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?”
“Kaye King!” Someone was calling to him in the crowded foyer of Heaven's Hill. Finally he saw Bunny Breckenridge, in another of her perennial black caftans, squeezing her way toward him through the guests, holding over her head a little silver cup of punch. “It's like the Tildens’ old Open House, isn’t it?”
“Sort of.”
She glanced into the living room with him. “I know what you mean. It's different.”
“Yeah. Nobody's smoking. It used to look like a rain forest in here.”
“No, here's what it is. Everything's…easy now. I hated those stuffy parties of Judy's. Except for the eclairs.” She squeezed Kaye's arm. “So hi, gorgeous. Are you cast in amber, or what?”
“You’re looking good yourself, Bunny.”
“Seven pounds. How ’bout cutting a foot or so off my intestine, Dr. King? I hear that works. I could come in any time this spring. I’m on leave all year.”
He kissed the plump cheek haloed by wild frizzy hair that was now cut shorter and turning an early gray. “How ’bout exercising? I run five miles every evening.”
She swung her broad hip sharply into his side. “I bet you hang your laptop from your neck and write articles while you do it.”
Kaye laughed, dropping his cashmere coat down on the other wraps that had been thrown onto the green leather bench in the hallway. Under the bench, he saw a skateboard and a dog's toy. On the console, beside the malachite pear tree with its jeweled partridge, he set the gold wrapped present that he’d brought for Noni. It was another charm, this one a tiny gold state of North Carolina. Every year he gave her a charm now.
The blue Chinese jar was filled with camellias. He ran his fingers over the cracks in the porcelain that he’d glued back together that night so long ago in the kitchen. “We can fix this good as new,” he had boasted, not knowing how much more valuable the jar's oldness made it. He smiled. Early Ming Dynasty. Now he knew. Thank god, the young had no idea how ignorant they were, or they could never risk so much, never be so brave.
A chaos of incredibly loud barks and shrieks was quickly followed by a stampede into the foyer of two large dogs and ten little boys, among them the curly-haired Johnny Tilden. He was the smallest, Kaye noticed, but the fastest of the group. Guests frantically backed away, protecting their drinks, as the boys chased each other out the door and down the steps onto the lawn where they ran off skimming Frisbees in air and leaping after them.
“Holy shit,” gasped Bunny. “Is that what ten-year-olds are like? No wonder they call Noni the Angel of Moors Elementary. In college, the students just sit there and sleep.” She was looking around the hall. “Where's Shani? She keeps promising she's going to find me a husband. I don’t necessarily mean somebody else's. But straight, single, and self-supporting is my wish list. Maybe I’m being too picky. I could let a couple of those go. What do you think?”
Kaye explained that his wife and daughters were in New York with Shani's family. Kaye would have gone too but this morning he’d had to perform an emergency triple-bypass surgery on a long-time patient. “So, what you up to on your leave, Bunny? Rabble-rousing? Or are you resting on your laurels? Give it a rest. We’ve got a Democrat in there, got eternal peace and prosperity, right?”
Bunny shook the little silver cup at him. “I’m not the one who needs to exit the Garden, Kaye. You’re a babe in Eden if you don’t think those creeps aren’t still out there, figuring out how to buy and bully their way back in. But what do you care, you’ll get the tax breaks.”
“Whoaa, babe.” Kaye held out both hands in surrender. “I pay my dues.”
She spluttered her lips at him. “I sure didn’t see you out hustling on election day. I saw Shani. I saw Noni. I saw me. I didn’t see you.”
“Is this going to be Crossfire, or where is Noni?”
Bunny pointed through the doorway into the living room. Kaye saw Noni standing near the piano in the center of a circle of elderly couples, some of whom he recognized from the parties long ago. They looked amazingly small and fragile to him now, when once they’d seemed so formidable in their loud laughter.
Noni wore a plain silk dress that was as black as the enamel of the grand piano beside her; the black made her luminous skin even whiter by contrast. Her silver blonde hair was loosely gathered atop her head and her neck and shoulders were bare. A shaft of afternoon light slanted through the tall windows on the pale yellow wall. Frowning, Noni closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her temple. Then she turned back, smiling to her guests. Kaye could see the gold charm bracelet on her wrist as she reached to include in the group an old stooped woman whom he suddenly recognized as Miss Clooney, the Moors High music teacher from all those decades ago. Looking past Miss Clooney, Noni suddenly saw him and smiled widely, waving. He crossed his eyes at her and she burst out laughing.
