A Town Divided by Christmas Read online

  “You don’t drive.”

  “Didn’t need to in Manhattan,” said Eggie, “and I don’t need to here. I can drive a tractor, but I can’t parallel park it with the baler attached.” He pointed in a direction that clearly didn’t matter and added, “I live three doors down that side street. The house is way too big for me but I keep most of it closed up and I only heat the rooms I use.”

  “You still remember how to drive, though.”

  “Haven’t checked in a long time.”

  “Don’t you ever go anywhere?”

  “I’m going constantly.”

  “On foot.”

  “Why get in a car to get from one part of Good Shepherd to any other part? If everybody did that, pretty soon we’d have to tear down some perfectly good buildings in order to make a parking lot. And then we’d have to walk just as far to get to the car as we would to walk on home.”

  Spunky laughed at that, and he grinned. “These lights won’t hang themselves,” he said. “But that was a pretty painless interview.”

  Only when he was halfway up the ladder in its new position did she realize that yes, he had told her quite a few answers to her key questions, so she could write them up like an interview. But the truth was that it was just a conversation, in which she had done a lot of talking and even teased him a little.

  Was he telling the truth, though? She could believe his workday suit belonged to a slightly heavier man, but was his father really buried in his jeans? It sounded like a good yarn, the kind that a politician who secretly wants to be reelected would tell to gullible constituents.

  Except that if it wasn’t true, there’d be at least fifty people in town to contradict the tale. So it kind of had to be true.

  Eight terms as alderman, but only about thirty-four years old, if her arithmetic was correct. If aldermen only served a year at a time, that still meant he came back to Good Shepherd at the age of about twenty-six. How long was he on Wall Street, if that part was even true? Did he even have time to go to college first? Surely you had to have a college degree to get hired by a Wall Street firm.

  And what kind of firm even does leveraged buyouts? Was he an investment banker, giving loans to companies looking to do the buying? Or was he working with his own funds to provide the financing? Or was it first one, then the other? How do you even get started in that business unless you get recruited out of college? So was he some kind of business school wizard? Had he gone to a highly recruited school?

  Or did he “make a killing” on Wall Street by earning enough money to come home and live in a paid-for house for a few years. How much money would it take to live here? The cost of living for Elyon and Spunky sure wasn’t depleting the grant very fast. If she removed the cost of rent and figured out only her costs, a single person could live in Good Shepherd for only a few thousand a year. And that included a few splurges now and then, like a train trip to the big city — Asheville? Hickory? Lenoir?

  No, the only train that came through town was a Norfolk Southern freight line. What, did he have to hobo it to Charlotte or Asheville? No, it must be the bus that got him out of Good Shepherd, if he ever had the urge to go. Or maybe, if he really made a killing on Wall Street, he’d hire a private plane to take him from the little airstrip just south of town, the one the crop-dusters used.

  As one of her elderly interviewees had explained to her, the airstrip didn’t have many planes because the local marijuana growers had to trust you not to see their fields and tell on them.

  “But doesn’t everybody know who grows marijuana?” she asked old Miz Gaywood.

  “Well of course we do, but we aren’t stupid enough to go out and find their fields.”

  “Why, are they boobytrapped?” asked Spunky.

  Miz Gaywood looked outraged. “These are responsible citizens, making a few extra dollars to eke out a living. Setting booby traps that might kill a child just hiking or chasing a butterfly — that would show a severe lack of civic spirit.”

  Spunky didn’t bother pointing out that their weed might end up hurting children anyway, and her mild response encouraged Miz Gaywood to keep talking, telling stories about how her own daddy gave up being a schoolteacher in Atlanta because his daddy offered him a lot more money to come and work the still.

  She’d have to put down hooch and weed as more reasons why people came home to Good Shepherd.

  Spunky even asked Miz Gaywood about the town’s nativity pageant situation.

  “Situation?” said Miz Gaywood. “Doesn’t every town have an 87-year feud between the two leading churches?”

  “I won’t believe you’re old enough to know anything about it first-hand,” said Spunky, “but what do you think caused that rift in the first place?”

  “Not my place to speculate on that, Dr. Spunk.”

  Spunky roller her eyes like a thirteen-year-old. “If you know exactly how old the feud is, you must know what happened that set things off.”

  “Well, Dr. Spunk, I’m not telling a secret to mention that it was about the two babies born on the seventh of December in the year of our Lord 1930.”

  “They just didn’t get along?” asked Spunky.

  “I don’t believe they met until years later,” said Miz Gaywood. “So it wasn’t them as caused it in person. It was the fact that the custom was to use the most recently born baby boy in the congregation to represent the Christ child, provided the baby was in good enough health to withstand the chilly weather.”

  “Nobody could figure out which one was more recently born?” asked Spunky.

  “Everybody knew. But the younger one had breathing problems and he got a very bumpy trip to Mission Hospital in Asheville. Half the congregation believed firmly that this baby would be blessed and healed in plenty of time to take his rightful place in the nativity. The other half thought it was near criminal to imagine putting a child with weak lungs out in the weather, so the very-slightly-older boy should have the part.”

