Her Montana Christmas

The thought buoyed the young pastor so much that within hours the next morning, he had women sewing chrismon symbols out of white fabric and nearly a dozen children lined up for parts in the Christmas pageant to be performed on Christmas Eve. Moreover, he was busy writing a script, dependent largely on scripture, for the reading, which he proposed to do with one man and two women.

He was surprised by how quickly the whole program began to take shape in his mind. He didn’t imagine that Christmas-pageant costuming had actually changed much across the centuries since the time of Christ, but he wanted to copy what had been used in Jasper Gulch one hundred years ago, and he would require Robin’s help to ensure accuracy. Before even that, however, he suddenly found himself in need of some expert advice on historical Hanging of the Green services.

It was an old tradition of mostly European origin, and he’d been through several of them, but he wanted this year’s service to be as authentic as possible as one that might have taken place a hundred years ago in Jasper Gulch. So off to the museum he went on Friday. He stopped off at the diner and picked up a sandwich on the way, arriving close to the lunch hour. Leaving the half-eaten sandwich in the cold car, he went in to find Robin and Olivia sharing brown-bagged meals in the break room.

“Ethan!” Olivia greeted him, smiling broadly over the rim of a steaming cup of soup. Like Robin, she didn’t look much older than a teen, with her petite stature, blond hair and sparkling blue eyes. She’d married Jack McGuire in October at the centennial’s Old Tyme Wedding, to no one’s real surprise. The two had a well-known history that had made them an item from the moment Olivia had stepped foot back into town after an absence of several years. “Jack tells me that you’re coming out Saturday to raid the place for greenery.”

He shot a glance at Robin, who sat staring at a prepackaged potpie on which she’d barely broken the crust. “Yes. Um, Mamie Fidler judges that the McGuire Ranch has the greatest variety of greenery hereabouts.”

“She’s right,” Olivia said, stirring her soup. “There’s cedar, which symbolizes royalty, fir and pine for everlasting life, holly, which represents the ultimate mission of Christ on the cross, and ivy, a symbol of resurrection. All would have been well known, I imagine, to anyone halfway versed in the traditions of the church a hundred years ago.”

“More so than today, it would seem,” Ethan muttered.

“Don’t forget the bells,” Robin put in. “Bells to signify the birth of royalty.”

Ethan shared a conspiratorial smile with her as Olivia said, “And I thought jingle bells were just for fun.”

He cleared his throat and mused, “Obviously, you two have already done excellent research.” He looked to Robin then and added, “I don’t suppose we could find an order of service or program for the Hanging of the Green ceremony, could we?”

She didn’t even have to think it over. “From a hundred years ago? Doubtful. If such a thing exists, it would be in your files.”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing there. At least not that I can find.”

“We might find something online from another church in another part of the country, if that will be of help to you.”

“I suppose it’ll have to do. I did think of it, but surfing the internet on my cell phone is not very handy.”

“I’ll take a look for you,” Robin said, starting to rise.

Ethan waved her back down into her chair. “Finish your lunch first. It can wait.”

“Maybe you’d like to join us,” Olivia offered. “I could heat you a cup of soup in the microwave.”

“Well,” he said, smiling, “if you’re sure. I just happen to have a sandwich in the car.” With the temperature hovering just above freezing, he’d judged that the sandwich would be as safe in his car as in a refrigerator.

“Your soup will be ready when you return,” Robin promised, getting to her feet, “and my pie should be cool enough to eat by then, too.”

“In that case, I’ll be glad to join you,” he told her, setting off.

He caught the speculative look that Olivia sent Robin as he slipped back out into the hallway. He felt a pang of guilt about that, but that was how it went in a small town, or so he told himself.

* * *

Strangely, while Ethan was at the museum sharing lunch with her and Olivia in the break room, Robin looked forward to Saturday’s outing with him. Later, as he sat at her shoulder while she searched the internet for historically accurate Hanging of the Green services, she couldn’t help being intensely aware of his every breath, murmur and movement with a kind of joyous expectation. Later, they surfed the web looking for and ordering delicate, period-appropriate glass bulbs and electric candles, as real ones would be too dangerous to use. Only after he went on his way, leaving her to her usual work, did she begin to have serious doubts about keeping company with him.

Perhaps the speculative looks that Olivia slid her way when she thought Robin wasn’t looking were to blame. Or maybe it was realizing how much she was coming to enjoy the pastor’s easy company. The phone call that she received as she was letting herself into her room at the Fidler Inn that evening certainly didn’t help.

“Hello,” she said, juggling her things. “One minute, please.”

“Robin?”

The sound of her mother’s voice instantly made the industrial carpet seem a more dull shade of brown than usual, and the creamy faux chinking between the faux logs on the walls suddenly became a rather uninspiring tan.

“Robin, is that you?”

“Yes, of course, Mother. Who else would it be?”

Her kitchen, which consisted of a six-foot length of brown cabinet that held a two-burner stovetop, a tiny microwave, minifridge, bar sink and four-cup coffeemaker, had been entirely adequate before; yet now she saw it as ridiculously lacking, even for a single woman whose main meals were prepackaged and microwaved.

“Well, it could be anyone, for all I know,” Sheila Frazier complained. “It’s been days since we last spoke, and you might have moved out of that dreadful motel by now.”

