She heard Kaye walking back to where he had brought her at dawn. She waited, wrapped in his coat, on the garden bench that overlooked the hill beside Clayhome, the hill that swept widely down through a meadow where in summer wildflowers grew. It was the highest hill for miles and it fell steeply away through the knolls and gullies left by the earthen terraces, fell to the edge of the dark woods that guarded Heaven's Hill.
She would miss the seasons moving over the fields and the woods here. Sharp new greens after April rain, late summer's deep languid shade, the red and gold and orange of autumn trees, the quiet of snow. She would miss her first sight of white crocus in winter frost and the May morning when her early roses bloomed.
Everything returns, Noni thought. There is no loss, only change. In years to come, Johnny would be here, and Johnny's children, and the seasons would move for him over Heaven's Hill, as they had for her and for those before her, as the seasons would move with the turning earth over these fields and woods for Johnny's children and for generation after generation.
Had she said the right things in her letter to Johnny? All she could be sure of was that she had said the true things. Her hope, her faith, was that true things, told in love, would do more good than harm.
She hadn’t planned to ask Shani to give Johnny the letter. She’d planned to leave the letter for Bunny to give him. But Shani had come into the hospital room the night they’d rushed her to the ICU. She’d come in, holding a folder, and she’d read the papers in it, and then she’d said, “I’m calling Kaye. Kaye needs to be here.”
When Noni had protested, Shani had come to the side of her bed and held Noni's hands and told her, “There's nobody in this world he's ever loved more than you. Of course he needs to be here.”
Everything had been in Shani's eyes, everything Noni had never said to her or to Kaye, had never asked, fearing to cause them pain. And Noni had felt so safe, so sure, looking up into Shani's eyes, that she had spoken without waiting for any doubt to stop her. “I’m not going to survive this, am I?”
Shani looked at her, then slowly shook her head. “No.”
Noni nodded. “I want you and Kaye to take Johnny. Will you talk about it with Kaye?”
Shani looked a long while out the window, then she turned and nodded and said, “Yes.”
“Thank you.” Noni gestured to the bed table. “Will you give Johnny this letter when you think it's right?”
Shani took the letter, slipped it into the pocket of her white doctor's jacket.
Noni touched her hand. “You already knew.”
Shani brushed back the dampened hair from Noni's forehead. “Of course I knew. You think I don’t know that man's ear, or his eyebrow, or his little finger when I see it?”
Tears fell along Noni's cheek and onto the pillow. “I didn’t think it would be right to tell him.”
Shani placed Noni's hand on the cover. “I don’t know whether he's thought about it or not. And neither does Amma. You know how she says, ‘Kaye King's the smartest fool alive.’”
Noni tried to smile. “I guess you better get him here.”
“I guess I better.”
She heard him before she could make out his shadow against the snow. And then he was standing beside her. The red childhood sled looked small in his arms.
“Stop frowning,” she told him. “It's the last thing I’m going to ask you.”
“You said taking you out of the hospital was the last thing you were going to ask me.”
“Ho ho.Why did I always think you were so funny?” Or she thought she said that. She couldn’t tell now if the words were coming out loudly enough for him to hear if she was even saying them or just thinking them. Perhaps, after all these years, he could hear her without her having to speak at all.
He lifted her carefully onto the sled at the steepest edge of the hill. “Hang on,” he told her and then he was at her back gently pushing, his shoulder leaning into hers, snow flurrying around them, and then he was jumping on behind, holding her to him.
Down the hill they glided, so much more slowly, more softly, more quietly than that first time, now, like a sled ride in a dream. She could feel him warm against her back, his arms around her, all the way down the long slope to the edge of the woods. They stopped against the snowy bank. Above the white trees, the darkening sky was luminous to her. They sat on the sled, not moving, his arms around her.
“Kiss me,” she said. But she didn’t know if she said it aloud. She couldn’t hear her words. But she felt his lips, chilled and soft, brush against her burning face, and then against her lips. “I love you,” she thought she told him. “I’ve loved you all my life.” His eyes looked down at her, dark gold, darker, and then lost in light.
