Then, while Scarlett was still admiring how nice Buck looked, big and handsome in his uniform, the camera moved up close on his face as he said that he had armed deputies, if necessary, to keep any manger scene away.

You could tell right away that what Buck had said about armed deputies wasn’t right. You could see it right there on his face that he knew it, too, before the camera swung away and the man in the television news studio came back on.

A moment later the telephone had started ringing. Instead of eating his dinner that Scarlett had fixed, Buck had answered one call after another until he finally gave up and went upstairs to see how Farrie was getting along. He came down again later to check the news, and Scarlett went to clean up the kitchen. When the news came on again, the telephone started to ring. It hadn’t stopped ringing, even late as it was.

Scarlett went out on the upstairs landing where she could see the light from the den and hear the rumble of Buck’s voice, still answering calls. Whoever they were, people in Nancyville, they ought to leave him alone, she thought. Deputies were armed. He was only telling the truth.

She couldn’t help remembering how he had looked as he sat on the edge of the bed feeding Farrie hot chocolate from a cup. Or the look on his face as he’d carried her out of the tower room. Or when he’d searched for her pulse. You wouldn’t think those big hands could find a spot on a little girl’s skinny wrist to take her pulse, but they had.

It was just too bad that some people hadn’t liked what they saw on TV, because their sheriff was a brave man. A good man. She had never met a man like him before.

I’m in love with him, Scarlett thought, surprised.

It was such a strange, totally unexpected feeling that she sat straight up in bed, staring at the spot of moonlight falling on the carpet by the window.

Was she sure? She didn’t want to make a big mistake again like she had the other night, coming to his room. But Sheriff Buck Grissom made her heart stop just watching him. And the feeling that she just couldn’t wait for him to kiss her hung around her like a homeless cat practically all the time.

It was love, all right, because it felt just like she’d heard other people say – sort of warm and excited and feeling happy whenever she thought about Buck. It was, Scarlett realized, probably the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her. That’s why she hadn’t recognized it right away; she just wasn’t used to having wonderful things happen.

But now, how everything had changed! For one thing, she didn’t have to force herself to do anything, she didn’t have to please Farrie and trick him into marriage. And she didn’t have to please Devil Anse, who wanted to bribe Buck and make him do something crooked.

No, she thought, almost hugging herself, she was in love with Sheriff Buck Grissom. She could please herself!

It made her so happy she couldn’t wait to tell him. She slipped her bare feet over the edge of the bed and started for the door.

The darkened house smelled like Christmas, filled with the fragrance of the spruce tree in the parlor. The prisms in the hall’s ceiling fixture winked sparks of light as Scarlett hurried under them.

What should she say? Just tell Buck that she’d just found out she was in love with him?

Scarlett hesitated at the door to the den, hearing his voice on the telephone. He was talking, not to someone about what had happened on the television news, she realized, but to his mother. It was Mrs. Grissom’s nightly call from Chicago. She always called after eleven because they had a different time in Chicago, Buck had explained.

Scarlett stood by the half-open door to the den, not knowing now whether she wanted to go in. She hadn’t known about places in America having different times. “Zones,” Buck had called them. But then she was pretty ignorant; she’d never finished her last year of high school because Devil Anse had made her drop out.

If a person was in love with someone like Buck Grissom, Scarlett thought, they would have to give some thought to something like that. Her grandpa, Ancil Scraggs, and all the things he’d done. And how much school she had missed.

She’d already seen the woman they said Buck had once been engaged to: Susan Huddleston, the county social worker. You could see Susan Huddleston was pretty much what a sheriff would look for in a wife. Not, she told herself, slowly taking a step back from the doorway, some wild Scraggs from Catfish Holler.

The happy feeling faded away. Scarlett knew now that she didn’t want Buck to feel that he was being forced into anything. Hadn’t he already told her he didn’t intend to make a fool of himself?

She bit her lip. She supposed he could do that, make a fool of himself with Scarlett Scraggs, old Devil Anse Scraggs’s granddaughter. Especially if she came down after eleven o’clock at night in her bare feet and only a secondhand church nightgown and tried to tell him that she had some crazy idea that she loved him.

The happy feeling was gone now, replaced with a sad, hollow place in her middle.

