The Last Noel (4 page)

On the floor of the hall closet she found a shopping bag and began to fill it. In the morning, when Aunt Ma arrived at Heaven's Hill to make their breakfast, and when she asked why
these gifts had been left for Kaye at Clayhome's door, the girl would explain (if need be, explain to her mother as well) that the presents were only a few little things of her own that she'd wanted Kaye to have, as she'd wanted to share her sled with him during his visit. Noni's preoccupied mother never paid much attention to what her daughter said—nor to what Aunt Ma said either—so she anticipated no awkward questioning. And Aunt Ma would say Noni was sweet and that would be the end of it.

She chose small gifts, mostly from Wade's pile but a few from her own and a few from Gordon's stocking (he wasn't even home anyhow), easy-to-pack objects that Kaye could take back with him on the train to this place called Philadelphia—the Swiss Army knife, cards, an Astronaut's belt, a book
, a Beach Boys 45, Silly Putty, a Frisbee. One by one she placed the gifts in the shopping bag, took a red crayon, and wrote on it, “To Kaye. From Santa.” Then she carried the bag out to the sled, which she'd left on the porch. On the seat of the sled, with a black crayon, she printed beneath the ornate gold scrolled script of her own name, the words “and Kaye.”

Noelee

AND

KAYE

She left the sled in front of Clayhome, beside the little cemetery of sticks made into crosses to remember the dead.

December 25, 1968
The Piano

 

 

 

Earlier in the week, Noni had left a red envelope inside the screen door of Clayhome addressed to “Mr. John Montgomery King.” Kaye's grandmother had shaken her head at the waste of the unused five-cent stamp. The envelope contained a stiff creamy card with a drawing of Heaven's Hill on it. “You are cordially invited,” the printed handwriting began, and it went on to request Kaye's company at a “Holiday Open House” on December 25 from two to five.

It was now two-thirty, Christmas Day.

“We're not talking about it. You're going and you're not going empty-handed,” Kaye's grandmother Amma told him matter-of-factly. “Those poor people have had a terrible loss and Christmas just makes it worse.”

Kaye, twelve today, replied with ironic movements of his eyebrows and lips. “Right, and what the whole Tilden family's waiting for is me to come over there with these dumb cookies and make their lives just perfect again.”

Amma Fairley turned her quiet dark gold eyes on her grandson, glancing from his braided headband to his peasant shirt and the colorfully embroidered vest that his mother had
made him up in Philadelphia, copying a picture he'd shown her of Jimi Hendrix. “Tell you what I'm waiting for, Mister I-Know-Everything—you putting a civil tongue in your head before the only place you're going is up those stairs.” She pointed through the sweet-smelling kitchen to the narrow steps whose edges had been worn by time as round as river stones; they led to the room that was now going to be Kaye's.

“Fine!” He crossed his arms emphatically. “Fine! That's the only place I want to go. You think I want to go watch Aunt Yolanda wait on those people? You're the one making me show up where nobody gives a rat's—” The gray-haired woman held up a warning finger and the boy closed his mouth over the last word of his sentence. “You're the one,” he repeated in a stubborn mutter.

“That's right. I'm the one.” Carefully smoothing the wrinkles from a piece of used green tissue paper, she pushed it across the tabletop at him. “Here. Wrap that candy up.” On a card she wrote in her flowing formal schoolhouse script, “Merry Christmas from Aunt Ma, Uncle Tatlock, and Kaye.”

It was Kaye King's fifth holiday trip down to North Carolina since he'd met Noni, but this Christmas everything was changing. This time there would be no train ride back with his mother to Philadelphia after New Year's; instead he would stay in Moors and live with his grandparents. Nineteen sixty-eight had been a hard year for Kaye's mother, with losses too fast and too deep for her cemetery of sticks and rubber bands to contain—in the end, a harder year than the boy could hide from those who would separate them.

