Stillness in Bethlehem (4 page)

It was now eight-twenty-five on the morning of Monday, December second, and Stu was sitting in his kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee, watching Peter Callisher’s car pull up the drive, and thinking that 1687 might have been a very good year, but he was just about ready for a house built the day before yesterday with a whirlpool bathtub and vinyl on the kitchen floor. He’d been thinking this way for six months now, and working it out, and he thought he was set. If he had a good enough take during the Celebration, he could break ground, as soon as the frost began to ease, out on that same back pasture where his father had died. He sure as hell didn’t need the pasture for cows, because he didn’t have any cows. He didn’t have any sheep anymore, either, and he was just about ready to give up on pigs. The back fifty acres of this farm had returned to forest decades ago. Stu went out there whenever he wanted and bagged whatever deer he needed to keep himself in meat. He couldn’t see slaughtering a pig he’d known all its life or a lamb he’d helped deliver. It didn’t make any sense, and he knew it didn’t make any sense, but he couldn’t help himself. Sometimes, when he’d had a few beers or a very long day or a particularly awful run-in with the Environmental Protection Agency, he put his copy of
The Deer Hunter
in the VCR and tried to relate it all to his years in Vietnam. That, Stu had once told Peter Callisher, would be how he finally knew he was losing it. He’d put that damned movie in the VCR and sit down in front of it and,
pow
, life would start to make sense.

Peter Callisher had a Jeep Wagoneer, a little too country for his image, but at least not Japanese. That was one of the things that divided the flatlanders from the natives up here, and Peter was always careful to let the town know which side he was on. So was Stu, who had been Away himself, even if it was only to get shot at. Stu would rather have defected to the Viet Cong than let himself be anything at all like one of
them
.

Peter pulled the Wagoneer to a stop in the middle of the chicken yard—the chickens being safely in the barn for the winter—and Stu stood up to go out to him. Normally it would have been Stu’s wife who went out, and Stu’s mother who saw to the boiling water and the jar of instant coffee, but Liza (Stu’s wife) and Dinah (Stu’s mother) were both down in town setting up a stall in the food arcade and were going to be there for all of the rest of the day. Dinah even had a small second stall in the souvenir place where she was offering quilts for sale. There were six quilts priced at nine hundred dollars apiece, each hand sewn, each showing a picture carefully calculated to appeal to a flatlander’s idea of the Real Vermont. Flatlanders had very strange ideas about the Real Vermont.

Stu went out the kitchen door, through the gun room and to the back door that led outside. He looked up and down his racks of guns automatically, making sure every one of them was in place. Why they wouldn’t be in place, he didn’t know. Nobody came out here unless they had a reason to visit. Anybody who came out to visit would know better than to touch anything he didn’t have permission to touch. Stu had 122 rifles of every conceivable make, type and era. He had almost as many marksmanship medals, awards, trophies and citations. He had enough ammunition to restart the American Revolutionary War. Except for every once in a while, when those damn fools in Montpelier pulled something he really couldn’t make himself believe, Stu never even thought of using his guns for anything but deer or target practice.

Peter got out of the Wagoneer, came stomping across the yard, and climbed the short flight of wooden steps to the gun-room door. He passed between the door and Stu’s chest and looked around at the weaponry. Then he shook his head and went on through to the kitchen. Stu shut the outside door and followed him.

“I got that Winchester I was looking for,” Stu said. “Found it night before last in an antique shop down in Burlington. Damn idiots thought it was a decoration.”

“It ought to be a decoration,” Peter said. “I’ll never understand what you’ve got against a lot of poor, defenseless deer.”

“It was Bambi that did it to me,” Stu said seriously. “All that fire. All those gunshots. Bambi’s mother felled with a single shot. It got me hooked. I’ve never been able to stop. I’m powerless over my addiction. Maybe they’ve got a twelve-step program for it.”

Peter dropped into a kitchen chair and looked around for coffee. “Maybe they’ve got a shrink who wouldn’t go crazy trying to examine your head,” he said, “but if they do, he’s no one I ever met. Aren’t you interested in what got me out here?”

“Mostly I’m interested in why you didn’t call first. It’s the first day of the Celebration. If I hadn’t been up all night refereeing, I’d be down in town already.”

“Liza and Dinah not getting along?”

“Liza and Dinah never get along,” Stu said. “The real surprise is that they haven’t killed each other yet. You notice our beautiful Christmas decorations?”

Peter frowned. “You don’t have any Christmas decorations.”

