Six Geese A-Slaying(5)

“Anyway,” Clarence was saying. “Larry always fakes a limp when he wants attention. I’ve got them feeding him some camel treats, and he’ll be fine by parade time. By the way, you do realize that you sent the elephants to unload in the pasture where the drummers and fifers are rehearsing, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “If you’re heading there anyway, see if you can convince the drummers and fifers that all that racket they’re making could spook the elephants.”

“It would if they kept it up,” he said, frowning. “Where do you want them to go instead? The musicians, that is.”

“In the cow pasture behind the house. It’s farther away—and downwind.”

“You don’t really intend to inflict a dozen bagpipers on a herd of defenseless cows?” Clarence said, with mock fierceness.

“There are no cows in the cow pasture at the moment,” I said. “It’s too full of Boy Scouts—they had their annual pre-parade campout there. And good luck spooking them—Rob was out last night helping ride herd on them, and he reports that they laughed at all his scariest ghost stories.”

“This modern generation,” he said, shaking his head. “Well, I’m off to cope with the camels and elephants.”

Of course the moment he left, I wondered what he meant by camel treats. Did one of the leading pet food companies manufacture such a thing? And if not, what did you use to bribe a sulking camel back into good humor?

I could ask him later. I looked back at my check-in sheet. I was using a tiny self-inking stamp of a holly leaf to mark everyone present and accounted for. I smiled with satisfaction at the almost unbroken garland of leaves marching down the right-hand side of the page.

I accepted a piece of peanut brittle from a small angel with red pigtails and a cup of eggnog from a passing cousin. I waved at a local farmer who strolled by herding a small flock of white turkeys with red bows around their necks. Evidently they were marching in the parade—which meant, I hoped, that they wouldn’t be anyone’s dinner this holiday season. Someone in the front end of a reindeer costume, complete with a battery-powered flashing red nose, wandered by scanning the crowd as if he’d lost something. Probably whoever was playing the hind legs.

“Aunt Meg? We’re here.”

My twelve-year-old nephew, Eric McReady, appeared at my elbow, at the head of a swarm of brown-clad shepherds around his own age. The Boy Scouts. Eric had recruited the local troop, who would be earning credits toward the next rank by performing public service. They’d be acting as mobile cleanup crews, with groups marching in the parade behind the camels, the elephants, the horses, and all the other large animals. Had the bagpipers evicted the Boy Scouts from their campground already? Or had Eric succeeded in getting his volunteers to show up on time? Either way it was good news. I smiled as I stamped them as present.

“Are we really going to have a white Christmas?” one of them asked.

I glanced up at the sky again. I’d been doing it so often all morning that I was getting a crick in my neck. The latest forecast I’d heard called for a small storm to dump two to six inches of snow on us sometime today. Normally two to six inches would have constituted a fairly large storm by central Virginia’s standards, but the meteorologists were almost ignoring it to focus on the massive storm system currently pummeling the Midwest and scheduled to unload another six to twelve inches on Christmas Eve.

“Yes,” I said. “I just hope it waits until the parade is over.” Or at least until the tail end of the parade was closer to town than our house. I had no desire to be snowbound with half the population of Caerphilly. Or with the dozens of animals we’d recruited for the parade—for this evening, I’d arranged quarters for the animals in town, in the barns belonging to the Caerphilly College Agricultural Sciences Department. I only hoped the snow would hold off long enough for them to get there.

“Snow! Snow! No school tomorrow! No school tomorrow!” chanted a dozen voices, as the Scouts capered around me in what I assumed was a snow dance.

Yes, two to six inches were more than enough to cancel classes. In their enthusiasm, they seemed to have forgotten that the schools were already closed tomorrow for the Christmas Eve holiday. In my school days, we’d have called this a wasted snow. But that didn’t seem to bother the exuberant flock of miniature shepherds.

“Ten-hut!” Eric called.

Behind him the rest of the shepherds fell into formation, saluted in unison and then clanged their shovels against their buckets.

“Cleanup patrol reporting for duty, ma’am,” Eric said.