Finally in November, when the sky in West Philadelphia was always gray and the days too quickly gave way to night, his mother gave way as well, retreating to a darkness from which, despite all the tricks his years with her had taught him, he could not bring her back. After she was carried strapped on a gurney to a hospital, her sister, unable to support the boy,
called home to North Carolina for help. Amma Fairley sent Kaye a train ticket.

Now his grandmother watched him as he turned the radio dial from a choir on her church music station singing “Jesus the Light of the World” over to loud Motown on the rock station, in order, she knew, to keep her from talking. Abruptly, Aretha Franklin shouted, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Find out what it means to me!” The old radio spluttered static as if indignant at the change.

Kaye hit the plastic box hard with his fist, then yanked out its plug.

“What you so angry about, Kaye?”

“Nothing.”

But that wasn't true, although he claimed otherwise, even to himself. Kaye was angry. Angry with his mother for choosing madness over him, with his aunt for choosing her own children. Angry at his expulsion from the urban turbulence of the world he knew, where—despite his small size—he'd won, with his fearless audacity, a place for himself. He was angry with his grandparents for living in the South where he would have to fight alien battles on a foreign terrain with unfamiliar weapons.

He didn't want to live in Moors, North Carolina, and go to the Tildens' holiday party at Heaven's Hill. He dreaded entering a new school where he would have to explain details about his parents to strangers. What was wrong with his mother? Where was his father? He didn't want to admit that, as far as he knew, his parents had never married and that he'd never laid eyes on his father, although he did have a snapshot of this young man, taken at a march in Montgomery, that he kept with his mother's Popsicle-stick crosses in her shoebox called “The Promised Land.”

Kaye had brought this shoebox with him on the train with his large duffel bag. That's all he'd brought. What few toys he'd
had, he'd given away to friends. He'd returned his books, his sports gear, and his used violin to the school that had lent them to him. He didn't want to play the violin down here in Moors. He didn't want to start school at Gordon Junior High in a room of white southerners, only one of whom he knew and that one a girl. Kaye hadn't spoken to Noni Tilden since his arrival at Clayhome three days earlier and he didn't want to speak to her.

It was the first Christmas in Moors that he had felt this way. While he and Noni had never so much as written a postcard or said a word on the phone during the full year between each of his earlier trips South, still, in the past, he had always been glad to see her and to renew their disputatious conversation. From the moment his uncle drove him through the brick gates of Heaven's Hill, he had always stared eagerly out the rear window of the black taxi, searching for Noni, readying himself to come bounding out the door to challenge her with new knowledge. And he knew that just as eagerly, Noni had started in right after Thanksgiving asking Aunt Ma almost daily, “How long before Kaye's coming?” and that she'd be waiting to see the old black taxi bring him in through the white stone drive.

It was true that each Christmas it had taken them a little longer to recover the freedom that they'd felt riding together on the sled the night they'd met—as if they were moving backwards, away from intimacy. Still, this was the first Christmas Kaye had felt that he didn't want to see Noni at all. In fact, he'd pretended not even to notice her as she'd run waving behind his uncle's taxi. This was the first time he'd stayed obstinately locked in his room—listening loudly to Hendrix's
Electric Lady-land
, or reading one of his mother's books,
Soul on Ice
and
Man-child in the Promised Land—
whenever he heard Noni downstairs in Clayhome's kitchen, hoping, he knew, to visit with him.

But now Kaye's grandmother was making him go to the Tildens' annual Christmas party, making him help bake the
candies and cookies he was to take there as a gift. It was the last thing he wanted to do.

In pressuring him to attend this party, Amma Fairley was not motivated by awe or fear or even respect for her employers, but by a kind and generous pity. The Tildens' oldest son Gordon had been killed in Vietnam the previous February, almost a year ago now. But this was their first Christmas, their first social gathering, without him.

“Noni lost her brother. She needs your help,” Amma said. “Or she wouldn't have come over here with that invitation, not with you looking through her like she was a old piece of glass. And no grandchild of mine's going to treat his friends that way.”

