The Last Noel Read Online Free PDF

white southerners, only one of whom he knew and that one a girl. Kaye hadn’t spoken to Noni Tilden since his arrival at Clayhome three days earlier and he didn’t want to speak to her.
    It was the first Christmas in Moors that he had felt this way. While he and Noni had never so much as written a postcard or said a word on the phone during the full year between each of his earlier trips South, still, in the past, he had always been glad to see her and to renew their disputatious conversation. From the moment his uncle drove him through the brick gates of Heaven's Hill, he had always stared eagerly out the rear window of the black taxi, searching for Noni, readying himself to come bounding out the door to challenge her with new knowledge. And he knew that just as eagerly, Noni had started in right after Thanksgiving asking Aunt Ma almost daily, “How long before Kaye's coming?” and that she’d be waiting to see the old black taxi bring him in through the white stone drive.
    It was true that each Christmas it had taken them a little longer to recover the freedom that they’d felt riding together on the sled the night they’d met—as if they were moving backwards, away from intimacy. Still, this was the first Christmas Kaye had felt that he didn’t want to see Noni at all. In fact, he’d pretended not even to notice her as she’d run waving behind his uncle's taxi. This was the first time he’d stayed obstinately locked in his room—listening loudly to Hendrix's Electric Lady-land , or reading one of his mother's books, Soul on Ice and Man-child in the Promised Land— whenever he heard Noni downstairs in Clayhome's kitchen, hoping, he knew, to visit with him.
    But now Kaye's grandmother was making him go to the Tildens’ annual Christmas party, making him help bake thecandies and cookies he was to take there as a gift. It was the last thing he wanted to do.
    In pressuring him to attend this party, Amma Fairley was not motivated by awe or fear or even respect for her employers, but by a kind and generous pity. The Tildens’ oldest son Gordon had been killed in Vietnam the previous February, almost a year ago now. But this was their first Christmas, their first social gathering, without him.
    â€œNoni lost her brother. She needs your help,” Amma said. “Or she wouldn’t have come over here with that invitation, not with you looking through her like she was a old piece of glass. And no grandchild of mine's going to treat his friends that way.”
    â€œShe's not my friend,” snorted Kaye. He dropped the warm white sugar balls and dark almond chocolates into a drawstring cloth bag with a sunflower sewn on it. He wrapped the bag in the green tissues and held the twisted top while Amma ran red paper ribbon between scissors and thumb so the tips sprang into festive curls. “My friends all live in Philly.”
    â€œWell, those Philly friends of yours didn’t invite you to a party and she did and she's the one with a big brother that got killed and you’re going and you’re taking these sweets with you.”
    Since her teens, Amma Fairley had worked as a maid at Heaven's Hill, and while in those forty years she had never been invited to a party there, on many occasions she had cooked for and cleaned up after the Christmas Open House. In the past few years, she had turned those duties over to her stepdaughter Yolanda, whose husband also ran errands for the Tildens in his taxi, but from past experience Amma knew that guests would be expected to bring small gifts, usually of holiday food or drink, to this party. She also knew that the most courteous guests came neither too early nor too late; she was keeping an eye on the metal clock above the stove to make surethat her grandson left Clayhome just before three o’clock to cross the lawn to Heaven's Hill.
    As for any further attempts to persuade Kaye to wear his new brown wool suit,