The Last Noel (3 page)

“I told you,” Kaye was saying. “Didn't I tell you? Santy didn't even have time to wrap most of 'em.” From the couch of presents, he picked up a red Swiss Army knife, and with an adroit precision he opened, then closed all its little blades.

“The gold presents are just from my parents,” Noni explained. “If they're unwrapped, they're from Santa. Those are all Wade's.” She pointed at the array of objects near the couch, in whose profusion could be seen an air rifle, an ACC basketball, a small pool table, and a madras golf bag filled with clubs wearing little tasseled head covers. “This side is mine. But,” she added with a flippant shrug, hoping to convey a sophistication as blasé as his curse, “I don't even believe in Santa Claus. There's no such thing.”

It was true that her brother Wade had disabused her of faith two years ago by sneaking her down the stairs to watch as her parents quickly disposed of the milk and cookies left for Santa, after which they had yanked unwrapped gifts out of huge shopping bags and tossed them around the room as fast as they could.

The boy was waving his flashlight in broad arcs back and forth across the floor full of presents. “Well, Santy or somebody. Could be it was the Baby Jesus did it. 'Cause this sure is a
lot
of stuff. Put on your coat. Let's ride this sled or I got to go home.”

She always remembered that she didn't hesitate. That she said yes. Over the years she would often wish that she could have lived her whole life that way, saying yes or no without fear, without qualification.

Together they struggled to carry the sled into the hall. Turning the old black iron key, she unlocked the door so slowly that the boy snatched at her hands in his eagerness. But she swatted him away, carefully pushing the door so there wouldn't be the loud screeching squeak that it made if thrown open. A swirling gust blew snow into the foyer. “Wait on the porch,” she whispered. She helped him haul the sled through the door down the stairs, then closed it behind him.

In her blue winter coat and her white angora cap and mittens, Noni slipped out onto the porch minutes later to find that the snow had slowed so that it no longer blew crazily in all directions but fell unhurried straight downward in large, soft, lazy drops. But the boy was gone. The sled was gone, too. Running to the snowy stairs, she skidded down them, fell, bounced to the bottom step, and sprawled in the foot-deep snow, her heart pounding, nearly in tears. She ran to one side of the house, then the other.

And suddenly, off beside Aunt Ma's house, she saw the beam of his flashlight through the floating snow. The boy was drawing circles of light around her, again and again, until she waved that she could see him. Coughing, struggling—her white rain boots, too large even with her jeans stuffed in them, were hard to lift out of the deep sinking snow—she labored across the lawn to where, holding the sled by its rope, he stood beside the door of Clayhome, the white-frame “servants' house,” which abutted the building that had once housed carriages and wagons and was now the garage. All the windows at Clayhome were dark but there was a light above the front door, where a wreath of holly, mistletoe, and pine, tied with a shiny red ribbon, hung on a nail.

“Watch out!” the boy called, pointing.

Noni looked down. She was about to step inside a square of earth that was protected under the eaves of the house. It was outlined by an odd assortment of stones and bricks now half covered by drifting snow. Inside these borders, sticking up from the snow in rows, stood a dozen or more little crosses, each about four inches tall, made of Popsicle sticks bound intricately together with different-colored rubber bands. Names and dates had been written in black ink down the sides of the crossed sticks. She could read only some of the names.

“Are they pet graves?” she asked, thinking the crosses might be for goldfish or canaries; they were too small for dogs or cats. But the boy said no, the crosses belonged to his mother, that she always brought them with her and stuck them in the ground when she came to visit. He said that every year on New Year's Day she would start assembling a new collection of these grave markers, then she would pack all but one of the previous year's crosses into a shoebox that she called “The Promised Land.” Each year she saved one cross from the previous year and put it with the other saved ones, and she set them out with the new ones in her cemetery. They were, she said, “reminders.”

“Reminders?” Noni asked.

Kaye looked away, then turned back to her with a dramatic nod. “Like your mama's ‘beau ideas,'” he said. “These are my mama's.”

Pulling her down to her knees beside him, shining his flashlight on the strange little crossed sticks, he began reciting from memory, as he might a school lesson. “Emmett Till, 14 yrs old, Aug 27, 1955, beaten to death.” He moved the light's beam along the row. “Willie James Howard, March 12, 1944, lynched to death.” “Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette, Christmas Day, 1951, bombed to death in bed.”

In the front row of the cemetery all the sticks had this year's date on them, 1963. Kaye quickly bounced the flashlight beam at each cross: “June 12, 1963, Medgar shot.” “Nov. 22,
1963, JFK shot.”

