The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

  Amma had always felt the land was hers, or maybe more just that she and the land belonged together. She felt it today as her family crowded round the dining room table, with the children at a card table nearer the living room so they could see the tree twinkling with the ornaments they’d made. Everyone had been given a place mat and napkin with Amma's signature sunflowers on them. As he had every year, Tatlock presided with his customary noblesse oblige over a holiday feast he had neither prepared nor paid for, passing around roasted chicken and buttered yams, collard greens and mincemeat pie with a garrulous sovereignty, talking mostly about the case he planned to bring to court to reclaim land where his Algonquin Indian ancestors on his mother's side had once lived and where developers were now building condominiums they called Algonquin Village.

  Everyone told him, “You’re right,” and, “You do that,” and, “Is that so?” But none of Tatlock's “cases” had ever ventured beyond the walls of Clayhome and the family didn’t expect this one to either.

  Now the dishes were cleared and the Fairley relatives had all gone home. It was dark and drizzly outside; Tatlock was asleep in his wheelchair with his long arms around the big portable radio that Kaye had given him for Christmas, a “boom box” Kaye had told his grandfather to call it, but Tatlock had said he wasn’t going to. He liked it though. He was glad to have the kind of radio he could take with him when he rolled his wheelchair outside and slept in the sun of the yard. Gently, Kaye eased the boom box out of the old man's arms and brought it into the kitchen, turned it on to the quiet jazz station from the university. Finally, he and his grandmother had found a station they could agree on. She liked the jazz station because it featured so many natives of North Carolina, like John Coltrane—whom she had met once at a picnic.

  Amma was sealing with wax paper the last of the scalloped oysters, a dish she had first cooked on Christmas Eve for the Tildens. “That was a sweet thing, Kaye, helping Yolanda's kids make something special for the tree.” Their tree in the living room was decorated with ornaments Kaye had created over the years out of pieces of tin, old buttons, parts of toys, and empty thread spools. Today he had organized his small cousins into an assembly line producing dried cranberry garlands and strings of paper angels. “They look up to you and you can be an influence on—”

  He interrupted her. “Don’t you ever get tired of Tilden leftovers?” Annoyed, he gestured at the oysters, then around the house filled with Tilden furniture and thrown-away Tilden clothes and uneaten Tilden food—here was a gift box of grapefruits sent to Bud Tilden, here were fur-lined gloves that had once been Judy Tilden's. The American Empire dining-room table with its matching sideboard was a castoff of Judy's mother's, who’d given it to Amma's mother in 1927 so she could replace it with something more modern. “This whole house is nothing but their throw-aways.”

  Amma kept patiently wrapping leftovers for the refrigerator. “What you rather do with good food, son, toss it in the garbage? You rather chop up that nice old table for firewood?”

  “Hey, they just tore down Moors Savings Bank and it wasn’t as old as that table.”

  “Too much wasting in this world. And too much of it over there across that yard, and I’m not adding more. Now let's sit down. ”As if to symbolize her refusal to waste, Amma pulled on a long cardigan sweater that years ago she’d knitted for Tatlock but which he’d outgrown (“out-eaten,” she called it). Amma Fairley's own weight hadn’t changed in twenty years. In fact, to Kaye, everything about his grandmother looked exactly as it had on his first Christmas trip to Moors eleven years earlier, except that her then peppery hair was now white. Firm and sturdily built, with her smooth long-fingered hands and strong-muscled arms and her braided coils of hair, Amma Fairley seemed to have rushed early to a certain place in her life and then stopped there forever.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, she took a flat square packet wrapped in Christmas paper from her pocket and placed it carefully and precisely in the center of the cleared table.

  Kaye assumed it was an envelope holding twenty or forty dollars in spending money, for she had often given him money so that he could “buy for himself, since Lord knows nobody else can get it right.” It was true that Kaye took a great deal of care with his clothes, and liked to choose his own. Tonight he was wearing a full-sleeved dark green silk shirt with a turquoise tie and the turquoise cuff links that Noni had given him yesterday (their birthstone) and which he loved. But if the gift were money, Kaye wondered why his grandmother hadn’t presented it this afternoon when they’d opened all the other presents—both for Christmas and his birthday.