As soon as Kaye joined them, Miss Clooney wagged a crooked finger at him. “John Montgomery King. You wouldn’t join the orchestra. No patience.”
“No talent. How are you, Miss Clooney?”
She gestured at herself as if nothing more needed to be said. Kaye excused them both and led Noni over to the Christmas tree, where the lights were once again red, green, amber, blue. “Amma sends her regrets. She just isn’t feeling up to walking over here for the Open House this year.”
“Oh bull. Zaki and Johnny told her they’d bring her over in Uncle Tat's space-age van and then wheel her up the ramp in his wheelchair. She just didn’t want to come. She's stubborn. I guess that's where you get it.”
“I’m not stubborn.”
Noni just smiled.
“Thanks for the microscope,” he told her. “It's as good as old.” She grinned at the familiar joke. “Your charm's out by the blue bowl.”
“Don’t tell me it's a charm, it's supposed to be a surprise!”
“How can it be a surprise when I give you the same thing every year?”
“Oh, Kaye. I give up on you.”
“No, you don’t.” Then, feeling awkward, he looked past her through the tall windows to the rose dusk falling outside. He sighed. “Anyhow, I wanted to give you something else. I found this over at Clayhome last night.” He felt in his pocket for the necklace. “I asked for it back by mistake a long time ago.” He opened his hand. In his palm she saw the silver heart on its broken chain. “I shouldn’t have. And I apologize.”
Slowly, by the heart, she lifted the chain from his hand. “Thank you.” She looked up at him. “I’ve been wondering what had happened to my heart.”
He smiled at her. Then she turned away and hung the necklace on a bough of the tree.
Abruptly, Kaye added, “Amma says you’re not well.”
Noni turned back to him. “Ah. That's why you’re here today. She sent you to check me out.” When he kept studying her face earnestly, she held out her hand, palm up. All the tiny gold charms slid below her wrist. “Want to take my pulse?”
“Don’t think I won’t.” He held his fingers to her wrist. Her pulse was fast but it was strong and steady.
“Mom!” Tousled and grass-stained, a leaf in dark bronze curls, Johnny rushed over to Noni and pulled her hand away from Kaye. “Mom, it's time! Come on!”
“Can you say hi to Kaye?”
The boy muttered a preoccupied “Hi,” as he thrust his slender tan arm up at his mother, showing her his large wrist-watch. “If we don’t play now, everybody’ll start leaving.”
Noni gestured at her dress, then at his disheveled clothes. “Hey, guy, I’m ready whenever you are. You want to play right this second, that's fine with me.” But Johnny scowled and spun away through the crowd. “That kid's a total clothes horse,” Noni explained to Kaye. “Excuse me.”
Her niece Michelle had passed near them with her shy young husband, both serving pastries on trays. Noni introduced Kaye and Kaye congratulated them on their marriage. “You mean,” scowled Michelle, “you don’t think we ruined our lives and damned ourselves to the lower middle class forever?”
“What are you, fourteen?” Kaye asked.
She scoffed. “We’re, like, twenty-three, excuse me. In the Middle Ages, we’d be middle-aged.”
Kaye laughed and her husband quietly smiled and they passed on, serving the guests.
Before the performance, Bunny wanted Kaye to see the large painting of Noni that was hanging over the dining room mantel. It was the final portrait in a series of paintings of Noni that Tatlock had done since her return to Moors. This one showed her alone in the yellow living room. She was seated at the black grand piano on whose top sat a vase of sunflowers. The old man had tried to capture Noni's smile by surrounding her face with rays of gold that led to the sunflowers and by placing at the tip of each ray the tiny gold word LOVE.
Bunny said it was not only the last picture that Tatlock had completed before his death, it was unique—the only painting, out of the more than a thousand that he’d done, in which he himself did not appear. As Kaye and Bunny looked up at it, she speculated about whether Tatlock had abruptly excised his own image from his artistic vision or if he had simply passed away before having the chance to paint his self-portrait into the scene.
The title of the painting, “Noni Plays Her Piano for Me,” written in gold across the bottom of the canvas, suggested to Kaye that the latter was more probable.
“Yes, I see him,” said Bunny, “leaning against the piano, dressed like Count Basie maybe.”
Back in April, Tatlock had died peacefully, painlessly, and in great splendor, like a French king, propped up in bed on big soft pillows, surrounded by dozens of loved ones, calling them to him to make bequests of his innumerable gadgets and to offer final words of wisdom. According to Austin Fairley, Tat's last words before drifting off to sleep and so to death were to advise his sons to sue his New York rep, who had proved to be a savage but careless embezzler of his client's profits—understating by thousands of dollars the prices he was getting for the fashionable folk art.
