A Burned-Over District by Charles Hibbard
A Burned-Over District
Charles Hibbard
Copyright 2014 Charles B. Hibbard
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Chapter 1
It may have been a coincidence that the whole thing got started at the annual Christmas Eve basketball game, Mildred High School vs. Ten Spot. The game has become quite a town tradition. It’s preceded by a chicken supper, the chickens being barbecued, special sauce recipe, outside in the early winter dark on the freezing apron of the fire station by our very businesslike volunteer firefighters and then rushed in foil roaster trays to the school cafeteria, where they meet their potato salad and where most of the population of the two towns gathers to gossip, laugh, and eat. The game starts after the supper, at about 8, and when it’s over the kids shower and get dressed up and everybody goes off to Christmas Eve services, including the town’s two Jews, one Wiccan, several closet atheists and agnostics, and the gorgeous and very private Myrtle Bench, who’s rumored, in the absence of any solid information, to be both an atheist and a socialist. But the Christmas Eve service is mainly a social event, and only a few disapproving cranks worry that its flavor is too tolerant and inclusive.
This particular Christmas Eve, though, there was some tension in the air, as though the town were sensing the forward pressure of unusual events. The volunteer firemen were too exuberant with the charcoal, so that some of the chickens got blackened, which produced a bit of un-Christmasy grumbling in the cafeteria. There was also a little bad blood between the opposing teams, for the usual teenage reasons – hormones, male identity issues – and even between their parents, due to a long-simmering conflict over duck-hunting territories.
Mildred High, impeccably coached by my very competent wife, Lu, won the game easily, as usual. The Ten Spot players got frustrated, and there was some shoving and trash-talking on the floor, which moved outside after the kids showered and got into their church duds. Lu, by that time occupied with our baby, Albert, was not in a position to assert much control over her players, so Principal Shivwits and I were attempting to insert our weak, out-of-shape bodies between scuffling pairs of massive ranchers’ boys, all of us slipping and sliding on the snow-encrusted asphalt of the parking lot, when the lights appeared over the western mountains.
It was after 10 o’clock, the darkness was nearly total, there was no moon, and the mountains were merely a slightly deeper blackness against the sky. You could pick out the jagged line of peaks only because the vast desert canopy of stars suddenly ended there. I’m trying to be very accurate and objective.
Our attention was drawn upward from the roiling basketball players and pudgy authority figures who were trying valiantly to break the thing up to the two very bright lights that suddenly appeared slightly above the sawtooth rim of the mountains, one an ethereal translucent green, the other purest white. (Some observers claim the lights did not, in fact, appear suddenly; that they actually “grew” into being from the darkness, or even arrived, trailing pointed wakes of light or clouds of glory, like cartoon superheroes. I did not see either of those effects. I merely looked up and the lights were there.) The two lights moved very slowly downward, then appeared to hover, gradually separating and growing brighter. They were much brighter than any star or planet or airplane running lights I’ve ever seen, but it was their very deliberate motion that surprised us all; the way they first lowered themselves and then paused, almost as though they were observing our little Christmas Eve dustup. Parnell, who had emerged reluctantly from retirement funk to attend his 30th chicken supper, later used the word “piloted” to describe their motions. But Parnell has built a career and a lifestyle on what he calls stirring up shit. The fight ended abruptly, as everybody stopped to watch. Suddenly the lights were above us (again, no one was quite sure how they got there so fast), moving eastward at a supernatural speed and leaving distinct trails of light, or scintillations that could be romantically described as stardust. They hovered briefly again to the east of us, over the deeper darkness of Devil’s Table, then gradually lowered themselves toward the top of that broad plateau and winked out. (Later, some of the onlookers would claim they heard a hissing or ripping noise as the lights passed over us, and also the distant thump of an impact on Devil’s Table as the lights disappeared. I did not hear either of those things. Or I don’t think I did.)
We all looked at each other. “What do you think that was?” Javier Shivwits asked me. Matt Matawan said, “It looked like they landed up on Devil’s Table.” A few people, including me, laughed. The fistfight was over, so we all went off to church.