  “Kaye, let's us talk for a minute.”

  Now he knew why she had waited. She wanted to preface her gift with a sermon. For that invitation to “talk for a minute” was always the preamble to something serious, often critical or painful, and rarely brief. He looked studiously at his watch, his customary response. His watch was now digital, with an alarm, not that setting the alarm would shorten his grandmother's lecture. He predicted that she would begin in her usual way with a summation of his blessings. Then she would narrow in on some failure of his to capitalize on those blessings.

  “Kaye,” she said, true to form, “God has given you so many gifts.”

  “I wish He’d given me that green sports car somebody over there got for Christmas today.”

  “You got a good brain, a healthy body.”

  “Grandma—”

  “You’ve been a good steward to your talents. And even though sometimes you been cheated and set aside—” Amma was talking here about school prizes that should have come to Kaye but didn’t; a school election he had probably won but was told he’d lost. “—Every time they slapped you down, you got up and kept coming on.”

  “Thank you.”

  She patted his hand. “And you got a real kindness in you. You always pretending like you don’t care, but you got a good strong heart.”

  He grinned at her, stood, threw his hands to his hips in his old comic way. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m good-looking?”

  “You already got enough people telling you that.” Amma said this flatly, not as a joke but as beside the point. Kaye was in fact secretly called, by the eleven Afro-American girls in his senior class, “The Catch.” He dated often and variously, only Afro-Americans; that was a rule of his, much debated among his friends. But he took a kind of pride in the fact that he was not in love and was too busy to be interested in falling into such a state.

  Amma was going on, commending him for keeping his grades high despite his night job at the taxi company and for sticking with football even though he didn’t like it—He interrupted her again. “Grandma, am I going to have to hear one more time how much money O.J. Simpson got to play for the Bills? When are you and Grandpa Tat gonna believe me? I am not going to make my living in their black box, running, jumping, dancing, or singing. And even if I wanted to, I’m not that talented!”

  “Your coach says all you needs a passion for the game.”

  “What do you think talent is? It's a passion for the game!”

  “Kaye. I’m trying to talk to you. You know I admire how you been working for the advancement of the race even when it wasn’t appreciated.”

  Now Kaye snorted at her loudly. “Can we call it a little more than ‘not appreciated,’ when the police bash your head open?”

  She held up her hand. “I don’t want to talk about Parker or about your mama either.”

  “That's right, because you know it's true and you don’t want to think about it.”

  Somehow lately it always came back to Kaye's friend Parker when he and his grandmother argued. Parker had been in prison for a year, convicted of possession of marijuana, of resisting arrest and even of assaulting a police officer. Summer before last, Parker and Kaye and a friend of Parker's had fought with half-a-dozen young whites outside a disco club in Mill-grove (the section of Moors known—until the city council changed the name in 1958—as “Africa”). The whit
es (county boys, high school drop-outs mostly) had decided to retaliate for a race riot in another state that they’d seen on television by trying to run down with a pickup truck the first group of local young black males they came across. Kaye and his friends had gone to the club after taking part in a civil rights demonstration earlier that day, and the stickers on Kaye's car had drawn the whites’ attention.

  Kaye had protested to the police that they’d only been defending themselves against drunks who were backing them into an alley, swinging bats and chains. The police arrested the three blacks anyhow, in fact arrested only the blacks, though they’d been outnumbered two to one. Amma had hurried to the police station the minute Kaye had called her; she’d brought Bud Tilden and they’d gotten Kaye out on bail.

  Then Amma had hired a lawyer, a man who’d represented Moors Bank and who had always stopped at Amma's sidewalk table outside the bank and joked with her. This lawyer had quickly arranged to have all charges against Kaye dropped. He told the judge Kaye King was a straight-A student and a first-string running back and that if he had seemed to be talking back to the arresting officers, he would apologize for it. The judge already knew Amma Fairley; she was a town landmark. The police accepted Kaye's apology and agreed that they had made a mistake in this one case.

