A Town Divided by Christmas Read online

Most people, being unobservant, replied, “Of course you do.” The Professor, however, merely smirked and said, “What do you think people want good conversations to be? They don’t want your contribution, they want your raptly listening face, your responsive face, your inquiring face — and the only sound they want from you is a stream of polite burbles to indicate that you’re still listening.”

  Spunky knew quite well that it was this talent of hers (which she still didn’t really believe she had) that had prompted The Professor to partner her with a socially unskilled science-and-numbers guy. Elyon would do his job, and leave Spunky to win people over to the project.

  But ten thousand people? That was just insane. Elyon calculated the numbers. “If you work eight-hour days, and we allow fifteen minutes for each interview, which is absurdly low, and fifteen minutes of travel time between interviews, and then we allow an hour a day to set up the interviews, it will take more than eighteen thousand days, and even with no days off, that’s almost fifty-two years.”

  “You could help,” said Spunky.

  Elyon rolled his eyes — proving that he really had been a teenager once — and said, “Only if we want to be ridden out of town on a rail.”

  “Oh, come on, you wouldn’t be that bad at it,” she said.

  “The manager of that breakfast place asked me to stop coming in because the waitresses were complaining.”

  “Don’t you tip?”

  “Bigger and bigger tips every day.”

  “I can’t imagine you making passes at them,” said Spunky.

  “I’m not sure if I should be proud or offended that you can’t even imagine me making a pass, but no, I don’t.”

  “So how did you offend them?”

  Elyon shook his head. “If I knew, I would have stopped.”

  But Spunky already knew. It was the punctilious way that Elyon gave detailed orders and then quizzed waiters — and everybody else — to see if they really understood his instructions. When she called him on it once — “Why do you test them like this was an introductory course in serving food to Elyon?” — his reply was, “Because that’s what it is.” When pressed, he explained that he doesn’t like disappointment.

  When she emailed The Professor with a complaint about the sheer numbers of interviews, he fired back a snippy answer: “Didn’t you take statistics? Hand out the questionnaires. Follow up with interviews of a randomly selected subset of questionnaire responders and non-responders. With a little thought, we can cut at least ten percent out of that 50-year estimate.”

  He was being funny — she had to cut 98 percent out of it because the grant wasn’t infinite. But when she discussed his email with Elyon, it took the lad only two hours to write a program to randomize all the selections for them while still making them statistically representative.

  “We’ll have the complete genome from all of them,” Elyon said, “and that’s what really matters.”

  Spunky might have retorted that she was so happy to find out that her work was completely trivial while his was “what really matters.” Instead, she realized that if Elyon believing his work was far more important than hers, he’d stay out of her way. There would be no profit in correcting him.

  At first her activities consisted of visiting all the open businesses in town to persuade them to put up posters and stacks of flyers, announcing the Good Shepherd Genome Project:

  “It’s free, it’s quick, there are no needles. It will help if you fill out a questionnaire. Your information will be identified by a randomly assigned number and no one will ever know whose genome is whose. Insurance companies will not be notified of any health information found. Children and babies are as important to the study as adults of every age. If you can’t come to the GSGP clinic, email me and I’ll come visit. Signed, Dr. Spunk.”

  She had a nice way with design, so it was all arranged on the page in a completely readable form, and her manner of writing it was folksy and warm.

  But she quickly learned that the most important thing she did was converse with store employees until they liked her. Then, when she was gone, they’d talk about what a lovely person Dr. Spunk was, and how easy she was to talk to, and how trustworthy she seemed. If she said no needles, there wouldn’t be needles. If she said their names would be held back and the results wouldn’t be shared with anybody, then it would be true.

  She had to replenish the stacks of fliers several times, and by mid-November they had almost five thousand samples. Of course, Elyon could only process them at a finite rate, but it was pretty quick and he was up to three thousand genome records analyzed.

  Spunky had conducted about a hundred interviews. If you were generous about the definition of “interview.”

  But there were almost as many questionnaires turned in as DNA samples, though many of them stuck to the health-related questions only. Biographical information usually started strong and then petered out when she got to the none-of-your-damn-business questions like, Have you ever moved away from Good Shepherd for more than a month? Why did you return?

  Maybe a lot of people felt as Elyon had assumed — that when they moved back to Good Shepherd it was a sign of personal failure in the outside world. But the non-responders on the biographical questions outnumbered the responders by a wide margin. They couldn’t all have failed.

  There was one thing about southerners that could be so maddening to Spunky. The way a southerner says yes is “Why, that’s such a wonderful idea! I’ll absolutely fill out the whole questionnaire.” The way a southerner says no is “Why, that’s such a wonderful idea! I’ll absolutely fill out the whole questionnaire.” The only way you can tell the difference is to wait and see what they actually do.

  Elyon was perfectly happy because he was racking up good numbers in his portion of the project, while she was falling short in hers. It didn’t dawn on him that the fact that the people in this hamlet showed up at the clinic in such high numbers was completely owing to her wooing of shopkeepers and clerks.

