The Last Noel (7 page)

As the singing started, Kaye pushed a pathway through the guests and left the party. No one tried to stop him. They were talking all around the room.

 

—Oh Becky, stop it!—

—Well, it's true! How can a stick like Jack Hurd produce a gorgeous boy like Roland? Sugar, you think there's a law in this state against seducing a fourteen-year-old?—

—Peace on Earth, ladies!—

Later that night when Kaye answered the knock on Clay-home's door, there stood Noni holding a large wicker picnic basket in both hands. “Why'd you go?” she chastised him. “You just left and didn't say good-bye. You're always doing that to me.”

He shrugged and stared off at the moon behind her.

“I wanted to give you your present.” She handed him the basket. “Happy Birthday.”

In his arms the basket shook and a mewling cry came from within. When he opened the top, a little black puppy struggled to its feet, then fell over. “What's this suppose to be?” said Kaye, although he knew why she'd done it.

Noni smiled. “You were always telling me, ‘I want a puppy but I can't take one back to Philly.' So now you're staying here, so now you can have one.”

“Where'd you get it?”

“It's a boy. My dad and I bought him at a pet store. He's a Labrador.”

Scowling, Kaye put down the basket, pulled the puppy out of it, and examined him as the little dog tried to gnaw on his fingers. “What? You picked him 'cause he reminded you of me 'cause he's black?”

Noni stamped her foot in exasperation. “No. I picked him 'cause he reminded me of you 'cause he was an asshole who doesn't even know how to say thank you.” She turned and marched off across the lawn.

Kaye watched her go. When she was halfway across the lawn he called out into the dark, “Thanks.”

“You're welcome!” was shouted back.

On Monday morning of the following week, Wade was driving Noni to school, in order, he told her, “to score Brownie points” with their mother before she saw his fall semester grades. As they started out, he was saying how, at the rock concert in Charlotte, some creep had defiled his Mustang with hippie bumper stickers. Noni was worrying that Wade was trying to trick her into admitting the vandalism, when suddenly she was thrown forward as he slammed on his brakes.

The entrance to Heaven's Hill was being blocked by a yellow school bus. While Wade was cursing the bus, Noni saw Kaye stepping stiffly into it, his hands jammed down in the pockets of his pea jacket. Before she could think, she leapt with her notebooks and her purse out of the Mustang, calling back to Wade, “Nevermind, I'll take the school bus.” She ran between the driveway columns over to the yellow vehicle, banging on its door just as it was closing.

At first the driver, a plump sour woman, didn't want to take on a passenger of whom she had no record. Noni spoke to her quickly (fearful that Wade would storm the door), but she kept her voice as quiet as her mother's. “I go to Gordon Junior High. I live here at Heaven's Hill.” She pointed up the driveway at the enormous house. “I'm Noelle Tilden. My mother's Judy Gordon Tilden. My mother told me to take this bus.” While Noni was talking, she glanced back into the body of the bus, quickly spotting Kaye, the only black person on it (there were only four blacks in the whole school, for all the others who lived in Moors lived in a different district). Two-thirds of the way down the aisle, he sat alone in a double seat, pressed against the window, ignoring her.

Silently the driver struggled with the girl for authority but finally she decided against taking the risk of trouble, with the house up that hill looking so large, and the name Gordon dropped so significantly. Besides, the horn of the Mustang was beeping non-stop, presumably because she was blocking the
driveway. So with a shrug, she pulled the lever that closed the door and told Noni to sit down.

Noni knew many of the students riding the bus, and more than that number knew her. She was aware that her name gave her power, made her popular. Everyone knew that Noelle Katherine Tilden lived in Heaven's Hill and wore stylish clothes, that her grandfather owned the bank and much of the town's real estate and had the same name as the school. Several seventh-graders greeted her as she passed them and offered to share their seats. She could feel them craning their necks to gawk back at her when she sat down beside Kaye.

Staring out the window, he didn't turn his head, but as the bus moved bumpily forward, she could feel a little of the tightness give way in his arm and she could feel his shoulder turn almost imperceptibly toward her. She leaned against him. “How's the puppy?”

He just shrugged.

She tried a few casual comments, but it became clear that Kaye wasn't going to talk to her. So she opened her music book. She struggled to study the notes of a Schumann piece she would have to play for her teacher after school, but instead she found herself thinking, on the slow ride through Moors, about the last conversation she'd had with her brother Gordon.

They'd been at the airport, the whole family. Gordon, in his new lieutenant's uniform, was going overseas, leaving his hometown—although none of them knew it—for the last time. He'd asked the ten-year-old Noni to come have a “private Coke” with him.

It was then that he'd told her about a September morning back when he'd been a high school sophomore. The first Negro students were entering the segregated Moors High School that day. There were only two, he said, a girl and a boy. The girl wore glasses and a starched white blouse and the boy
had on a navy blue suit and a tie. Yelling at them from the sidewalks were thirty or forty white parents. (One of these red-faced women—Gordon told Noni that he'd emphasized this fact to their mother to make her sympathetic to the Negroes—had been smoking in public, and wearing a quilted bathrobe.)

