Stitches

S.E. Nordwall




Little Prescott Williams pricked his finger – again.  Why was the number eight so difficult to sew?  It should have been one of easiest, in his opinion, due to the combination of straight backstitches involved.  

“This cloth is too tough! Why does this have to be done on an old duffle-bag?”

“Because it needs to last,” responded Mr. Hopewell.  “You will need a handy reference until these equations are committed to your memory.”  

The boy already had to rip up stitches from failed answers when Mr. Hopewell shook his head and made that “tsk-tsk” sound through his chapped lips.  This had been the best way the teacher found to get his students to learn – better for the memory than simple drawing upon the ground with a stick.  He sometimes employed a slate and chalk in his lessons, but chalk was precious, nearly as much so as ink and paper.  Somehow the threads of old clothing were just plentiful enough to afford lasting lessons.  

He’d had to trade a lot of squirrels to get that weatherproof scrap of fabric that his young charge was busily trying to feed a needle through.  He’d had to trade ten good coyote-pelts to get the set of steel needles – but they would serve well, not only for this task, but for sewing up leather, clothing…saddles…better than the cheaper ones crafted from bone.  That, and he didn’t like to think what bones those models had been made from – moreover whose bones.

“After you finish your addition tables in the black thread, I shall start you on the multiplication tables in the white thread,” Hopewell said, standing behind the boy on the worn wooden bench.  

“At this rate, the white stitches will be red stitches!” the boy complained.  Already there were tiny bloodstains upon the duffle-bag fabric from the eleven-year-old child’s misaimed stitches.  

“Either learn from it or develop calluses,” his teacher intoned.  “The fabric may be heavy, but it is lighter than skin.”

“It isn’t lighter than MY skin” Prescott complained.  

“If you want to gain an education that will force your betters to respect you, this is the price you must pay. I am afraid that this is the world you have been given.”  

“Hmm-hmm,” the boy said.  “I wish I could write with light, like the people in the old days did.”  

“One day, you may write with ink and paper,” the teacher answered.  “Keep at it, and you may rise to status.  Slack off and you’ll be condemned to the life of a scavenger.”

Spencer Hopewell sighed.  Education didn’t actually make much of a difference, all-told.  He was a teacher, yet survived the same way Prescott’s parents did – through hunting and trapping, trading with the caravans that braved the wasteland and scavenging what a previous society had left behind.  He remembered paper – its smell and its feel.  He even remembered the tablets where one could hit a few plastic keys and write with photons and code… and how easy it was made for people who knew little to nothing of the codes behind the letters and the numbers.  Hopewell spoke and wrote in a few languages – including HTML… a long ago, faraway skill that was useless now; and his knowledge of that particular code was a matter of studying a dead language for his own entertainment.  At least the Spanish was still useful, along with his primary English. Of course, the language of mathematics was universal.  

He taught the living children and grandchildren of the survivors of his generation more out of passion to keep intelligence alive than out of it affording him a good living.  Some of the parents of his wealthier clients were the reason, however, why he’d gotten to taste beef, milk and cheese every once in a while.  It was enough – for now.  

He peered over his pupil’s work – another equation.  “No,” he said.  “That is wrong.  Remember the lessons in the sand.”  

Hopewell took the trimmed-down tree-branch (a rarity that he was lucky to have) that rested against a wall of the shack and drew in the dirt at the boy’s feet – two straight lines, a plus sign and two other straight lines, followed by an equation-sign.  He pointed to each straight line in turn.

“Remember.  One…”

“Two,” Prescott said as the man rested his stick over the other lines. “Three… Four!”

“Yes. And you do remember the symbol for Four.”

“Silly me,” the boy said to himself with a small giggle.  “I don’t know why I was stitching a five! I must have zoned out there!”  He took his needle and started loosening the errant threads.  

“There was a time in my childhood when the Leaders tried to make the populace believe that two-plus-two-equaled five, or, at the very least, other falsehoods that were just as grave.”  

“Why would they do that?” Prescott asked.  He knew, vaguely, that the fabled “Leaders” of The World Before were the ones responsible for the world that he knew.  The World Before was, according to the legends, a world of plenty – a world where people read books, a world with many trees and a world where people didn’t have to worry about their teeth falling out if they wandered into certain “zones.”  

“They wished to control people,” Hopewell said simply.  “Getting people to repeat the lies by-wrote was a way to assess loyalty.  Those that ignored what was right in front of their faces to repeat the words they were given had their place within the tribe.  Those that continued to speak the truth had to pay a terrible price for their refusal to be controlled.  This is why you must learn to think critically, my young friend.  What I wish for you is what I wish for all my students – to keep the truth no matter what.”

