The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

“I got to go,” finally he said, checking his enormous watch. So they tugged the sled out from under the snow where it was buried and ran with it, both of them pulling the towrope, across the lawn to her front porch where, straining against the weight, they hauled it up the steps.

  “You want me to carry this on back under your Christmas tree?” he asked her. When she said no, without a word he ran away, through the deep dragging prints they had made in the snow together.

  “Good-bye,” she called. “Merry Christmas.” But he didn’t answer her.

  Alone in the living room, Noni looked at the presents poured out across the floor. Her mother hated to wake up in the morning, even on Christmas; her brother Wade always sneaked downstairs and played with his toys for hours before making Noni go ask their parents to come begin the day. Wade had even boasted that rising early he had often stolen gifts from her pile and from Gordon's pile and had added them to his own, and that their parents had never noticed his theft. She wasn’t sure if this was true. It was flagrantly true that Wade stole, but he also lied and he took a perverse pride in boasting of exaggerated misdeeds. On the other hand, her parents were so careless that it was possible, even probable, that they would never notice that a few gifts were missing from the haphazard display.

  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.

  The Second Day of Christmas

  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.

  Kaye echoed his grandfather's perpetual lament. “What's he suppose to do? Thanks to that V.A. hospital he can’t even walk.”

  “There's a million things Tat could do.” Amma scooped the gingerbread Santas onto the baking sheet. “Help me with the million things I do. Sit behind my sales table in his wheelchair and free me up to do my work. He could help me sew. A man can sew, same as a woman.”

  “You said he was a hard worker.”

  “I don’t say him no. He worked long as somebody told him what to do and handed him money to do it. Minute that job quit, he quit too.”

  Kaye stepped into the other room and watched the great hewn coal-black slabs of Tat's hands as they floated, folded, atop his rising belly. “He’d look silly sewing. He's too big.” Examining himself in the mirror over the blue threadbare velvet couch, the boy stretched up his shoulders, arched his feet, and then went back into the kitchen. “Was my real grandpa, was Grandpa King big or little?”

  “Big.” Amma closed her oven door, took Kaye's hands in her own, and held them up to his face. His hands were like hers, a light cinnamon brown with broad palms and long slender fingers. “Kaye, you stop all this worrying about being tall. Look at these hands of yours. You got big hands. Big feet too. You gonna be big as Tat there, big as Bill King. I married two big men.

  “But I tell you one thing, son, the biggest man I ever knew in my life was my daddy and he was the runt of his litter. My daddy Grover Clay was no bigger than you are now the day he died.”
>
  This was news to Kaye, and the first positive thought he’d had about the forced move to Moors: that there were useful discoveries to be made here. “What was your daddy like?” He sat down, hoping for a story.

  But Amma looked at her kitchen clock, handed Kaye the wrapped gift, and motioned him to the door. “Like your mama,” she said, chagrin and pride in her voice. “He was like your mama. Just ’cause he couldn’t win didn’t mean he wouldn’t fight. Get on over there.” She plugged back in her radio, found her station, and began to hum along with the choir, “Jesus, Oh What a Wonderful Child!”

  As Kaye left Clayhome, he put two of the bumper stickers he’d brought from Philadelphia into his pocket: STOP THE WAR and IMPEACH NIXON. (Even though Nixon wouldn’t even be inaugurated until January, his mother had already wanted to impeach him.) He’d give the stickers to Noni as a way of demonstrating that he was, as always, far ahead of her.

  Despite the season, the day was warm and sunny, with a mild breeze that swayed the Victorian kissing balls hanging on red ribbons from the porch cornice of Heaven's Hill. The wide white door opened just as Kaye reached it and Noni stepped out to welcome him. He could see her whole face lighting up as if bright candles were shining through it. He also saw that she was still taller than he was. Standing as straight as he could, he took solace in his grandmother's prediction about his large feet and hands. “Merry Christmas,” he said, frowning. “My grandmama sent me over here.”

  “Merry Christmas.” Noni's smile faltered in response to his scowl. “Happy Birthday.”

  “Yeah, you too.” He looked at her, then looked at the porch roof, then sighed, making a loud noise through his lips. “Listen, I’m sorry about what happened to Gordon.”

  Noni nodded slowly, swallowing the abrupt tears that always came whenever anyone was kind to her about her brother's death.

  Kaye frowned. “Gordon was okay.”