A Town Divided by Christmas Read online

  “I won’t come near your tonsils, sir,” said Spunky. “I have better aim than that, and besides I doubt you have tonsils because when you were young, they were taking out everybody’s tonsils.”

  “What, they’ve stopped?” asked Old Dan.

  “Well, the number of tonsillectomies has dropped from almost a million and a half per year back in the 1950s to a sixth of that number now.”

  “Now don’t tell me you know how many of every kind of operation gets performed every year,” said Old Dan.

  “I had strep throat and swollen tonsils just over a year ago, and those were the statistics the doctor recited to me as he explained that no, he had no intention of taking out my tonsils.”

  “Well, I want mine back, so I’m complete on Resurrection Morning.”

  “The exact number of tonsil transplants performed every year is zero, and that number has never changed,” said Spunky. “I studied statistics in college, so I know.”

  “Sending girls to college,” Old Dan muttered. “Where will it end.”

  It was Eggie who answered. “It better end pretty quick, because none of these college girls is dumb enough to marry an old bachelor like me.”

  “Me too, just the same,” said Old Dan. “It’s been a dang lonely life. But at least I’ve never had a serious income, so I always had do-gooders calling on me to bring me charitable suppers. That’s the best part about being one of the baby Jesuses — The Church Of can’t very well let me starve to death.”

  “So that was the pageant you were in?” asked Spunky.

  “So I’m told,” said Old Dan, but then he looked puzzled. “Except McCoogle and I looked so much alike they couldn’t even tell our baby pictures apart. For all I know, in the fracas we got switched back and forth so many times that not a soul knows which is which.”

  “How did you feel about growing up as a Baby Jesus?” asked Eggie.

  Spunky shot him a look and he shrugged. Apparently it was a joint interview.

  Old Dan didn’t care whose question he was answering. “At first I didn’t mind all the attention. But when I got to school, that’s when it got nasty. There were boys from Nativity Church that couldn’t rest till my clothes were covered with mud, and that took some doing on dry days, I’ll tell you.”

  “It turned violent?” asked Spunky.

  “Among the children,” said Old Dan. “All the grownups were good Christians and pretended to care equally for everybody — even as they tore the town apart with their feuding. That’s why I’m not sure whether it was really me in the pageant of The Church Of.”

  “The Church Of has the bell, right?” asked Spunky.

  “The Bell from Hell,” said Old Dan. “Rings so loud you can’t hear a word spoken inside either church, so I don’t know as it makes much of a difference which steeple has it. But I hope that’s not what you came to ask me about, because I’ve answered all the questions so many times I thought about writing up a pamphlet of my answers. Only printing up pamphlets takes money, and my handwriting is illegible so the printer can’t set the type.”

  It sounded like he meant that to be funny, and so Spunky laughed.

  He either misunderstood or pretended to. “‘Illegible’ means nobody can read it. Though I never met a soul as called it ‘lejjing,’ so why not just say ‘unreadable’?”

  “For an illiterate old coot,” said Eggie, “you sure spend a lot of time talking about words.”

  “They’re the only things I’ve got to entertain myself with. I talk to myself like a crazy person. I answer myself too. I’d think I was crazy if I hadn’t seen that alderman fellow doing the same thing.”

  “You have not,” said Eggie.

  “We call him Eggie because he shaves his head,” Old Dan confided to Spunky.

  “And because my name is Ecgberht,” said Eggie.

  “I’ve seen your name written down and it’s not a name,” said Old Dan, “it’s an explosion in the alphabet soup factory.”

  Old Dan was full of information about a lot of people who were dead and therefore couldn’t have their DNA sampled. But family history was part of this study, and in Good Shepherd there was a lot of knowledge about ancestors and ancient feuds and which family originally homesteaded this or that plot of ground. Information that could help them chart the passage of and prevalence of various genes.

  She had already got so much information that during her downtime, Spunky was charting the town’s genealogy. She could never aspire to the completeness of Iceland’s genealogical database, but she was working with less than a tenth of Iceland’s numbers, so she could at least try to approach completeness.