He carried her into the room where they had first met and he placed her on the laced pillows and soft linens in the high tulipwood four-poster bed. Taking the quilt from her hope chest, he covered her with it and then he lay down beside her in the bed, holding her in his arms.
At noon on Christmas Day, his birthday, when Kaye awakened, her face was cold against him, her hand was cold in his.
Coming through Noni's window, where the sycamore tree bowed in its cape of snow, rays of gold light fell on him, like sunshine, like the angels his mother had promised would watch over him in heaven, the beau ideas who had taken their places with golden swords in the great army of the good.
The Twelfth Day of Christmas
December 25, 2003
The Sled
He was dreaming. Once again he was at her funeral in St. John's Church, the way it had really been on that day seven years ago. The sharpest winter light came slanting through the old glass. In front of the gold-filigreed altar rail, her casket rested on a black velvet cloth, the gleaming coffin banked high with white camellias and dark red roses.
Everyone said the church had never been so crowded, not since her wedding, that everyone she loved was there, everyone who loved her. Hundreds of white candles cast a glow on their faces and on the stained glass window of the blue angel welcoming Noni's great-grandmother into heaven, and the stained glass window given by her mother, Judy, showing Christ touching the head of a small boy, one of the little children suffered to come unto Him.
Evergreens lay heaped upon window ledges and along the sides of the church. On either side of the choir stall stood four small Christmas trees, bare of any decoration.
His son Johnny stepped forward and took his place beside the casket; it happened in the dream just as it had at the funeral; his son Johnny in his newly purchased black suit, and his eleven-year-old eyes newly old. Johnny raised the violin and began to play. But in the dream, the music wasn’t the sad melody that the boy had really played at the funeral, the melody Noni had loved, Bach's “Air on a G String,” the music Johnny had played that day without ever faltering, in tears but not crying.
In the dream, although Johnny moved the bow across the violin, the music that came out of it was drums. Beating drums that filled the church and shook it. On and on the drums beat, a mournful death song steady and slow, relentless, monotonous, great drums marching closer, louder and louder.
Kaye awakened with a cry, and, as always in the dream, the deep drum he heard was his own heart beating.
“Honey, you okay?” Shani flung back a warm arm, touched his warm back.
“I’m going to get up.”
“You get up, they’ll get up.” She yawned. “It's Christmas. Avery’ll be tearing through stuff like a bear at a picnic.” She turned back toward sleep. “Okay, I warned you.”
Kaye walked quietly in his robe past all the gifts that lay arranged around the vast open living room of the new house into which they’d just moved, his third house, the largest, since he’d married Shani. It was nearly as large as Heaven's Hill. Shani and Johnny had teasingly referred to it as “Kaye's Tara.”
He’d told them both, “Johnny shouldn’t make jokes about Tara. He's the owner of the biggest house in Moors. He's the one Wade keeps trying
to trick into selling the place off, so Wade can turn it into luxury homes and a country club.”
“You can’t sell history,” Johnny had replied with the solemnity of his eighteen years. “I’m living at Heaven's Hill when I get back from Juilliard.”
Kaye had raised his parodic eyebrows. “I’ll tell you what Grandpa Tat used to tell me. ‘Son, you don’t know what life's going to do to you.’”
“I know what I’m going to do. Move back home to Heaven's Hill.”
And Kaye had thrown out his arms in his old dramatic way. “How you going to have a music career in Moors, North Carolina?”
“Kaye.” Shani had taken her husband's arms and hugged them around her. “Would you please leave him alone? Johnny, your dad thinks he knows everything. Have you ever noticed that?”
He grinned at her. “No, I never noticed that.”
Despite Shani's prediction, their younger daughter hadn’t awakened as Kaye made his coffee. He took the cup out to the flagstone verandah and sat in a deck chair watching the mist lift out of Glade Lake into the indigo sky.
