She would, too; a determined Carol Allen was a force to be reckoned with. But Sela was chuckling as she went into Carol’s bedroom, because it wasn’t as if she intended to keep her relationship with Ben a secret. She’d barely settled in and started answering Carol’s barrage of questions when someone knocked on the door, then Barb and Nancy appeared in the doorway.
“We need to run something by you,” Nancy said to Sela.
And that was the real start of the busy day. Nancy, bless her, had taken it on herself to get with Mona Clausen and design the braziers, based on an entry they’d looked up in an ancient set of World Book Encyclopedias. That was one less thing Sela had to do, but they wanted her approval. By the time that was finished and Nancy was gone, the washer was finished with its cycle and she took the clothes outside to hang them on the clothesline to dry.
While she was doing that, a kindergarten teacher who Carol had contacted walked up and wanted to begin organizing the curriculum for the school-in-planning. She helped Sela finish hanging the clothes, then they went inside for a four-way confab with Carol and Barb.
Next one of the community pastors came knocking. Brother Ames was in his seventies, looked kind of like a skinny Santa Claus now that he was growing out a white beard, and he had a lot on his mind.
“People are going to want to get married, but there aren’t any marriage licenses now. Babies will need to be recorded, but we don’t have birth certificates—and, mark my words, starting in about seven months we’re going to have a population boom here in the valley. When the lights go out and the television goes off, people find other ways to entertain themselves. How do you want to handle these issues?”
Sela gaped at him. Somehow she didn’t think “community leader” was intended to be in charge of things like this. Marriages, divorces, and births were legal issues, state issues . . . and there were no functioning local governments now. Holy crap.
It wasn’t just Brother Ames who would be asking; there were other churches in the valley, other pastors. Someone needed to make a decision. Sela wanted to take him into Carol’s bedroom and turn him over to her aunt, but Carol was taking a nap.
There was something really serious that would be going down tomorrow, she felt as if she should be concentrating on that, but she couldn’t breathe a word about it to anyone—and even in the middle of big drama, the small dramas of life went on. People would be born, and people would die. There would be marriages and divorces—well, maybe not divorces, though people could break up and stop living together—regardless of whether or not there was a functioning government, and everything needed to be recorded.
“Get a notebook,” she said. “Or one of those big scrapbooks. It doesn’t matter what you use, but records have to be kept. We’ll do what people did when all of this was the business of the churches, before politicians stuck their noses in. You perform marriage ceremonies, and you record them. Same with births: they need to be written down, baptize the babies if the parents want.”
Brother Ames looked massively relieved. “I was hoping you’d say that. We’ve been talking about this—the other pastors and I—and that was the only way to handle the situation that we could think of, but we wanted some guidelines we could all follow, so we’re on the same page.”
She wondered why, in that case, they hadn’t drawn up their own guidelines, but people had gotten accustomed to government making those decisions for them. She sincerely doubted the state would have her arrested for “authorizing” a system, so she might as well be the one to give the go-ahead. “When everything is up and running again, and that may be years, I doubt the state will take the position that all the marriages made during that time are illicit. That would be a really stupid, unpopular position to take. So treat everything as seriously as you would before. I can guarantee you that, as far as the people here in the valley are concerned, any marriage ceremony you perform is just as legal without electricity as it was with it.”
“Bless you,” said Brother Ames.
Then another neighbor showed up asking about the physical therapist who had been working with Carol,