Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  "A bed and three meals a day, the next five months and change, for you and the bunny rabbit?" she added it up.

  "That's right."

  "And then a boat ride."

  "Of course."

  "You won't take up much space on a boat, but in the meantime, what can you do for us?"

  "Of course I'll earn my keep," he declared, gesticulating with the half-empty glass in hand. "That's why I asked to meet with you here, right? Shit, I'm not about to lay around and let someone feed me for five straight months. Even I don't have that much chutzpah."

  "How's your woodworking?"

  "It's okay. If you need someone to fix a loom or spinning wheel, you could do a lot worse than ask me."

  "I won't trust you to work on our boats if you're just 'okay'."

  "Oh, Hell no, don't bring my skinny butt anywhere near those suckers. No, Belinda, I am not the man to fix your seafaring vessels, but a settled community needs a lot more than just big honking ships, so I am happy to be another pair of hands for many smaller things."

  "What kinds of smaller things?"

  "Just let me know what I can do to help, you know? Actually, I'm a lot worse at hunting than carpentry, so don't ask me to shoot any deer, but if your fish are still swimming, I can catch them. I can shear sheep, although that's more of a summertime thing, and I'll be gone by then, but I can trim hooves, help with the lambing, that kind of stuff. I can always split firewood, and that’s good for this time of year. I can repair a four-heddle loom as well as weave on it--"

  "You can weave?" Belinda interrupted.

  "Sure I can weave, though I'd rather knit. All that damned warping business tries my patience."

  "Oh, you're a knitter too, now?"

  "Absolutely. I’ve noticed it’s a lot easier to walk for three years if you can make your own socks."

  "Next you'll be telling me you can cook, too?"

  "Sort of. You shouldn't ask me to plan a full supper, but I can certainly grind cornmeal--except I guess you don't grow corn this far north, but--yeah, I can help out with the cooking, sure."

  "What kind of work did you normally do at your home in America?"

  "I taught school, was my main job. I still helped out with other chores, though."

  "You had a school, now? What ever did you teach there?"

  "We did the basics, you know--reading, writing, arithmetic, and I taught them some history, biology, meteorology, agricultural principles..." he went on until Belinda interrupted him again.

  "Did you say you can read and write?" she demanded.

  "Yeah, I can do that, too, why do you ask?"

  "How much can you read?"

  "Pretty much anything written in the modern English language is doable, but..."

  Belinda sprang out of her chair and went to the next room. She came back with a book in her hands: a dust-filmed early twenty-first century tome bound in fabric-covered board. She opened it to an early page in a manner befitting the handling of a case of precious stones, and laid it on the table in front of Charlinder.

  "Read this page to me. Tell me what it says here," she instructed.

  Charlinder started where her thumb pointed at the upper-left corner of the delicate yellow page and read aloud a page of epic poetry. Belinda waited until he reached the end of the page and looked up.

  "You're a bloody clever liar if you just made that up," she said.

  "Why would I want to lie to you about this?"

  Belinda ignored the question. "Are all Americans literate?"

  "No," he chortled. "There may be other villages where folks outside the ordained clergy can read, but I haven't seen them yet."

  "I guess that was a silly question."

  "Even at home, sometimes I felt like I was the only one around who cared about having an education outside of growing soybeans and catching fish. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with soybeans, but...am I the first person you've met who can read? You have at least one book still intact, so..."

  "I know of a few villages farther south where some folks are literate, but...they never get around to sharing their skills with the rest of us. When the original survivors built this village, they taught their children how to read, but the next generation wasn't so concerned, and the one after that cared even less, so when I was born, no one knew their letters anymore. You're the first one who's ever shown me something in this book."

  "It's good to see you've been taking care of it. Do you have others in such good condition?"

  "We have a handful of other books that haven't yet fallen apart," she said. "But, Charlinder, if you taught your own village's children to read and write, maybe you can teach ours, too."

  Charlinder had to put down the glass. He steadied his hands in Smoky's coat.

  "You want me to be your schoolteacher for the next five months or so?"

  "Can you do it?"

  "I'm not sure it's possible for anyone to learn a whole lot in five months."

  "Can you get us started, at least?"

  "I'll need a space with tables and seats, a fireplace, and writing supplies, I'll need adequate fuel for the fire for as long as the weather stays cold, and I'll need the space to be available for my lessons, every day. How many kids are we talking about?"

  "There'll be dozens. We can have the space arranged in days."

  "Then I can get you started if someone can put me up."

  "Come to my house for now," she said with a smile, "and we'll get something in you besides whisky."

