The Last Noel

by Michael Malone

  “Sweet?”

  “But I’m not talking about the gifts the Lord's given you.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I got two things I need you to do for me.”

  Kaye took his grandmother's gnarled hand, examined the arthritic fingers. “Why should I do something for you, when you won’t listen to me? Here you sit stubborn as an old mule, with all these stairs, ninety-five years old, blind as a bat, high blood pressure, and nobody but Dionne living with you.”

  She pulled away her hand. “Dionne's a nurse.”

  “She's not an R.N. A nurse is trained. Dionne's a niece. A very competent and sensible niece but she's not a R.N.” Shaking a pill from a capsule, he handed it to her with a glass of water. “That’ll help the stiffness in your hands. Every six hours. Now if you moved in with Shani and me, you’d have two doctors around you all the time.”

  “What’re y’all gonna do, keep me alive forever?” She swallowed the pill. “Now you stop nagging at me, go on upstairs and see if you can find that old leg box of Tat's.”

  At first Kaye was at a loss. “Leg box? You talking that amputated tibia and fibula that he and I wired together?”

  She nodded. “If they mean leg bones, that's what I’m talking about. Go get it while I do these dishes.”

  “Don’t do those dishes.”

  She swatted his hands away. “Kaye, if you don’t stop fussing at me, I’m gonna lose what's left of my mind.”

  How long had it been since he had even been upstairs at Clayhome? His old room surprised him by its dwarfish size. He could reach from bed to windowsill. The dormer ceiling was so low that he had to bend his head in the corners. On the near wall, fifty or more yellowed pieces of newsprint dangled and curled, with the captions he’d added in black marker now faded to gray: “Angela Davis, ACQUITTED. George Jackson, KILLED. ATTICA.”

  He couldn’t find the leg box. He looked under the bed and in the closet and behind crowded bookshelves (planks held up by cinder blocks painted white) of paperbacks, thinking he ought to go through them some day. He opened a nearly demolished Moors High spiral notebook, the wire binding half unraveled, the pages pressed so hard with penciled calculus formulae that they felt like pages of braille. A Valentine card fell out, a silhouette of a little fifties-looking couple fast-dancing on top of a record player. It was a silly mushy card about two hearts and one soul and always being there and always understanding. It was signed, “Thanks for helping, I love you, Noni.” He couldn’t remember what the help had been.

  Finally in a small tin trunk shoved between the low wall and the single bed with its painted iron headboard, Kaye found the box containing the bones of Tatlock's wired-together lower leg and foot. The bones were nearly brown now. Beneath this box he saw another one: an old shoebox tied with string.

  Sitting on the thin musty mattress, Kaye opened the box that his young mother Deborah, back in the projects in West Philadelphia, on a gray day, in their two-room concrete home that had looked out on a horizon of other cramped concrete homes, had first christened The Promised Land. Inside the box, Kaye saw his past lying jumbled among the little crosses that his mother had made of Popsicle sticks tied with rubber bands.

  Under the dog Philly's collar with its metal name tag was one of those strips of cheap photos taken in a booth, four shots in a row of Parker and him at the bus station, clowning for the camera, back when they were in junior high. Kaye put the stained, faded picture in his wallet.

  He pulled out Bud Tilden's thin, gold, old-fashioned watch and fastened the pigskin band on his wrist.

  He found the red Swiss Army knife with all its little blades and tools that Noni had given him the first Christmas they met.

  He found the snapshot of his father Joe Wesley at the Montgomery march that had been returned to him by the private investigator. He slid the discolored picture down in the pocket of his soft black cashmere jacket. He found the small alabaster case of his mother's ashes, engraved “Deborah King, 1938–1979.”

  Now there was nothing in the box but his mother's little wooden crosses, the reminders of her passionate anger, the “beau ideas.” Some of the yellow sticks were broken now, their rubber bands brittle; on some, his mother's handwriting was no longer legible.

  Kaye picked up one of the crosses at random and held it under the plastic lamp beside the bed. It said, “Denise McNair, 11 yrs old, bombed, Sept 15, 1963.”

  In four more years, Kaye's daughter Debby would be eleven years old. He’d take the crosses home and show them to her. He’d tell her that what had happened in Birmingham could not happen in Moors forty years later.

