Charlinder's Walk (55 page)

The next hand in the air was from Andre, Miriam's oldest grandson. "How do you know Nevila was telling the truth?"

"She showed me some things that Gentiola made. She even gave one of those things to me, which I'm now going to show to you."

He took the yarn memory out of his pocket and explained in what order they would see it. The little ones saw it first, then the older pupils, and Judith last. The more studious teenagers recognized the significance of what they saw immediately: it was the biggest part of the controversy that Eileen could never explain. Even those who didn't catch its importance right away were unanimous that the object was "way cool."

Once the children went home and told about two dozen variations on the tale to their families, all the adults had to hear it directly. The village council called an assembly, and Charlinder spent an afternoon and part of an evening telling everything he could to all the Paleolans over the age of sixteen. Young and old, Faithful and godless, they were all riveted. He let them file out ahead of him when it was finished. Darrell hung back after the rest.

"How do you think Eileen would have felt," he asked, "to know what you've just told us?"

"I think Eileen would have done whatever she could to learn about the mechanics behind magic," replied Charlinder. "I'm not sure how much she could have learned, but I'm sure she would have given it her all, because she would have been so alarmed to hear of what one human being could do. Either way, though, she probably would have been a lot more comfortable knowing about Gentiola than with the idea of God's holy punishment."

"I'm trying to imagine how she would have spoken with Mark if they had found out they were both mistaken," said Darrell.

"I'm sure they would have ripped into each other with enthusiasm," Charlinder responded casually. "Darrell, speaking of Eileen, there's something else I've been meaning to tell you about."

"And what new insight did you gain into that woman's life during your years abroad?"

"It wasn't really an insight so much as...anyway, while I was staying with Nevila, she showed me how I'm descended from Eileen."

"Of course you are. Of the twenty original founders of this village, fifteen left descendants, and if you do the math, everyone in your generation should be descended from all of them, and in fact nearly all of you are."

"But do you know that for a fact?"

"Oh, yes. All of the village's known parentage is stored in the infirmary, so I know of your relation to Eileen. Did you think she didn't leave more than a generation of descendants?"

"Of course I'm not surprised now, but I never thought about her that way before. I guess I should have."

"So now you know," said Darrell pleasantly. "First Eileen had a son with her friend José, and that son was your great-great-grandfather. Then two years later, she had a daughter with her friend Ryan."

"And that daughter," Darrell continued, "was my mother."

"I really didn't know that," Charlinder breathed.

"My paternal grandfather, meanwhile, was Eileen's old buddy Mark."

Charlinder now spoke aloud, his newfound awe abandoned. "I'm sorry."

Darrell chuckled. "I may not be quite what he had in mind, though I'm sorry to say both Mark and Eileen died before I was born, so I never got to talk to either of them. But, you know, I think toward the end of his life, he learned a much greater acceptance for all the quirks in what he called God's creation. It's probably due to his blood that I'm still alive, anyway, so I'm not sorry."

"How much else have I not tried asking you?" Charlinder wondered aloud.

"You're much better-informed than most of your peers, and most of your parents' peers, at that. It'll do you no harm to ask more questions, especially when you consider that it really hasn't been all that long since the end of the world."

"It's been a hundred-twenty-two years," Charlinder counted.

"To someone your age, I'm sure that must seem like an eternity," Darrell conceded, "and in my grandparents' former lives, a century was a huge span of time, but they were only my grandparents, and I'm still here. Our society is still very young. We're really just taking our first steps."

After that day, he started working with Judith. They planned lessons together in the evening and handled different sections of the class in the mornings.

"How long do you think the council will let us keep this up?" she asked him one afternoon after about a week of joint teaching.

There was no need to ask what she meant. With two entirely able-bodied adults choosing the school as their primary occupation, the people in charge would soon begin asking if the children were now learning twice as much as before and if this was doing their village twice as much good.

"Actually," said Charlinder, "I hope they bring that up some time soon. Have you ever thought about what would happen if we merged with the other villages?"

At this, Judith looked flabbergasted. "Our culture would probably get swallowed up like a minnow. You do realize there are hundreds of people around us who don't agree with the way we do things around here."

"Sure, we'd be in the minority, but that doesn't have to mean we'd disappear. Haven't you considered it'll have to happen eventually? Those woods aren't getting any bigger, the deer aren't breeding any faster, and our family trees are growing awfully close together. We can wait another century or two and end up fighting over territory, or we can share and combine resources on our own terms. Which way do you think would turn out worse for us?"

"Okay, I guess we'll have Eileen thrashing in her grave no matter what we do, so what does this have to do with our school?"

"I have a plan to show you," Charlinder began, and he couldn't help but smile. "I want to bounce some ideas off of you, and see if there’s something in here that’s worth doing."

Catching onto Charlinder's excitement, Judith's eyes opened wider. "What kind of plan could this be?"

"It has everything to do with our school," Charlinder assured her, "and I'm sorry my uncle isn't around to hear about it. I wish my mom could hear it, too, but I think you'll agree, at least, that Eileen would be pleased."

He showed her the notes he’d written out for the learning center he had in mind.

"Hey, what’s this you’re saying about libraries in the city remains?" she demanded. "Aren’t the cities dangerous?"

"No, the cities are fine," he assured her. "They’re more afraid of us than we are of them."

They stayed out going over the idea until the sky grew too dark for reading. They kept debating it well into the night. The one point on which Judith agreed right away was that Eileen would have approved.

Epilogue

The year was 2170, and the farm by the Paleola River was now home to only a few dozen people who grew crops sufficient to feed hundreds. Charlinder now lived in the middle of a school--a growing, sprawling, bustling school--a short walk from the shore of the bay, dozens of miles from where he'd grown up. At the moment when Judith came to wake him up, that old farm was the very last thing on his mind. All he could think was that he was getting much too old for this and could the sun please stop being so bright.