  “I’m doing that scientifically,” Elyon said, when he saw her charts.

  “You’re doing nothing of the kind,” said Spunky. “You’re doing statistics about long chemicals, and I’m dealing with the lore of the local culture. You: genes. Me: memes.”

  “Memes,” said Elyon, “are a fancy name for epigrams and cat pictures.”

  “You tell yourself that, Elyon,” said Spunky.

  “All that lore of the local culture is probably fiction, anyway. I mean, it’s already lore that you and that bald coot are a thing, and after we leave here I bet you become the legendary Indian princess who came to Good Shepherd and got old Ecgberht pregnant and then threw yourself down a well because he wouldn’t admit you were the mother.”

  That was the first time Spunky was actually sure that Elyon was trying to be funny, and since he actually succeeded at it, she laughed out loud. But then she thought of something. “How are you hearing the local gossip?”

  Elyon just shook his head. “I’m not without resources,” he said. “When the diners stopped serving me, I asked around and hired a girl who comes in and cooks for me. Cleans a little, too.”

  “Oh,” said Spunky. “And here I thought you were tidy.”

  “I am tidy,” said Elyon, “though not quite at OCD levels. I didn’t say she had to work hard. I didn’t say she cleaned a lot.”

  “So she feeds you and then goes home and fixes dinner for her seven children?”

  “Jozette doesn’t have any children,” said Elyon scornfully. “She stays and eats with me and that’s when I find out what people in town are talking about.”

  “So you interview her,” said Spunky.

  “I know so much more about her than I want to know that sometimes I feel like screaming.”

  “So you yell at her?”

  “Never,” said Elyon. “She’s a good cook, she’s always cheerful, she can read the recipes I got my mother to email to me, and I’d never do anything to hurt her feelings or I’d probably starve to death.”

  Spunky might have made some remark about Elyon entertaining a young woman in his bachelor apartment without a chaperone, but then Spunky remembered that this was Elyon, so Jozette was as safe as an escapee being tracked by a bloodhound with a cold.

  Spunky tried eating with Elyon and Jozette, a high school graduate with absolutely no understanding of any aspect of Elyon’s abilities or work. Her cooking was barely adequate — her idea of seasoning was either a little salt or a lot of salt — and Spunky got the distinct impression that the girl made it a point to bend over a lot facing Elyon, so he could see down her blouse clear to her belly button. There was never anything between blouse and skin to obstruct his view.

  Spunky knew for a fact that not one girl in Elyon’s entire educational experience had ever tried to provoke any interest from him, so the poor boy was completely unequipped to deal with all that aggressive cleavage.

  He’s going to be married or at least engaged before this project is over.

  Spunky emailed The Professor about this and received a terse reply: “Good for him. Mind your own beeswax.”

  The Professor was right. After all, the day a monkey ...

  After that, Spunky
started taking all her meals at one of the restaurants that had banned Elyon. She was glad if Elyon was discovering his desirability to poor ignorant mountain girls who hoped he would take her away from all this. But she didn’t have to sit through the first tedious bloom of love.

  Then Eggie started showing up at suppertime, and it took maybe ten minutes to get from “May I sit with you?” to him grabbing the check and paying for it.

  “It won’t save me money,” Spunky told him. “The grant pays for all my meals.”

  “How can I impress you?” asked Eggie.

  She laid a hand on his. “You know that you already have. But we don’t have a future.” She didn’t have to explain about their mutually exclusive goals.

  Eggie smiled at her ruefully. “Here’s the future I see for us. Dinner and conversation at short-order restaurants until your grant runs out.”

  “Or until Christmas Eve,” said Spunky.

  “You really did come here just to see our dueling nativities.”

  “I came here to collect stories.”

  “You’ve got mine by now,” said Eggie.

  “As you have mine,” said Spunky. “As far as either of us has been willing to share.”

  “This isn’t going to end like a Hallmark movie, is it,” said Eggie.