The Fairley sons had in fact sued this agent. And they had actually won; Tatlock's only real lawsuit had been posthumous, and successful. But, as Kaye told Bunny, they were lucky that they did win, considering what Tatlock's estate owed the IRS, after it became evident that the old man had never bothered paying any income tax on the sale of his paintings, being of the opinion that the government would just waste the money on foolishness.
“I couldn’t agree with him more,” Bunny said. “But I’m telling you, Kaye, two guys from Atlanta offered me five thousand each for my Tatlocks! Great-looking guys. Just my luck they were gay. Oh, shit, there's Wade.”
Kaye looked into the foyer and saw Wade Tilden angrily stopping his wife Trisha from embracing her daughter Michelle. Still red-haired and freckled, Wade was now bald and had a potbelly that hung strangely on his skinny frame.
Bunny grabbed two chocolates from a silver bowl, then threw them back. “God, I can’t stand that man. Noni said he's the reason why Michelle ran off and married Corey. Just to get out of that McMansion. Gordon's Landing, Jesus, I bet Wade's got “Gordon's Landing” monogrammed on his balls, just like on his towels and sheets. I mean, of course, his golf balls, but who knows? I can’t stand him.”
They watched Wade rapidly making the rounds, glad-handing guests as if he were running for reelection and didn’t have much time at this stop.
Bunny asked Kaye if he’d heard how, right after Judy died, Wade had tried to get R.W Gordon's will overturned in court, although Judy's own will had reproduced her father's bequests word for word. Kaye said he’d never heard anything about any of the Gordon inheritance and could care less.
“Well, this will was very specific.” It left Heaven's Hill to Noni if and only if she married and had a child. She had the use of the place in her lifetime and after her death the entire property would go to the oldest male child of her body. “Married and of her body.” Bunny made a face. “Guess the old Repub didn’t think much of single moms or adoption. On the other hand, he had the brains to pick Noni over Wade to leave the old family jewels to.”
However, were there no such male heir, then Heaven's Hill would go to Wade and his children. Or at least to his son, for Wade had “disowned” Michelle for marrying Corey. “Right, who’d want to be ‘owned’ by him anyhow?”
On what basis, Kaye asked, did Wade think he could break such a will? “We all know Noni got married, we all know she had a male heir.”
With a disgusted glance at Wade, Bunny lowered her voice. “According to Bible Boy over there, right before Judy died, she confided in him that she wanted to change her will to negate R.W.'s—”
“And leave everything to Wade?”
“You got it.”
“And why would she do such a thing? Just for love of Wade?”
Bunny moved Kaye away from the couple next to them so that she couldn’t be overheard. “It's a doozy. Wade claims that Judy told him that when Noni's marriage to Roland was breaking up, Noni’d had an affair. Wade had this lawyer arguing that the clear intent of R.W.'s will was that only a male heir of Noni's marriage could inherit and that Johnny wasn’t legitimate.”
Kaye stared at her. “You’re kidding?”
“Right! That's our Noni, the whore of Houston, recognize her? Lucas Miller told me that old Judge Hilliardson scorched Wade into ashes and blew them on the floor. Said he couldn’t believe a gentleman would come into his courtroom and insult his own sister. So the will stands, and Johnny inherits.”
“Do you think Mrs. Tilden actually believed that? According to Grandma, she got pretty delusional the last couple of years.”
Bunny shrugged. “I didn’t like Judy when she wasn’t delusional. But, hey, I guess it was pretty rough, a woman like that, not able to walk.”
Kaye confessed that there’d been a time when he’d suspected that Noni's mother's prolonged paralysis might have been psychosomatic.
Startled, Bunny walked him over to the dining room mantel, further away from other guests. “Psychosomatic? I thought she kept having some weird kind of strokes that they couldn’t get a fix on? I thought that's why Noni had to keep taking her to new doctors?”
Slowly, Kaye shrugged. “Oh, Bunny, who knows? I sure don’t. She's dead. It's over.” Opening the glass face of the old French clock that sat in the middle of the white mantel, gently he moved the longer filigreed iron hand a few minutes ahead so that the clock would strike the hour. It began chiming its lovely bell sounds, six of them. He looked down at the antique Persian rug in front of the hearth. He had lain here with Noni that night. He had heard the chiming of the twelve bells just before her mother had come rushing along the upstairs hall, screaming “Fire.”
