The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (3 page)

Of course, he didn't say “Go jump in the lake, Mrs. Wendleken” or anything like that. He just reminded everyone that when Jesus said “Suffer the little children to come unto me” Jesus meant all the little children, including Herdmans.

So that shut everybody up, even Alice's mother, and the next Wednesday we started rehearsals.

Chapter 4

T
he first pageant
rehearsal was usually about as much fun as a three-hour ride on the school bus, and just as noisy and crowded. This rehearsal, though, was different. Everybody shut up and settled down right away, for fear of missing something awful that the Herdmans might do.

They got there ten minutes late, sliding into the room like a bunch of outlaws about to shoot up a saloon. When Leroy passed Charlie he knuckled him behind the ear, and one little primary girl yelled as Gladys went by. But Mother had said she was going to ignore everything except blood, and since the primary kid wasn't bleeding, and neither was Charlie, nothing happened.

Mother said, “And here's the Herdman family. We're glad to see you all,” which was probably the biggest lie ever said right out loud in the church.

Imogene smiled—the Herdman smile, we called it, sly and sneaky—and there they sat, the closest thing to criminals that we knew about, and they were going to represent the best and most beautiful. No wonder everybody was so worked up.

Mother started to separate everyone into angels and shepherds and guests at the inn, but right away she ran into trouble.

“Who were the shepherds?” Leroy Herdman wanted to know. “Where did they come from?”

Ollie Herdman didn't even know what a shepherd was . . . or, anyway, that's what he said.

“What was the inn?” Claude asked. “What's an inn?”

“It's like a motel,” somebody told him, “where people go to spend the night.”

“What people?” Claude said. “Jesus?”

“Oh, honestly!” Alice Wendleken grumbled. “Jesus wasn't even born yet! Mary and Joseph went there.”

“Why?” Ralph asked.

“What happened first?” Imogene hollered at my mother. “Begin at the beginning!”

That really scared me because the beginning would be the Book of Genesis, where it says “In the beginning . . .” and if we were going to have to start with the Book of Genesis we'd never get through.

The thing was, the Herdmans didn't know anything about the Christmas story. They knew that Christmas was Jesus' birthday, but everything else was news to them—the shepherds, the Wise Men, the star, the stable, the crowded inn.

It was hard to believe. At least, it was hard for me to believe—Alice Wendleken said she didn't have any trouble believing it. “How would they find out about the Christmas story?” she said. “They don't even know what a Bible is. Look what Gladys did to that Bible last week.”

While Imogene was snitching money from the collection plate in my class, Gladys and Ollie drew mustaches and tails on all the disciples in the primary-grade Illustrated Bible.

“They never went to church in their whole life till your little brother told them we got refreshments,” Alice said, “and all you ever hear about Christmas in school is how to make ornaments out of aluminum foil. So how would they know about the Christmas story?”

She was right. Of course they might have read about it, but they never read anything except “Amazing Comics.” And they might have heard about it on TV, except that Ralph paid sixty-five cents for their TV at a garage sale, and you couldn't see anything on it unless somebody held onto the antenna. Even then, you couldn't see much.

The only other way for them to hear about the Christmas story was from their parents, and I guess Mr. Herdman never got around to it before he climbed on the railroad train. And it was pretty clear that Mrs. Herdman had given up ever trying to tell them anything.

So they just didn't know. And Mother said she had better begin by reading the Christmas story from the Bible. This was a pain in the neck to most of us because we knew the whole thing backward and forward and never had to be told anything except who we were supposed to be, and where we were supposed to stand.

“. . . Joseph and Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child . . .”

“Pregnant!” yelled Ralph Herdman.

Well. That stirred things up. All the big kids began to giggle and all the little kids wanted to know what was so funny, and Mother had to hammer on the floor with a blackboard pointer. “That's enough, Ralph,” she said, and went on with the story.

“I don't think it's very nice to say Mary was pregnant,” Alice whispered to me.

