The Last Noel (5 page)

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.”

“He liked you a lot.”

“I liked him too. So, I guess you heard…” Kaye made a face, pointed at Clayhome.

All of a sudden Noni wasn't sure if she should mention Kaye's mother's hospitalization. His loss was oddly more complicated, more private, than hers. Anxiety heated her
hands and face as she fought to find the right words. “Aunt Ma told me you were going to stay down in Moors and go to school here and you probably wish you weren't but maybe it won't be so bad.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, it will.”

She felt for a moment defeated by his certainty. Then affection rushed through her. “Kaye, I'm so sorry about what happened to your mother.”

He nodded, looking away until he gained control, then he spoke in the tone that Noni came to think of as his Philadelphia voice, the voice of the alien place called “the Street,” the place that excluded her. “Well, my mama always said, ‘You fight Whitey, he'll take you out. Jail you, shoot you, bomb you, drug you.' That's how they got her.”

Noni wanted to protest that all whites wouldn't do those things, but she thought she might offend him. Instead she asked, “Don't they think your mother'll get better?”

He shrugged again. “¿Qué se?” Then he shook himself, literally shook himself free of memory, and smiled ironically, holding out the candy. “Well, I'm not here empty-handed.”

She took the tissue-wrapped bag. “Thank you.”

For a while they both looked at the porch floor. He noticed that she wore boots and it occurred to him that maybe they added to her height. High white boots with white tights on her thin legs and a lime green miniskirt as short as summer shorts, and over it a bulky red sweater that had Christmas trees knitted across the front. To his surprise, she had cut her blonde hair short, like the girl in
Rosemary's Baby
, and she was wearing makeup, at least black eyeliner and black mascara.

Finally, with a trace of his old flamboyance, he pointed at her head. “What happened to your hair? Get caught in a lawn mower?”

She looked at him for a minute, and then suddenly relaxing, grinned back. “What happened to yours?” She felt happy
that he'd challenged her in that aggravating manner. “Your hair's as big as…as…a beach ball.”

He twisted the psychedelic peace symbol pinned on his headband. “A beachball? You think Philly's on the beach? You think I even know what a beachball is?”

“It's a big round rubber ball as big as your hair.”

“You ever see a black beach ball?” He crossed his arms and grinned at her with that irrepressible ebullience. “You ever hear a beachball say, ‘Shout it loud, I'm black and I'm proud!'? You ever hear that?”

“No.” Her smile widened.

“Who are you suppose to be anyhow—Twiggy?”

She mimicked his comic exaggeration, crossing her own arms as she said, “I am supposed to be me, myself, and I!”

All at once they both burst into laughter in the old way, as they'd laughed on the sled the night they'd first met.

It was at this moment that Noni's seventeen-year-old brother Wade, wearing his gray cadet's uniform from his military school, slammed out of the front door and, shoving his way between them, snarled, “I'm getting the hell out of Munster Lodge.”

Wade Tilden looked like his mother; he had her milky skin dotted everywhere with red freckles and her strawberry blond hair—although his was almost shaved. He was tall with dangling arms and his tight gray jacket was covered with gold braid and brass buttons sticking out from his thin chest in flat straight rows. Ignoring Kaye completely, he added with a casual belligerence, “Noni, you don't want to wake up dead, tell Mom I went to see
2001.
They're just looking for any excuse to treat me like a dumb baby.” Wade was pretending to be going to the local movie theater, when in fact he and his friends were driving his new Mustang to Charlotte three hours away to attend a rock concert.

Alarmed, Noni pleaded with her brother. “Mom said you couldn't go to Charlotte. Please, Wade, don't upset her.”

“If she doesn't get off my back, I'm joining the fuckin' Army! Maybe I can get myself killed like perfect old Gordon. Maybe if I'm dead I can catch a break from those two!” Wade shouted this at the closed front door.

Mrs. Tilden, having lost her older son Gordon to friendly fire in the Tet Offensive, lived in terror that freakish violence would rob her of her younger boy as well. Had it been possible, she would have kept Wade by her side waking and sleeping, locked away from the risks of life. Nothing frightened her more than his new driver's license. Their embattled negotiations over the Mustang that Judy's father, the bank president R.W. Gordon, had ridiculously bought his grandson (as a bribe to finish school) were as prolonged and labyrinthine as a war treaty, with peace never coming closer.

