"I take it you don't want to knit for him," said Charlinder.
"For that big a job, he's out of his mind," Yolande replied, while Stuart tugged on her top and whined, "Mama..."
"Yes, baby, I hear you," Yolande cooed. She untied her apron and laid it on the ground, made Stuart sit down by her left hip, and lifted the hem of her top to let him latch on and nurse. She resumed shelling peas one-handed. "And I keep telling him I'm not going to do it for what he's offering in return, but he keeps trying to bargain and beg off me.”
"You know he doesn't seriously expect you to do that for him," said Miriam. "He just wants your attention."
"Oh, of course," Yolande answered. "I just feel like I'm surrounded by stupid men these days," she grumbled. "But I don't mean you, Char," she said.
"I know," he replied.
"What's Bruce doing this time?" asked Meredith, referring to Yolande’s brother.
"He keeps going on about how we should always have faith in God and He'll show us the way, and all that sheep-crap. Like, last night, he wanted me to go to the fricking Sermon with him. I had to throw my spindle at him before he'd leave me alone."
A sympathetic groan went up around the circle. While Charlinder was the most assured nonbeliever of all of them, none of his friends were particularly Faithful. Miriam sometimes attended the bonfire Sermons because, being on the village council, she felt she needed to keep track of what went on, but she complained that the Sermons always either annoyed her or put her to sleep. Sunny attended sometimes and found the Sermons amusing, though Charlinder still didn't understand why. Meredith went once or twice a month; she said she was curious about what the Faithful were saying. She also liked having somewhere to go after dark. For the most part, any discussion involving God was one they could take or leave.
"I went," offered Sunny. "You didn't miss anything. They're back to their old standby."
"Which old standby is that?" asked Charlinder.
"It's the freaking Plague again," she said with a tone of describing something pathetic.
“I’m glad I gave it a miss,” said Nadine.
“You’re just lucky you
can
give it a miss,” said Yolande.
"There you are!" said another voice. It was Kenny, looking very happy to see Yolande. Contrary to her hopes that her sitting in the middle of several spinning wheels would scare him off, he flopped down on the grass next to her. "I was wondering where you went," he said happily, jiggling Stuart's foot.
"Leave him alone, he's eating," snapped Yolande, swatting Kenny's hand away.
"Sorry, I was just making conversation," he said.
"I already told you, I'm not knitting any sweaters," Yolande began.
"But I'll make you a new set of needles!" Kenny offered. "Hey, I'll even make them before you start on the sweater."
"I could teach you to knit, and then you wouldn't need me to do it for you," Yolande offered, in the tone of having been in this conversation too long already.
"Come on, I can't knit, I'm a guy."
"That doesn't stop Char."
"Yeah, but he's Char," Kenny replied. Charlinder almost wanted to ask him what exactly that was supposed to mean. "What's the problem, why are you being so stubborn?"
"I want a new set of bone needles, and a new tripod stool," said Yolande. "Or better yet, you could ask your mother!"
"My mom's got three of us," Kenny complained.
"And I've got Bruce and Stuey."
"But Stuey's really small."
"And
you
are not my son, so if you don't wanna do me any woodworking, you can take your bone needles and--"
"You two can find something else to talk about or go somewhere else," said Miriam. Yolande looked accordingly subdued.
"So, Char, what did I miss? Was 'Lande just telling you all what an idiot I am?"
"Don't flatter yourself, we weren't talking about you," said Yolande.
Sunny shared a conspiratorial eye-roll with Charlinder, then moved on. "Right, we were talking about the Sermon last night."
"I didn't go," said Kenny. "Why, what did they tell us this time?"
"All about how God loved our ancestors so much He brought them the Plague," she explained.
"That old compost again? Does anyone listen to them?"
"Some people do, actually," Miriam answered. "Do you think they’re right?"
“No, why would I?” said Kenny. "Sometimes diseases just happen, you know? Like storms and droughts."
