Moonlight and Mistletoe

“Fireworks! The city council and their damned fireworks! That’s all we need!”

All around them crowds massed in the square and over the courthouse lawn ooh’d and aah’d as the next brilliant concussion shook the skies. Buck looked around, but none of his deputies was in sight.

“Stay together,” he shouted as they hurried toward the Christmas tree.

“Sheriff?” A figure loomed in front of him, carrying a TV camera on its shoulder. “You are the Jackson County sheriff, aren’t you? Are you expecting a demonstration here tonight by the -”

“Out of my way,” Buck snarled, pushing past him.

Whoooouum, roared a rocket. Closely followed by the BLAM of a hundred tiny golden fish wriggling across the night sky. Several babies in the crowd started to cry.

“Not bad, not bad,” Byron Turnipseed shouted as he stumbled along in his blanket behind Buck, who held the shotgun firmly but unobtrusively pressed to the small of Devil Anse’s back. “You’ve got to admit the noise of the fireworks is great cover. Hitchcock himself couldn’t have done any better!”

As they approached the tree a figure dashed up to them and grabbed Farrie’s arm. “Where have you been? You’ve given me a nervous breakdown, kid,” the band teacher screamed over the mind- altering explosions of several percussive rockets overhead. “We’ve already started! How’re you going to get up in the tree now?” he demanded at the top of his lungs.

Farrie looked at Buck, her lip quivering. Her hand in his tightened. She said, so low he could hardly hear her, “I don’t climb so good.”

Scarlett said, “Farrie, you don’t -”

“Wait a minute!” Buck bent over and looked down into the pinched little face. For a moment the fireworks were so noisy he couldn’t speak. Then he said loudly to Farrie, “Don’t worry about a thing, babe. I’ll get you up in the Living Christmas Tree before I do anything else.”

He took her hand again. “I’ll take Farrie up,” he told the music teacher. Their faces turned green and red in a shower of rocket light. “Just make sure somebody’s waiting for her when she gets up there.”

Another television cameraman hurried up followed by a young woman with a script in her hand. The TV newswoman promptly stepped beside Buck and Farrie and said to the bank of portable lights the technician turned on, “This is Jennifer James live from Nancyville, Georgia, with some of the performers in the town’s controversial Living Christmas Tree.”

“He’s not a performer,” Mr. Ravenwood yelled, pushing her out of the way, “he’s the sheriff!”

“Are you really the Jackson County sheriff?” Jennifer James followed them, microphone extended. “Your face seems rather battered, Sheriff. Is this the result of some violence that has already taken place because of the controversy up here?”

Buck pushed the mike away, shaking his head. “C’mon, kid,” he said to Farrie. He took her hand and started for the back of the Living Christmas Tree. He had already seen the blanketed figures of Byron Turnipseed and Devil Anse and a hybrid fleecy-canine figure take a position down front. Thank goodness they seemed to be in semidarkness.

At the foot of the tree’s ladderlike stairs, Farrie pulled back, screaming every time a rocket went off.

Scarlett tried to soothe her. “We never seen fireworks but once,” she yelled. “I don’t think she was big enough to remember.”

“I don’t wanna go up there,” Farrie screamed, “they’ll hit me!”

It wasn’t just the fireworks, Buck knew. He remembered the desolate look in those black eyes when she’d whispered to him she didn’t climb so good.

And didn’t walk toogood, he told himself. And all the other things, including being a Scraggs.

He lifted Farrie in his arms, wincing with the stab of pain in his shoulder. “Farrie?” He knew she heard because she gulped, then shuddered. “You’ve done nothing but yell the past hour about how much you wanted to get here. Now,” Buck said, his mouth at her ear, “I want you to go up there and sing. You can sing better than anybody else and you know it. Let’s see you do it!”

The little pixie face lifted to him, tear-stained and surprised. She said something, but fireworks noise drowned it out.

“Sing!” Buck told her. “I know you can do it, kid. Just stop bawling.”

Farrie’s arms went around his neck suddenly and she clung to him. Finally she nodded. In spite of himself, Buck smiled.

“You take me,” he heard her say. “Only you!”

“You got it,” he assured her.

They went up the first stairs into the tree and hands reached out to them. “Go get ’em, Farrie,” the Bells yelled over the thunder of rockets.

“I’ll take her,” Judy Heamstead said when they reached the Angels. “It’s only a few steps more.”

Buck shook his head. He needed to be down on the courthouse grounds, but, like his dad, he never broke his word. “I told her I’d carry her all the way. Wouldn’t let her down now. That right, kid?”

Eyes shining, Farrie grinned at him.

Two men in the robes of the Presbyterian church choir were waiting on the last level. They reached out and took her from Buck’s arms. “Glad to see you got here,” one of them said as he set Farrie on her feet. “You ready to sing, honey?”

Farrie was telling them she was when Buck turned to go. He was looking forward to hustling Byron Turnipseed, old man Scraggs, and the dog to a safer, less public place. He was on the tree’s bottom level when a roar from hundreds of throats went up, then he heard the unmistakable sound of a plane swooping low.

“Santa Claus,” the crowd was yelling.

Buck jumped the remaining feet to the ground. The plane, with a big Night Sun spotlight playing over the courthouse lawn, was getting ready to release the city council’s freebie Santa.

Buck struggled to get through what seemed like a wall of bodies with faces all turned to the sky. The fireworks were over, but their problems weren’t. The courthouse environs were no shopping mall parking lot; a jump there was hazardous, as any fool should know. Especially after dark.

Deputy Kevin Black Badger materialized at Buck’s elbow, dark circles under his eyes. “Sheriff,” Kevin said belligerently, planting himself so Buck could not pass him, “is that a dog over there by the tree wearing my best imported Australian sheepskin rug that was in my camping equipment?” He stopped, abruptly, to peer into Bucks face. “Good Lord, who beat you up?”

“Later,” Buck told him brusquely.

A cheer had gone up as Santa, carrying a big black bag, jumped out of the low- flying Cessna and did a lengthy free-fall before opening his parachute. Buck swore under his breath. “Go get the ambulance and fire rescue on the radio,” he told Black Badger.

The deputy looked up and calculated the drift of Santa’s chute over them. “Yes, sir!” Black Badger left at a run.

The circling plane’s searchlight, sweeping over the crowd, now picked out what seemed to be a budget version of two shepherds and a strangely extraterrestrial sheep, the latter now snarling viciously at one of the shepherds.

Another roar went up as the light illuminated the trio. People stood up and pointed. One shepherd hitched closer to the crowd as if trying to disappear into it. The sheep promptly dragged him back, teeth clamped in his robes.

A voice in the crowd cried, “Sheep and shepherds? Are we going to have the manger scene after all?”