  You could kill the past and bury it too deep for it to climb out of its grave. Couldn’t you?

  Kaye was closing the box when a glint of tarnished silver caught his eye. Twisted and tangled in the wooden crosses was the thin broken chain with the heart made of a dime that Noni had ripped from her neck in the hospital corridor, after he’d asked for it back, after she’d said she had to take care of her mother, had to take her mother out to ask Jack Hurd for help in California, couldn’t tell her mother about them now, after she’d asked Kaye to wait, just wait, after she’d asked him for patience he didn’t have, after the fire, after they’d made love that one time. “Reach out for me. Just call my name.”

  Kaye heard his grandmother shouting for him from the foot of the stairs. He put the shoebox under his arm and carried down to her the box of bones.

  “Couldn’t you find it?”

  “I found it. What do you want me to do with these bones?”

  Amma peered carefully into the mildewed box. “Take them to Holy Redeemer and give them to Deacon Hawser. Tell him I want these leg bones buried in Tat's coffin and if he can’t open the coffin up, then right beside it. I wish to the Lord I’d thought about it at the time but my mind was a mess.”

  Kaye was surprised. “Bury the bones, what for?”

  The old woman closed the box and gave it back to him. “’Cause when that last trumpet sounds, and it's time for Tat-lock Fairley to go walking, he's gonna need both his legs, all the weight on that man, to carry him over Jordan. I got to be with Bill King and I won’t be able to help him.”

  Kaye stared at the woman, thought of a half-dozen comments, some of them genuinely curious, but finally he left them all unspoken and just nodded at her. “I’ll ask Deacon Hawser if it's okay.”

  Impatiently, she waved him away. “Don’t ask him, tell him. Deacon Hawser's most comfortable when you don’t raise his doubts.”

  Kaye laughed. “Grandma, you should have gone into politics. You should have been mayor of Moors.”

  She snorted at him. “I got better things to do with my time. Now, Kaye, there's something else.” He sat back down, rolled his eyes comically. “And it's not funny. It's Noni.”

  Amma was getting worried about her. About her health. She’d been watching Noni carefully the last few weeks and now she wanted Kaye to start doing the same. She thought there might be something wrong with her, and if there was something wrong, she wanted Kaye to do something about it.

  Kaye was listening intently to his grandmother. “What do you mean ‘wrong,’ her health? Does she go to a doctor? Does she have a doctor?”

  Amma shook her head. “I don’t know ’bout that. She says she's just fine, but, Kaye, I know her, I’ve known that child since the day she was born, and she's not herself.”

  Sometimes, she said, Noni seemed to lose her footing coming down the stairs or even just walking on the flat pebbled driveway. Or she’d be talking to you and she’d misplace her train of thought. It was like her sentences had jangled up inside her and she couldn’t get them to come out in the right order.

  And then the last few weeks she’d been saying things that weren’t like her at all—snappish things to Johnny or Amma, when Noni had never had a bad-tempered bone in her body.

  Kaye asked if Noni had complained of headaches.

  “This past week one got so bad when it came on, s
he couldn’t see any better ’n I can. She hides it but I can tell.”

  Walking across the kitchen, Kaye looked out the casement window across the dark lawn to Heaven's Hill as if he could see Noni right now beyond the brightly lit porch with its garlanded boughs and large ribboned wreaths. “Is she under a lot of stress? Sounds like migraines.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Last time I saw her, she said things were great. She loves her school, Johnny fine's….What's going on with her and Lucas Miller?”

  “Lucas Miller's a good man. Mighty good. And been a good friend to her.”

  “She ought to marry him,” Kaye said. “Marry Lucas, give that kid of hers a dad. That kid's going to be a handful.”

  Amma Fairley peered for a long time at her grandson through the thick glasses that magnified her old bleared eyes. Then she sighed.

  “What's the matter?”

  She shook her head softly. “You’re the smartest fool I know, Kaye King.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “She don’t love Lucas Miller!” Amma's thin voice sharpened and her hand slapped his as it rested on the table. Shocked, he pulled away, staring at her as she kept shaking her head. Her neck was now so frail, it looked incapable of supporting the heavy weight of white hair and dark folds of flesh. “Who you think that girl's loved her whole life long since she was a child? You so smart, you know everything, who you think, Kaye King? Who you think, fool?”

