The Last Noel (9 page)

Now all Kaye could talk about was how the Tildens were the problem with America and how everybody else was the problem, except for the people he had pictures of covering the walls of his room. Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and such. These last few years Kaye had stopped making new Popsicle stick cemeteries for his mama and instead had started taping up all these newspaper photographs on his walls until his room finally looked to Amma like the shotgun house Tatlock had grown up in out in the country, wallpapered with tin signs and pictures cut out of store catalogues. After Kaye taped the pictures to the wall, he wrote things in black marker on them, just like Deborah had written on her little crosses. Soledad
Brothers, ACQUITTED. Angela Davis, ACQUITTED. George Jackson, KILLED. ATTICA.

A few months ago Noni had told Amma that she never saw Kaye much at school anymore; somehow both of them had started running with their own crowds and had drifted apart. Noni said that their friendship had gotten harder to keep up anyhow: Kaye acted so angry with her every time he told her about something he'd seen on the news. But how was Noni supposed to make up to him for the last four hundred years of American history? Why was he taking it out on her?

Amma had hugged Noni and told her that the past was a heavy thing, too heavy to lift unless everybody lifted together. It would all work out in the Lord's good time. “The Lord's too slow for Kaye,” Noni told her.

Deep down, Kaye's grandmother had thought maybe it was just as well that he'd stopped spending so much time with Noni. She had always wondered if the real reason Judy had sent Noni up to that New England school hadn't been to get her away from Kaye. And if the child hadn't gotten so sick up there that first semester, Judy could have kept them apart, too, that way. But if that had been her plan, it had backfired. Noni came home and the teenagers had gotten closer than ever. It was clear to Amma that Judy didn't like her daughter's friendship with Kaye, or her husband's affection for him either, not one bit.

Of course, if those children did fall in love, the world wouldn't be easy on them. Love was hard enough without adding in other people's nastiness about race. It was probably all for the best. And both of them were too busy to get serious anyhow; children didn't used to keep so busy. Kaye had two jobs and a dozen or more after-school projects on top of his sports programs. And Judy kept Noni wound up tight enough to snap a watch spring. She couldn't have worked her harder if she'd been planning to enter her in a pet show. It had been just the same with Judy's parents pushing her when she was little:
Judy had to come in first in every swim meet, win the blue at every horse show.

Noni was a sweeter child than her mother had ever been. Sometimes Amma felt like she could see Noni's heart right there in her face. She could see Noni's heart filling up with all this love she wanted to give folks. But folks wouldn't take enough of it to give her ease. Noni was all feelings, always had been. She was like her brother Gordon that way.

Wade now, he was a different story. Ever since Gordon died, it was like Wade had joined hands with the devil, like he'd decided that if the Good get killed, he'd better be as bad as he could be. He'd flunked out of one military school and got himself thrown out of another one. Then the university here turned him down, in spite of how they still had Bud Tilden's shirt hanging from the rafters of their stadium, in spite of how some Gordon or other had even built them their library. Now Wade was home for the holidays from the pokey little college in Atlanta where they'd had to send him. Home and up to worse than his mama knew. Vodka bottles in the trash and old marijuana butts in ashtrays under his bed with a bunch of filthy magazines. Pills of every color rolling around in his sock drawer.

Getting into college, thought Amma, that's not something I'll have to worry about with Kaye. Not with his good grades at Moors High, not the way he'd scored on that test they'd had to drive to Raleigh for. Plus, once Kaye had gotten his height—just like she'd told him he would—once he'd shot up all that way—Kaye had sports going for him, too. Or could have going for him, if he'd cared anything about it and could learn to stop his back-talking the coach.

“Your boy's got an attitude problem,” the coach came over to Clayhome to tell her and Tatlock. “And he's got a motivation problem. We need to motivate that boy's passion for the game of football.” Well, all the man had heard in reply was a
long speech from Tatlock about how, back in his teens, he'd played the best football, baseball,
and
basketball the town of Moors, North Carolina, had ever seen, but because of his color he'd never a chance to show what he could do. Which was possibly even true, for Amma could remember to this day, even in love with Bill King as she'd been at the time, how that Fourth of July at the town park the muscles ruffled in Tat's big back and arms, and how his skinny bat slung around and how the baseball flew like a white bird off into the blue cloudless sky.

But none of Tat's horn-blowing about the past was any use to Kaye, who might need a push from that football coach if Amma's savings wouldn't stretch far enough to get him through college. Bills were high, money hard to come by. And her daughter Hope, with six kids, Hope and her husband both working, a good man, but they could always use a little extra help. Plus, Amma was still trying to catch up to what she'd put away three years ago that she'd had to use traveling with Kaye by plane to Philadelphia. But after Deborah had got hold of those pills in the hospital, Amma wasn't about to stay home; she had to be there at Deborah's side to pull her through, even if it broke her heart when she saw she might as well have been a stranger off the street to her own daughter.

Yes, Amma thought, I sure do worry more about Kaye since I lost my poor child Deborah, because I've lost her sure as if I'd lowered her into the ground. And a child's a child, in their thirties, their twenties, or even a baby taken from you before you gave birth, like she'd lost two before Deborah came. A child's a child.

Amma finished stitching the sunflower to the third apron. Well, Noni looked so pretty tonight and let's hope she has a happy time at that school dance—even if Kaye and his friend Parker put it down the way they did. Tat asked them why
they
weren't going to the dance, and of course, the truth was they couldn't have gone anyhow because they weren't seniors and
they weren't dating seniors, but Kaye started in on Tat about how this was no time to be dancing.