"Then if you ask the Sermon-preachers, they'll probably say God makes the weather to punish and reward us," said Sunny.
“I guess that means we’re bad every winter,” joked Nadine.
Chapter Two
Eileen and Mark
Charlinder slipped into the village's main cabin later that day to grab some reading material before he went back to the cabin he shared with his uncle, Roy. The topic of the recent Sermon occupied his thoughts much more than he let on. It was not the first time the Faithful argued that the Plague had been brought about by an unhappy God. Others maintained that the disease, like a sudden flash flood, had simply happened to a world of people unprepared for it. It would not be the last time. The debate was as old as their community or older. It was a power struggle that they had inherited through the generations, ever since the first band of survivors settled on the farm.
The last victims of the Plague had died in the spring of 2012; immediately after that, twenty people from the area around the nearby city had found each other and made a home for themselves on that previously historic farm by the Paleola. Of those twenty, three died in the first winter after the Plague ended, leaving seventeen adults to develop what was left of the farm whose previous management had died along with everyone else. Even before those three deaths that winter, they saw two of their new community's strongest personalities engaged in a conflict of beliefs that would rage on for years before they reached a detente.
The village's first schoolteacher, and the only person who produced any lasting written material, was a woman named Eileen Woodlawn. It was her journal that Charlinder liked to read when he could steal a bit of free time, and she espoused the scientific philosophy, that the Plague developed just like any other airborne virus, only it turned out to be far more destructive than all the rest combined. A man from the same small town, whom Charlinder knew only as Mark, argued for the side of religion, that the Plague was an act of God. As long as the conversation did not stray to the topic of the Plague, or God's Will, Mark and Eileen were able to work and even live together with minimal antagonism, but when they did argue, it led to some of Eileen's most colorful journal entries.
Charlinder took the journal, with its battered cover and pages worn down to velvety softness, over to his bed, and sat down on his mother's old mattress, which he had kept after her death. He thumbed through the pages until he found the entry that marked the beginning of the conflict.
August 10, 2012
This bullshit cannot go on. I knew he was a Jesus freak when he said something about how the Plague victims are with God now, and if he were just waxing spiritual about how it's in God's hands, that would be okay, but now he thinks he can tell us what God wants from us. If I hear one more time about how God brought about the Plague to punish us for our sins, I may have to grab something blunt and beat up that old retired fireman. Leann just got pregnant, and of course everyone is delighted, because we'll have to have lots of babies to keep our whole species from going extinct, but we’ve just started figuring out how to live without civilization and we’re not sure how we’ll even feed ourselves once we’ve gone through the last stocks from the supermarkets that weren’t looted down to nothing, but no one wants to listen to me. I say maybe we should try to figure out some contraception so the babies don’t happen faster than we can feed and clothe them, and everyone is like, sure, whatever, we've got time to figure that out. Mark is the worst of all, telling her she's doing God's will, and all that crap about not resisting His divine interventions, like it's all us women's responsibility to pop out babies like gum-balls from here on out.
To her credit, Leann doesn't appear to be going for it, and I wonder how long it'll be before she has a mood swing and gives Mark an earful, because that'd be hilarious and I'd kick myself if I missed it. But I also have to wonder how the hell this is going to work. We’re coming along pretty well with the food procurement and preparation, and José is doing a good job of teaching carpentry to the other guys, and I’m working on teaching the other women how to use the spinning wheel, but we couldn't even shear more than one sheep this spring without hacking its wool to bits. Can we at least make it through the winter before we go adding any helpless mouths to feed? And could Mark please shut up about the fire and brimstone and expecting us all to be fruitful and multiply, for a change?
The debate between Mark and Eileen became more personal as the months went by.