“But she was,” I pointed out. In a way, though, I agreed with her. It sounded too ordinary. Anybody could be pregnant. “Great with child” sounded better for Mary.

“I'm not supposed to talk about people being pregnant.” Alice folded her hands in her lap and pinched her lips together. “I'd better tell my mother.”

“Tell her what?”

“That your mother is talking about things like that in church. My mother might not want me to be here.”

I was pretty sure she would do it. She wanted to be Mary, and she was mad at Mother. I knew, too, that she would make it sound worse than it was and Mrs. Wendleken would get madder than she already was. Mrs. Wendleken didn't even want cats to have kittens or birds to lay eggs, and she wouldn't let Alice play with anybody who had two rabbits.

But there wasn't much I could do about it, except pinch Alice, which I did. She yelped, and Mother separated us and made me sit beside Imogene Herdman and sent Alice to sit in the middle of the baby angels.

I wasn't crazy to sit next to Imogene—after all, I'd spent my whole life staying away from Imogene—but she didn't even notice me . . . not much, anyway.

“Shut up,” was all she said. “I want to hear her.”

I couldn't believe it. Among other things, the Herdmans were famous for never sitting still and never paying attention to anyone—teachers, parents (their own or anybody else's), the truant officer, the police—yet here they were, eyes glued on my mother and taking in every word.

“What's that?” they would yell whenever they didn't understand the language, and when Mother read about there being no room at the inn, Imogene's jaw dropped and she sat up in her seat.

“My God!” she said. “Not even for Jesus?”

I saw Alice purse her lips together so I knew that was something else Mrs. Wendleken would hear about—swearing in the church.

“Well, now, after all,” Mother explained, “nobody knew the baby was going to turn out to be Jesus.”

“You said Mary knew,” Ralph said. “Why didn't she tell them?”

“I would have told them!” Imogene put in. “Boy, would I have told them! What was the matter with Joseph that he didn't tell them? Her pregnant and everything,” she grumbled.

“What was that they laid the baby in?” Leroy said. “That manger . . . is that like a bed? Why would they have a bed in the barn?”

“That's just the point,” Mother said. “They didn't have a bed in the barn, so Mary and Joseph had to use whatever there was. What would you do if you had a new baby and no bed to put the baby in?”

“We put Gladys in a bureau drawer,” Imogene volunteered.

“Well, there you are,” Mother said, blinking a little. “You didn't have a bed for Gladys so you had to use something else.”

“Oh, we had a bed,” Ralph said, “only Ollie was still in it and he wouldn't get out. He didn't like Gladys.” He elbowed Ollie. “Remember how you didn't like Gladys?”

I thought that was pretty smart of Ollie, not to like Gladys right off the bat.

“Anyway,” Mother said, “Mary and Joseph used the manger. A manger is a large wooden feeding trough for animals.”

“What were the wadded-up clothes?” Claude wanted to know.

“The what?” Mother said.

“You read about it—‘she wrapped him in wadded-up clothes.'”

“Swaddling clothes.” Mother sighed. “Long ago, people used to wrap their babies very tightly in big pieces of material, so they couldn't move around. It made the babies feel cozy and comfortable.”

I thought it probably just made the babies mad. Till then, I didn't know what swaddling clothes were either, and they sounded terrible, so I wasn't too surprised when Imogene got all excited about that.

“You mean they tied him up and put him in a feedbox?” she said. “Where was the Child Welfare?”

The Child Welfare was always checking up on the Herdmans. I'll bet if the Child Welfare had ever found Gladys all tied up in a bureau drawer they would have done something about it.

“And, lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them,” Mother went on, “and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and—”

“Shazam!” Gladys yelled, flinging her arms out and smacking the kid next to her.

“What?” Mother said. Mother never read “Amazing Comics.”