“You think they're ‘dancing' in Hanoi with those B-52s carpet-bombing them day and night?! You think Vietnamese children are ‘dancing' down the roads on fire with napalm?! You think with the world blowing up I want to go boogaloo with a gym full of bubblehead crackers like Roland Turd?”

Tat told him, “Boy, I'd boogaloo with Mrs. George Wallace I had my legs. And old George Wallace would cut in and grab his wife back, he had the use of his. And look at us both stuck in these wheelchairs. You don't know what life's going to do to you, Kaye King.” Then Tat just wheeled himself over to the TV and turned on the news, while Kaye muttered at his back, “Life's not gonna do anything to me, old man, I'm gonna do things to life.”

Well, Amma thought, probably he will. I'm not worrying about Kaye. She folded the finished apron and took another one from her stack. Her grandson wouldn't be waiting on life to come smack him from behind, and even when life inevitably did, it wasn't going to knock him over like it had his poor mama. Kaye always bounced back. He reminded her of that plastic punching bag he used to love that would pop back up at you. Bounced back and talked back and wouldn't stop talking, that was Kaye. 'Course, he could always get you laughing sooner or later. Yolanda said that's why he'd been made night dispatcher at Austin's taxi company, young as he was. He made the drivers laugh with his voices and jokes. Plus he could always get the cars to the customer, like he had all of Moors County on a map inside his head. She wasn't going to worry about Kaye.

Amma heard heavy shoes come running down the stairs, young male laughter, then she felt a kiss and the brush of a moustache on the side of her neck.

“Stay cool, Grandma.” Kaye stood there at the opened refrigerator with his skinny school friend Parker Jones, both of them in solid black, head to toe, with big black circles of hair
on their heads. Kaye pulled off the legs from the Cornish game hens left over from the supper Amma had made for Heaven's Hill. He gave two to Parker, ate two others himself.

“You turn off those lights upstairs?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Well, go turn off those tree lights, too. Tat's not looking at that tree, he's looking at that fool television.”

Kaye's dog Philly ran into the kitchen to see what the noise was about and followed Kaye back into the living room.

Amma slapped Parker's fingers off a cake. “Leave that alone. Parker, you weren't upstairs messing with Tat's leg box again?”

For years Kaye's friend had had an insatiable fascination with the bones from Tatlock's amputated leg, and had loved to look at them. Parker had even borrowed the bones once to terrorize his sister into believing that he'd dug up a murdered man in their crawl space.

“We got better things to do than play with old bones,” Parker told her. “Times are changing, Grandma.”

“That so?”

“Yep, the black man's time has come.”

“Um hum.”

Kaye returned and spun the radio dial to the Motown station where the Drifters were singing “White Christmas.” He shook out one of his grandmother's aprons, held it so the sunflower spread across his chest. “Outta sight. I'm telling you, slap these sunflowers on wild-color T-shirts, you can sell 'em, make some bread.”

“You can sell 'em,” agreed Parker. “Every jive turkey in town be wearing a big yellow flower.”

“Flower power to the people, Grandma. Later.” Kaye tossed the apron back on her table and pulled Parker with him across the room.

“Kaye! You come back in here and put on a coat. It's cold out there. Kaye!”

The door slammed as she turned up the radio. Tat yelled, “I can't hear my program in here,” and turned up the television. A TV voice was singing, “Here comes Google with the goo goo googly eyes” about that horrible chocolate and vanilla peanut butter that Tat would eat right out of the jar with a spoon.

Amma turned off her music and went back to work. She pinned a sunflower onto an apron bib, smoothed the cloth under the foot pedal of her sewing machine, and looked out the window at Heaven's Hill where all the lights were still on.

At Moors High School gym the spinning planets were deflating and the sparkle lights were blinking out in the fiberglass snow of the Stardust Court. Hands held tightly between them, Noni and Roland were slow-dancing to the last dance, John Lennon's “Imagine” without the words. Inside her head Noni was singing the words about imagine all the people living life in peace, while the outside of her head was pressed into the silky lapel of Roland's tuxedo. She could feel his warm breath in her hair as he whispered, “You're the most beautiful girl here. I'm a lucky guy.”

This conjunction, or disjunction, between imagining world peace and feeling Roland's breath was symptomatic of how Noni had felt through the entire Christmas dance—Stardust on Mars, it was called—as if she were looking at the gathering through peculiar binoculars that caused her to see completely different scenes through each of the lens, one far away, one very close. Far away, the dance looked like the tacky Snowland at the mall, a row of cheap plastic Christmas trees in front of which children got their pictures taken with Santa, with the odd addition here in the gym of a solar system of painted balls hanging from the ceiling representing the planets (in the wrong order). Far away, girls without their dance partners looked
miserably perky laughing together in corners, while the boys who were supposed to be dancing with them ran outside to drink or do drugs; teachers didn't notice, or pretended not to. Far away, Noni could imagine Kaye's look of exaggerated comic horror at the poor dancers, or the talentless band, which played everything from David Bowie to the Allman Brothers in the same thumping style. Far away, she could imagine the speech on archaic sex roles delivered by her best friend Bunny Breckenridge, who had gone tonight to see
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
with “The Outsies,” the group of self-described hippies and nerds with whom she and Noni had picketed the Moors draft board to protest the Vietnam War.

But close-up, Roland Hurd, who would never picket anything, was leaning down to kiss Noni sweetly on the face and then on the lips. “My dad's so right,” he whispered. “You're the best of the best.” Close up, other senior boys were cutting in on Roland to dance with her. Senior girls ran over to ask her where she'd bought her dress. Roland did, well, not real dance steps like the ones Kaye and she had choreographed together, but Roland moved his body in ways that felt very pleasant. He had no doubts when he danced, which made it easy to give in to him.