He said three police cars sat parked at the curb in front of the school, but the policemen didn't get out of them or try to stop the crowd of adults from screaming at the two children. But five members of the student council organized by Mindy Breckenridge (Bunny's older sister) were waiting on the sidewalk with two teachers, the music teacher Miss Clooney and the English teacher Mr. Altman. And they made what Miss Clooney called “an honor guard” (“And the honor is ours,” she'd said) around the two Negroes and they'd walked them past the shouting parents and into the school. Gordon, the sophomore class vice president (“and that was a joke”), was one of this honor guard.

Day after day these school officers met Dorothy and Arthur after their classes, walked with them through the halls, sat with them in the cafeteria, walked with them out of the school and into the bus.

“You know what, Noni?” Gordon told his little sister as they drank their Cokes in the airport. “It's the only thing in my life I'm proud of. That I showed up that morning when Mindy called me. The only thing.”

Upset, Noni tried to make her brother feel good about himself. “Aren't you proud to be a soldier?”

“No. I just don't have the guts to fight Mom and the rest of it. That's what I'm telling you, Noni. It's so damn easy to give in. They make it so damn easy. So don't get scared. Don't let them.”

Unsure of what he meant, she ran around the chair to him, hugging him tightly. “Oh, Gordon. Please don't go!”

“I've got to. You take care of Dad, okay? You know what I mean, the drinking? Nonibaloneymacaroni?”

On the bus ride now, Noni was thinking about Gordon's funeral, how the rain was falling from the shiny brim of the honor guard's hat in St. John's Cemetery as he handed the American flag to their mother. And how their father had cried so terribly, his face twisted in a way she'd never seen before, when he put his hand on Lt. Gordon Tilden's rose-covered casket. She was wondering now whether the young black woman she'd seen that day standing under an umbrella next to an ivy-covered tomb of another Gordon who'd died in a war, Capt. E.D.R. Gordon Jr., C.S.A., 1842–1864, whether the woman had been the girl Dorothy, beside whom Noni's brother had been so proud to walk.

When the school bus stopped, Kaye pushed around Noni out of their seat and hurried up the aisle. She had to move quickly to stay at his side as he strode straight through the cluster of teenagers on the lawn and climbed the stone steps of Gordon Junior High School.

At the top of the steps, he turned and found her beside him. “I named that dog Philly,” he said. “I'll see you.”

Inside the school corridor, Noni watched as he pushed open the door labeled “Principal's Office.”

When finally Kaye walked out, she was still there in the hall, waiting for him.

And she walked with him from class to class, from locker to lunchroom, throwing the power of her name over him like a cloak. He didn't ask her to do it, he didn't acknowledge that she was doing it, but she knew that it would make a difference and that it was something, it was some one thing she could offer him.

And in a strange way it was also a means of her keeping close to Gordon, of keeping Gordon alive.

After school, Noni's mother drove up in their Lincoln to take her to her piano lesson, and although Noni looked in the
bus windows as fast as she could when they passed it, she didn't see Kaye inside.

That evening, back at Heaven's Hill, Noni tapped at the door of Clayhome. She could hear the radio inside, a woman on it singing, “He's got the whole wide world in His hands!” While she waited for someone to answer, she looked down and saw that there was a new cemetery of Popsicle sticks beside the door, inside their old border of stones and broken bricks. This time the plot was more crowded with the little black-marked crosses than Noni had ever seen it before. But why would the sticks even be here when Kaye's mother was in a hospital in Philadelphia, when she couldn't have brought her crosses down to Moors this Christmas as she had done on previous years?

Kneeling, Noni read the names on the sticks: there were crosses for Che Guevara, for Black Panthers “Shot by the Los Angeles police,” for Bobby Kennedy, for Watts and for Czechoslovakia and for Hue. There were dozens and dozens of crosses. And in their center was the one that Kaye had told Noni had burst in two his mother's heart.

Black words filled both small sticks of this cross:

 

Apr 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., 39 yrs old, shot to death. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.

 

“Noni? What you doing, baby?”

The girl stood, brushed soil from her white tights. “Hi, Aunt Ma. I was looking for Kaye. I wanted to know how it went, the rest of his day at school. I didn't see him on the bus.”

Amma told Noni that her grandson hadn't come home yet, that he had gone off with his Uncle Austin to try to find a part-time job at the taxi company. “You want to come in and see that cute little dog Philly? He is a devil.”

“Thank you, but I have to practice.” Noni pointed at the cemetery. “Is Kaye's mother down here now?”

The woman shook her head. “No. Kaye stuck those sticks in the ground himself. He brought all that stuff with him in her old shoebox. Kaye and his mama are real close, always were. It's tough on a only child.”

“If she gets better, will he go back to Philadelphia to be with her?”

Amma gave Noni a long look. “Kaye's going to stay here with us. And I'm glad he's got you for a friend. Now don't stand out here in this cold damp without your coat on. Go on back home and get warm. I'll tell him to call you.”

Noni lifted her thin shoulders, let them fall. “He won't.”

Amma took the girl's flushed face in her broad strong hands. “Go on home.”