  Belinda's husband had died many years before, and she lived with her oldest daughter and son-in-law and their four children. Her daughter looked after Charlinder while Belinda went out and started making arrangements for the schoolhouse. He suspected this involved a lot of telling people about him, but this time he really wanted everyone to know what he was doing there. The more he thought about it, the more he really wanted, more than anything, to teach as much about written language as he could, and that meant he didn't want to deal with any false starts while news trickled around and more people showed interest. He wanted all his students to begin at the same time, and that begged another question.

  "When you say 'dozens,' just how many dozens are we talking about?" he asked Belinda that evening when she returned.

  "I've talked to a lot of families, and there'll be at least forty children in your class," she said.

  "That might not be the best thing," he said. "I usually found that once you bring the class over twenty-five students or so, you start getting problems."

  "We could split them up, and you'd teach two classes a day," she suggested.

  "I might split them up later, but I'll need to get acquainted with them first. Listen, Belinda, how important is it to this community to become literate?"

  "I'm not sure I quite get your question, Charlinder. Haven't I been telling you it's very important to us?"

  "I can see it's important to you, but I haven't met the other parents yet."

  "Are you having second thoughts on us already, young man?"

  "I'm not getting cold feet, but if we're really going to accomplish something here, then there's something you all need to understand if you've never seen a school. I don't want to become the village's official babysitter. We only have a few months, which means I can't afford to lose time on discipline problems and attendance issues. These children I'm teaching need to be at least six years old, and they need to be polite and well-behaved. They need to be able to sit still and keep quiet while taking instructions from a relative stranger, and they need to do it for several hours a day. I want to have several adults in the class at all times to help keep the kids in line, and they need to be adults that the kids take seriously. All the students need to come to my lessons every day that they're not sick, and I can only teach the ones who are interested in learning. If anyone would rather play around than follow my lessons, I will expel them from class and I may or may not give them a second chance."

  "I can see you have some experience
at this," Belinda said when Charlinder had finished. "All that is quite reasonable, and I've also spoken to several parents who'd like to learn, so...if they can find a way to move their chores around, then..."

  "...then there's no reason they can't also learn," Charlinder finished. "Yes, Belinda, I will gladly teach your community's parents, provided they stick to the same attendance schedule. When do you think we can get started?"

  "Your classroom is well underway, we'll just need a bit of time for things like fuel and supplies. You've just got here today and you're about to become the most important man on the coast," she mused with a smile.

  "I don't want to seem arrogant or demanding here. It's an honor to be of help, so I want to make sure this actually works."

  "I know you do. So do we."

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Knowledge

  In the ensuing four days, Belinda found a new place for Charlinder to live. Her best friend's daughter, Marietta, was a widow who had a spare room in her house since her son had run away from home. Charlinder took her son's bed and Smoky was set up in the cages along with the rabbits that Marietta and her daughters bred, which looked smaller than Smoky but were almost twice as heavy. Her daughters, Francie and Pauline, appeared slightly taken aback to have a male in the house again, though Charlinder chortled to himself that they would soon find out he didn't exactly fit their definition of a man.

  Belinda showed up at their house on the morning of the fifth day and told Charlinder his students were waiting for him. He'd already met a lot of people interested in reading lessons, though he didn't yet have a handle on all the names and faces.

  They opened the door to a noisy, spacious and remarkably warm room. There he found a roaring fire in the grate and three rows of benches and tables spread across the longer dimension of the space. At the front was a huge sheet of slate nailed into a wooden support structure and anchored to the wall. Scattered on the tables were dozens of small sheets of slate and scraps of chalk, while a crowd of children buzzed and scampered amongst a handful of adults. Charlinder's arrival, however, brought a shift in attention as every pair of eyes in the room found him.

  "Good morning, everyone," he called to the room. They did not yet know to respond with "Good morning, Char," like his Paleola students had always done. "Listen, I want everyone to choose seats, and I want the young people seated by height," he instructed. "Everyone take a slate and some chalk, and let's have the little ones in the front, taller kids in the back, and the adults at the ends of the rows. Then I'll get your names."

  They didn't have any scrap paper on hand, so Charlinder couldn't take down their names, but he counted twenty-six girls and seventeen boys under sixteen and two men and four women including Belinda.

  "How well do you all know your alphabet?" he asked after explaining to them how he expected them to behave. All he got in response was a lot of blank staring.

  One of the women raised her hand to just above her head. "Begging your pardon, sir, but what do you mean by 'alphabet'?"

  "All right, then, that'll be the first thing we learn. Take your chalk and mark on your slates the way I do on the board." He started at the upper left of the board and drew a shape made of three straight lines. "This is the letter A. Everyone repeat after me..."

