Live Nativity
Saturday was made more horrible because it happened a week before Christmas. I’ve been a nurse so long that sometimes I see the same woman come back two or three years later and deliver a perfectly healthy baby. After it was obvious nothing could be done, it was about 6 a.m. Sunday morning, and I left the exhausted mother, the distraught father and the chorus of wailing family members and walked to the back of the hospital, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my purse, and leaned against the gray cinderblock.
The moon was bright in the black sky, and I could feel it gaze back at me; it looked confused. Some things live and some things die, not everything can make it, I told myself. I’m not a regular smoker, and you’re not even supposed to smoke within a certain number of feet of the hospital, but everyone breaks the rules sometimes. I was standing there a few minutes in my blue scrubs when I noticed an older doctor with unusually long hair. He was smoking away.
“That kind of night?” he asked. I nodded. He puffed on his cigarette a little bit and said, “Me too.”
***
Sunlight was pouring through the window of my bedroom, streaming through the mini-blinds, around my furniture and houseplants, throwing an eerie green light everywhere and, for a moment, I forgot about the night before.
I made strong coffee with my French press and drank it on my front porch when I noticed a large wooden sign on the other side of my street with the words “Live Nativity” and a red arrow hand-painted pointing toward the Four Corners Church. Suddenly, I heard the sound of a truck slam on its breaks and the sound of an animal screaming. Was it a lamb? Goat? Whatever it was, it sounded hurt. I could see the head of a donkey poking through the grate of the pen, its huge, almond-shaped eyes. The old man driving the truck was completely indifferent to the sound of the animals, and I instinctively yelled, “Hey. What the hell?” But he didn’t hear me and started the truck again. The horrible wailing started again as he turned the corner, hauling the animals away.
*
When I got to the live nativity, it was already dark. There was the same donkey from earlier in the day, looking blankly at me. There was a fence around the nativity scene, but I opened the gate and walked in anyway. Pretty Christmas lights hung from the fence — green, red, white, yellow, sparkling up the darkness. Inside the manger, a ceramic statue of Mary sat on the lawn, wearing a long dark brown woolen robe. She was holding Jesus in her arms; Jesus’s ceramic eyes glinted white. Two live sheep, side by side, fluffy and white, stood on the lawn. They looked like they were eating grass in their sleep. When the goat saw me, it made that horrible wailing sound and my heart started to beat out of control. The animal had a crazed look to it and began to pace.
“Bahhhhhhhhhhhh,” it screamed. It got so out of control that it knocked over one of the ceramic camels and ran out of the nativity.
*
A few days later, I delivered a perfectly normal, chubby, Christmas baby named Frank. The parents were elated. I brought in holiday cookies shaped like wreaths, presents, and trees and left them in the breakroom. The blankness in my mind was gone, I felt free, and also gone was that terrible sound of the screaming goat. My colleagues and I talked idly of our holiday plans; there was nothing to smoke cigarettes about.
On Christmas Eve, I was alone in the breakroom drinking coffee and eating a red cookie shaped like Santa Claus’s hat, when I noticed the local paper laying on the table next to the box of cookies. I picked it up and flipped it open to the second page:
Freemont, Florida — Police in Freemont are asking people to be on the lookout for a goat that was let out of the Four Corners Church Live Nativity on Jackson Street. Police say the goat, which goes by the name of Lourdes, went missing yesterday morning and that’s when Allen Zeback, minister of the church, contacted police. The goat takes part in the yearly Four Corners Church nativity scene but is owned by The Goatscaping Company which offers the ruminants as an alternative to herbicides in the management of vegetation. Police say Lourdes has one curly horn and is small, brown, and generally “funny looking” and has a “sensitive” temperament. Anyone who spots a goat roaming in the Freemont area, or anywhere else in Freemont, is asked to call police.
I put the paper down and the doctor from the other night was standing there.
“Oh, the goat story,” he said and laughed, grabbing a cookie.
He pulled a chair up and sat by me. “Probably some kids playing a joke. Things happen. Half the time we don’t know why. I mean I have a patient right now with brain damage. He keeps calling me Led Zeppelin.”
The doctor grabbed a cookie, got up. Then we were both paged at the same time and left the breakroom, pulled in opposite directions down the same white hall.
