The Last Noel (40 page)

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.

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.