might have happened. The Plague is in the past; it is history. We need to take care of the present, and if you have enough time on your hands to be quibbling about something that far in the past, then you're not doing enough to get this farm moving into the future."
Phoebe looked extremely impressed with Miriam's rant, but Ruth was unfazed.
"But what kind of future will we have if we just make the same mistakes that brought God's anger on our ancestors? How many of us will survive another Plague?"
"And again I ask," Miriam continued, "Who are you to know what any supposed God wants us to do, any more than the rest of us? And have you ever found it a little strange how your whole argument for why we should love God, and worship Him, and build our lives around bending to His will and honoring His divine plan, is that He supposedly brought about a disease that killed over six and a half billion people in less than two years? Have you ever considered how that looks to those of us who aren't impressed with your reasoning for why God even exists in the first place? Any God who would do that to His creations for disobeying a moral code that He never even bothered to communicate to them is, as far as I care, not a God who deserves even our respect, much less our worship."
This time, even Ruth was shocked. She finally blinked and recovered her voice enough to say, "There doesn't have to be any mystery in what God expects from us. It's a pity that none of our original survivors left a Bible in good enough condition to last this long, but all you have to do is pray, and listen to what He says."
"Except I don't think you, or any of the other Faithful, want us to pray," Miriam told her. "You don't want us to listen to voices only we can hear, and you don't want us to discuss what we think may have happened over a hundred years ago. You want us to listen to you. And that's why the rest of us don't want to have this conversation. It doesn't matter why our ancestors saw all their family and friends die of the Plague, because at this point, there's nothing we can do to change the fact that it happened. Arguing about what they did to bring that disease on themselves isn't going to make our children's lives any easier or better. The only people who have any reason to care about why the Plague happened are long since dead."
"I see I'm wasting my breath on you," said Ruth, with a slight expression of awe.
"You've been wasting your breath on everyone who's been sitting here, honey," Miriam confirmed.
Ruth speared her ball of yarn on the ends of her needles and stood up. Before she walked away, however, she looked at Charlinder. "She never could explain how she knew it was safe to go outside, could she?"
"I don't think she was ever really concerned about that," Charlinder answered.
"No, she may not have been concerned. But she still never managed to explain it, even after she described it in her diary," Ruth reminded him, and finally walked away.
"What was that about? Who is 'she'?" asked Phoebe.
There was no way it could be anyone else. "Eileen Woodlawn."
The sky was getting dark and it was time to pack up the spinning wheels and go to dinner. Charlinder went to the meeting square with Roy, as always, with Ruth and Miriam's argument replaying in a loop through his mind. Soon after they sat down with their food, Kenny came over, but he wasn't there to talk to Charlinder. He tried to hold his face in a still expression, but he kept grinning ridiculously.
"Roy, could you come with me for a few minutes?" he asked between stupid grins. "I want to tell you about something. Char, can I borrow your uncle?"
"Sure, whatever," Charlinder said lamely as his uncle went off with Kenny.
When he came back, Charlinder was nearly finished eating, and Roy apparently also found something very, very funny.
"What was that about?” he asked.
Roy flopped down on the grass next to Charlinder and tried to control his laughter. "Kenny told me all about the argument you just saw between Ruth and Miriam! Kenny says," Roy paused to look around him and make sure no one was watching them, then lowered his voice to a whisper," he says, 'Forget about God, I'm gonna go worship Miriam!'" he repeated, then collapsed into middle-aged-man-giggles.
"Kenny wasn't there," argued Charlinder. "He won't be caught dead near Spinners' Square unless he's hanging around Yolande, so how does he know what happened?"
"He got the story from Phoebe!"
"Doesn't anyone on this farm," Charlinder began, without bothering to keep his voice down, "have anything better to do than talk about each other?"
At this, his uncle laughed out loud; great, howling notes sang out from him. "Wake up and smell the cornbread, Char! You're not living in Eileen's era!"