“I know. I don’t have them because they both made a set and they won’t either of them let the other’s go up, not even to put the two sets up together. That’s what they kept me up about, last night. Dinah says Liza’s are too hick, and Liza says Dinah’s are too arty. Dinah, by the way, has been having her portrait painted by Jan-Mark Verek. It’s got Liza fit to spit.”

“Jan-Mark Verek,” Peter said musingly. “You got some coffee somewhere, Stu? Even bad coffee?”

“I’ve always got bad coffee.”

“I couldn’t call you up because we’re putting out the paper today, and besides, you know what it’s like, calling from town. Even since the party lines died, you know what it’s like. How do you figure they do it without party lines?”

“They listen at doors.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. God, that does look like bad coffee. That looks like awful coffee.”

“It tastes worse.”

Stu put the cup full of black sludge down in front of Peter and stepped back. Peter looked tired and wrung out and just a little bit angry, but the drive up here must have leeched most of the fire out of him. That there had been fire, Stu was in no doubt. Peter wouldn’t have bothered to make the trip otherwise. It wasn’t as if he could be on his way to anyplace else. This farm wasn’t on the way to anyplace else. Even the only other thing out here—the Vereks’ brand-new ultra-bizarre log house—could only be reached by picking up the Delaford Road.

Stu got a fresh cup of coffee for himself—if you could call freeze-dried crystals fresh; this stuff really was awful—and sat down at the other end of the table. Years ago, when he and Peter were boys, they had sat for hours just like this. When it got dark, they didn’t turn the lights on. They talked instead. They talked about the things they would do when they finally got to Away. They talked about the men they would be once they knew they never had to come back. They never considered the obvious: that the place you were born and raised has a hold on you you might not ever be ready to give up.

Stu reached around to the shelf at the back of his head and found his pack of cigarettes. He got them down and lit up, offering the pack to Peter in the process. Peter shook his head, and Stu wondered if he was having another go at trying to quit.

“So,” he said, dragging and blowing smoke at the ceiling. “What’s up? What couldn’t you talk to me about on the phone?”

“It wasn’t that I couldn’t talk to you about it,” Peter said. “It’s just that I didn’t want to. I mean, hell, they want to know my opinions, that’s what I write editorials for.”

“Opinions about what?”

“Tish.” Peter jerked his head, more or less in the direction of the log house. “She’s finally gone and done it, you know. Or she’s on her way to go and do it. That’s what I hear from Franklin Morrison.”

“Done what?”

“Filed that injunction the ACLU has been blathering about for I don’t know how long now. Except she hasn’t filed it yet, it’s too early. She’s leaving for the federal courthouse in Montpelier at nine-thirty. Camber Hartnell’s taking her.”

“Camber Hartnell would, wouldn’t he?” Stu sighed. “You figure we’re really violating anybody’s constitutional right to freedom of religion, running this Celebration?”

“I figure we’re violating the Constitution six ways to Sunday. I’ve told you that before. With the case law the way it is—”

“The guy who’s playing Joseph this year is the biggest atheist in town.”

“The guy who’s playing Joseph this year is Bobby Beggen and he was born here,” Peter said. “Tish wasn’t born here, but she’s a bona fide resident and she qualifies as a potentially injured party under the law. She is therefore allowed—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know.” Stu took another drag on his cigarette. “So what does this mean? Is she going to get the Celebration closed this year? With the tickets already sold and the inns booked?”

“I don’t think so. I talked to Benjy and he says he’ll file a countermotion for the town, and that ought to hold up any action until after the holidays. It’s not this year that’s the problem.”

“Once we get through this year, we might be able to talk her out of the whole thing,” Stu said. “You know. Using persuasion.”

“We might,” Peter agreed. “The problem is—”

“What?”

“Well, it’s like cancer, isn’t it? We’ve been getting away with this for years, basically because no one wanted to be the first to complain. Now Tish is going to be the first to complain, and if we deflect her there’s sure to be half a dozen other people who won’t mind at all being second. And sooner or later—”

“Ah,” Stu said. “Sooner or later.”

Peter took a long gulp of his coffee, made a face and put the cup down. “I’ve worked it all out,” he said. “After I talked to Benjy and Franklin, I mean. You have any idea how much of the town budget gets paid for by the Celebration?”

“Nope.”

