A Town Divided by Christmas Read online

  “I have all the normal feelings,” said Elyon.

  “You just don’t show them,” said Spunky.

  “Let me ask you something,” said Elyon. “Why does everyone call you Spunky?”

  “The Professor calls me Dr. Spunk,” said Spunky.

  “The question stands,” said Elyon.

  “My last name is Spunk. It’s a natural nickname,” said Spunky.

  “It’s not natural to have it completely replace your first name. What is your first name? Is it so awful that you hide it from everyone?”

  “Yes,” said Spunky. “And that question, however rudely it was phrased, shows that you’re capable of speculating about other people’s motives. These are all very good signs.”

  “Name?” asked Elyon.

  “If I have your solemn oath that you will never divulge it to anyone in Good Shepherd, North Carolina.”

  “I so swear,” said Elyon.

  “Or on the internet or any social media, or by text or telephone.”

  “You seem to think I have some sort of presence on social media, and that I have someone in my life that I could tell your terrible secret to.”

  “My name is Delilah Spunk,” said Spunky.

  A couple of beats while Elyon thought this through. “A Bible name,” he said.

  Spunky nodded.

  “The woman who seduced Samson and then betrayed him to her real lover, who was apparently a barber.”

  Spunky nodded again.

  “Nobody names their daughter Delilah. Who looks at a baby and thinks, ‘This little girl is going to grow up to seduce men and betray them’?”

  “My mother and father were just getting religion when I was born. Mother wanted me to have a Bible name, so she picked Delilah out of a list of ‘Women of the Bible.’ It wasn’t till she was deeply involved in a Southern Baptist church that somebody who had actually read the Bible told her the Samson story and asked her why she thought Delilah would be an appropriate figure for her daughter to emulate.”

  “Thus confirming my belief that all religious people are loons. Including my own very Orthodox family, by the way,” said Elyon.

  “My mother isn’t a loon, she was simply naive.”

  “No, Dr. Spunk, knowing who Delilah was is what marks you as naive.”

  “You knew,” said Spunky.

  Elyon simply regarded her without answering.

  “Was there irony somewhere in your comment?” asked Spunky.

  “An explanation of irony is even more pathetic than explaining a joke,” said Elyon.

  “Are you somewhere on the autism spectrum?” asked Spunky. “Flat affect, off the charts smartiness, but no practical awareness at all of other people’s feelings and responses to your words and actions?

  “I have often wished I had savant capabilities, but lacking them, I’ve trained my mind into a fine-tuned engine of discovery and memory,” said Elyon. “And I’m always aware of other people’s feelings and responses to my words and actions. I just don’t care.”

  “Until we’re ready to take up residence in Good Shepherd, let’s meet every week at this time, since obviously both of us are free.”

  “And these meetings will be instead of something convenient, like sending emails to each other?”

  “I don’t believe you will ever read an email from me, let alone reply,” said Spunky.

  “Who did you hear that from?” asked Elyon. “An old girlfriend?”

  “You’ve had a girlfriend?” asked Spunky.

  “That’s the kind of irony that I employ in order to entertain myself,” said Elyon. Then he walked away.

  Spunky’s first thought was that maybe if she just did nothing, the whole project would go away. The Professor would find some other team for this grant, and Spunky could move back home to Tempe and sun herself on her parents’ front gravel while she thought of something she could do with her ambiguous doctorate that would allow her to support herself someday.

  But Spunky immediately realized that she could never do that. She would dig in, write the questionnaires, gather the material they’d need, supervise Elyon’s equipment acquisitions, and handle the logistics of getting them both moved in to appropriate apartments in Good Shepherd.

  With any luck, this could all be done before the first of October, so that the actual data acquisition could be sorted before Christmas.

  If everybody was cooperative, it might even be finished before Christmas.

  Then she remembered her father’s first law of adulthood:

  Everything takes longer.

  2

  Good Shepherd was not what Spunky expected, but when she tried to think of what she had expected, she couldn’t figure it out. Had she expected Disney World’s Main Street? Or a depressed downtown of pawnshops, nail salons, thrift stores, and homeless shelters where department stores used to be?

  Since there was no WalMart anywhere near Good Shepherd, the downtown was still alive, with two grocery stores and a couple of one-off department stores. A florist, a book shop, several salons and boutiques, a hobby store, and a discount store in a building that still bore the name of J.J. Newberry, a now-defunct five-and-dime, in faded signs painted on brick walls.

  It was a downtown where people of every income level could come and shop, with not a recognizable mall-store anywhere. Even the eating establishments were local — a couple of diners, a soup-and-salad lunchery, and one sit-down restaurant with a clear intent to seem classy. No arches, crowns, or saucy red-headed girls.

  Every store seemed to have apartments above it. People lived downtown.

  “So we’re not doing genetics here,” said Elyon. “We’re doing paleontology.”

  For once Spunky agreed with him. “The town that zoning laws forgot,” she said.

  “It’s like the churches are the tent pegs keeping the whole town from blowing away,” said Elyon.

