The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer

Author:Robert J. Sawyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SFWRITER.COM Inc.
Published: 2024-03-23T01:45:20+00:00

Interview with Roscoe Koudoulian

Sarah presumably had told her brother Joshua about what had happened to her, but it wasn’t until after Letitia and Jürgen left that she told her mother and father about Hornbeck’s attack. They were, I was relieved to see, completely supportive and didn’t blame her in any way. Sarah left out Jürgen’s beating Hornbeck up, which I found interesting; I guess she wanted her parents to like her newfound friend. And I was pleased when Sarah called me “a good person,” something I hadn’t heard said of me for a very long time.

Abraham’s place was about a mile from Sarah’s parents’, but it was an easy walk through cleared land, and it helped us both work off the massive dinner Sarah’s mom had made.

Old Order Mennonites tended to read two types of books: religious texts, including their preferred Martin Luther version of the Bible, and Mennonite history. Abraham turned out to be a font of knowledge on the latter topic. I’d heard that Mennonites and Amish, like many religious communities, simply didn’t talk about sexual assault. “Oh, long ago, we were like that,” Abraham told me as we sat in his candle-lit main room. “But at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, things started to change. Women began speaking up—as well they should—and, just as important, men started listening. Back in those days there was certainly some sexual abuse within Mennonite communities, especially by clergy. But unlike the Catholics—you’ve heard of them?—well, they tended to shelter abusers, apparently, but we did what Mennonites have always done with those who break the teachings. We shunned them; we cast them out.”

That gave me pause. I’m too young to have experienced COVID-19, but I remember COVID-50. I vividly recall how politicians coddled those who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated, even though they were prolonging a crisis and putting others at risk. The Mennonites’ simple rule for their society—you’re either in or you’re out—made a lot of sense to me.

Old Abraham went on: “In the old days, people apparently used to think of us as stuck in our ways. That’s only sort-of true. Back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, our community here mostly spoke German. By the dawn of the twenty-first, the switch to English was well underway, and, really, no one seemed to mind. A culture comes from its beliefs and values, not a language. Of course, the reason for the switch was to better interact with our neighbors, who, back then, bought our produce. But ever since the great collapse, there haven’t been any neighbors, not until you lot showed up.”

“Speaking of the . . . the ‘great collapse,’” I said, “surely after technological civilization fell, there must have been desperate people trying to invade your farms, no?”

“There were some,” Abraham said, “or so the story goes. But not as many as you might think. They didn’t want to become farmers or horse grooms. They wanted their machines back, their gadgets, their power that ran through wires.

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