Bunny was looking at him oddly. “What's the matter with you?”
Kaye pulled himself back. “Nothing.”
“What's ‘over’?”
“Nothing.” He walked Bunny back into the room. “Listen, Amma told me she's worried about Noni. You notice anything odd about her lately, like maybe she's sick?”
“I should be so sick.” Bunny shrugged dismissively. “I was here all day yesterday helping her get this thing ready and she looked fine to me.”
“Does she see a doctor?”
“I don’t know, but if you’re worried, talk to Jack Hurd.”
Exasperated, Kaye flung up his arms. “Why does everybody think that old man is God?” He looked across into the living room to where Hurd, stooped like a great heron over Johnny Tilden, was helping him move the carved music stand into place beside the grand piano. Guests were gathering around it.
The ten-year-old now wore a small blue blazer over a fresh white polo shirt. He solemnly opened his sheet music on the stand, then picked up his violin and bow. Lucas Miller walked around ringing a large bell until everyone was quiet. Then Noni joined her son at the piano. She leaned down and whispered something to him, then she kissed him.
“Johnny tells me,” she said to the gathered guests, “that you very sweet and very kind and very patient friends want us to play something for you again this year.”
“They do, Mom, stop worrying!” The boy tugged her by her hand over to the piano bench as adults laughed fondly.
She sat on the bench and opened the keyboard. “Okay.” She nodded at him. “Take it away, Maestro.”
The boy announced to the small crowd that he and his mother would now play a special arrangement that they had written—“Well, mostly my mom did it”—for piano and violin. It was in memory of Bud Tilden and it was one of his favorite pieces of music. “Bud Tilden's my grandfather,” Johnny stopped to explain. “It's the Warsaw Concerto and it's nine minutes long and then you can go home.” Again people laughed with affection.
Then the boy tucked the violin under his chin, bit down on his full soft lip, and nodded at his mother. She began to play the grand opening chords.
Kaye moved to the side of the piano and studied Noni watching Johnny as she played, accompanying the sweet sad line of his violin, her notes under and around his, following him, smiling at him with that wonderful smile that Tatlock had known to paint as gold sunlight.
Then all of a sudden Noni's hands stumbled and came off the keys. Johnny kept playing. Kaye saw that she had tightly squeezed her eyes shut and that her fingers were moving erratically above the keys like a blind person searching for something that was unexpectedly not where it was supposed to be. Kaye moved closer as Johnny abruptly turned toward his mother, puzzled, alarmed, but still playing on alone, his small bow sawing back and forth.
Just as Kaye reached her, Noni's eyes fought open; she leaned out from the piano and smiled at her son, nodding reassurances at him, and gesturing with her hand a backward circle. He seemed to understand what she meant, for finishing a phrase, he started back at the beginning of the section of music that he’d just played alone.
Noni's fingers found their place on the keys; the piano joined the violin and together they played to the dramatic end of the piece. Enthusiastic applause burst through the room. Kaye had the feeling that people might not even have noticed the pause and then the repetition. Standing, Noni took Johnny's small hand and together they bowed again and again to the warm applause. With her other hand, she held tightly to the side of the piano.
As the applause ended, Kaye was close enough to hear Johnny questioning her. “What happened, Mommy, why did you stop? Did you forget?”
She looked down at him confused. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m just a stupid old mommy. I’ve got to go upstairs now and get some aspirin, okay? You were just wonderful!”
Noni thanked everyone for listening and urged them now to join Lucas Miller around the piano to sing a last few Christmas carols before they left. At the motion of her hand, the lawyer came quickly forward. She said something hurriedly to him as he took his seat at the piano, pushing carefully at the sides of his glasses, watching her until she’d passed through the doorway into the hall.
In the hall Kaye took a penlight and his cell phone from his coat pockets before he made his way upstairs and along the corridor to Noni's room. He found her kneeling on the floor of her bathroom, beside the toilet. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“How bad is that headache?”
“Bad.”
“So bad it made you throw up?”
“Maybe I’ve got the flu.”
He helped her to the tall four-poster bed and lifted her onto it, propped her against all the white lace and linen.
“Noni, can you see me?”
He told her to follow his finger with her eyes. She couldn’t do it. He checked her eyes with the penlight. He asked her questions about dates and facts. They confused her.
“Okay.” He looked at his watch, Bud Tilden's watch that he’d found again the night before. “Okay, Noni, I want you to pack a robe and a nightgown.”
Pulling herself up on the pillows, she tried to joke. “Why? Are we eloping? I thought you were married.”
