The Last Noel (35 page)

December 25, 1995
“Noni Plays Her Piano for Me”
by Tatlock Fairley

 

 

 

Noni Tilden had restored the tradition of the Christmas Day Open House at Heaven's Hill that had been hosted for so many years by her parents. It struck Kaye, as he stepped into the foyer and heard the soft hum of Southern voices and the bright laughter, how everything was both the same and completely different. In the wide front hall, willow baskets of pink poin-settias lined the parquet floor and holly wreaths hung on doors from gold ribbons. Christmas cards rested in swags of white pine on the banisters. But at the end of the hall, behind the scalloped Revere punch bowl on the Italian table with the curved legs, Lucas Miller now stood, the lawyer whom Kaye and Noni had known at Moors High. He was ladling into little silver cups holiday drinks for Dr. Jack Hurd and Becky Van Buehling. Kaye had heard they were engaged now. He stood watching for a moment, missing Bud Tilden's light pleasant voice greeting his guests. “God rest you merry, gentlemen!” “Peace on Earth, ladies!”

Then Lucas Miller waved at him, his narrow earnest face kind behind the round gold-rimmed glasses. Just last night
Amma had been telling Kaye that Lucas was a good friend to Noni, but not the man Noni loved. Just last night she had made Kaye promise to come to the Open House at Heaven's Hill today because she was worried about Noni.

Kaye was sitting after dinner with his grandmother in the kitchen at Clayhome, where she was patiently allowing him to take her blood pressure. Since Tatlock Fairley's death the previous spring, Kaye always came over to make soup for her on the weekends. Soup was, she said, one of the few things she still took pleasure in eating. To eat it, she didn't have to wear her teeth, and it settled her stomach.

After dinner, just as he did every Sunday night throughout the year, Kaye gave Amma as much of a physical check-up as she'd allow. And, just as he did every week, he made his plea that she should leave Clayhome and move in with him and his family. As always, she refused. But when he put away his stethoscope to go, she stopped him. “Kaye, let's us talk for a minute.”

He smiled, expecting the blessings lecture. “Yes, I'm a lucky man. Yes, I ought to appreciate it more.”

Amma took off her apron, settled into her kitchen chair with its worn pillows, with old bleached sunflowers on their covers. “That's true, son. You got a good smart wife doing good in the world, and y'all love each other. And you got two sweet little girls.”

“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, she 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?”