  “That sounds pretty reasonable to me,” said Spunky.

  “Then you’re one of those apostate heretical Nativity Churchers,” said Miz Gaywood with a wry smile.

  “And if I say that the younger one deserved a chance to get better, especially if prayer could hasten his healing?” asked Spunky.

  “Then I’d say you’re one of those heretical apostates in The Church Of,” said Miz Gaywood, and now she was grinning.

  “In other words, ‘A plague on both their houses.’”

  “I wish no ill on anyone,” said Miz Gaywood. “But isn’t eighty-seven years long enough to forget about a ridiculous grudge? Shouldn’t somebody have made the walk across the square to reunite what used to be a perfectly happy Episcopalian congregation?”

  “What about you?” asked Spunky.

  “Nobody give’s a rat’s tail what I think or what I do,” said Miz Gaywood. “I could walk back and forth between the churches for two weeks, buck naked, and not a soul would care about my protest.”

  “You’re still an attractive woman, Miz Gaywood,” said Spunky. “I think you’d be a major distraction to a lot of Christian men, so they’d have to arrest you.”

  “Now I’m tempted.” They had a good laugh and Spunky went back to town.

  That interview with Miz Gaywood was one of her best — and also one of the last before Spunky helped Eggie light the town hall. She completed a lot of his interview in the process, and her next few interview visits with strangers showed her just how small this town really was.

  “Saw you helping Eggie with the lights,” said every one of them.

  “Had nothing better to do,” she answered. “And I interviewed him just like I’m interviewing you.”

  “But you an’t putting up lights while we’re talking,” said sharp-tongued Miz Illa Morgood.

  “Will if you want me to,” said Spunky. “If you provide the lights.”


  And it was Miz Illa who first said what a lot of folks must be thinking. “He sweet on you? You sweet on him?”

  It didn’t even take her a second to know she was talking about Eggie. “He’s just about won my vote in the next election,” Spunky answered.

  “He doesn’t want your vote,” said Miz Illa. “He wants you to run against him. Or run unopposed for another seat, so he can quit.”

  “He’s told that to everybody?” asked Spunky. “I thought I was special.”

  “He didn’t have to tell us, we all knew. Laziest boy ever born in this town. Never does a lick of paying work. I don’t know how he lives, ’less he gets nice old widow ladies to cook him dinner.”

  “Do you cook him dinner?” asked Spunky.

  “Hell no,” said Miz Illa. “I’m old, and I’m a widow, but I’m not nice, and don’t you go telling nobody that I am.”

  As Spunky was trying to work her way to the end of the conversation, Miz Illa said, “If you an’t sweet on him yet, or him on you, you’re bound to be by Christmas.”

  “And why is that?” asked Spunky.

  “I get the Hallmark Channel by satellite,” said Miz Illa. “I know how it works, specially at Christmas.”

  “I’m pretty sure those movies are fictional,” said Spunky. “I don’t think there’s some natural law they’ve tapped into.”

  “I think that’s the only really foolish thing you’ve said here in my house,” said Miz Illa. “I really ought to make you put up lights for me, and buy them yourself, for saying something so foolish. It’s plain that both of you is as lonely as an orphaned possum and you’re both tolerably good looking and I think you’re sturdy enough to bear him a couple of sprats and even if you can’t cook, he’s got enough money in his stash to hire you some neighbor girl to come in and cook every day but Sunday.”

  Spunky concluded from this that Miz Illa had already made the same speech to other people, or heard it from them, so the imaginary romance between her and Eggie must be the talk of the whole town.

  Well, if it made people want to meet her and talk to her, so much the better. They’d find out it wasn’t true when she left town and headed back to the university, and Eggie stayed in Good Shepherd.

  It was only when she helped Eggie put together the stage for The Church Of’s pageant that the gossip finally got to her. Spunky found herself thinking, what if Eggie and I switched from helping each other to loving each other? Could she stand to live in a town this small, with all this gossip, and two Christian churches that feuded over the baby Jesus for eighty-seven years?

  And why was she even imagining a life in Good Shepherd? Was she, in fact, developing feelings for Eggie?

  Well, yes. But they were feelings of admiration and respect. Those were not inconsistent with love, but they were not feelings of rapture and glory, which is about what it would take to get her to give up her career as a scientist or scholar or whatever she was, in order to live in Good Shepherd and spawn a contender for the baby Jesus part every couple of years.

  Plus, if she lived here she’d have to pick a church.

  On that day, building the stage for The Church Of, she asked one of the other workers, a young man named Gilbert, what church he went to.

  “Repentance Baptist,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “What side are the Baptists on?”

  “Side?” he asked. Then he saw her looking at the two stages being built at exactly the same time, facing opposite directions. “Oh, this is an Episcopal thing. The rest of us just attend whichever pageant we feel like. A boy’s got his heart set on a pageant angel, he’s going to watch her show. Nobody keeps a tally. The Episcopalians don’t care what Baptists do, or Pentecostals. We might as well be Muslims for all they care.”

  “You ever lived somewhere else besides Good Shepherd?”

  He grinned at her. “If I wanted to be interviewed, I would have made an appointment. You must be getting desperate.”