“Out of the black night with horrible vengeance, the Mighty Marvo—”

“I don't know what you're talking about, Gladys,” Mother said. “This is the Angel of the Lord who comes to the shepherds in the fields, and—”

“Out of nowhere, right?” Gladys said. “In the black night, right?”

“Well . . .” Mother looked unhappy. “In a way.”

So Gladys sat back down, looking very satisfied, as if this was at least one part of the Christmas story that made sense to her.

“Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea,” Mother went on reading, “behold there came Wise Men from the East to Jerusalem, saying—”

“That's you, Leroy,” Ralph said, “and Claude and Ollie. So pay attention.”

“What does it mean, Wise Men?” Ollie wanted to know. “Were they like schoolteachers?”

“No, dumbbell,” Claude said. “It means like President of the United States.”

Mother looked surprised, and a little pleased—like she did when Charlie finally learned the times tables up to five. “Why, that's very close, Claude,” she said. “Actually, they were kings.”

“Well, it's about time,” Imogene muttered. “Maybe they'll tell the innkeeper where to get off, and get the baby out of the barn.”

“They saw the young child with Mary, his mother, and fell down and worshipped him, and presented unto him gifts: gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”

“What's that stuff?” Leroy wanted to know.

“Precious oils,” Mother said, “and fragrant resins.”

“Oil!” Imogene hollered. “What kind of a cheap king hands out oil for a present? You get better presents from the firemen!”

Sometimes the Herdmans got Christmas presents at the Firemen's Party, but the Santa Claus always had to feel all around the packages to be sure they weren't getting bows and arrows or dart guns or anything like that. Imogene usually got sewing cards or jigsaw puzzles and she never liked them, but I guess she figured they were better than oil.

Then we came to King Herod, and the Herdmans never heard of him either, so Mother had to explain that it was Herod who sent the Wise Men to find the baby Jesus.

“Was it him that sent the crummy presents?” Ollie wanted to know, and Mother said it was worse than that—he planned to have the baby Jesus put to death.

“My God!” Imogene said. “He just got born and already they're out to kill him!”

The Herdmans wanted to know all about Herod—what he looked like, and how rich he was, and whether he fought wars with people.

“He must have been the main king,” Claude said, “if he could make the other three do what he wanted them to.”

“If I was a king,” Leroy said, “I wouldn't let some other king push me around.”

“You couldn't help it if he was the main king.”

“I'd go be king somewhere else.”

They were really interested in Herod, and I figured they liked him. He was so mean he could have been their ancestor—Herod Herdman. But I was wrong.

“Who's going to be Herod in this play?” Leroy said.

“We don't show Herod in our pageant,” Mother said. And they all got mad. They wanted somebody to be Herod so they could beat up on him.

I couldn't understand the Herdmans. You would have thought the Christmas story came right out of the F.B.I. files, they got so involved in it—wanted a bloody end to Herod, worried about Mary having her baby in a barn, and called the Wise Men a bunch of dirty spies.

And they left the first rehearsal arguing about whether Joseph should have set fire to the inn, or just chased the innkeeper into the next county.

Chapter 5

W
hen we got home
my father wanted to hear all about it.

“Well,” Mother said, “just suppose you had never heard the Christmas story, and didn't know anything about it, and then somebody told it to you. What would you think?”

My father looked at her for a minute or two and then he said, “Well, I guess I would think it was pretty disgraceful that they couldn't find any room for a pregnant woman except in the stable.”

I was amazed. It didn't seem natural for my father to be on the same side as the Herdmans. But then, it didn't seem natural for the Herdmans to be on the right side of a thing. It would have made more sense for them to be on Herod's side.

“Exactly,” Mother said. “It was perfectly disgraceful. And I never thought about it much. You hear all about the nice warm stable with all the animals breathing, and the sweet-smelling hay—but that doesn't change the fact that they put Mary in a barn. Now, let me tell you . . .” She told my father all about the rehearsal and when she was through she said, “It's clear to me that, deep down, those children have some good instincts after all.”