  Only then did Spunky notice the churches. She realized that to Elyon, it was bound to look like a large number, but Spunky grew up in a church-going town and so the churches were, to her, like lawns — you only noticed them if they weren’t well tended.

  There were the normal denominations for a southern town, and none of them looked particularly large. The only church buildings with any attempt to look imposing faced each other across the small town square, and neither one managed to look like anything special compared to the two banks, the courthouse, and the city hall.

  But the churches still won out because they both had steeples, one with a big clock and the other with a big bell.

  “I wonder if the bellringer sets his watch by the other church’s clock, or if the clockwinder set the clock by the bellringer’s idea of noon.”

  “They just look at their cellphones,” said Elyon.

  “I’m afraid our mobiles have been bricked in this place.”

  Elyon pulled out his iPhone and swore. “No bars at all.”

  “The bars are at the far ends of Main Street,” said Spunky.

  “You know what I meant,” said Elyon. “No reception.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see whether we can get any kind of high-speed internet,” said Spunky.

  “It’ll be even more interesting if we can discover that none of these people have human genes so we can get back to civilization.”

  “This is civilization,” said Spunky. “Look at the sidewalks at four on an autumn afternoon.”

  “Wow. Real pedestrians.”

  “Exactly,” said Spunky. “These people have actual working feet. They aren’t just squishy driver worms inside cars.”

  By now Elyon had located the address of their rental agent, half a block off of Main Street. And it only took a moment for the agent to point out the building where both of their apartments — and their office — were located. Directly across the same si
de street.

  “How convenient,” said Spunky.

  “Because we’ll be dropping in on our rental agent every morning to tell her how we’re doing,” said Elyon.

  “Because we’re half a block from Main Street. And a diner that serves breakfast.”

  “Aren’t you the cheerful one, Pollyanna,” said Elyon.

  Spunky really couldn’t let that one pass. “Have you ever actually read Pollyanna?”

  Elyon looked at her blankly. “There’s a book?”

  “What, you only saw the Hayley Mills movie?” asked Spunky.

  “Movie? It’s just — a word my parents used for anybody who was insanely cheerful no matter what happened.”

  “That’s a fair definition,” said Spunky. “Don’t ever see the movie.”

  “It’s that awful?”

  “No, but it makes people with human hearts cry, and that might cause other people to realize you don’t have one.”

  “I cry at sappy movies,” said Elyon. “That’s why I don’t go to them.”

  It took them forty minutes to unload the van that would be their only source of transportation for the duration of the study. Elyon got the big apartment so he could sleep in the smaller bedroom, run all his analytics out of the big bedroom, and use the furnished living room as a reception area for people coming in to fill out their questionnaires and have their samples taken.

  Spunky got a tiny studio apartment on the top floor, which was, fortunately, only two flights up from the street. It gave her a lovely view of the top floors and roofs of nearby buildings.

  Elyon was working on connecting all the electronics that were supposed to be connected when Spunky announced she was going out for a walk.

  “Why?” asked Elyon.

  “To see the town.”

  “We saw the whole thing driving in.”

  “We’re going to live here for a few months, why not get to know the place?”

  “And what will you do the second day?”

  She ignored him then, and walked to the central square. There was a bandstand there, and a set of weathered bleachers. Apparently this was where public events and ceremonies took place. The bandstand made her think of middle school, trying to get tuneful sounds out of her flute until she liberated herself by not registering for the orchestra or band when she entered high school.

  Did Mom and Dad still have that flute? It’s not as if Spunky ever looked for it when she went home.

  The two big churches that faced each other across the square were both Episcopalian, which in the small-town South meant they were the churches that the well-off people attended. But why two?

  Then she got close enough to the second one to see that it was the First Episcopal Church of the Nativity. Wait ... didn’t the first one have that name?

  She walked back and peered again at the sign. First Episcopal Nativity Church, it said. Were they both branches of the same franchise?

  Somebody near her chuckled. “Strangers always get a kick out of that.”

  Spunky turned to face a bald man in a suit. “Oh, is it funny?”

  “Not to us,” said the man. “I’m Eggie Loft, and so many people hate me that I’m serving my eighth term as alderman, which means I get their phone calls when there’s a feral cat or a particularly clever garbage-can-tipping raccoon or a new pothole in a paved road.”

  “Isn’t there a whole board of alderman to take those calls? And a mayor and a town office?”

  “This is Good Shepherd, North Carolina,” he said. “We keep offering the position of mayor but nobody runs for it. And if somebody ever ran for one of the other alderman seats, they know that I’d retire, so they don’t do it.”

  “I see what you mean. They must keep you hopping.”

  “I take care of every problem they bring me, within a year.”

  “A year?”

  “These are patient people. A year is usually quick enough. But those churches — they are not a joke. When the Episcopalians split in two, it’s like it turned Main Street into a deep canyon. Nobody has cross over from one church to the other in ... how many years now? Old Dan and Bubby McCoogle are eighty-seven this year, so yes ma’am, the Episcopalians are divided in half for nearly a century.”

