“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 violence 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.”

  “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.