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this play?” Leroy said.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œWell,” 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.
    â€œExactly,” 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.”
    â€œNo, 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.”
    â€œMaybe 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.
    â€œYou have to have a card.”
    â€œHow do you get a card?”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œSure 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