There were four crosses close together side by side that all said Sept 15, 1963. The boy read out their inscriptions: “Addie Mae Collins, 14 yrs old, bombed.” “Denise McNair, 11 yrs old, bombed.” “Carole Robertson, 14 yrs old, bombed.” The fourth cross had fallen over. He brushed off the snow and stuck it back in the ground next to the others. “Cynthia Wesley, 14 yrs old, bombed.” Noni didn't know how to respond; she wasn't sure what any of it meant, except that somebody had killed these people, children too, and that as a reminder the boy's mother had made these peculiar little stick crosses—which was a very strange thing to do—into a sort of doll's cemetery. She said, “They're very nice,” which was all she could think of to say.

Kaye stood, brushed snow from his knees. “My mama's been in marches and sit-downs, too.”

“Sit-downs?”

“You sit down and the police can't make you get up. A policeman hit my mama in the head.” He ran his hand across the top of his head. “She'll show you the scar. Well, my grandmama says,” and he spoke with a sad matter-of-factness that Noni recognized as Aunt Ma's voice. “Says my mama takes things too much to heart, and she takes any more, she's gonna bust in two. You want to see something else?” Before she could answer, he slipped inside the door and vanished, leaving her huddled beside the cemetery. He was back within minutes, awkwardly holding a long narrow cardboard box. Holding it out across his arms, he told her to open it. “You're gonna see something you
never
saw!”

In this prediction, the boy was absolutely right. For inside the box there were human bones wired together. The bones of a big foot. And the bones of half of a long leg. “Now how 'bout that!” he asked her, eagerly grinning.

Noni was speechless. She could only nod.

“My Grandpa Tat keeps this box hid in his closet, but he
showed it to me. He made the V.A. hospital give him back his leg they cut off, and me and him wired it back together just like a jigsaw puzzle and now he's gonna use it to make his case.”

“His case?”

But Kaye was busy thrusting the box back inside the door, and after he closed it he seemed to be finished with the subject for he didn't answer her. “You want to ride that sled?” he said again.

Beside Clayhome, the hill swept widely down through a meadow where in summer wildflowers grew. Toward the bottom, the slope plunged steeply through the knolls and gullies left by century-old earthen terraces falling to the edge of the dark woods that guarded Heaven's Hill.

Noni was upset to see that, without waiting for her, the boy had already taken her sled for a ride down the long slope. All the way to the woods, two blades had cut deep, straight parallel lines into the snow; running beside these tracks were the scuffled tracks of his boots climbing back to the top, dragging the sled behind. “You already went,” she complained.

“Sit down,” he told her, carefully maneuvering the sled into position, patting the seat and tugging on her coat.

She wanted to protest his preemptory orders, remind him that she owned this sled, that she'd take charge of it now. But she wasn't exactly sure what steering might entail, and finally she decided to wait until after the first run before she demanded the return of her property. Before she had even a second to settle herself with the towrope he'd handed her, he was at her back pushing, his thin shoulder leaning sharply into hers, shoving the sled hard, snow flurrying around them, and then he was jumping on behind, bumping her forward with his body, his legs straddling hers, his feet in their floppy galoshes stretched out to each side of the wooden steering bar. He was shouting, “Hang on!”

Down the hill they flew, fast, faster still, faster than skates
or bicycle, so fast that her mouth opened, not to scream but to laugh. And she laughed all the way down the long steep slope until they skidded to a stop at the edge of the woods against a snowy bank. Back they ran, without talking, hauling the sled up the hill, then again she sat and again he pushed and down they flew once more. The third time, he said, “Your turn,” and sat down himself; she pushed, leapt on, and steered with her feet, and they shot away, at first a little wobbly but then as fast as ever. Over and over, moving along the rising for fresh snow, heated now inside their coats but their hands and feet wet and chilled, they rode the red sled down the slope for which her house had been named, hundreds of years ago, Heaven's Hill.

During the hour they were sledding, the snow slowed to a few drifting flakes, then stopped. Above the white trees, the gray sky grew luminous. Years later she would remember that it was Kaye who wanted to quit first, although they would argue this point like the others for decades. But it was her clear memory that although she was very cold, she begged for one last ride down the steepest edge of the slope, and that he was steering this last time, and that they both screamed all the way down with the thrill of the speed.

The knoll racing toward them was too high, the ditch behind it too soon, too deep, and the sled tilted, tipped, and flew away spinning, and they toppled out, rolling together down the bank, stopping in a tangle, as high over their heads snow fell on them like a wave at the beach, but not scary like a wave. Soft and thrilling. It was then that his lips, chilled and soft, brushed against her face, so that in her memory he had kissed her. And it was then, as he struggled across her, that his cold cheek moved against her lips so that in his memory she was thanking him with a kiss.

But both were later memories only, not really thought of by either of them in the moment. At the time they were laughing in a loud manic delight, as they rolled out from under
the snow slide. Then side by side, they moved their arms up and down, making angels, angels like paper dolls tied at their wing tips.

“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.