As much as he had enjoyed watching Miriam tell Ruth how she really felt, there was something in her words that bothered him almost as much as the Faithful's proselytizing of fear and obedience. The Plague had made its way into his schoolroom and Spinners' Square in the same day. He had long understood that the debate, even in the days of Eileen and Mark, was not really about disease, but about power. The disease was merely the vessel that the Faithful used to carry their arguments. Miriam, Roy and all Charlinder's friends understood it just as well, but while Charlinder tried to fall asleep that night, his mind see-sawed between the events of that day, with repeated flashes of Taylor, Robert, the hunting trip with Kenny, and the sheep-grazing with Miriam. As all the images spun together, the parts that continued to haunt Charlinder were Miriam's choice phrases to Ruth that day.
I don't care...it doesn't matter...we aren't interested...
That was why the picture didn't add up. Jess and Theo didn't want to be left alone with Bruce because they didn't want to argue with him. Yolande fled from
the Square when the argument escalated, while Phoebe hardly participated at all. Khalil's more science-based explanation for the Plague, however amusing to the observer, merely demonstrated that the nonreligious couldn't agree on a stable theory for the disease, whereas the Faithful were always on the same page. The Faithful were always itching for a fight and willfully created opportunities to preach. Charlinder's friends scorned those opportunities, shrinking away from argument at least and rebelling against it at most. Charlinder was caught between those who espoused what he found dubious at best and dangerous at worst and who cared enough to start a fight over it, and those who didn't care enough to talk.
For his part, he was neither impressed with the Faithful's case for their side, nor satisfied with the nonreligious willingness to dismiss the debate as a waste of time. He wanted to move toward the future far more than Miriam, but he also wanted to find the answer to the past--not just an answer that made sense, but one that he could defend. No one in his community yet had such an answer. All they had was a war of philosophy and a battle of wills, with one side having no evidence and lacking the interest to find it, and the other insisting the evidence was all in what had already happened. On one side were the passionate, on the other, the apathetic. He was on the side of the apathetic, and this was one of those times when passion had God on its side.
He, too, was part of the problem. He could hardly fault his friends for shrinking away from the debate, when he himself always found it easier to shut the discussion down than to engage. Now he wanted to engage, but not if it meant he’d be alone. He needed to do something. It was his responsibility as a teacher to offer his students the truth, but the best he could give them in some subjects was gathered from materials created over a hundred-twenty years before. What else did he have, though? Did anyone have anything better since the Plague had brought about the end of previously known life?
As Eileen had told Mark, and Charlinder had told Taylor, there was probably a satisfactory explanation with no assistance from divine wrath, but it was unavailable to them because the scientists researching the disease had died before they could do their jobs. The Plague was a destructive force that didn't care what its survivors or their descendants thought about it. If the scientific story could never be found, that would neither confirm nor deny any religious speculation on the subject. However, his understanding that much would neither make his friends and other non-Faithful more passionate nor subdue the ambitions of the Faithful. This was not an answer to his question, only an understanding of the problem, because he had to be aware, as his uncle said, of what he was up against.
As the night drew on and his body grew more tired and his mind more calm, it occurred to Charlinder that he was up against tremendous losses of privileges that pre-Plague civilizations had taken for granted. The loss of life brought the loss of knowledge and communication. The result was that Charlinder and everyone else in the world as he knew it were both ignorant and isolated, living in a world where information, if it was worth sharing, could only travel as fast and as far as a rider on horseback. In fact, the researchers who'd worked on the disease early in its progress probably had known more about it than Charlinder's era had been able to find out--probably more than even Eileen and her contemporaries had learned. Their findings had either died along with them, or the span of their research had outlasted the availability of worldwide communication, in which case the information was still out there, where it was originally gathered.
The place where the professionals had had the most time to research and, indeed, the greatest reason to seek the truth, was at the source of the disease. That was where they must have found the information relevant to what Charlinder needed to know. The answer he needed was not how the virus had spread to the rest of the world from northern Italy--Eileen had already recorded that much--but how it had developed in the first place. He could find Italy on a map in the blink of an eye, but there was an ocean in the way; he could never get that far.