Strange. Ethan had recognized her voice after a single chance meeting. Well, perhaps more than one. But shouldn’t her own mother be able to recognize her voice? And how did Sheila know what the inn was like? She’d never been here. Still, the comfy patchwork quilt on the bed suddenly seemed faded and old, and the unstained woodwork that had struck Robin as so fresh when she’d first come to stay at the Fidler Inn now appeared unfinished, incomplete.

Dropping her handbag on the bed, Robin stared at the little square dining table—which bore no resemblance to the pair of chairs that flanked it—and steeled herself for the conversation to come, her mood shifting just as her surroundings had.

Sighing, she asked, “What is it, Mother?”

“I thought you should know that a position has come open as a research assistant here at the university. The Templeton foundation is endowing the position, so if you apply, you’re guaranteed to get it. I know it smacks of nepotism, but after all the good the Templetons have done the university, we are not ashamed to—”

“Mother,” Robin interrupted, wondering why she couldn’t exercise the same circumspection with her own family that she did with everyone else, “this position is in the science department, isn’t it?”

“Well, of course, but you are a trained and able researcher.”

“I am a historian,” Robin said, enunciating each syllable clearly, her temper barely in check. “I know you place no value on that, but history is what I love. History is what I do. And I already have a job as a historian here in Jasper Gulch.” Never mind that it barely paid above minimum wage or that she’d been thinking of leaving.

Her mother’s reply was exactly what Robin expected.

“Oh, honestly. You cannot mean to bury yourself in that hideous little throwback of a town, where you don’t even have decent cell-phone service so I have to call you at your motel, all in the vain hopes of connecting with some jumped-up cowpokes who just happen to be distant relatives.”

Robin pinched the bridge of her nose. “Mother, do you not realize that you are displaying the very same attitude that drove Great-Grandma Lillian away from her home?”

“And you are determined to follow in her footsteps!” Sheila Templeton Frazier, Ph.D., insisted shrilly. “What have we done that is so awful?”

“You haven’t done anything, Mother,” Robin said. “I didn’t come here to get away from you. I came in search of something more. Why won’t you listen?”

“And why won’t you understand,” Sheila countered, “that you are nothing to these Shaws? You will never be anything to them but a lying little opportunist, Robin. You may think that because they’ve accepted young Massey into the fold, they’ll accept you, too, if only for the Templeton name, but I assure you that is not the case. Even if they believe your claims, which I doubt, once they understand that Templeton funds are tied up exclusively in the foundation for scientific research, they’ll bar you from the door. Mark my words. How many times has it happened before?”

Sadly, Robin had lost more than one erstwhile friend who, having discovered her Templeton relationship, had thought she could command the Templeton money. Only those connected with the Templeton Foundation for Scientific Research enjoyed the largesse of Templeton funds, however, and Robin had long ago decided that science was not her calling. Her father managed the foundation, from which her Templeton grandparents had both retired. Her mother was herself a research scientist, so the Templeton foundation was, in a very real sense, the family business. But not—much to the chagrin of her parents—for Robin.

She was fully aware that if she didn’t somehow engage with the foundation or marry someone who could be taken into the foundation, all the Templeton money would pass out of the family’s control with the deaths of her parents. And that was fine with her. What the Templetons didn’t seem to understand was that family was more important to Robin than foundations or money. They just didn’t understand how sad and lonely she was because her acknowledged family consisted of only her parents, her Templeton grandparents and one unmarried Frazier uncle, her father’s brother, Richard, none of whom seemed to value her in any real way. They looked down on her profession. They looked down on her relationship with her beloved late great-grandmother. They even looked down on her faith, which she’d learned at her great-grandma’s knee.

She’d never known her Gillette grandparents. Her Frazier grandparents had both died when she was young; she didn’t even remember her grandmother, Dorothy Elaine Gillette Frazier. Perhaps that was why she had been so close to her great-grandmother, Lillian Gillette. And that was why, a year after her beloved great-grandma’s death, she had come here to Montana to find what remained of her family. Her Shaw family. Lillian, many would be shocked to know, was not Lillian at all but rather Lucy Shaw, whom entire generations of Shaws thought dead and buried for decades.

They all assumed that Lucy Shaw had died in 1926 when her Model T automobile had careened off the Beaver Creek Bridge into the rushing water below. They had no idea that Robin’s great-grandma Lillian had confessed on her deathbed, at the ripe old age of one hundred and three, that she was Lucy Shaw and had faked her own death in order to run away from Montana to New Mexico with her beloved Cyrus. Lillian—or Lucy, rather—had encouraged her lonely great-granddaughter to find her Shaw relatives in Montana, but Robin’s father and mother had insisted that Lillian had been raving when she’d come up with the “Montana story.”

Several weeks ago, Robin had finally found enough proof to convince her that Lillian’s story was true. Lillian was Lucy, but Robin’s parents wanted nothing to do with the Shaws, considering them little more than country bumpkins who would try to impose on the storied Templeton name and the science foundation that her mother’s family and Robin’s father so assiduously protected.

Sadly, as her parents had recently pointed out, Robin now had little reason to believe that the Shaws would want to have anything to do with her. After all, she had been living and working among them under false pretenses for months. Her parents wanted her to forget the Shaws and come home to New Mexico to “do something useful” with her life, the study of history not being on their list of useful endeavors.