Charlinder's Walk (17 page)

"Physical issue. These things just happen, it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong."

"I think you’re the first person I’ve ever met who thinks that," she said, in a tone of disappointment.

He decided to change tack. "Well, some people just don’t have kids; you’re raising three already. Before the Plague, back when there were so many people around, some didn’t have any because they just didn’t want to be parents."

"What did they do with their lives?"

"It was up to them to decide," he said with a shrug.

Annette picked up the knife and resumed chopping the potato. "I can’t imagine how anyone could think like that."

He thought to himself,
There are a lot of things some people can’t imagine.

"What was it you did for work in your home village?" David asked over supper that evening.

"I was the schoolteacher."

David looked impressed. "How did you end up with a job like that?"

"Let me think." In fact it was difficult to say exactly what qualified someone to teach school in the Paleola village. "First, I volunteered for the job when my old teacher decided he'd had enough, and he agreed I was good for it. The village council accepted, so I got the school. I don't know if that's how it was done with everyone else. My successor came on the recommendation of her cousin, who's one of my closest friends."

"And did you just take your friend's word for it?" asked Brian.

"Not really; I trained my successor at the school for the last few months before I left, so I got to see how well she worked."

"So he didn't just take his friend's word for it," Sarah pointed out.

"No, as I was about to run off for who-knows-how-long, that would have been irresponsible."

The conversation turned eventually, as Charlinder feared it would, to his family life.

"Since my mom died, almost four years ago, I've been living with my uncle, and he was the most helpful of anyone I knew when I was getting ready to travel," he explained.

"What happened to your father, then?" asked Dana.

"Nothing happened to him. I just never knew the guy. No one in my community was raised by their father, it's not our custom."

"So your custom is for the mother to raise the children all by herself?" asked Annette.

"No, the mother raises the children along with her nearest-age brother, sometimes still living with their mother and uncle."

"So, what, then?' began Brian, "What if the brother doesn’t want to raise his sister’s kids?"

"That works about as well," Charlinder answered, "as if the sister decides she doesn’t want to be a mother."

The family was then quiet, and David showed a look on his face as if to say his son shouldn’t have gone in that direction
.
"Besides," Charlinder continued, "as long as everyone's getting some, it all evens out."

Dana choked on her bread, while David and Annette looked stunned. "Try not to repeat that kind of language in front of anyone else in our village," David advised after he recovered, while his older daughter laughed. "In fact, just don't tell anyone any of what you just told us."

"Not a word," Charlinder sighed.

"Listen, Annette, about your baskets," said David to his wife, "I've heard from Mr. Flanagan about a new place you could sell them..."

They didn’t ask him to tell them any more about his family life or village culture for the rest of the meal, which was fine by him. When it was time for sleep, the parents retreated to their bed in the corner of the first floor, and Charlinder followed the children into the loft, where four serviceable straw mattresses awaited. Lacey was tethered in the shed behind the house. It made a lovely change to stretch out on a soft bed placed on a wooden floor well above the ground.

"Dana, what were those little kids doing around our house this afternoon?" Brian asked his older sister.

"They wanted to pet Charlinder's sheep," she answered drowsily.

"You all be quiet up there and go to sleep," came their father's voice from downstairs.

As comfortable as he was with the arrangement, this didn't seem like a family that often received guests.

"Hey, guys," he whispered, "why do you have an extra bed up here?"

"Dad got that bed made after he married Annette," Sarah explained, "so the next baby would have a place to sleep when it got older."

"And this would be the baby that never came?"

"Yeah, that one."

And they’ve kept it here in the house the whole time?
"Right."

Charlinder thanked the family for their hospitality and said goodbye after breakfast the next morning. He set off again with Lacey, who gave him a haughty bleat and stayed several feet ahead of him.

"Yeah, I know, but you got a break from walking!"

As his host had requested, Charlinder didn't tell anyone else in the village what he'd told David's family. He didn't talk at all to the rest of the village except to say hello, if even that, to the ones who stared at him as he passed. He left with his ewe from their territory and continued north along the Mississippi, hoping that most of the human settlements he encountered in the future would not leave him feeling as sad and frustrated as this one.

Chapter Fourteen

Susan and Eileen

As he'd suspected, there were a number of villages along the river. This was fortunate, as he still needed to acquire some solid food. He would periodically net a fish from between the ice floes in the river and sometimes eat it raw straight away, other times barter it for a hot meal in the nearest village, where he would then trade a pot of Lacey’s milk for some dried foods to carry in his pack. Some villages were as uniformly white-populated as the first one he'd visited, others showed some ethnic variation, which meant that Charlinder was sometimes but not always the object of much staring. His hosts occasionally offered him a bed for the night, but he usually continued up the river that same afternoon. Though he had yet to see another society like the Paleola village, he was also relieved to find that most of the people he encountered were not as punitive as in that first one. There were times when Charlinder even came close to meeting someone he could tell about his trip's purpose with a clear conscience.

West of the Mississippi River's source he met a girl named Susan, of about Judith's age, who thought it was very intelligent of him to know how to spin and knit and do other "women's work." While she showed him how to turn reversible cables, the interaction became so comfortable that when the questions about his journey happened as they often did, Charlinder decided this was someone he could tell the whole truth. Once he was finished explaining his intentions, she stared ahead at the ground in front of them, frowning as though to collect her thoughts.