My father said he couldn't exactly agree. “According to you,” he said, “their chief instinct was to burn Herod alive.”

“No, their chief instinct was to get Mary and the baby out of the barn. But even so, it was Herod they wanted to do away with, and not Mary or Joseph. They picked out the right villain—that must mean something.”

“Maybe so.” My father looked up from his newspaper. “Is that what finally happened to Herod? What did happen to Herod, anyway?”

None of us knew. I had never thought much about Herod. He was just a name, some-body in the Bible, Herodtheking.

But the Herdmans went and looked him up.

The very next day Imogene grabbed me at recess. “How do you get a book out of the library?” she said.

“You have to have a card.”

“How do you get a card?”

“You have to sign your name.”

She looked at me for a minute, with her eyes all squinched up. “Do you have to sign your own name?”

I thought Imogene probably wanted to get one of the dirty books out of the basement, which is where they keep them, but I knew nobody would let her do that. There is this big chain across the stairs to the basement and Miss Graebner, the librarian, can hear it rattle no matter where she is in the library, so you don't stand a chance of getting down there.

“Sure you have to sign your own name,” I said. “They have to know who has the books.” I didn't see what difference it made—whether she signed the card with her own name, or signed the card Queen Elizabeth—Miss Graebner still wasn't going to let Imogene Herdman take any books out of the public library.

I guess she couldn't stop them from using the library, though, because that was where they found out about Herod.

They went in that afternoon, all six of them, and told Miss Graebner that they wanted library cards. Usually when anybody told Miss Graebner that they wanted a library card, she got this big happy smile on her face and said, “Good! We want all our boys and girls to have library cards.”

She didn't say that to the Herdmans, though. She just asked them why they wanted library cards.

“We want to read about Jesus,” Imogene said.

“Not Jesus,” Ralph said, “that king who was out to get Jesus . . . Herod.”

Later on Miss Graebner told my mother that she had been a librarian for thirty-eight years and loved every minute of it because every day brought something new and different. “But now,” she said, “I might as well retire. When Imogene Herdman came in and said she wanted to read about Jesus, I knew I'd heard everything there was to hear.”

At the next rehearsal Mother started, again, to separate everyone into angels and shepherds and guests at the inn but she didn't get very far. The Herdmans wanted to rewrite the whole pageant and hang Herod for a finish. They couldn't stand it that he died in bed of old age.

“It wasn't just Jesus he was after,” Ralph told us. “He killed all kinds of people.”

“He even killed his own wife,” Leroy said.

“And nothing happened to him,” Imogene grumbled.

“Well, he died, didn't he?” somebody said. “Maybe he died a horrible death. What did he die of?”

Ralph shrugged. “It didn't say. Flu, I guess.”

They were so mad about it that I thought they might quit the pageant. But they didn't—not then or ever—and all the people who kept hoping that the Herdmans would get bored and leave were out of luck. They showed up at rehearsals, right on time, and did just what they were supposed to do.

But they were still Herdmans, and there was at least one person who didn't forget that for a minute.

One day I saw Alice Wendleken writing something down on a little pad of paper, and trying to hide it with her other hand.

“It's none of your business,” she said.

It wasn't any of my business, but it wasn't any of Alice's, either. What she wrote was “Gladys Herdman drinks communion wine.”

“It isn't wine,” I said. “It's grape juice.”

“I don't care what it is, she drinks it. I've seen her three times with her mouth all purple. They steal crayons from the Sunday-school cupboards, too, and if you shake the Happy Birthday bank in the kindergarten room it doesn't make a sound. They stole all the pennies out of that.”

I was amazed at Alice. I would never think to go and shake the Happy Birthday bank.

“And every time you go in the girls' room,” she went on, “the whole air is blue, and Imogene Herdman is sitting there in the Mary costume, smoking cigars!”

Alice wrote all these things down, and how many times each thing happened. I don't know why, unless it made her feel good to see, in black and white, just how awful they were.