Then as he sank, finally, into sleep, the northern coastlines of those vast continents he'd been studying so obsessively rose into his mind again, and Charlinder thought to himself, I can't get that far east...but I can go west...
Chapter Seven
Walk
Charlinder woke up the next morning to find his uncle on the way outside.
"Good morning," Roy said cheerfully. "Any better?"
"Yeah," he answered, then for reasons he didn’t yet understand, he blurted it out. "I want to go to Italy," he shared. Maybe it was the early hour, or the comfort of knowing what he needed to do.
Roy blinked, his face otherwise blank, his movement arrested. He looked the way Charlinder had felt when Robert had asked to speak to his students.
"To research the Plague where it started," he explained before his uncle could ask.
"Right," said Roy. "How are you going to get there?"
"I'm gonna walk."
"You can't walk across an ocean."
"I mean, I'd go west. Then I'd just need a boat to get across the Bering Strait, and from there it's all land."
"Do you have any idea how long it would take just to get that far?"
"I know I'm looking at a long time, but it'll be worth the trouble in the end."
"When did you get this idea?"
"Last night, it came to me."
"How about what you'd eat? Where you'd sleep? How you'd stay on course? What you'd wear in the cold? Did that come to you last night?"
"I'm working on all that."
“Really.”
“Yes! This question needs an answer, and I’m gonna bring it home.”
Roy sat back down on his bed and looked off into the middle distance. “Wow, sometimes I forget,” he began, looking back at Charlinder, “how much you’re like my sister.”
“Yeah, Mom was also independent-minded.”
“Your grandma said she was ‘stubborn as a sick mule’.”
“I’m sure Grandma knew all about that, as she raised you both.”
“What exactly are you implying?”
“Look, Uncle, the point is, I’m going to Italy, and there I’ll find out how the Plague started.”
The next several days passed no differently from any other Spring days in Paleola. The only thing that changed was Charlinder. The school lessons and all hours of the next day flew by like they took no time at all. He felt like he was no longer afraid of the mountains in front of him now that he could see the horizon beyond. It soon occurred to him that his plan to go to Italy had not come to him all at once. It had been growing for weeks until it had come together during the night. Once he was able to put his intentions into words, his hands were suddenly untied, the buzzing in his ears was silenced, and his eyes were wide open. Everything he noticed suddenly had to do with his walking around the world. What he would need to take with him, what he would miss while he was away, what he wouldn't miss while he was away, what he wouldn't have to put up with when he came back. All of these things suddenly came into focus.
The only thing missing, he soon realized, was that there was no reaction from anyone else in the village. He had assumed that his uncle would tell Miriam, who would tell her children and Charlinder's friends, who would tell their brothers, and then suddenly everyone in the village would know what he was planning to do, and everyone would have questions. As it turned out, no one said anything about his plans. If there was any difference, it was that people were suddenly quiet around him, but since he was so busy thinking about how far he would travel and what he would bring back, this did not bother him.
He supposed his assumption was wrong, and that his uncle had not told anyone about his plans. If Roy had kept silent, the only reason Charlinder could suppose was that Roy didn't believe him, or rather didn't take him seriously. Perhaps he thought that if he acted like nothing had happened, then Charlinder would stay put. If that was Roy's attitude, then Charlinder would need to find another way to show that he had every intention of going to Ital
y, even if he had to cross mountain ranges barefoot and swim through freezing water between Alaska and Russia. He needed to show them that he would go with or without their approval, though he would benefit from their support. He needed to find a way which preferably did not involve sitting down everyone he knew and explaining the journey he planned. That would not only be tedious, it might not even get the job done. After all, if his uncle refused to acknowledge his plan, then how could he expect a better response from anyone else?
The fifth day after he told Roy was a bad day at school. The younger ones wouldn't calm down, while the older ones wouldn't do anything. He was accustomed to dealing with each of these issues, but not this combination to this degree. Around the time to start the writing lessons, he got to thinking about what a relief it would be to let some other poor sucker deal with the little brats while he answered to nothing more arbitrary than the elements and time.