March 23, 2013
The old man's picking fights now. I swear he’s got too much time on his hands. There’s no excuse for that, either, because it’s not like we’re in any danger of running out of shit to do around here. Marissa and I are teaching English to José so that he can better teach carpentry to the menfolk, and Mark has known José longer than any of us but he’s not even learning carpentry very well, and maybe he’d be learning it better if he stopped getting up my grill. As long as he doesn't try telling the rest of us what to do, he can rail on about his Lord and Savior all he wants, but that would make too much sense. Oh no, now he wants to go out of his way to piss me off, and he's doing a great job of it.
Today, Mark decided to corner me into having Round #942 of the Neverending Debate with him. It doesn't matter what I say, he'll never listen, because logic dumped his sorry ass long ago. He's always going to swear that God made the Plague to punish us for our sins of loud music, short skirts, premarital sex, and not going to church. And as he constantly reminds me, I can't say that I know he's wrong. I can never really find evidence against his position, because the concept of God's existence and everything associated with it can never be either proven or disproven as long as The Man Upstairs doesn't poke his head out of the clouds and tell us if we can't share, we can't have. As long as things keep going the way they’ve been for the last few thousand years, and nothing happens that can’t be explained by nature or debunked as a hoax, the entire case for God all comes down to the world's biggest example of how you can't prove a negative. The fact that there might be more substantial evidence to back up my argument regarding the Plague if we still had the technology and infrastructure for travel and research doesn't matter, as far as he's concerned. As long as I can't change his mind, no amount of evidence on my side will ever have the least merit to him.
Obviously, I was feeling very stupid today, because I made the mistake of having a discussion of bio-terrorism with Patricia where Mark could hear us. We were just minding our own business, cleaning a deer carcass and throwing ideas back and forth about the possibility of a terrorist having created the Plague and it went much farther than they expected and then got out of control, and Mark heard us talking, and he starts up about how now I'm changing my mind, so I'm not so sure after all. And if I don't know where I stand, he says, that means I know there's something missing in my arguments. That was the most logical thing I've heard him say in ten months, too bad he still can't come up with any positive evidence for his side other than "I believe in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ." I said just because I can show a little flexibility, doesn't mean I'm losing any confidence. But of course that didn't even slow him down, he keeps going on about how our sins brought God's wrath on us, and we're living with the result, and sooner or later I'll accept that, and give myself over to God's will, so finally I lost it. I asked him, if the Plague was God's wrath, then what separates us from the dead? I'm a godless heathen, Marissa's a dropout, Tom made his living in divorce, Sarah's a pagan, Amin and George are both homosexuals, and Mark's a jackass, so why are we still alive while so many faithful Christians died like flies?
Mark said our punishment was to be left behind.
That was a pretty sharp one coming from him, actually; I was impressed. And I couldn't really argue with it, either, but it was still more of the same you-can't-be-right-until-you-prove-me-wrong nonsense, so I didn't take his bait. I picked up a handful of deer intestines and told him that I didn't have to justify my scientific theories, or defend my logic to him, or be under any pressure to show him more evidence, when he was the one expecting me to believe it all came from the Great Big Grampa Up In the Sky saying Naughty, naughty, you got caught-y, puny humans! And he should stop trying to do his Mack Daddy Magic on Molly, too, because she is never going to have his babies, just forget it. He walked off in a huff at that point. Why did he have to make me take it that far?
The battle over the source of the Plague, and its accompanying debate over sexual morality and differing ideas of correct behavior, would be a source of tension for years to come, but it was at this point that fellow survivor Laura, who had been a Christian minister before the Plague wiped out her church, attempted to mediate their differences.
March 25, 2013
Laura came to have a little talk with me last night. I don't know whether it was Mark or Patricia who went and told her about our latest fight, but apparently Laura thinks my line about the Great Big Grampa in the Sky wasn't very funny. I guess she would think that was kind of gauche. And I do feel for her, being jammed in between a nut-job like Mark and a curmudgeon like me, because anyone who tries to settle our differences must be either a saint or a masochist. On the plus side, I haven't had to argue with the nut-job since he interrupted me from helping Patricia gut that deer the other day. Maybe I got the filthy old perv where he lived by bringing up Molly.