“Just keep Mom off my back before I kill her and you both.” Wade repeated the warning without affect or without elaborating on how his twelve-year-old sister was supposed to accomplish this urgent task.

Kaye stood there, still invisible to Wade. He could tell that the way Wade ignored him was embarrassing Noni. So he walked away, over to one of the green rockers on the porch, and sat down in it. Kaye had always felt a physical dislike of Wade; it was as instinctive as the affection he'd felt toward Noni's other brother, the older Gordon. While over the years he'd encountered Gordon no more than half-a-dozen times, his memories of him were warm and rich.

Gordon had once told Kaye he “was taking a slow soul train to freedom,” and by his last year at college had quit his fraternity, grown his blond hair down to his shoulders, started playing the harmonica, and stopped wearing shoes. Kaye could remember seeing Gordon's long dirty white feet hopping warily over the icy lawn to untangle the Tildens' old setter Royal Charlie from a prickly holly bush. He could remember the wry sweetness with which Gordon had winked
at him once, making him feel grown-up and smart, as the college senior had been arguing about the Vietnam War with his nasty-tempered grandfather, R.W. Gordon, in the Tildens' driveway. The old man had shouted at him, with his typical coarseness, “Don't shit where you sleep, boy. You know how rich I am?”

Gordon had smiled, winking at Kaye. “Depends on what you mean by rich, Grandpa. Martin Luther King's the richest man
I
know.”

Listening now to Wade whining at Noni, Kaye was thinking that it was Wade, not Gordon, they should have named after the bank president, for Wade far more resembled R.W. Gordon in both his irascible personality and rigid politics than his gentle older brother ever had.

Two years ago, Kaye had heard from Noni about how Gordon had gone off to fight a war he didn't believe in because Mrs. Tilden had made it clear that serving his country was expected of someone with the Gordon name. It was too bad, Kaye was thinking, it was a real shame that it had been Gordon and not Wade on whom a bomb had landed out of the Asian sky back in February.

As if Wade had overheard this thought, he abruptly wheeled around in Kaye's direction. “Hey, Sly,” he said, “why don't you just make yourself at home on my porch?”

Noni said, “Wade!”

Kaye rocked with exaggerated contentment in the green rocker. “Thanks, I will.”

“If you're looking for your Aunt Yolanda, she's inside serving our guests.”

Noni said, “Wade, stop it!”

Kaye stood up, staring at Wade, grinned as he extended his middle finger, and then slowly turned his hand and formed the peace sign. “Mustang Sally, I'm just here to date your sister.”

Noni said, “Kaye!”

Fists tight, Wade lunged toward him. Kaye raised his own fists and grinned, “Come on.”

But just then the door opened and Judy Tilden's head leaned out, her strawberry blonde hair pulled back by a burgundy velvet headband that matched her short burgundy velvet dress and burgundy satin pumps. She ignored Kaye and Noni both. “Wade, I need to speak to you for just a minute, sweetheart, right now.” Her head disappeared. The military cadet spun around, his face enflamed with rage as he slammed into the hall after her. “Great! What did I do wrong this time?!”

A little while later Wade stormed back outside and bolted down the porch stairs. Noni now sat in the swing that was hung by chains from a high bough on a huge oak near the driveway. Standing behind her, Kaye pushed on the wooden seat. Noni was laughing with her hands over her mouth.

Wade growled, “What's so funny?”

She shook her head, laughed harder and harder.

Wade picked up river pebbles from the driveway and gratuitously hurled them at the two doves sitting, as usual, in the dogwood near the house. Then Noni and Kaye watched as he flung himself into his Mustang and went squealing away fishtailing, tires spitting gravel behind him, unaware of the stickers on either side of his front bumper—IMPEACH NIXON and STOP THE WAR.

Noni couldn't stop laughing. “Asshole,” Kaye said, mimicking Wade's furious stomping around the yard flinging pebbles.

“Don't make me laugh, or I'll, I'll…”

“Pee?”

“Yes!” She couldn't believe she'd admitted that. She ran off and left him. When she returned, he got off the swing and sat her back down in it. Pushing hard with her feet, she began to pull herself back and forth.

Kaye grabbed both chains. “Hang on!” He hauled the swing back, further and further, high over his head, as high as it could go, until Noni was almost tilted out of the seat. “Kaye, stop!”