There couldn’t be anything much better than to live in this house, and make a home for Farrie, and be Buck Grissom’s wife. But look at her! She didn’t even have bedroom slippers to put on her feet. When she got dressed in the morning she put on somebody else’s clothes. And she didn’t have a home. Neither did her little sister.

It had been all right to pretend that she could trick Buck Grissom into marrying her. Or even to know that Devil Anse had tried to use her to bribe him. But it was a different thing entirely when you’d just found out you were in love.

And that maybe he wouldn’t care.

Shoulders drooping, Scarlett turned and padded back to the stairs.


* * *

Buck was glad to know from his mother’s call that his sister and the kids were fine, and that her husband was diagnosed, now, with a concussion and not the skull fracture they’d all feared. As soon as he hung up, though, the telephone rang again.

Buck snatched it up. He was dog-tired and wanted to go to bed but it seemed like half the town of Nancyville had to talk to him. It had been that way since six o’clock. This time his caller was the mayor. “Yeah, Harry,” Buck said wearily.

“Buck, listen,” the mayor said. The evening’s constant talking had reduced his voice to a rasp. “As you know, most of the city council are still here at my house, with the exception of Steve Morrisey and Britta Jergensen – Britta had to go home and let her babysitter go. But we’ve been looking over some of the counteractive measures that have been suggested, and we’ve decided to – ah, commit to a few.”

“We don’t need any of that, Harry,” Buck said. “In spite of what you think you heard on television, the sheriff’s department of Jackson County is not going to be down at the courthouse tomorrow night with a cadre of deputies to use force on any living manger scene. Because there isn’t going to be any manger scene.”

“Now, you don’t know that, Buck,” the mayor said quickly. “There were a lot of people looking at Channel Ten tonight, and they heard what you said.”

“That was just something dreamed up by those Atlanta news people,” Buck maintained. “Nobody had said anything about a manger scene or using deputies until the TV people showed up. Harry, that team would have been happy as hell if they’d gotten me to say that I was going to run Joseph and Mary and the kid that won the Best Baby Jesus contest off the courthouse lawn at gunpoint!”

“That’s just the problem,” the mayor said hoarsely. “Junior Whitford came over here a little while ago with most of his Committee for the Real Meaning of Christmas, and they’d been watching Channel Ten, too. I’ll say it to you, Buck, although I won’t say it to them – that damned committee’s got their heads turned by all the publicity. They’ve decided they’re going to have a manger scene after all!”

Buck surveyed the wall before him bleakly. “They can’t. There’s a court order.”

“Court order, fiddle-faddle!” the mayor burst out. “They think they’re going to storm the courthouse! They’ve already called Channel Ten, Junior tells me, to tell them what they’re going to do.”

And Channel Ten loved it, Buck thought.

“We had to put on our thinking caps,” the mayor went on. “There we were, except for Britta and Steve Morrisey, trying to come up with a new approach.”

Buck said cautiously, “You’re not thinking of those damned fireworks, are you?”

The council had learned that in a pinch they could use the leftover supplies of fireworks from the last municipal Fourth of July celebration, which was not as strange as it sounded: fireworks were a part of southern Christmases, even though the custom was dying out somewhat.

“Well, I think we ought to go with the fireworks,” the mayor was saying, “although I know you don’t like them, Buck. But the idea is to provide so much entertainment tomorrow night that – uh, people won’t look kindly on any interruptions from Junior and folks I won’t mention. We’ve just had an offer from Ronnie Dance, who runs an outfit that specializes in dropping Santa Clauses during the holiday season.”

“Dropping Santa Clauses?” Buck straightened up, surprised in spite of himself. “What the hell’s that?”

“The big operators bring their Santa Clauses in by helicopter, Buck,” the voice on the telephone explained a little apologetically. “You know, Santa just steps right out of the chopper in the parking lot and into the nearest J.C. Penney’s or what have you. Ronnie doesn’t have a helicopter, he runs a skydiving service in the summertime out of a Cessna 206. Santa Claus-dropping is just his off-season business. But he can drop a skydiver in a Santa uniform onto a circle that’s been already drawn on the asphalt at the shopping mall. Most of Ronnie’s Santas used to be paratroopers; they kind of look for that target.”