  Nor did he notice that his job was completely mechanical and quick, while hers required insight and responsiveness and observation and empathy and warmth and humor and verbal ability at a level that he couldn’t recognize, let alone carry out.

  Unfortunately, she was as blind to her contribution to Elyon’s success as he was. She thought her interviews all went well, and when she was there in person in their parlors — she couldn’t think of them as “living rooms” when so many of them looked like they were straight out of the set of Gone with the Wind — they would tell her stuff she would never have dared to ask on the questionnaire.

  In fact, she rarely had to ask anything that might be construed as prying, because when she simply listened raptly as they talked, they would ramble into stories that were so personal and even confessional that she could hardly believe they would tell them to a complete stranger.

  But by then she wasn’t a complete stranger. She was a deeply interested friend.

  There were no fifteen-minute interviews. It took that long just to get past the iced tea and the homemade rolls and the pralines, which apparently made the trip up from New Orleans to this mountain village on a regular basis.

  “If you’d just discipline yourself and keep them on topic, you could do the interviews in fifteen minutes,” Elyon said more than once.

  “If I ever did an actual on-topic, fifteen-minute interview, that would be my last interview because word would spread.”

  “Word that when Dr. Spunky comes over, she leaves within fifteen minutes? That would make you way more popular.”

  Spunky didn’t bother to argue. Understanding how to get people talking was something Elyon didn’t even want to learn.

  But as Thanksgiving approached, Spunky found that Elyon was getting fewer and fewer visitors to the clinic. It looked as if they might top out somewhere under six thousand samples and two thousand complete qu
estionnaires. Spunky still had a few weeks’ worth of interviews lined up — but over the Thanksgiving weekend, though she had several invitations to dinner, nobody would commit to the time it took for an interview. Determined to work, and imagining that Thanksgiving dinner probably meant the whole day, she declined the invitations.

  In frustration, Spunky made her way to the town hall to have a chat with the only expert on Good Shepherd that she knew.

  Eggie didn’t have an office with his name on it. As far as Spunky could see, the town hall was a museum of Good Shepherd history. Walls in every room seemed to have themes. The volunteer firefighters’ wall. The constabulary wall. The town doctors’ wall. The plumbers’ wall. They had pictures of people dating back to the first cameras that came into town, it seemed, and on up to a few that were dated last year.

  Then there was the town government wall. Mayors, aldermen, individually and in groups, with a few framed newspaper stories. But there was no photo more recent that ten years before, and no picture of Eggie at all.

  “I just don’t like how I look in pictures,” said Eggie, who had apparently sensed that someone else was breathing the air in the building and came to identify the intruder.

  “I don’t understand people who don’t like their pictures taken,” said Spunky. “If you can go out in public wearing your face, then how can it bother you for somebody to take a picture of that face?”

  “I don’t mind having my picture taken,” said Eggie, “but nobody ever feels the need to take it.”

  “Not even when you’re, you know, making a speech? Welcome to the Fourth of July picnic? Whatever?”

  “Nobody waits for a speech before they start. Every family shows up to the town picnic and starts eating the food they brought as soon as it’s laid out and they said grace over it.”

  “So the actors come to the nativity pageants and just say their lines as soon as they arrive?” asked Spunky.

  Eggie laughed. “Oh, no, those have a starting time. But it isn’t me who sets them off. No starter’s pistol! They wait for the four pm bell from The Church Of — though the people from Nativity Church pretend they’re looking at their clock tower — and then they just start.”

  “Simultaneously,” said Spunky, shaking her head.

  “How else could we get maximum chaos and unChristian competition?”

  “Eggie,” said Spunky, “I’m running out of interviews and it looks like half the town is sitting out the DNA sampling.”

  “You mean you got half of them to give samples?” Eggie looked impressed.

  “More than half,” said Spunky. “But I think I’m also running out of talkative people.”

  “Not possible,” said Eggie.

  “Let’s just say they’re as talkative as they are lonely and unbusy,” said Spunky. “And I don’t stand much chance of interviewing any of the busy ones.”

  “Like human beings everywhere,” said Eggie.

  “I thought if you maybe asked people to give us samples —”

  “Weren’t you paying attention when we met? The people in this town hate me.”

  “I know, they keep electing you alderman, it’s really funny but it’s obviously not true.”

  “It is true,” he said. “If I walk up to their front door the curtains close and nobody hears the doorbell or my knocking or my shouting, and when I walk around the house I can hear them run to the back door to close and lock it, too.”

  “Pardon my candor, Eggie, but is it perhaps a personal hygiene problem?”

  He gave her a wan smile. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “No, no, just a lame joke.”

  “They avoid me because they’re afraid I’m going to ask them to help solve a problem.”

  “Are you?”

  “Why do you think it takes me a year to solve even the easy problems? The only way to solve a problem is either to raise money for it or get somebody to volunteer to help me work on it. Nobody has much money, and when it comes to labor, they hide from me so well that I’ve become kind of an expert on pothole filling and pruning trees that are blocking the right of way.”