“I think it would be dumb of me to lie all the time.  Playing pretend is one thing, but…”

“You must care for the truth enough to be willing to die for it, if need be.”  

“You didn’t die for it.”  

“I was only a child, younger than you, in The World Before,” the teacher answered.  “My voice meant nothing.  It was my parents that suffered for the truth.  I have only survived thus far by luck.  Tell me, child, do you know anyone else as old as I am?”

“No, Mr. Hopewell.”  

“You probably never will,” he replied.  

The elderly man continued his hawkish glare over his student.  The dust in the shack made him cough.  He often held his lessons in outbuildings like this one – a shed adjacent to a barn.  Enough sunlight came through the slats the walls were composed of to make for easy reading and writing on the dirt-floor and for the sewing-work on guides that were meant to last.  The shed kept the wind out as well as the threat of sunburn. Lessons outside were few and far-between given the blighted landscape – a hot flat in the summer and blistering tundra in the winter.  The winters had a later onset than they’d had in Hopewell’s childhood, but had grown more brutal given the lack of windbreaks that the forests used to provide.  One considered oneself lucky to even find a grove of trees anymore – hence why paper had become a commodity used only by the upper classes.  

People tried their best to scrape out a living from the land.  It was, on a basic level, better for one to know how to work a hand-plow and a donkey than it was to learn mathematics tables, but both the Williams Family and Spencer Hopewell knew that education was the key to young Prescott possibly getting a future career within one of the remaining cities.  Basic addition and subtraction were, of course, in use among the countryside for trading purposes – except for those places that insisted that two-plus-two equaled five.  More advanced lessons would hopefully bring the child to impress his betters enough to be granted access to more than an old scavenger’s knowledge of the world and to a longer life than the rest of his family would be living.  

The Williamses decided that Prescott was the smartest among their remaining brood of ten births, with five-survivors past the age of three.  He was also the eldest among the living.  Hopewell was, thus far, concentrating his lesson-plan upon the boy.  The others, perhaps, in time, would benefit.  Given the increase in his cough, the teacher wondered if the boy would be teaching his siblings in his stead soon enough.  He would be lucky to live long enough to train up the youngest, and, of course, that depended upon what resources the Williams clan was able to share to keep a mentor in their employ.

After the lesson in numbers for the day, Spencer Hopewell had a treat for Prescott:  A book for the boy to read – an honest-to-God paper-book he’d managed to find in his travels.  It was not a short-story sewn into a cloth scrap, some by-memory thing written upon the earth, something inscribed hastily in a heavy clay tablet or a tale told orally, but a rare piece that he’d come upon by chance that someone of a higher station hadn’t managed to snatch up. It was possibly too advanced for the child’s reading-level thus far with his work with scripts written in dust, but nothing was “too advanced” in this age, especially for someone who needed to learn quickly and with any scrawl of letters one could come by.  The piece was fiction – a long-ago, faraway tale of mythical races and a little man given the task to destroy a piece of jewelry endowed with the power of an evil entity.  Hopewell did not know how well the story would sit with his charge, given that the blighted lands that were ruled by Evil did not bear too dissimilar a description from the world of everyday life that the boy had lived in since his birth.

“Mom and Dad say that if I do really well, that maybe I’ll get to be rich someday,” Prescott said.  “You know a lot, but you aren’t rich.  Why should I even want to be rich? My family grows and hunts enough to keep ourselves alive. I’d rather be chasing rabbits with Sparks than doing this, or tanning hides with Dad.  Ow!”

“Watch yourself,” Hopewell cautioned.  “You want your food to be reliable, don’t you?” he added.  “You don’t like the days when you have to go without.”

“I don’t like it when Sally cries,” Prescott said with a nod.  “She cries at night if we don’t have supper.  It’s annoying – I can’t sleep.”  

“Now, now, she is little,” said Hopewell, “still a baby – not a little baby, but still new.”

“Yeah,” Prescott sighed, taking up some white thread and starting on the multiplication tables he was supposed to memorize.  One-times-one equaled one – so the first part would be the easiest to sew…    

The boy paused and gave his mentor a quizzical look.  “Mom and Dad say that the Leaders used to be called the Big Babies.  Why is that?”

“Hmmm,” Hopewell muttered as he paced about the shed and scratched his thin beard.  “The Leaders in The World Before fought with each other – a lot like you do with your little brother and sisters.  They also wanted everything for themselves and didn’t like it when people disagreed with them.  They were unable to handle facts and so suppressed them.”

“And they eventually made the world like it is because of the lies and the fighting?” Prescott said.

