A Town Divided by Christmas by Orson Scott Card

Author:Orson Scott Card
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2018-10-09T21:48:03+00:00

7

I’m not an anthropologist, Spunky reminded herself. I’m not here to study their culture, and I have no ethical rule of non-interference. If I fall in love with the town’s main public servant, and he by some chance also falls for me, it won’t change anybody’s DNA or behavior patterns or culture or anything.

Except for that tiny lingering part of me that wants to avoid the emotional devastation of leaving here, knowing that I won’t come back and that he can’t follow me.

I’m just not a one-Christmas-season kind of girl, Spunky realized.

Having never been in love or anything close to it, she hadn’t known how it would hit her.

Now she knew.

It was all-consuming. Ever since that snowy flirty walk to Thanksgiving dinner, ever since she had cried into his shirt and felt his arm around her while he prayed for the whole gathering and watched him work magic in the lives of the people around him, all she could think about was him, except when she absolutely had to talk to somebody or do some job, and even then he would creep into her thoughts and distract her.

“Leave me alone,” she said to him when she responded to a knock on her apartment door and there he was. “I have work to do.”

His reply was to kiss her quite thoroughly and then step past her to stand over the table, looking at the charts. The one on top was the master chart, tracking the families that were most intertwined. She used yellow highlighter to draw the connections when somebody showed up in more than one place — as one family’s child, as another family’s son- or daughter-in-law.

“Good thing I know you’re not tracking our inbreeding.”

Still a little cloud-niney from the kiss, Spunky floated over to stand, not beside him — too dangerous to her ability to function mentally! — but across from him. “What I’m tracking,” she said, “is Episcopalians.”

“The rich people,” he said. “Typical historical approach.”

“The people divided by the nativity pageant in 1930,” she corrected him. “Look at all the intermarriage through the whole Episcopalian community before the church divided. And afterward, not one extra-congregational marriage.”

“Lack of exogamy going to be a problem, do you think?”

“Before the war in Bosnia, Serbs and Croats and Muslim Bosnians intermarried like crazy,” said Spunky. “Since the war, it took fifteen years before the first interfaith marriage, and it made international headlines.”

“Um, nobody’s been massacred in a football stadium in Good Shepherd.”

“Ignoring the fact that Good Shepherd has no football stadium, just two sets of bleachers at the high school, this is exactly what I’m fascinated by. Nobody’s been killed here. It isn’t a war. People don’t even hate each other, or at least everybody’s civil.”

“As long as they all stay to their side of the street, so to speak,” said Eggie.

“Atrocities, massacres in Bosnia, and fifteen years later, at least one marriage. Bad tempers and building a second church with a clock instead of a bell, plus two pageants at the same time for eighty-seven years, not a drop of blood shed, and no intermarriage.

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