  Thus he spent his first teaching day introducing his class to the Latin alphabet as adapted for the English language. They learned to distinguish vowels from consonants and they learned the basic consonant sounds and the short and long simple vowel sounds. He taught them the alphabet song, and found it very amusing to watch six adults, some of were old enough to be his parents, singing along with the children to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. By the time the sun abandoned them, the class was able to construct and recognize words such as cat, wet, pig, pond and run. He felt that the first day had gone very well and they'd accomplished something important, though he didn't expect many of his students to be nearly so biddable once the novelty wore off and he started asking them to learn words like through, although and unique.

  Over the next few weeks, his class became more familiar with the secrets of the alphabet and comfortable enough around Charlinder that he had to discipline several young ones for goofing around during lessons. Pauline and Francie became more accustomed to his presence in their home. Marietta refused to let him help her around the house, so he spent a lot of time spinning and knitting Smoky's wool in preparation for Greenland. He couldn't go anywhere without someone asking for his opinion on one thing or another. He taught lessons six days a week, and while his students often grumbled about the schedule, he pointed out that in that case, they needed to appreciate their Sundays a lot more.

  Marietta lived close to several other families, and her nearest neighbor was Sharon, also a widow, who kept laying hens and sewed sails for a living. She had five children, mostly young adults, and since none of them were in Charlinder's class, he wasn't as well-acquainted with the family as he might have expected of his nearest neighbors. She apparently got along very amicably with Marietta, but it wasn't until February that she became more than a face to Charlinder.

  She brought him to her house one evening and engaged him in what was undoubtedly the most uncomfortable conversation of his life that wasn't precipitated by him doing something wrong. It concerned her youngest son, Bobby, whom Charlinder had assumed was a very shy 12-year-old but who turned out to be a disabled 15-year-old. Since Charlinder was known around the village as a man of some learning, he was expected to hold the answers to the boy's condition. Although he was hardly qualified to have an opinion on the matter, Sharon insisted that he tell her something about why her son wasn't like other kids his age. Feeling like a wretched, disgusting person the whole time, he gave her his best guess.

  "I heard about what you told Sharon last night," said Marietta while Charlinder was planning the next day's lesson and she looked after her livestock.

  Yeah, it figures, he thought. What he had told Sharon was that her son was compromised because she had drunk too much hard liquor while she was pregnant with him. "How did you hear about it?"

  "She told me. We like to have a little chat together here and there, you know."

  "Did you know what she wanted to ask me when she came over yesterday?"

  "Yes, I reckoned it had something to do with her Bobby. Is it true, then? Was it the whisky that did it?"

  "As I told Sharon, I can't know for sure what happened," he sighed, "but I've got no reason to lie to her."

  "You know, I can't say I'm surprised," said Marietta. "I don't mean about Sharon in particular. I mean in general. It all fits together. Can't say I really fault her for how she handled herself, though. Did she tell you she's not really a widow?"

  "Yes, she told me about Andy running out on her."

  "Right, so. You try waking up to find you've got four children to raise alone, and another one coming, and your husband's just up and left. You might hit that bottle extra hard, too."

  "I know what you mean. I don't blame her."

  "I reckon that doesn't help her, though."

  "I kept telling her I didn't know what I was talking about, but--"

  "--but you had an idea about what might have happened," she finished. "Don’t apologize for answering her question, for heaven’s sake. Just tell me something: where did you learn all this?"

  "Eileen wrote it all down, and everything she wrote was the village's property after she died. We learn things at school, we learn things from the village medic, and we pass it around Spinners' Square."

  "This is why we need to learn how to do what you can do."

  "I can't do all that much," he pointed out.

  "Oh really? What can't you do? You don't hunt, but you can fish. You can build things, fix things, and make things with your hands that men don't normally do. You're the only man I ever met who's offered to help me cook. Where does it end?"

  "I can't speak any foreign languages. I can't pilot anything larger than a rowboat, I don
't come out very well in fistfights. I don't always make the wisest decisions. I'm not good at planning anything long term."

  "Boys who leave home at twenty-one are in no condition to make the wisest decisions," she said, looking off toward the ground as though remembering something she would rather forget. "And is anyone planning anything in the long term, really? Is that even possible since the Plague wiped us all out? Our idea of a plan for the future is to carry on the family trade. We think we can say how many children we'll have and then we've got it all figured out. Only we don't consider what to do with those children once they're here. I never told you what happened with my Georgy, did I?" she referred to her runaway son. "You’ve been with us over two months and you haven't asked why my only boy ran off?"