Far across the lake, in the old part of town, rose the small hills of Moors; the tallest of them the one called Heaven's Hill, the one where they had sledded.
Noni had been dead for seven years. Seven years, thought Kaye. The whole body completely changed its composition in seven years; the brain grew new cells and nerves. Then why, every Christmas, did he awaken with the same deep familiar pain in those new muscles and blood?
“I don’t need nothing from that house to remind me of your mama,” said Amma Fairley to her great-grandson Johnny. “She's in my thoughts every day of my life.”
“I just wanted you to get first choice on her Gift Day, Aunt Ma.” The teenager kissed the old blind woman as she sat in the cushioned wheelchair in the kitchen of Clayhome.
Amma fought the tremor in her hand as she raised it to touch his face, feeling for where he leaned over her, tall and thin—like Noni at his age. “Honey, you’re my Christmas gift from Noni, that's a fact. It was Christmas she came home with you from across the sea. Did you know that?”
“Yes, Grandma, you told me. And told me.”
“Are you rolling your eyes at me?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t you mock the old. I’m going to be seeing your mama real soon on the other side. She's gonna be waiting there for me. She's got gathered up all the ones I love at the riverside. I’m going to tell her you’re a sweet boy and you’re a smart boy, going off to college in New York City, but you’re a mocker. You want me to tell your Mama you’re a mocker, when I see her up in Heaven? ’Cause Noni couldn’t abide meanness, never could.”
“You aren’t going to tell her that. You’ll tell her we’ve been missing her but we’re doing fine.”
“That's the truth, honey. We been doing fine.”
“Noni's Gift Day” had been Johnny's idea. Those whom Noni had especially loved he had asked to come over on Christmas Day this year to choose something to take from Heaven's Hill; they could take anything they wanted, furniture, art, personal effects; whatever they wanted to keep as a reminder of her.
For the previous seven years, Johnny had been glad to have his older cousin Michelle and her husband Corey live in the house. Wade's daughter had loved the place and was always warning Johnny against her father's efforts to get the place away from him, for Wade had finally given up his legal pursuit of Heaven's Hill and now periodically tried to buy it through intermediaries.
During Michelle's stay there, everything had been left pretty much the way it had been at Noni's death. But now that the young couple had finished their graduate training and had moved to Baltimore, new arrangements had to be made. While Johnny refused to sell Heaven's Hill (to Wade or anyone else), finally he had agreed with Bunny—Bunny and Kaye were his trustees—that while he was away in college, it made sense to rent it out. If they picked good people, it would be better for the house, Amma told him, to have them in it than letting it sit empty. A house hated to be left alone.
So they were going to auction off the furnishings and appliances that Johnny didn’t want himself. Those he did want, they would store until he could decide what to do with them. There was no rush, Aunt Ma told him. Heaven's Hill was in no hurry. It would wait for him to come home.
“You’ll be waiting too,” he said to her, stroking the heavy white hair.
“Hush.” Toothless and bent and shriveled, Amma lifted her blind face, her laugh surprisingly rich. “I got to go. No telling who that fool Tatlock's suing now. Could be he's suing God Almighty. I got to get up there and take care of things. Put on my gold shoes and go see all the love in your sweet mama's face. You know that's what they named her for? That's when she was born, the birthday of the King of Love. Noel. That's what her name means. It means Love.”
There were no ivy kissing balls, no evergreen garlands, no strings of lights on the porch of Heaven's Hill. Just a large green unadorned wreath on the door with a black bow. Johnny hung the wreath there every Christmas, the anniversary of his mother's birth and death.
On the porch, Kaye sat in one of the green wood rockers until he felt ready to go inside the house. He hadn’t been in it for years. “Too many memories,” he told Bunny.
“What's wrong with memories,” she replied.
“They hurt.”
“What's wrong with that?”