"Where do you get your information about the pre-Plague era?" she asked at last.

"You know Eileen Woodlawn, that I told you about? She left a lot of journals, and she wrote about all sorts of things that happened in her lifetime. Especially what happened during the Plague."

"Who else left written records?"

"Pretty much just her, actually. You'd be surprised at how much ground she covered, though; her writings formed the basis of most of our educational program."

"Are you saying there was only one person in your community who left any writing to future generations?"

"Well, they were all so busy learning how to survive, it looks like no one else in her generation thought it was important to keep a journal."

"You have no way of knowing what they were thinking, as you weren't there with them."

"I know I wasn't there with them, and since I wasn't there to see it, there's a lot I don't know, so that's why we need written records from the ones who were there, which is where Eileen comes in."

"But don't you think it's a little suspicious that no one except that one woman left anything in writing?"

This was far from the confidante Charlinder had thought he would find in Susan. At first he’d thought she was the first person he’d met since leaving home who didn’t look at him like a weirdo because he knew how to hold a spindle as well as a saw, and now she was treating him like a fool for seeking answers. "What, do you think she burned the writings from her fellow survivors so no one could leave anything to disagree with her?"

"I'm not accusing
her
of anything, I'm just asking how you can rely so much on the word of only one person from a time that would be so strange to you."

"Look, I can show you her journals, and you can see how knowledgeable she was, and her insights are really intelligent..."

"I'm sure she was brilliant," Susan cut in, "but we're still talking about just one person's experiences, and you're getting her opinions along with her facts."

"But her opinions don't make her facts any less valid."

"I'm not arguing with that. I'm saying you can't get a full picture from just one person's account."

Charlinder was now seriously asking himself how he had walked into this conversation. Exactly what kind of conclusion was he supposed to reach? "Well, regardless, her part of the picture is all I have to go on, unless you have a more unbiased account here?"

"No, all the story we have of the Plague is oral, and it's pretty vague," she admitted. "But you don't see any of us taking off more than halfway across the world based on what little we know."

"But I've already taken off, and I'm not inclined to drop the whole idea and turn back."

"I'm not asking you to go back home already," Susan shrugged. "Just to keep in mind what you may or may not find once you get to where you're going."

Charlinder was thankful that he hadn't received an invitation from anyone to stay the night. What he may or may not find? What was that supposed to mean?

Enough time had passed that the daylight hours ran longer now. He was able to get a good distance from the village before it was too dark to walk any more, and he was very tired indeed when he unrolled his bedding that night.
Beware of teenagers bearing complicated cable skills
, he thought ruefully,
because you never know what other tricks they’ll have up their sleeves
.

What might he find or not find? That question gnawed at him as he fell asleep: what was the
what
here? The next thing he saw was not the Midwestern springtime forest in which he’d bedded down for the night. It was the paradox of dreaming; that sensation of being somewhere totally unknown or inappropriate but thinking it’s perfectly natural to be so confused. He was standing at the junction of a tangle of roads, all curving outward and stretching off into the distance in an unknowable maze of incomprehensible intersections and bypasses. He didn't take any of the roads in front of him, only looked around. "I'm trying to find something," he said out loud to no one in particular.

"And if you set your sights broadly enough, you can hardly expect to be disappointed," said a voice behind him. It was a woman, young like him, with the same accent as the Paleolans.

"That much is obvious," Charlinder responded, "but what might I not find?" he turned around to find the source of the voice, but even though no one appeared, he knew the woman was just behind him. "How broadly should I set my sights?"

"Now, that's the right question to ask," said his friend. "You must ask yourself whether making sure you find
something
to say your mission is accomplished is as important as getting the answer to your question."

"Of course I want the answer," he said. "So what will I have to find to get it?"

"And now you open up the possibilities," said his friend. "The answer you seek will influence the evidence you find. So are you looking for your answer, or Eileen's?"

"I think we're both asking the same question, really," said Charlinder.

"But you forget that Eileen is not a part of your world, and she lived in a very different time, so make sure that what you seek is not tied to what Eileen would have hoped to find."

"But if Eileen would have looked for the right thing, then shouldn't I do the same?"

"You should look for the right thing, not aim to do the same as Eileen. What matters is that you find
your
answers."

"And if I don't find them?"

"Then perhaps you were looking in the wrong direction."

"Who are you, anyway?" he asked the voice.

"Who, me?"

"Yes! Who are you?"

"Oh, I’m just an old friend," was the breezy reply.

Charlinder woke up that morning with a part of himself expecting to find a sprawl of roads in front of him, and wasn't quite sure what to make of Lacey standing over him and demanding to be milked. Then he remembered to consult his compass again to continue west.

He had so far worked out two customs for his stops at villages. The first was for his map; every time he stopped at a settlement, he found someone to mark where they were so that Charlinder could measure his progress. That was so far turning out to be depressingly slow, but his direction was reassuring. The other custom was to help himself to the local food, which of course meant what he could fit in his pack as well as what was served to him at the table. He didn't think of it as stealing; he called it "sampling," and he didn't do it at all the villages he visited. On occasion he also snatched a few scraps of leather if he could find it because he was wearing out moccasins at an alarming rate and needed the material for new ones. His criteria were concerned with how much the settlement had to spare. If they were doing well enough that they wouldn't notice what he took, then he figured he wasn't really hurting anyone. If they barely had enough to feed their own people, then Charlinder did without and moved on.