  Spunky shook her head. “It isn’t going to have an ending. One day the Professor tells me and Elyon that we’ve got enough data and we pile into the van and drive away.”

  “That is an ending.”

  “Not all ends are ‘endings.’ Ours will be more like petering out,” said Spunky. “But from now on, I’m going to be comparing every other guy who made a killing on Wall Street with you, and none of them will measure up.”

  “So you’ll remain a spinster until ...”

  “Spinster! Not I, laddie, unless I feel like it. I’ll just settle for somebody who’s obscenely rich even if he isn’t the kind of guy who comes home to take care of his ailing father and then stays to keep his hometown livable. Because there’s only one of him.”

  Eggie got a thoughtful look as he gazed into her eyes, and she realized that instead of bantering, she had been completely candid, and her respect for him might lead him to a false conclusion.

  She needn’t have worried, because his response was banter. “I see through your whole act now, Dr. Spunk. You go to school for years and get a doctorate so that gathering data as a post-doc will provide you with an excuse to visit small towns, where you can break the hearts of local politicians.”

  He was bantering when he talked about a broken heart, wasn’t he? “Good Shepherd isn’t small. You’ve got ten thousand people.”

  “That isn’t even one Bruno Mars concert,” said Eggie.

  “Eat your food, Eggie,” said Spunky. “I’ve still got work to do tonight.”

  “All work and no play ...”

  “Makes Delilah spunky?”

  “I just remembered,” said Eggie, “that the food here isn’t very good.”

  “It’s as good as whatever Elyon is having for dinner in his apartment, with less cleavage.”

  “Jozette’s mother, Miz Eliza, is a miraculous cook. Jozette just doesn’t pay attention.”

  “I want to meet the other nativity baby from 1930. If he’s still alive.”

  “I already told you that he is,” said Eggie.

  “That was yesterday. He’s eighty-seven. Things can change.”

  “If Bubby McCoogle is still alive at nine in the morning, we’ll visit him. He may not be as lucid as Old Dan, though. They still revere him at Nativity Church. Lucid or not, there’ll be somebody with him.”

  “Do they do that with everybody who was ever the Christ child in the nativity play?”

  “Only the ones who started a war of icy civility,” said Eggie.

  Bubby McCoogle wasn’t alert at all. A middle-aged woman, nicely dressed, sat nearby on the porch of the old folks home, reading something on her Kindle. So Amazon’s reach extended even to Good Shepherd, though Spunky imagined the local UPS drivers making deliveries on buckboards. Eggie asked the woman how Bubby was doing today. She just shook her head and went back to her Kindle.

  Spunky sat beside him and tried to explain about the cheek swab she needed, but Bubby showed no sign of consciousness except that his eyes were open. Unfocused, but open.

  “I don’t hear him arguing against taking a cheek swab,” said Eggie softly.

  “I can’t force somebody to ...”

  “This isn’t a criminal case you’re building. It’s just easier to get DNA from a cheek swab than from a beer glass.”

  “The glass clearly contained tomato juice,” said Spunky.

  “Maybe he was drinking blood.” Then Eggie reached over and pulled Bubby’s mouth open, holding the cheek wide.

  Bubby gave no reaction and made no movement to shy away or bat Eggie’s fingers from his mouth.

  “That looks like consent to me,” said Eggie.

  It’s not as if this would invalidate his DNA, thought Spunky. She darted a swab into his mouth, then sank it into the solution and sealed it. She labeled it with Bubby’s subject number and that was that. If the middle-aged Kindle-reader noticed what they did, she wasn’t objecting.

  “I feel like a burglar,” said Spunky as she and Eggie walked out of the grounds of the old folks home.

  “He doesn’t want his saliva back,” said Eggie. “Or his cheek cells.”

  “It’s not as if we left a hole in his face,” said Spunky.

  “We both rationalize our ethical violations so well,” said Eggie, “that we really need to go into business together. As the pettiest criminals in history.”

  “The Tissue Thieves,” Spunky suggested.