“Almost a third. A third. Can you believe that? And it’s not only the fancy stuff, either. I mean, good years, we go fancy. But bad years, we pay for the roads without raising taxes and we pay the heat on a lot of houses with nobody but widows in them and—well, God knows what. We’ve been doing this since 1934, Stu. I don’t know if we can survive without it.”

“Everybody else does.”

“Yeah,” Peter said, “but they don’t survive very well. Oh, hell, Stuart. I don’t want to see us get to be like one of those places upstate with nobody in them practically and the town hall falling down and everybody sucking up to the flatlanders because they bring in the money. At least here we only have to suck up to the flatlanders once a year.”

“And it’s once a year too much,” Stu said.

Peter shot him a look. “I wish you wouldn’t joke about it. I came up here to make you give me some help. We’ve got an hour. I think this is something we ought to do something about.”

“Like what?” Stu was surprised.

“Like go up there,” Peter said. “Go up there now. Make her see reason.”

“Tish?”

“
Make
her see reason,” Peter insisted.

Stu was about to shoot him another flippant comment, and then he saw it. Peter’s eyes were straying. Peter’s eyes had left the conversation and come to rest on the gun-room door, riveted, as if he were Superman and his X-ray vision had just caught sight of Lois Lane being held captive on the other side. There were faint beads of sweat on his forehead and his upper lip, and an odd flush under his skin—odd because his skin itself seemed too white. Stu didn’t think he’d ever seen him look so strange.

“Peter?” he said.

Peter Callisher came to with a shudder. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “I think I’m losing my mind.”

“What I don’t understand,” Betty Heath was saying, sewing another glass ruby onto the hem of Balthazar’s robe, “is what difference it makes if she does file this injunction. I mean, it’s just her, isn’t it? It’s just Tish? Why should she be able to shut everything down when she’s the only one who’s complaining?”

The glass rubies were in a cardboard box on a long narrow table pushed up against the wall under the window that looked out on Main Street from the basement of the First Congregational Church, and right next to them was another cardboard box full of shiny nylon satin ribbons. Sharon Morrissey pawed through the ribbons and came up with one in green. She turned it over in her hand and put it back again. Out on Main Street, Amanda Ballard was jogging along the sidewalk on her own, her Christmas spirit decorously displayed by a big chunk of red-and-green yarn tied into her hair. Sharon Morrissey hated women who wore big chunks of yarn in their hair. She could never wear anything in her hair herself, because she had a big white streak across the left side of it, and the streak always made her self-conscious. It was worse because she’d had the streak for as long as she could remember. Pictures of her at the age of three showed it clearly, looking out of place and vaguely painful, as if it were the result of a terrible tragedy. Of course, she didn’t like Amanda Ballard much in any case. There was that. She would have looked at something else, but everything else she could think of to look at seemed to be a snake pit. She couldn’t look at Betty Heath, because Betty would suspect just how stupid Sharon thought she was, which was infinitely so. She couldn’t stare at the gold felt Christmas bell she had been painting over with glitter, because the damned thing was insipid and even Betty would realize that. Most of all, she couldn’t stare at Susan Everman, who was sitting at her elbow putting glitter on a green felt Christmas tree. Sharon Morrissey and Susan Everman lived together in a small two-bedroom house on the town end of the Delaford Road. They had bought that house three years ago, while on a vacation trip up from New York City. They had moved into it six months later, giving rise to a kind of town talk that was neither gossip nor speculation, but a half-curious statement of fact. Sharon Morrissey wrote children’s books that Susan Everman illustrated. They used one of their two bedrooms for the guests who arrived with regularity every weekend of the winter. They had a savings account together at the Vermont Savings and Loan. Everybody in town knew perfectly well what was going on. Most of them, in good New England fashion, didn’t care a whit. Unfortunately, one of the few people who did care—or who at least found the whole thing so uncomfortable that she couldn’t stop talking about it once it was brought to her attention—was Betty Heath. As Sharon had told Susan more than once, being around Betty was much worse than being around someone who definitely didn’t like lesbians, because with somebody who definitely didn’t like lesbians, you could just not like her back. Betty was such a mass of confusion, she made Sharon’s head ache. She also had a memory like a sieve. Betty would insist on having something explained—wasn’t it difficult, for instance, to get the bank to allow you to have an account
together
?—and Sharon would explain it, and ten minutes later Betty would have to have it explained all over again. Talking with Betty, Sharon sometimes felt as if she were teaching a class at the New School, with all the good parts left out. Betty would never ask about sex and never listen to anything she considered pornographic. Sharon never got to say anything that might have caused a serious and fatal shock.