Since none of the Herdmans had ever gone to church or Sunday school or read the Bible or anything, they didn't know how things were supposed to be. Imogene, for instance, didn't know that Mary was supposed to be acted out in one certain way—sort of quiet and dreamy and out of this world.

The way Imogene did it, Mary was a lot like Mrs. Santoro at the Pizza Parlor. Mrs. Santoro is a big fat lady with a little skinny husband and nine children and she yells and hollers and hugs her kids and slaps them around. That's how Imogene's Mary was—loud and bossy.

“Get away from the baby!” she yelled at Ralph, who was Joseph. And she made the Wise Men keep their distance.

“The Wise Men want to honor the Christ Child,” Mother explained, for the tenth time. “They don't mean to harm him, for heaven's sake!”

But the Wise Men didn't know how things were supposed to be either, and nobody blamed Imogene for shoving them out of the way. You got the feeling that these Wise Men were going to hustle back to Herod as fast as they could and squeal on the baby, out of pure meanness.

They thought about it, too.

“What if we didn't go home another way?” Leroy demanded. Leroy was Melchior. “What if we went back to the king and told on the baby—where he was and all?”

“He would murder Jesus,” Ralph said. “Old Herod would murder him.”

“He would not!” That was Imogene, with fire in her eye, and since the Herdmans fought one another just as fast as they fought everybody else, Mother had to step in and settle everyone down.

I thought about it later though and I decided that if Herod, a king, set out to murder Jesus, a carpenter's baby son, he would surely find some way to do it. So when Leroy said, “What if we went back and told on the baby?” it gave you something to think about.

No Jesus . . . ever.

I don't know whether anybody else got this flash. Alice Wendleken, for one, didn't.

“I don't think it's very nice to talk about the baby Jesus being murdered,” she said, stitching her lips together and looking sour. That was one more thing to write down on her pad of paper, and one more thing to tell her mother about the Herdmans—besides the fact that they swore and smoked and stole and all. I think she kept hoping that they would do one great big sinful thing and her mother would say, “Well, that's that!” and get on the telephone and have them thrown out.

“Be sure and tell your mother that I can step right in and be Mary if I have to,” she told me as we stood in the back row of the angel choir. “And if I'm Mary we can get the Perkins baby for Jesus. But Mrs. Perkins won't let Imogene Herdman get her hands on him.” The Perkins baby would have made a terrific Jesus, and Alice knew it.

The way things stood, we didn't have any baby at all—and this really bothered my mother because you couldn't very well have the best Christmas pageant in history with the chief character missing.

We had lots of babies offered in the beginning—all the way from Eugene Sloper who was so new he was still red, up to Junior Caudill who was almost four (his mother said he could scrunch up). But when all the mothers found out about the Herdmans they withdrew their babies.

Mother had called everybody she knew, trying to scratch up a baby, but the closest she came was Bernice Watrous, who kept foster babies all the time.

“I've got a darling little boy right now,” Bernice told Mother. “He's three months old, and so good I hardly know he's in the house. He'd be wonderful. Of course he's Chinese. Does that matter?”

“No,” Mother said. “It doesn't matter at all.”

But Bernice's baby got adopted two weeks before Christmas, and Bernice said she didn't like to ask to borrow him back right away.

So that was that.

“Listen,” Imogene said. “I'll get us a baby.”

“How would you do that?” Mother asked.

“I'll steal one,” Imogene said. “There's always two or three babies in carriages outside the A&P supermarket.”

“Oh, Imogene, don't be ridiculous,” Mother said, “You can't just walk off with somebody's baby, you know!” I doubt if Imogene did know that—she walked off with everything else.

“We just won't worry anymore about a baby,” Mother said. “We'll use a baby doll. That'll be better anyway.”

Imogene looked pleased. “A doll can't bite you,” she pointed out. Which just went to prove that Herdmans started out mean, right from the cradle.