  “They don’t deserve to have a conscientious public servant such as yourself,” said Spunky, “if they won’t even help you.”

  “Oh, they eventually do, some of them. But the ones I can count on, well, I can’t go to them too often or they’ll stop being home when I come over. I have to space it out.”

  “Well, for pete’s sake, Eggie, I know how to work, and with nobody talking to me most of the time, I have time to help. Let’s fill some potholes.”

  “Ouch,” said Eggie. “That takes hot asphalt. I can only do it when our piece of highway tax money comes in. Sometime in March.”

  “So people have to drive on rough roads all winter?”

  “Everybody knows where the potholes are by winter and they drive around them and yell at me whenever they see me. It was sweet of you to offer, though.”

  “You must have other problems to solve. Tree pruning. I wield a mean lopper, and I’ve used pole pruners and pruning saws and chain saws, in my time. Never had a branch fall on my head. Or anybody else’s.”

  “Is that a sign of good aim or bad?”

  “The only person I know who needs a branch dropped on his head now and then is doing genome analyses in his apartment.”

  “Dr. Spunk,” said Eggie, “I’ll take you up on your offer to help. And while we’re working together on putting the fence back up around the cemetery by the highway — a favorite target of drunk drivers, I’m afraid — I’ll let you interview me, just to set an example for the others.”

  “That actually sounds rather fun.”

  “How are you with heights?” he asked.

  “How tall is that cemetery fence?” she asked.

  “The next job is putting up the Christmas lights on the town hall and setting up the Christmas display in the square.”

  Spunky showed her surprise. “Good Shepherd still puts up official town Christmas decorations?”

  Eggie laughed heartily. “Oh, darlin’, this is Carolina mountain country. If we want a Christian holiday display, we’ll have one. And if somebody sues to stop it on constitutional grounds, lightning may well strike their house when they’re away and burn it to the ground.”

  Spunky couldn’t hide her suspicion. “Actual lightning, as in an act of God? Or lightning that comes in a can of gasoline?”

  “I don’t approve of it, Dr. Spunk,” said Eggie. “And it’s never happened here, because we have a first-rate volunteer fire department and we’ve never had a priggish litigious anti-Christian fool move into Good Shepherd. I think the name of the town puts off unbelievers when they’re deciding where to live.”

  “But you’re saying that fires of that sort do happen among the mountain people.”

  “Empty houses only. Better than drive-by shootings, don’t you think?”

  “Am I in danger? I’m kind of a true believer in science myself.”

  “You don’t own the building where you’re living, and you’re planning to leave, and you haven’t sued anybody over public displays of Christmas.”

  “And I never would, because I love Christmas. The more lights the better. Though I have no patience with manufactured nonsense like Rudolph or Frosty. I’ll sue if the town puts up those.”

  “You don’t scare me, Dr. Spunk. If you’re not a resident of the county, then you have no standing to sue. Some lawyer told folks about that rule around the turn of the last century, and ever since then, irritated neighbors here and there have turned some litigious soul into a nonresident. I think it’s a pernicious practice and it’s certainly illegal, but I don’t know if anybody’s ever been arrested for it, and no jury would ever convict anybody for a lightning strike burning down a house.”

  Spunky shook her head. “So there’s viol
ence lurking under the surface.”

  Eggie shrugged. “Unlike those nonviolent drive-by shootings we hear about in big cities.”

  She shrugged back at him.

  “But if there’s a mountain country arson gene,” said Eggie, “I bet you’ll find it.”

  4

  It turned out conversation was impossible when Eggie was at the top of the ladder, attaching strings of lights under the eaves of the two-story town hall, while Spunky held it steady at the bottom. Spending the whole day looking at the seat of Eggie’s trousers was only interesting until she ascertained that he still had a young man’s waist and backside, no matter how bald he looked.

  Why had she thought he was middle-aged when she first met him? If he didn’t shave his head, he’d still have quite a lot of hair, even on top. And the only reason he looked heavy was that his suit didn’t fit well.

  “Did you used to be heavier?” she asked him once, as they shifted the ladder to another place on the wall.

  He looked at her oddly.

  “The suit you usually wear,” she said. “It’s too big for you.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “My dad’s old suit. He hardly ever wore it because after Mom died he didn’t go to church, and in his will he left the suit to me and demanded to be buried as he lived, in jeans.”

  “And you did what he asked.”

  “The suit was about all he owned,” said Eggie. “That and the house, which I live in.”

  “If alderman is an unpaid position and your father didn’t leave you his fortune, how do you live?” asked Spunky.

  “From the kindness of strangers,” said Eggie.

  “I did see Streetcar Named Desire,” said Spunky. “True answer now?”

  “I went off to Wall Street and made a killing on leveraged buyouts,” he said. “Then I came home to take care of Dad as he was fading, and after he was gone I couldn’t think of any reason to leave.”

  “So you made enough during a few years on Wall Street that you —”

  “It doesn’t take much to live well in Good Shepherd,” said Eggie, “especially if you own your house free and clear.”