  “I am, and you’re a nice guy, so why not just answer a simple forthright question?”

  “Because I spent my whole time in high school bragging like a fool on what I’ll do when I made the NFL, and then I didn’t get accepted at any college with a football program, so here I still am.”

  “There’s other ways out of town than an athletic scholarship,” said Spunky.

  “Well, I’m overdue for them to come along with a Genius Grant or Publishers Clearing House, but they keep not seeing my house number in the dark.”

  And Spunky had herself another interview, because once he started talking, there was no getting that Baptist boy to clam up again.

  5

  It’s not as if Eggie hadn’t heard the same rumors about the two of them. In fact, being a local boy that everybody loved, he was bound to get teased about it, and Spunky figured that he must be getting pretty tired of having her around.

  He made a joke about it, the day they took down the Welcome to Good Shepherd sign from the east end of town, so Mack Wine, who originally painted it, could fix up the picture of the Good Shepherd he had copied from a print by Del Parson that Miz Illa owned. He couldn’t go out and repaint it in place, because it was cold in early December and he was old and well along with dying of something that he wouldn’t talk about. So they had to bring the sign to him.

  As they were unscrewing the sign from the posts, Eggie said, “I’ve got to get to the big city pretty soon because if I don’t kneel down and offer you a big fat diamond ring on Christmas Eve, folks are going to be so mad at me they’ll write me in as mayor.”

  “So you think we’re in a Hallmark Christmas movie, too?” asked Spunky.

  “Well, you’re a smart solitary educated woman going about her business, partnered with a complete geek who doesn’t know she’s female, and I’m a lonely, good-looking, hairless-but-not-bald bachelor with all kinds of leisure and a mortgage-free house. And we’re thrown together constantly because you keep taking ‘yes, please’ for an answer whenever you volunteer to help on something. We know how such situations have to end up for the good order of the universe to be maintained.”

  “Isn’t it enough that we take care of moving this sign?” asked Spunky. “Do we have to take on the good order of the universe, too?”

  “Somebody’s got to,” said Eggie.

  “Not me,” said Spunky. “I’m not an alderman.”

  “But you’re falling in love with our crazy little town, aren’t you?” asked Eggie.

  “I am,” said Spunky. “If they’ll just offer me a job at the local university ...” Which was the same as saying, No way will this ever be my home.

  Eggie sighed. “I guess I’ll never get a woman to make a baby for me,” he said.

  “Well, if you’d stop shaving your head and let the hair grow in, maybe you’d have a chance with one of these buxom nubile country girls.”

  “The way they see it, I’m halfway through my life already. Too old to scamper about with them, but too young for them to count on me dying and leaving them my fortune while they’re still young enough to remarry and have somebody else’s babies.”

  “Now that doesn’t sound like a Hallmark movie,” said Spunky.

  “Yeah,” said Eggie. “More like Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde.”

  “You did go to college,” said Spunky.

  “I did, but I read Austen from my mother’s bookshelves, and I saw Importance of Being Earnest at three different universities when I was growing up because it was worth a bus ride to her, since Mama didn’t calc’late to raise no idjits.”

  “Your mother did not talk like that.”

  “She did when she said she didn’t calc’late to raise no idjits.”

  “Save yourself a bus trip, my friend,” she said to Eggie. “You are not to propose to me in a public place because if anybody is so arrogant as to propose to me in public witho
ut knowing the answer in advance, the answer will be ‘no’ with a glass of whatever liquid is at hand thrown in his face.”

  “The glass itself, or just the liquid contents thereof?”

  “It depends on how sure he seems to be that I’ll say yes.”

  “So my native confidence will work against me.” He looked very crestfallen, and for a moment it occurred to Spunky that maybe he was only pretending to be joking, and in fact this conversation might have been designed to see if the idea of such a proposal might be at least a little intriguing to her.

  It wasn’t. And pitying somebody for their disappointment would be a truly terrible reason to throw over all her plans and dreams in order to live in a town so small it didn’t even have a mayor, just so she could bear a kind, hardworking, but unambitious husband a passel of young bumpkins.

  Then again, he had made a killing on Wall Street before he was twenty-six. Did you still need ambition after that?

  She wondered how many zeroes there were in a Wall Street killing.

  She thought about Elizabeth Bennett teasing her sister Jane by saying that she really fell in love with Darcy when she got her tour of Pemberley.

  It was about time she got a look inside Eggie’s paid-for house, wasn’t it?

  6

  But when Eggie took her by the elbow instead of letting her help with setting up the back wall of the Nativity Church stage, it was not to give her a tour of his fine domicile. Instead, he explained that it was about time she got her interview with each of the two big babies who had caused all the problems by being born within a few hours of each other on December seventh in 1930. “Eleven years before Pearl Harbor took that date away from them forever,” said Eggie.

  Old Dan, whose last name nobody used but it was Lacker, had never married and so had no relatives. He lived in a converted carriage house behind the big house he grew up in, which he now rented out to a young family who were related to him in some distant cousinly way.

  “I wondered when the hell you was going to come and stick my tonsils till I gag up some DNA,” Old Dan said, greeting them at the door.