  But Parker's friend was not so lucky. And Parker himself unluckier still. The police claimed he had pulled a knife to stop them from entering his car where he had hidden half a kilo of homegrown marijuana. Parker said that the police had planted the drugs in his car but nobody but Kaye believed him. It was true that Parker had pulled a knife; what was remarkable to Kaye was that he’d had the strength to do it after one of the policemen had beaten him to the ground with his nightstick.

  “Parker fought back,” Kaye said stubbornly now to his grandmother. “And it's like Mama used to say, white people don’t do time and rich people don’t do time and the only poor black people that don’t do time—” Kaye thumped both fists on his chest. “—Are the ones with the right connections. The lucky ones like me. But Parker still fought back. If you don’t fight back, you’re already dead. It was your daughter Deborah taught me that, Grandma!”

  Amma nodded slowly. “That's true. Your mama was always saying, ‘Fight. Fight.’ Well, son, like I keep telling you, you can fight and lose every time—”

  “Doesn’t mean your fight wasn’t right—”

  “No it doesn’t. But it means you’ll end up like your mama. Or my daddy, shot through the head and nobody ever even arrested for it. Or your friend Parker in jail with blood still running down his face.” Suddenly Amma pushed the present across to him, slid it under his hands. “I want you to fight, Kaye.” She touched the card. “But I want you to win.”

  He strode back and forth, urgent to make her listen. “We are winning. Segregation. Gone. Death Penalty. Gone. Vietnam War. Gone. Nixon and that whole gang of crooks. Gone. We did that. A whole generation did that.”

  “Well, let's hope so, son. But I’m not talking about any generation. I’m talking about you. I don’t want there to be nobody can set you aside. Nobody in this world.” She moved the wrapped packet. “Open it.”

  Kaye sat down, opened the Christmas wrapping carefully, as she had taught him, so that the paper might be used again. Inside bound together with a rubber band were three blue passbooks gold-stamped “Moors Savings Bank.” On the inside cover, each book had “John Montgomery King College Account” written in Amma's beautiful ornate script. Every page of each book was filled with entries of small deposits, usually weekly, going back for decades. He saw one entry for $2.13. The current total was $38,798.96. Kaye was amazed by the amount his grandmother had saved. All this from sunflower napkins, from pickled okra and willow baskets, all this from eighteen years of her resourceful labor.

  Slowly he grinned. “…Damn!” He jumped up and kissed her, hugged her raucously. “Look at you, Grandma. Look at you.”

  “Don’t be fooling with me.” She freed herself from his embrace, pushed him back into his seat. “Kaye, you’re already gonna get yourself into a good college. You did that on your own.” She held the savings books up before him. “This gonna keep you there. Oh, I know, they all saying at Moors High how you’ll get some scholarship. But they’re the same ones said how the student with the highest grades was going to give that valedictorian talk at Gordon Junior and then they took that away from you, son, and gave it to a white girl. This way we don’t even need them, no sir.” She squeezed his hands in hers, his hands so much larger than hers now. “This is how you gonna fight for your mama.” Tears lightened her amber eyes to gold. “This is how you gonna win. You not going to end up a little cross tied with a rubber band lying in some shoebox.”

  Kaye couldn’t swallow fast enough, so he swiped tears away with his fist, and Amma thought that it was just what he had done as a child because he’d never wanted to cry. “You know I love you, Grandma?”

  She blew her nose in a handkerchief she took from the sweater's pocket. “Yes, I do.”

  He turned the radio to an Oldies station. Fats Domino was singing “My Blue Heaven,” one of the songs Kaye's mother had taught him to dance by when he was six years old. He pulled his grandmother out of her chair and jitterbugged her around the table. “Yes, she does!”

  She tried to pull away. “Kaye, Kaye, you stop it and turn that mess down!” The black Labrador Philly galloped into the kitchen, leaping and barking to join the dance. From the living room Tatlock yelled, “I’m trying to watch my program in here!” although he’d been fast asleep and the television wasn’t even on.