  “They’ll think the movie is about stealing Kleenex,” said Eggie.

  “Which gives away the whole plot. You’re right.”

  Parting with Eggie at the clinic, where Elyon was taking samples, Spunky felt a stab of regret. What if this was the only really good guy she’d ever meet? She might never meet a man who would be such a good father to their kids — though how she knew that kindness, hard work, and selfless service would be good attributes for a father or husband to have, Spunky couldn’t have said. She just knew that she might always regret her decision to ignore the sparks between them.

  But she couldn’t talk to Elyon about it. In fact, she didn’t know anybody to talk about such things with. They’d think she was crazy, which would damage her reputation, or they’d blame her father’s neglectful childrearing for her madness. Falling in love with a bald alderman in a country hamlet. Here, take a long pull on our Sanity Juice — you’re decephalizing too rapidly in the hot sun.

  What Elyon actually did was simple. He cleaned up in his office and then his eye was drawn to the new phial of cheek scrapings Spunky plunked down on the desk beside his computer mouse.

  “Are you asking me to put a rush on this?” Elyon inquired.

  “No, forty-five seconds will do,” said Spunky.

  Elyon sighed elaborately as he began the process of reading Bubby’s DNA. “Oh, by the way, Thanksgiving is tomorrow,” he said.

  “So I’ve heard,” said Spunky.

  “I’m inviting you to have Thanksgiving dinner with Jozette and me,” said Elyon.

  “Three’s a crowd,” said Spunky, “but thanks.”

  “At her mother’s house,” said Elyon. “Cooked by her mother.”

  “You can’t invite me to somebody else’s Thanksgiving dinner,” said Spunky.

  “Miz Eliza did the inviting,” said Elyon. “She’s assuming that if you ask around, you’ll accept. She has kind of a big dinner. A bunch of people have Thanksgiving at her house. Jozette tells me that if you’re invited once, the invitation stands for as long as you want to come. I spent a couple of hours last night after dinner helping
Jozette set up tables all over the house. It’s like thirty people.”

  ‘Like’ thirty people? Was Elyon beginning to talk like Jozette? Or had he always said things like that, only Spunky wasn’t actually listening?

  “What time?” asked Spunky.

  “I thought so,” said Elyon. “I’m going over at noon, because Jozette and I are doing tablecloths and silverware. Miz Eliza doesn’t trust us with the plates.”

  “Perhaps she knows Eliza well.”

  “I think she just doesn’t know me well enough,” said Elyon. He laughed, but he also looked a little embarrassed.

  “What, you broke something at her house?” asked Spunky.

  Elyon looked away from her, as if embarrassed. “She, um, she says that I can’t be trusted with plates till Jozette remembers to wear ... a ... you know ... supportive underwear.”

  “Jozette’s own mother said that?”

  “And Jozette said, ‘Buy me one that fits,’ and Miz Eliza said, ‘Stay the same size for a month and I will.’”

  This was the way Jozette and her mother talked in front of Elyon? If Jozette’s father was in the picture, he was probably loading the shotgun already.

  “What time should people who aren’t interested in looking down Jozette’s blouse arrive?”

  “Something about the turkey coming out of the oven about two. Does that sound right?”

  “I’ll come earlier. Bring something?”

  “As Miz Eliza always says, all you need to bring is your best appetite and pants you can let out.”

  Compared to this aloof scientist, Spunky realized, Eggie was downright sophisticated. He must have picked up his city manners in New York, while he was making his killing. Whereas Elyon had no manners at all, except bad ones, so now he was cloning a set of manners from a family that didn’t even meet local standards.

  Well, her job wasn’t to supervise Elyon’s education. If he got out of town unmarried, he’d probably recover soon enough and be back to his regular unspeakable rudeness.

  The next morning, Jozette came by quite early and took Elyon away. As a result, Spunky got caught up in her genealogical charts, referring back and forth to photocopied town records, and lost track of time. The knock on her apartment door alerted her to the fact that it was two-fifteen.