His face frozen, he opened her closet door, pulled an overnight bag down from the shelf, and tossed it onto the pink couch at the foot of her bed. Then, yanking out her dresser drawers, he began throwing lingerie onto the bag.
“Are you crazy? What are you doing!” Noni twisted herself off her bed and staggered toward him.
Grabbing her arms, he held her in front of him, stared at her. “Listen to me. We’re going to University Hospital. I’m checking you in tonight. I’m going to get somebody to do a CAT scan and an MRI on you as soon as they can schedule it.”
“Kaye, you’re crazy. I’ve got a headache! I’m going downstairs to my guests.”
“Fine, you go downstairs and tell your guests good-bye while I make these phone calls. Then you tell Bunny you’re going with me to the hospital and that you want her to stay here with Johnny.”
She struggled with him. “I’m not going to do any such goddamn thing!”
“You want to cause a scene, you want to ruin everybody's good time, you want to scare Johnny?” He knew that would stop her.
“You’re scaring me!” She fought loose, staring at him. “What do you think's wrong with me? Look at me, Kaye, look at me.”
He spoke to her fiercely, his hands tight on her arms. “There's nothing wrong with you. We’re just going to do these tests. There's nothing wrong. If anything's wrong, I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it.”
Amma was sitting in the dark by the kitchen window at Clayhome, sitting in the quiet, listening. She wasn’t playing the radio, which she rarely had on anymore. Her own thoughts were enough to keep her occupied. Thinking through the past, getting ready to leave it in order, that's what her time needed to go to now. For instance, she had to get her mind right about what she’d done that early morning at the swimming pool the day Judy died. Four years ago or more, and it was still troubling her. If you knew what was good, why wouldn’t you do it? Isn’t that what Amma had said so long ago to that poor man Bud Tilden? But what if, in a particular case, you lost your certainty about what was good? There was nothing worse in the world.
To Amma, the hard question was whether she’d have acted differently that morning when she’d found Judy swimming out in the pool if she hadn’t heard her talking to Wade about Johnny just the day before. If Judy hadn’t said what she’d said then, and what she’d said in that pool.
It had been a warm afternoon, the middle of June, and Amma’d told Dionne to take the Tildens some iced tea out to the side porch where they were sitting, the two of them looking so alike with their milky skin and pale red hair, Judy in her wheelchair and Wade on the steps, talking on and on about how they were going to redo Judy's will so Johnny would never inherit Heaven's Hill.
They hadn’t known Amma could hear them from the kitchen window. Or they hadn’t cared. Ever since Amma was a little girl, owners of Heaven's Hill had been talking in front of her like she was a piece of furniture. The things she’d heard in that house would freeze your blood. Or boil it.
Wade was red in the face, just steaming, telling his mother how R.W. Gordon never in a million years would have wanted Johnny to inherit his ancestral home if he’d known that Johnny wasn’t Roland's baby. The very idea would have torn the old man out of his grave like robbers had dug him up.
Judy was in a state, asking Wade what could they do about it?
“Get your lawyer over here, Mom, that's what we can do about it. We can change your will.”
“But it's Daddy's will that controls everything!”
“Then we’ll go to court. Grandpa's clear intent, clear intent, that's what we’re dealing with here!” Wade kept slapping one of his hands down on the other, as loud as a horsewhip. “You think Grandpa intended for some nigger bastard of Noni's to get his hands on Heaven's Hill? Come on!”
Judy had burst into tears. “I shouldn’t have told you! Wade, don’t say anything to Noni, please. You know what? I think she was lying to me, just to upset me. I don’t think Johnny is…Kaye's.”
“Oh bullshit!” Wade had thrown his tea glass right off the porch onto the brick walkway where it smashed into broken bits that somebody was going to have to clean up.
The next morning, earlier than usual, five o’clock and already light—what did Shani call it, summer solstice?— Amma had walked over from Clayhome and made her way around to the back of Heaven's Hill. She had to take her time nowadays, especially on that flagstone path. Her balance wasn’t so good, and the last thing she wanted was to break her hip and have Kaye use it as an excuse to move her out of Clay-home. And there sat Judy's wheelchair, all the way at the top of that path, up on the patio. There was Judy down swimming in that swimming pool, swimming back and forth, back and forth, like somebody had wound her up too tight, like she used to swim when she was a school girl, trying to win those races that her daddy R.W. Gordon was always yelling at her to win. Leaning over the side of the pool, yelling at her: “Gordons win gold, Gordons don’t win silver, they win gold!”