“She's not my friend,” snorted Kaye. He dropped the warm white sugar balls and dark almond chocolates into a drawstring cloth bag with a sunflower sewn on it. He wrapped the bag in the green tissues and held the twisted top while Amma ran red paper ribbon between scissors and thumb so the tips sprang into festive curls. “My friends all live in Philly.”

“Well, those Philly friends of yours didn't invite you to a party and she did and she's the one with a big brother that got killed and you're going and you're taking these sweets with you.”

Since her teens, Amma Fairley had worked as a maid at Heaven's Hill, and while in those forty years she had never been invited to a party there, on many occasions she had cooked for and cleaned up after the Christmas Open House. In the past few years, she had turned those duties over to her stepdaughter Yolanda, whose husband also ran errands for the Tildens in his taxi, but from past experience Amma knew that guests would be expected to bring small gifts, usually of holiday food or drink, to this party. She also knew that the most courteous guests came neither too early nor too late; she was keeping an eye on the metal clock above the stove to make sure
that her grandson left Clayhome just before three o'clock to cross the lawn to Heaven's Hill.

As for any further attempts to persuade Kaye to wear his new brown wool suit, a birthday present from her, instead of the bizarre and jarring outfit he had on, or to let her trim what he called his Afro, Amma had never been one to waste precious energy on futile desires. It was enough that he should go pay the Fairleys' respects to the Tildens at their Open House. And go he would.

She watched the boy with an appraising eye as he swiftly moved the cookie cutter over her sheet of gingerbread dough, leaving behind neat rows of brown Santa Clauses. “You got busy hands like me,” she told him. “I never had any use for an idle hand.” Amma nodded with tolerant disappointment at her husband Tatlock out in the living room in his wooden wheelchair, asleep in front of the large brown television set where he'd been watching news of the astronauts circling the moon in Apollo 8 the night before. The three astronauts were taking pictures of the earth rising behind the moon. Everyone was worried about them because Apollo 1 had blown up in January of 1967 and killed the men trapped inside.

Kaye gave a studied look at his grandmother's second husband, overweight and crippled in his chair beside the black iron coal stove. Grandpa Tat watched the news morning, noon, and night. Kaye didn't like the news; the news had driven his mother crazy. But unlike her, Tatlock listened to the goings-on in the great world with absolute impartiality and no emotional investment whatsoever. The news was his way out of the house, but it didn't touch him, not the way his own troubles did. His own troubles were his chief interest and chief conversation. With endless fascination he would recount the minutest details of his physical condition, with a ghoulish emphasis on how he'd “lost it all. Toes. Foot. Leg.”

Tat had worked outdoors for thirty-five years on the grounds crew of the nearby Haver University, had built big walls and roads and fences, dug big ponds and cleared big trees. Now, he was shrunk into a wooden wheelchair in a low room, a sufferer with diabetes and, according to him, a victim of prolonged medical neglect for which, as he endlessly vowed, he would someday get a lawyer and bankrupt the veterans hospital.

Amma was saying, “That man tells me he can't do nothing 'cause he lost his leg to the Sugar. What's his leg got to do with his hands?”

Kaye shrugged. “He's got disability. You want him to get a tin cup and beg on Main Street?”

Her eyes—the strange dark amber that Tatlock called cat eyes—flecked gold. “Kaye King, don't make me think you're calling my table sales begging on the street.”

“No, Ma'am.” But in fact that had been what Kaye had meant. His grandmother's street vending embarrassed him; she resembled too closely the beggars on the sidewalks of Philadelphia. Amma spent evenings at her sewing machine, making place mats, dishcloths, aprons, tea cozies, guest towels, and such. On these objects she had started sewing, at Tatlock's suggestion, large yellow sunflowers that served as a kind of logo of her craft. In good weather, she sold them from a table set up in front of Moors Savings Bank, where Noni's father Bud Tilden worked for his father-in-law. She sold them as fast as she could make them. She also sold her candies and cookies, her pickled fruits and canned vegetables, cut flowers and dried herbs and willow baskets. For decades now she had sold anything she could think of to make or grow and she kept the money in a savings account at Moors Bank.