  “But the churches have the same name,” said Spunky.

  “Neither one would give up the Nativity name,” said Eggie. “That would be like conceding the other side was right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “Exactly my point,” said Eggie. “I bet you’re Dr. Spunk, here to find out just how inbred our town is.”

  “That is not at all our purpose, Eggie,” said Spunky cheerfully, “and I hope you’ll call me Spunky.”

  “‘I hate Spunk,’” said Eggie, with so much scorn and fervor that Spunky was taken aback. She couldn’t answer.

  “I suppose you get that all the time,” said Eggie.

  “I’ve never run into anti-Spunk prejudice until this moment,” said Spunky.

  “First episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show,” he said. “Lou Grant tells Mary that she’s got a lot of spunk, and she starts to thank him, and he says, ‘I hate spunk.’” Then he laughed. At a fifty-year-old tv show.

  “I’ve never seen it,” said Spunky.

  “Obviously, or you’d be laughing too. It’s one of the great moments in television history. Right up there with, ‘As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.’”

  Spunky had to shake her head.

  “I guess you weren’t watching television in 1978,” said Eggie.

  “If you believe in reincarnation, maybe I was,” said Spunky. “And you aren’t old enough, either.”

  “You caught me. Born in 1983. But my father loved telling that one. WKRP in Cincinnati was his favorite show. He never watched Cheers because he didn’t hold with drinking. Had no problem with cleavage, though — when Loni Anderson was on the screen, you couldn’t look at anything else.”

  “So you were born a decade before me, but you grew up in an earlier decade.”

  “That’s it,” said Eggie, chuckling. “And he always quoted Lou Grant’s ‘spunk’ line because he knew I’d meet you someday.”

  It was her turn to chuckle.

  Then he cocked his head and asked a question. “How come you don’t use your first name? Spunky seems to be a nickname from your last name.”

  “My first name is Delilah,” said Spunky, “which is only one tiny step better than Jezebel.”

  Eggie nodded wisely. “My given name is Egbert,” he said. “But of course you assume the spelling is e-g-b-e-r-t.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “My father went to college for a little while, so I was named e-c-g-b-e-r-h-t, king of Wessex in the early 800s. He was the first Saxon king to be recognized as the king of all England. Very famous, at least until the Normans arrived.”

  “I remember hearing all about King Ecgberht in ... no class offered anywhere ever,” said Spunky.

  “Hence, I go by ‘Eggie.’”

  “It takes a formidable name to make ‘Eggie’ preferable,” said Spunky.

  “I couldn’t very well call myself ‘Lofty,’” he said. “So my last name was useless.”

  “Yes sir,” said Spunky. “‘Eggie’ wins.”

  “They told me you were walking around looking lost,” said Eggie, “so I came out to explain the churches to you.”

  “Did you think that was an explanation?” asked Spunky.

  “I’m quite sure it was an explanation. Remember that it happened about fifty years before I was born. I have already told you exactly everything that I know. There was one church, and then there was two, and they’ve been fighting like ... like Christians ever since.”

  “Fighting?”

  “No guns, no knives, no ambushes,” said Eggie. “That’s
Kentucky or Bosnia or West Virginia. Here, we just choose up sides and never, never, never regard the other side as fully Christian, or their pageant as the real Nativity play.”

  The fact that he was shaking his head made it clear he thought it was at least a little bit crazy.

  “Can’t people just go to both?” asked Spunky.

  “You can, because you’re an outsider,” said Eggie. “Only you can’t, because they begin and end at the exact same moment on opposite sides of the square. And each one faces toward their own church, so their backs are to each other. I can’t believe you didn’t know about the ‘dueling pageants of Good Shepherd.’”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Then why in heck did you decide to come here? That’s the only thing that’s even close to famous about this town.”

  “You mean besides having only one alderman and no mayor?”

  “Why pay for more government and waste time on more meetings than you need?” he asked.

  “Very sensible. Why pay to put on one more pageant than you —”

  “Oh, Dr. Spunk, we need those pageants. Else half the Episcopalians would leave town in a huff, and the other half would regard it as beneficial ethnic cleansing.”

  With a grin and a jaunty wave, Eggie Loft, Alderman, turned away and walked back to the city hall.

  Spunky’s immediate response was a desire to hurry back and tell Elyon about this weird holy war. Then she remembered that he was, after all, Elyon, so she headed for the nearest of the diners and began her exploration of the short-order menu.

  3

  Spunky didn’t really think of herself as good at meeting people, because approaching strangers made her crazy with worry. But once she was actually speaking to the person, the adrenalin kicked in and her brain was able to come up with a stream of very useful ad-libbed questions while noticing every fact about the person that she could ascertain.

  Because she excitedly asked rather charming questions, and then listened intently to the answers, people considered her a superb conversationalist. She used to protest, “But I don’t actually contribute anything to the conversation.”