The swing was still there, hanging from the oak bough. He could see the twelve-year-old Noni sitting in the swing, in that silly lime green miniskirt and white vinyl boots, laughing with him about Wade, how Wade was driving off with no idea that his Mustang now called for the impeachment of a bad president and the end of a bad war.
In the green rocker beside him, Kaye could see Bud Tilden sitting with his Sazerac and his hapless sweet smile, the night when they’d sat together after Noni had driven away with Roland, the night Kaye had heard his news about the Roanoke Scholarship. “I want someone to love her who knows who she is.”
And Kaye had said nothing.
All those talks he’d had with Tilden, so many, and he could see now not only the weakness that he’d always pitied in the man, but also the goodness so quietly offered, the fatherliness.
“How's it going, Mr. T?”
Behind him Johnny had opened the door, barefoot, tall and thin, in wrinkled khaki pants and wrinkled cotton shirt. “Did you say something to me, Kaye?”
Kaye stood up. “I was just talking to Bud Tilden. I liked your mom's dad. He was good to me.”
Johnny gave him a strange look. “Why didn’t you come in? Door's not locked.”
“You look like your Uncle Gordon.” Kaye pointed at the teenager's bare feet. “It's Christmas. Aren’t your feet cold? It's freezing out here.”
“It's not freezing. You’re old. Come on in.”
Kaye walked slowly through the closed-up house where boxes and cartons stood stacked around the floors and everything had the faint smell of emptiness. In the pale yellow living room, the tall windows were shuttered and the black grand piano was covered in white cloth. The carved music stand still stood beside it.
In the dining room on the long varnished table, high heaps of china and silver were arranged in radiant rows. Kaye moved slowly along the side of the table. He felt he could touch the past now, in a way he hadn’t been able to feel it before. He could reclaim memories with his careful meticulous hands.
There was the scalloped silver punch bowl and the small cups.
There was the silver loving cup engraved with the words John “Bud” Tilden Player of the Year. Kaye picked it up, ran a finger along the incised letters.
There was the set of white wedding-band china, the plates and bowls and cups he and Noni had served their dinner for two on, that night when the only lighting was the red and gold flames of candles in these silver candelabra and these alabaster sconces and this fireplace. That night when this French clock had chimed midnight.
“Are you all right?”
Hurriedly, Kaye walked out of the dining room and into the foyer. He was leaning against the wall and beside him on the floor were stacked framed pictures, fifty or more, collected over the last two hundred years by owners of Heaven's Hill: there was every kind of art work, from eighteenth-century British oil paintings of horses and dogs to nineteenth-century Asian watercolors of birds in trees to awful pastels of scenic vacation views to the folk portraits of Tatlock Fairley. Kaye tilted through the large stack of his grandfather's canvases, stopping at Tatlock's last painting, “Noni Plays Her Piano for Me” with the gold rays around her head that had the tiny word, “Love,” at each gold tip.
Johnny followed him into the hall and stood next to Kaye, studying the picture. “Mom had a great smile, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did.” Kaye took the portrait out of the stack and set it on the console. Beside the picture sat the old blue Chinese jar.
“It's early Ming Dynasty,” Johnny said.
“Yes, I know.” Kaye touched the cracks, followed the mending, all those pieces so laboriously put back together at the green pine table in the kitchen of Heaven's Hill. What had happened that night? The Christmas dance that Noni had gone to with Roland. Kaye had brought her home. Bud Tilden had broken the bowl and cut his feet. Kaye had bought the chain for the little silver heart. That had been the night he’d said, Reach out for me.
What if he had reached out for her then?
What if he had kissed Noni that night, leaning across the bowl, as he had wanted to do? Would it have made any difference?
“Mom loved that jar. She told me how you fixed it. ‘Kaye can fix anything,’ she said.”
“Well, she was wrong.” Kaye turned to the teenager. “If I could fix anything, if I could fix one thing ever only in my life, she would be here right now. She would be standing here right now.” Kaye traced Noni's face on the canvas with his hand.
The Last Noel Page 28
