A Stillness in Bethlehem(12)

Now Susan put aside the green felt Christmas tree she had been plastering with glitter balls—the felt decorations were for the children’s wing of the hospital over in Hanover; the town always used its extra materials to make ornaments for the chronic ward and the ICU—and picked up a spool of bright pink thread. Then she shook her short gold hair, shot Sharon a look it was impossible for Sharon to miss, and said, “It’s precisely because she’s only one person that she has a case. That’s what the Bill of Rights is all about. Protecting the rights of the individual against the will of the majority.”

“Rights,” Betty Heath said slowly. She put down Balthazar’s robe and reached for the next bit of emergency sewing on her table, a sky-blue angel’s costume whose hem had begun to drag. “I don’t get all that about rights. I have rights, don’t I? And so does everybody else in town. I don’t see why Tisha’s are the only rights anybody has to think about.”

“They aren’t,” Susan said patiently.

“Well, they sound like they are. Peter Callisher coming here all upset like that and saying we’re not going to get to put on the Celebration anymore. I’ve known Peter Callisher all his life. He never behaves like that.”

“He was pretty upset,” Susan said noncommittally. She shot Sharon another look, and Sharon smiled. Peter Callisher had not been “pretty upset” when he’d blown through on his way out to Stu Ketchum’s. He’d been foaming at the mouth when he wasn’t breathing fire. He’d been so hot that Sharon imagined she could still feel the heat, twenty minutes later. She looked at the big institutional clock on the back wall and saw that it said quarter to nine. Peter had probably made it out to Stu’s by now and been calmed down. Sharon thought that was too bad. Tish Verek could use a good talking-to by somebody who wasn’t in control of himself at all, and not just because of this silly injunction. Sharon didn’t really believe that the injunction would shut down the Celebration, now or ever. Too much depended on the Celebration’s going on. Too many people counted on the money it brought in. Where Tisha was really a danger was in her penchant for creating discord and the tactics she used to get it moving. Tisha hinted, that was the problem. She hinted about Sharon and Susan, knowing just how delicate a balance their lives were. She hinted about other things, too, that could not possibly be true. Lately she’d been picking on poor fat Timmy Hall, saying he reminded her of someone, flashing around that picture she had of the boy who had killed all those people in a swimming pool. It would serve her right if Timmy turned out to be far less placid than he looked.

The gold felt Christmas bell was finished. Sharon tossed it into the box she and Susan were using to transport the things and said, “It won’t really matter this year anyway. She didn’t start soon enough to shut the Celebration down. And between this year and next, there’s an awful lot of time for things to happen.”

“An awful lot of time for her to hire more lawyers,” Betty Heath said. She adjusted her glasses, poked at her thinning and badly dyed brown hair, and stabbed hard at the hem of the angel’s gown. “I never liked either one of them, not since they came here. Building that silly house that looks like it’s going to fall down any minute, and then that man talking to the newspapers about all that nasty sex. That’s all people think about anymore, you know, sex. It wasn’t like that when I was growing up. We had interests. Now all people want to do is go to court and go to bed, and I can’t see much difference between the two except you do one of them naked. Oh, I’m sorry, dears, I didn’t mean anything. Of course you wouldn’t know about any of this. You’re both much too nice to know anything at all about that sort of thing.”

“Right,” Susan said, blanching a little.

Sharon grabbed a piece of red felt cut into the shape of a leaping reindeer and bent her head over it.

Betty Heath leaned forward to look out the window onto Main Street and said, “Oh, there’s Dinah Ketchum. She must be on her way over to the barn. I’ve got to get hold of her.”

“Go right ahead,” Susan said.

“We’ll be fine on our own for a few minutes,” Sharon said.

“Take your time.”

Betty Heath looked doubtful. “If you’re sure,” she said slowly. “I really do have to talk to Dinah. It’s important. But there’s so much work to do here, and there’ll be more coming in…. You know what it’s like on the day the Celebration opens.”