Hopewell nodded.  “A child’s tantrums are a normal part of the development of a young person – so you should not fault your youngest sister for crying when she doesn’t get enough food or when you take a dangerous thing that she thinks is a toy away from her.  I will not fault you if you become frustrated and stamp your feet and yell.  Some of your upcoming lessons are going to be quite difficult, so I expect it.  However, with adults… things are supposed to be different.”

“Adults are supposed to act like ‘dults.” Prescott hummed.

“Yes, but they often act like dolts,” the teacher intoned.  “Do not be too quick to trust someone just because they are an adult.  You trust me because I have earned your trust, have I not?”

“You’re the most boring guy I know,” Prescott agreed.  “I don’t think you’re gonna blow up nothin’.”  

“Good, good,” Hopewell laughed.  “We started calling the old leaders the Leaders rather than the Big Babies after a while… when babies started becoming extra-precious.”  

Prescott winced a little as he tried to concentrate on his sewing.  His father had been stoic whenever he’d had to dig a tiny grave out on the edge of the family’s land but his mother had cried a lot every time one of the little ones didn’t make it. All of the graves had names on the markers.  When Prescott had been among the neighbors some space down the road, he’d learned that some folk had stopped naming their children until they’d turned two because it wasn’t expected that most of them would survive that long.  People were starting to grow un-attached to youth until youths proved their strength.  

Life was going to be better for him, Prescott decided.  Maybe he would rather be chasing down rabbits with the family dog or helping his father with leathers because he found these things far more interesting than schooling, but if he could go to one of the cities and get a job where he could use paper, any children he had would have enough food and good shelter.  They would be warm and would get clothes woven from new cloth rather than cobbled together from remains.  Prescott’s mother was good at weaving, but she had to do a lot of gathering and scavenging to make the blankets she made and his father had yet to find a good stock of un-diseased sheep to raise wool from – he was trying, though.  

“If you are able to impress people with your literacy,” Hopewell said, taking a seat on the bench next to him to rest his aching knees, “You may very well get to a position where you can do what you want all the time.”

“Like the rich people do?” the boy asked.  “Like I said, I don’t really care unless I can keep any kids I have from cryin’ all the time.  I hear tell that if you’re rich and you get to use paper and stuff, you can get any kind of girl you want.”  

“You can get more than one,” Hopewell said.  “The world needs children, so if you can support more than one wife, you’ll be given that.”

“The rich people were like that before, though, weren’t they?” Prescott asked.  “Back when everyone had lots of stuff?  The Big Babies?”

“Yes, but they tried to hide it,” Hopewell said with a smirk.  “That was part of the problem, I suppose.  The Leaders thought they could do whatever they wanted because they had all of the paper they could ever hope for and could keep it locked away from everyone else. If I remember correctly, the most important paper was green then.”  

“Didn’t they wonder what God would think?” the child asked.  “Mom and Dad say we’re supposed to share - and that I’m supposed to share with the family even when I don’t want to ‘cause God is watching.”  

“You are still young, so I will forgive you,” Hopewell said with a rueful smile.  “Your parents are sincere when they talk of a belief in the higher laws of Heaven,” he said.  “I know them well enough to know that, but you should know one hard truth – if there is one thing I can leave you aside from reading and simple math, it is this:  Don’t trust people who talk about God too much.  Like the rest of us and like human beings since time immemorial, they worship money.  Some of the ones who crow the most about God are the ones that worship coin and paper the most.”  

“That’s stupid,” Prescott groused.  “I got to hold a copper coin in my hand once and it didn’t have any powers.”  

“That is because you gave little thought to spending or hoarding it,” Hopewell responded.  “You will know the power of such things after your first trip into the city.  Also, if you catch the attention of your betters and they let you have an in-road to becoming one of them, you’ll receive some of your own worship.”

“I don’t wanna be worshipped.”  

“On some level, we all worship the rich, hoping that good fortune will fall down to us.  We pray for their generosity… or their business, whether they give it or withhold it.”

“And you’re supposed to nod and smile when they lie to you?”

“Maybe in the old world, but not now… not anymore – Remember, boy, what I told you about the truth.  Don’t ever compromise it – and be willing to die for it if need be.  The world isn’t as it was, but it can always get worse.”  

“Hmmm,” Prescott said.  He bit his lip as he poked a needle through the tough fabric he was working, hoping that this memory-scrap would be worth the time, trouble and pricked fingers.  

“What if I don’t make it, Mr. Hopewell?” the child asked.  “In getting the right peoples’ attention and getting rich, I mean?  You never got rich… will I just wind up like you, teaching people and hoping?”

“There is nothing wrong with that, boy,” the teacher answered.  “Giving you an inroad to becoming wealthy is but a secondary goal of mine.  My first goal is far more important.”

“And what is that, Mr. Hopewell?”  

“To make Amu-Iqua smart again.”