There Judy was, seventy-two years old, naked as the day she was born, swimming in a straight line like the hounds of hell were chasing after her.
And Amma knew it wasn’t the first time Judy’d been in that pool; she’d seen the wet nightgowns hanging in the bathroom. Poor Dionne had showed them to her, wondering how they’d gotten that way, scared to ask Mrs. Tilden. Well, now they knew.
Not until she’d made her way down to the edge of the pool had Judy seen her there. Amma’d clapped her hands. “Judy! You get out of that pool before something happens to you. At your age! And weak as you are, too.”
Judy spat water out like a mean child. “You can’t tell me what to do.” And she’d kicked her feet faster.
“Judy! You’re having one of your spells and you don’t even know what you’re doing. You come over here to the side of this pool right now and let me help you out. You hear me, come on!”
“Get away from me, you stupid old nigger. Stop spying on me. This is my house.”
Judy had never called her that before, never used the word as far as Amma knew. It showed what Wade was doing to her, showed how she’d come under his influence. Amma watched Judy swim faster and faster, churning the water, but not in a straight line anymore, and she knew something wasn’t right, but all she said was, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Get away from me!”
Amma had walked on back up the flagstone path, hearing the sound of the water slopping against the sides of the pool.
And the question, the question Amma still couldn’t settle in her mind, was, when she’d reached the patio, hadn’t she heard, “Aunt Ma! Aunt Ma!” called up to her? Or had it only been in her mind, or had it been the splashing water?
She hadn’t come back out to cut her flowers until after seven. She’d just sat at the green pine table in the kitchen at Heaven's Hill, just sat listening to the house sleeping.
Judy was dead when she came back, floating face down in the pool. That's when Amma had taken the wheelchair from the patio and rolled it down the path and thrown it into the pool and thrown in the nightgown, too.
Then she’d tried to yell for help but her voice was too old and weak. So she’d rung the big iron triangle hanging from the side of the summer kitchen, that Judy said was an antique, that had once called workers up from the terraced fields below.
Sitting in the dark by the window at Clayhome, Amma told herself that if she couldn’t settle her mind about Judy before she died, she’d leave it up to Jesus. Maybe up in heaven she and Judy both could say they were sorry.
Across the lawn, the holiday lights at Heaven's Hill were a blur of blinking colors. Noni's party was over; Amma could hear people shouting “Merry Christmas,” and the cars driving off.
Afterwards it was quiet for awhile. Out of the quiet she could suddenly hear Johnny running across her gravel path and up her steps—she could tell it was him—and then he burst through the door into the kitchen. “Aunt Ma!”
“I’m over here, honey, what's the matter?”
“Kaye took Mom to the hospital in his car! And he told me to stay here.”
Amma held out her arms and, breathless, the boy ran into them. His curls were damp, the curls people probably thought he’d gotten from Roland Hurd's black curly hair, like his tanned skin. Johnny had a sweet spicy smell like cookies. She patted his back. “What's wrong with her? Just wait. Catch your breath.”
Johnny huddled next to the old woman, taking in air in deep gulps. “Nothing. Kaye says nothing's the matter with Mom. It's just some tests he's got to do and it's better to do them at Christmas because it's not busy. But why couldn’t I go if it's not busy?”
Amma kissed the boy's head. “Well, I guess where they do these tests is someplace children can’t go. But, listen to me, honey, listen to me. Kaye knows what to do. If he says we don’t have to worry, then we don’t. He's the head of that whole place over there. So we can put our minds to rest, all right? It's just some tests your mama needs for those headaches she's been having.”
“Maybe they can find some pills for her?”
“I’m sure they can. You want to stay the night with me?”
He nestled against her, shook his head beneath her hand. “I got to stay with Aunt Bunny. She's counting on me. Are you all alone?”
“No honey. Dionne's upstairs watching Tat's videos. You go on back home.”
“Okay. Bye.” And he was gone.
Amma sat there in the dark, worrying about Johnny. Something was wrong with Noni and Amma knew it, whether Kaye did or not. You can’t keep your eye on a child from the day she was born and not know when there was something the matter with her.
Well, if the cup wouldn’t pass from Noni, then the Lord give that little boy the strength the Lord gave Kaye when he wasn’t much older. Kaye had come through, like gold in the fire, like Daniel.
And so would Johnny. He was a good boy, with his daddy's brave soul and his mama's loving heart. But deepest down he was like Amma herself. He had her love of family and of home, too. That boy loved Heaven's Hill. And it would be his.