  “Kaye King!” Someone was calling to him in the crowded foyer of Heaven's Hill. Finally he saw Bunny Breckenridge, in another of her perennial black caftans, squeezing her way toward him through the guests, holding over her head a little silver cup of punch. “It's like the Tildens’ old Open House, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of.”

  She glanced into the living room with him. “I know what you mean. It's different.”

  “Yeah. Nobody's smoking. It used to look like a rain forest in here.”

  “No, here's what it is. Everything's…easy now. I hated those stuffy parties of Judy's. Except for the eclairs.” She squeezed Kaye's arm. “So hi, gorgeous. Are you cast in amber, or what?”

  “You’re looking good yourself, Bunny.”

  “Seven pounds. How ’bout cutting a foot or so off my intestine, Dr. King? I hear that works. I could come in any time this spring. I’m on leave all year.”

  He kissed the plump cheek haloed by wild frizzy hair that was now cut shorter and turning an early gray. “How ’bout exercising? I run five miles every evening.”

  She swung her broad hip sharply into his side. “I bet you hang your laptop from your neck and write articles while you do it.”

  Kaye laughed, dropping his cashmere coat down on the other wraps that had been thrown onto the green leather bench in the hallway. Under the bench, he saw a skateboard and a dog's toy. On the console, beside the malachite pear tree with its jeweled partridge, he set the gold wrapped present that he’d brought for Noni. It was another charm, this one a tiny gold state of North Carolina. Every year he gave her a charm now.

  The blue Chinese jar was filled with camellias. He ran his fingers over the cracks in the porcelain that he’d glued back together that night so long ago in the kitchen. “We can fix this good as new,” he had boasted, not knowing how much more valuable the jar's oldness made it. He smiled. Early Ming Dynasty. Now he knew. Thank god, the young had no idea how ignorant they were, or they could never risk so much, never be so brave.

  A chaos of incredibly loud barks and shrieks was quickly followed by a stampede into the foyer of two large dogs and ten little boys, among them the curly-haired Johnny Tilden. He was the smallest, Kaye noticed, but the fastest of the group. Guests frantically backed away, protecting their drinks, as the boys chased each other out the door and down the steps onto the lawn where they ran off skimming Frisbees in air and leaping after them.

  “Holy shit,” gasped Bunny. “Is that what ten-year-olds are like? No wonder they call Noni the Angel of Moors Elementary. In college, the students just sit there and sleep.” She was looking around the hall. “Where's Shani? She keeps promising she's going to find me a husband. I don’t necessarily mean somebody else's. But straight, single, and self-supporting is my wish list. Maybe I’m being too picky. I could let a couple of those go. What do you think?”

  Kaye explained that his wife and daughters were in New York with Shani's family. Kaye would have gone too but this morning he’d had to perform an emergency triple-bypass surgery on a long-time patient. “So, what you up to on your leave, Bunny? Rabble-rousing? Or are you resting on your laurels? Give it a rest. We’ve got a Democrat in there, got eternal peace and prosperity, right?”

  Bunny shook the little silver cup at him. “I’m not the one who needs to exit the Garden, Kaye. You’re a babe in Eden if you don’t think those creeps aren’t still out there, figuring out how to buy and bully their way back in. But what do you care, you’ll get the tax breaks.”

  “Whoaa, babe.” Kaye held out both hands in surrender. “I pay my dues.”

  She spluttered her lips at him. “I sure didn’t see you out hustling on election day. I saw Shani. I saw Noni. I saw me. I didn’t see you.”

  “Is this going to be Crossfire, or where is Noni?”

  Bunny pointed through the doorway into the living room. Kaye saw Noni standing near the piano in the center of a circle of elderly couples, some of whom he recognized from the parties long ago. They looked amazingly small and fragile to him now, when once they’d seemed so formidable in their loud laughter.