"Rise and shine, Char, and show your face to Auntie Miriam or she'll tear you a new nostril," said Judith as she strode into his office where he'd slept the night.

"Auntie Miriam has been tearing new figurative orifices," he grunted, "in my metaphorical body cavities for almost thirty-six years. It's not so scary anymore."

"Okay, how about this: Auntie Miriam will tear
me
a new nostril if I don't produce your sorry carcass at the marina in the next ten minutes."

"Fine, I'm getting up," he grumbled.

"You do have a room, with a bed, you know," said Judith. "Did you get drunk with Robert and stay up half the night arguing about the nature of the universe again?"

"It wasn't more than two hours, and where is the old crackpot, anyway?"

"He's working on his syllabus like a responsible teacher, which you should appreciate, now comb the debris out of your beard and present yourself to Miriam."

"Dare I ask why she wants to see me at the marina?"

"Some mostly-white guys just brought a dinghy up to the pier and they're asking for you, now doesn't that pique your curiosity?"

"Where'd they come from?"

"North," she said cryptically. "Definitely further north, now let's get a move on."

Among the changes that were made as the villages around the river valley merged together and somehow managed not to kill each other was that the joint council decided that everyone-- yes, that did include those oddball matrilineal Paleolans--needed to choose surnames to pass onto their children. Most Paleolans complied by choosing the name of the family's most recently deceased male relative. Charlinder, ever the odd duck, chose more than one new name. The nameplate by his office read Charlinder Woodlawn-Roy, but most younger people around the settlement knew him as Uncle Char. Judith had become like a sister to him, and Kenny had been like a brother until his death two years before. Robert surprised him by turning out to be an excellent History teacher, and later became his favorite sparring partner. His sister Ruth had taught Language and Composition until she died a few years before. Judith was the co-head of the school, in charge of elementary education; no one could match her ability to keep fidgety, difficult children attentive and engaged.

He followed her into the hallway and headed towards the east entrance. They passed Sarah’s office, where she was planning her Geometry syllabus for the coming semester. Just a few years after his return to Paleola, someone came to Charlinder and told him that a few white people had just shown up out of nowhere and said they knew him, so he went out to the meeting hall and found Sarah, Brian and Dana with her one-year-old son on her hip. They were in search of a new place to live and asking how they could contribute. Now Sarah was a Math teacher at the school, and Brian and Dana were in charge of animal husbandry.

Just as his community had underestimated Charlinder until he’d turned up alive and intact after three and half years’ absence, so he had underestimated his fellow villagers and their neighbors until he saw what they could do with a good idea. Once the plan for the school was shaped into something realistic, the Paleolans started braving the city remains to gather up materials, and once the neighboring villages saw what they were doing, they practically competed with one another to see who could get involved first. Their settlement now approached two-thousand people originating from five different contributing villages and several experts who’d been recruited from greater distances. Several distinct strains of post-Plague culture bumped up against each other every day and so far, somehow, there had been no mass murders, just a lot of meeting hall events full of very colorful language.

If anyone was ferocious enough to take this increasingly unwieldy bunch of people and make them work together, it was Miriam, who was now mostly blind, mostly deaf and too stiff to walk very far, but still sharp and formidable as ever. She had now buried all her siblings and three of her children, and never went anywhere without a great-grandchild to be her eyes and ears, but if anyone in the Bay settlement wanted to make anything happen, it was Miriam’s approval they had to get.

Darrell had continued to provide the community's medical care until he lost his mobility to a broken hip when he was ninety-three. By then, the settlement was big enough that they needed more than one person to cover their medical needs, so he trained both Bruce and Yolande to replace him. They were both still at work and had the three boys and two girls they'd raised together working with them.

After Darrell was retired, Charlinder told him that there was no Nevila, that Gentiola was alive and well and had told him her story of her own volition. Darrell said he wasn't surprised, that the Nevila part of the story had always seemed ill-fitting to him; Occam's Razor and all that. He died a few months after that, at ninety-eight. Only then did Charlinder feel confident enough to tell others the truth about Gentiola; he told Miriam and Benjamin, Judith, Kenny, all his spinning buddies, with the promise that they wouldn't share it with their brothers or children.

His old friends from Spinners' Square, meanwhile, put all their children into his classes, and they never missed a parent-teacher meeting, which led to some strange, nervous times outside of the school, but their children always handed in their homework on time. Then, to make matters even stranger, all of them except for Yolande became teachers themselves; Nadine and Phoebe did elementary education, Meredith taught Geology, and Sunny taught Biology. The fact that he was technically their boss did not stop them from going to the mat with him as his students' mothers, and he wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

In their walk to the pier, he and Judith ran into Carlos, now in his late thirties and in charge of food security. He looked very much like a shorter, balder version of Charlinder who had grown a decent beard at fifteen and begun losing his hair in his twenties. He had married, oddly enough, a sweet Faithful young woman originally from the Paxtonville settlement. At their wedding ceremony, Meredith had explained to Charlinder that Carlos and his bride planned to have her younger children also live with them in a joint avuncular-patriarchal family formation because, as she put it, "they just wanna piss off everyone around here." They had lived together in that odd hybrid-type family for around eighteen years now and were raising several children who made formidable students.

"Hey, Uncle Char," said Carlos, "I hear Auntie Miriam's waiting for you to come answer those guys' questions." He gestured over his shoulder towards the pier, where Miriam was sitting on the bench with her great-granddaughter, Emilia, while some foreign-looking fellows talked with Kenny’s twin nephews.

"Yeah, and speaking of which, do you know what's going on?" asked Charlinder.