  Through the noise came the sound of someone knocking at the front door; Kaye two-stepped Amma, protesting, over to open it, as Philly jumped around them.

  Mrs. Tilden's dinner party had officially ended and Becky Van Buehling, the divorcée intended for Doctor Jack, had rushed away in order to make it home before her ex-husband returned their children as arranged by their lawyers. The minute Doctor Jack managed to get Mrs. Van Buehling's mink coat on over her immensely wide-shouldered red sequined dress, she’d hurried out into the rain, but before he could follow her, Mrs. Tilden had pulled him into the living room and sat him down beside the huge dazzling tree.

  “What's Rockefeller Center doing without its tree?” he’d joked.

  But Mrs. Tilden had no time for his humor. “Did you like Becky?” was all she wanted to know.

  “I’ll marry her tomorrow.”

  “Will you stop joking? Why does everybody think life's a joke? Life's not a joke.”

  At the same time Bud Tilden carefully (after three bourbons, five glasses of champagne, and two snifters of brandy) was making his way to the den to listen, while pasting the past into photo albums, to the record of Chopin piano music Noni had given him for Christmas.

  At the same time, unnoticed, Noni raced, under her father's huge white golf umbrella, through the rain across the wide lawn between Heaven's Hill and Kaye's house to tell him the good news.

  As soon as the kitchen door of Clayhome opened, it felt to Noni as if the celebration of what she’d come to announce had already started. “My Blue Heaven” played loudly on the radio. Kaye and Aunt Ma whirled about. So happy did Kaye look that Noni wondered if Jack Hurd had phoned him while she was walking across the lawn. “Merry Christmas!” she shouted.

  Kaye pulled her into the circle with Amma, moved them both in a swing step across the kitchen floor.

  “Do you know?” Noni shouted over the music.

  Amma fought free of the young people and fell breathless into a chair while Kaye danced Noni around her in one of their old intricate shag combinations. “Know what?” he grinned. “What do I know? I know everything!” They knocked into the table, oranges and grapefruits rolling onto the floor.

  “Did he already call you?”

  “Who?”

  Noni held Kaye with a fierce hug, tightly linking her arms behind his back. “You got a Roanoke Scholarship! Listen to me. You won the Roanoke, Kaye,
you won it!”

  Kaye stopped dancing, broke her embrace with his hands, backed her off so he could look at her. “…You’re kidding?”

  “No! Doctor Jack just told me. He found out early. It's true. He's sure.” Noni turned to hug Amma. “He got a Roanoke, Aunt Ma. That's the best thing you can have at Haver. They pay everything, tuition, room, even your books and your food for the whole four years.”

  Amma stared from Noni to Kaye. “He got one of those?”

  Noni explained how the Roanoke was a full four-year scholarship to Haver University, how there were only two awarded each year and that Dr. Jack Hurd, who knew someone on the committee, had told her that this year Kaye would be one of them. They would send him a letter on January 10 telling him so.

  Kaye repeated, “You’re kidding me?” Laughing, he dropped theatrically into the chair beside his grandmother. Then he nodded with the old childhood grin, quietly cursing in amazement.

  Amma had opened one of the passbooks, was looking at the neat rows of figures, was seeing—Kaye knew—eighteen years of sewing, weaving, canning, and baking, eighteen years of smiling beside the doors of the bank. She said, “Now, that's, well, something, ain’t it? They can give you all that in a letter, what I spent so many years piecing together.” Neatly gathering together the three passbooks, she handed them to Kaye. “Honey, these are still yours.”

  “Grandma, Grandma, you know what these are for?” He waved the three blue bankbooks in front of her, kissed them one by one. “These are for medical school. For medical school! That's when you really need money. Not college, that's nothing! But the money it takes to go to medical school! And money's what you got! You are a Mama Moneybucks!” He flipped the bankbooks in her face like cards between his long dexterous fingers. “Why, I’m going to learn everything in that medical school. I’ll make Grandpa Tat a new leg so amazing you two’ll be doing the Watusi at the Indigo.” He rushed at her chair, started tickling her in the sides. “I’ll cut open your chest and fix your heart so it will never stop working!”