  Noni wore a plain silk dress that was as black as the enamel of the grand piano beside her; the black made her luminous skin even whiter by contrast. Her silver blonde hair was loosely gathered atop her head and her neck and shoulders were bare. A shaft of afternoon light slanted through the tall windows on the pale yellow wall. Frowning, Noni closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her temple. Then she turned back, smiling to her guests. Kaye could see the gold charm bracelet on her wrist as she reached to include in the group an old stooped woman whom he suddenly recognized as Miss Clooney, the Moors High music teacher from all those decades ago. Looking past Miss Clooney, Noni suddenly saw him and smiled widely, waving. He crossed his eyes at her and she burst out laughing.

  As soon as Kaye joined them, Miss Clooney wagged a crooked finger at him. “John Montgomery King. You wouldn’t join the orchestra. No patience.”

  “No talent. How are you, Miss Clooney?”

  She gestured at herself as if nothing more needed to be said. Kaye excused them both and led Noni over to the Christmas tree, where the lights were once again red, green, amber, blue. “Amma sends her regrets. She just isn’t feeling up to walking over here for the Open House this year.”

  “Oh bull. Zaki and Johnny told her they’d bring her over in Uncle Tat's space-age van and then wheel her up the ramp in his wheelchair. She just didn’t want to come. She's stubborn. I guess that's where you get it.”

  “I’m not stubborn.”

  Noni just smiled.

  “Thanks for the microscope,” he told her. “It's as good as old.” She grinned at the familiar joke. “Your charm's out by the blue bowl.”

  “Don’t tell me it's a charm, it's supposed to be a surprise!”

  “How can it be a surprise when I give you the same thing every year?”

  “Oh, Kaye. I give up on you.”

  “No, you don’t.” Then, feeling awkward, he looked past her through the tall windows to the rose dusk falling outside. He sighed. “Anyhow, I wanted to give you something else. I found this over at Clayhome last night.” He felt in his pocket for the necklace. “I asked for it back by mistake a long time ago.” He opened his hand. In his palm she saw the silver heart on its broken chain. “I shouldn’t have. And I apologize.”

  Slowly, by the heart, she lifted the chain from his hand. “Thank you.” She looked up at him. “I’ve been wondering what had happened to my heart.”

>   He smiled at her. Then she turned away and hung the necklace on a bough of the tree.

  Abruptly, Kaye added, “Amma says you’re not well.”

  Noni turned back to him. “Ah. That's why you’re here today. She sent you to check me out.” When he kept studying her face earnestly, she held out her hand, palm up. All the tiny gold charms slid below her wrist. “Want to take my pulse?”

  “Don’t think I won’t.” He held his fingers to her wrist. Her pulse was fast but it was strong and steady.

  “Mom!” Tousled and grass-stained, a leaf in dark bronze curls, Johnny rushed over to Noni and pulled her hand away from Kaye. “Mom, it's time! Come on!”

  “Can you say hi to Kaye?”

  The boy muttered a preoccupied “Hi,” as he thrust his slender tan arm up at his mother, showing her his large wrist-watch. “If we don’t play now, everybody’ll start leaving.”

  Noni gestured at her dress, then at his disheveled clothes. “Hey, guy, I’m ready whenever you are. You want to play right this second, that's fine with me.” But Johnny scowled and spun away through the crowd. “That kid's a total clothes horse,” Noni explained to Kaye. “Excuse me.”

  Her niece Michelle had passed near them with her shy young husband, both serving pastries on trays. Noni introduced Kaye and Kaye congratulated them on their marriage. “You mean,” scowled Michelle, “you don’t think we ruined our lives and damned ourselves to the lower middle class forever?”

  “What are you, fourteen?” Kaye asked.

  She scoffed. “We’re, like, twenty-three, excuse me. In the Middle Ages, we’d be middle-aged.”

  Kaye laughed and her husband quietly smiled and they passed on, serving the guests.

  Before the performance, Bunny wanted Kaye to see the large painting of Noni that was hanging over the dining room mantel. It was the final portrait in a series of paintings of Noni that Tatlock had done since her return to Moors. This one showed her alone in the yellow living room. She was seated at the black grand piano on whose top sat a vase of sunflowers. The old man had tried to capture Noni's smile by surrounding her face with rays of gold that led to the sunflowers and by placing at the tip of each ray the tiny gold word LOVE.