“Yeah, I heard that,” Buck said, shoving the dog out of his seat and getting in behind the wheel. “Look, I don’t care what kind of rumors they’re spreading, if there’s a manger sit-in, we’ll deal with it the way my dad did in the seventies with the Vietnam War protesters. We will gently remove them from the area in dispute.”
As he said it, Buck hoped that if the manger sit-in materialized, the parties involved would come peaceably. And that Jackson County deputies wouldn’t have to bodily carry out Joseph, Mary, and some local kid voted Best Baby Jesus. That would make a TV news item Jackson County would never forget.
Both deputies stepped back as he gunned the engine and pulled the Blazer out of the parking lot.
Kevin Black Badger lived out on Route 19, the highway that ran north to Union County and then into North Carolina. Buck was sorry to hear about Kevin’s bronchial pneumonia, but told himself it was not all that serious or Kevin would be in the hospital. On the other hand, he wasn’t at all sorry that he’d assigned Kevin to search Makim’s Mountain instead of driving the patrol car around all afternoon with Scarlett Scraggs.
The sky was overcast and because of the cold there wasn’t much traffic. Buck was looking for connecting State Road 165 that would take him into 19 when he came around a curve, doing about sixty, and suddenly saw an old stake-sided truck broken down in the middle of the road.
Buck swerved the Blazer. He had put his sling back on his right arm that morning, and the moment he yanked at the steering wheel he knew that had been a mistake. The Blazer hardly responded to one hand. As he struggled with it a weedy figure in a satin windbreaker and cowboy hat stepped out from behind the broken-down stakebody at the last minute, waving his arms.
The Blazer missed the idiot dancing in front of it, roared off onto the shoulder of the road, then plunged into a stand of shortleaf pines.
It took a moment for Buck to pry himself upright. The passenger’s side door hung open and the Scraggs dog was gone. He’d banged his head, but he wasn’t so groggy that he didn’t recognize the two faces that appeared at the Blazer’s window.
“Well, boy,” Devil Anse said, “we been trackin’ you all week and we gotcha. This here’s Reese Potter, my granddaughter Scarlett’s betrothed, you might say. We’re both a mite anxious to ask you a few things. Like when you’re gonna make up yore mind.”
Scarlett had locked all the doors and windows to the Grissoms’ house, but she still kept looking over her shoulder and listening for the sound of trucks or cars in the driveway that might be Devil Anse and the Potters coming for her. Thinking about it, she accidentally stabbed Farrie with the pin she was using to fasten her mistletoe headdress.
“Ow!” Her sister’s scream was genuine. “What’s the matter with you, Scarlett? You been acting mean as a three-legged cat all day long, but I ain’t done nothing to you!”
“No, you haven’t,” she admitted. She was afraid to tell Farrie of her feeling that something terrible was going to happen. They should have left Nancyville a long time ago. Now Buck Grissom was in trouble with Devil Anse because he hadn’t let him bribe him, Reese Potter was hanging around again when she’d thought there’d been an end to all that, and, finally, she was in love with Buck and it was plain he didn’t love her.
No, last but not least, Scarlett thought, studying her sister standing in front of her in Mr. Ravenwood’s Spirit of the Mistletoe costume, there was Farrie. She didn’t know how she was going to get Farrie out of Nancyville when her little sister thought all these things that were happening were wonderful. The new life they’d been looking for.
But after Christmas, Scarlett knew, they would be plain old Scraggses again. The social worker, Miss Huddleston, would be back in town and Farrie most likely would be turned over to the court. She had heard enough about the Jackson County welfare department to guess it wasn’t likely they’d give Farrie back to their grandpa to raise. They’d put Farrie in a foster home, or a home for children who needed special care -
And Scarlett would never see her again.
“What’s the matter, Scarlett?” Farrie peered up into her face. “You look so sad. Aren’t you happy we’re going to have a Christmas this once?”
Scarlett frowned. “We had Christmas before,” she said, jerking the pieces of plastic mistletoe into place. “I got a doll from the church over at Toccoa when I was little, and we had some kind of Christmas nearly every year since you were born. Maybe not so as you’d notice it much, but we had it.” She picked up a plastic mistletoe berry that had fallen out of Farrie’s headdress and tossed it on the table. “This stuff! Last Christmas I shot real mistletoe out of oak trees and we sold it.”
“With Uncle Lyndon Baines’s twenty-two,” Farrie reminded her.
Scarlett shrugged. “Anybody can shoot mistletoe out of a tree with a shotgun.”
“We made fifty-seven dollars,” Farrie remembered, “but Grandpa took it away from us.”
“Well,” – Scarlett leaned back on her heels to look at Farrie full-length – “that’s why we ran away.”
Something was happening to her little sister. In her long white angel dress, topped now by the big, full wreath of plastic mistletoe resting on her wiry hair, Farrie glowed. For the first time it seemed to Scarlett that Farrie was looking more like other little girls. Her face wasn’t so pinched, she didn’t seem so thin, her funny little grin wasn’t so elvish. And tonight was Farrie’s night.
Mr. Ravenwood had put Farrie on the top of the tree as the Spirit of Mistletoe for the final number. The closing song sung by the entire tree, plus Farrie’s solo, would be spectacularly joined by all the church bells in downtown Nancyville: the First Methodist, the Nancyville First Baptist, the Makim’s Mountain Presbyterian, and St. George’s Episcopal Church, which had a real carillon played by computer program.
“I guess I’m happy we’re having Christmas here,” Scarlett said reluctantly. There was no need to let her little sister suffer just because she was out of sorts. “It could be a lot worse.”
She looked up at the kitchen clock. It was almost noon and she had to fix lunch. That at least would make her feel better; planning something for Farrie and herself to eat from the cookbooks.
Nevertheless, the doleful feeling wouldn’t go away. Scarlett wished it was five o’clock, and time for the Heamsteads to pick them up for the performance. But that was still hours away.
A trickle of blood from the cut on his eyebrow where the cretin in the cowboy hat had hit him made its way down into the corner of Buck’s eye, partly fogging his vision. He wasn’t bothered so much by the cut, nor even the rabbit punch old Devil Anse had delivered to his abdomen in a fit of temper, as he was by the cold.
Buck figured from the looks of the misty sun over the tops of the pines that he’d been tied to the tree for about an hour. After punching him up, the two Scraggses – one, he gathered, was the girls’ uncle Lyndon Baines – and the two Potters, father and son, had gone down to their pickup trucks to drink beer and talk things over. The more beer the louder the talk. He could hear them distinctly now, discussing profits in the hijack turkey market.
Buck tried his legs experimentally. He could hardly stretch them out, they were so cramped. The Scraggses had him restrained with his own handcuffs, a prime humiliation for any law officer, and his right shoulder and where he was sitting on the half-frozen ground had gone numb.
In a little while the Scraggses and what Devil Anse called the family of the “betrothed” – the Potters, father and son – would come back up to persuade him to adopt their current business agenda. Lay off investigating Jackson County truck hijackings, was the message. Especially turkeys. And lay off the entire spectrum of Scraggs enterprises.