The Last Noel Read Online Free PDF Page B

a birthday present from her, instead of the bizarre and jarring outfit he had on, or to let her trim what he called his Afro, Amma had never been one to waste precious energy on futile desires. It was enough that he should go pay the Fairleys’ respects to the Tildens at their Open House. And go he would.
    She watched the boy with an appraising eye as he swiftly moved the cookie cutter over her sheet of gingerbread dough, leaving behind neat rows of brown Santa Clauses. “You got busy hands like me,” she told him. “I never had any use for an idle hand.” Amma nodded with tolerant disappointment at her husband Tatlock out in the living room in his wooden wheelchair, asleep in front of the large brown television set where he’d been watching news of the astronauts circling the moon in Apollo 8 the night before. The three astronauts were taking pictures of the earth rising behind the moon. Everyone was worried about them because Apollo 1 had blown up in January of 1967 and killed the men trapped inside.
    Kaye gave a studied look at his grandmother's second husband, overweight and crippled in his chair beside the black iron coal stove. Grandpa Tat watched the news morning, noon, and night. Kaye didn’t like the news; the news had driven his mother crazy. But unlike her, Tatlock listened to the goings-on in the great world with absolute impartiality and no emotional investment whatsoever. The news was his way out of the house, but it didn’t touch him, not the way his own troubles did. His own troubles were his chief interest and chief conversation. With endless fascination he would recount the minutest details of his physical condition, with a ghoulish emphasis on how he’d “lost it all. Toes. Foot. Leg.”
    Tat had worked outdoors for thirty-five years on the grounds crew of the nearby Haver University, had built big walls and roads and fences, dug big ponds and cleared big trees. Now, he was shrunk into a wooden wheelchair in a low room, a sufferer with diabetes and, according to him, a victim of prolonged medical neglect for which, as he endlessly vowed, he would someday get a lawyer and bankrupt the veterans hospital.
    Amma was saying, “That man tells me he can’t do nothing ’cause he lost his leg to the Sugar. What's his leg got to do with his hands?”
    Kaye shrugged. “He's got disability. You want him to get a tin cup and beg on Main Street?”
    Her eyes—the strange dark amber that Tatlock called cat eyes—flecked gold. “Kaye King, don’t make me think you’re calling my table sales begging on the street.”
    â€œNo, Ma’am.” But in fact that had been what Kaye had meant. His grandmother's street vending embarrassed him; she resembled too closely the beggars on the sidewalks of Philadelphia. Amma spent evenings at her sewing machine, making place mats, dishcloths, aprons, tea cozies, guest towels, and such. On these objects she had started sewing, at Tatlock's suggestion, large yellow sunflowers that served as a kind of logo of her craft. In good weather, she sold them from a table set up in front of Moors Savings Bank, where Noni's father Bud Tilden worked for his father-in-law. She sold them as fast as she could make them. She also sold her candies and cookies, her pickled fruits and canned vegetables, cut flowers and dried herbs and willow baskets. For decades now she had sold anything she could think of to make or grow and she kept the money in a savings account at Moors Bank.
    Kaye echoed his grandfather's perpetual lament. “What's he suppose to do? Thanks to that V.A. hospital he can’t even walk.”
    â€œThere's a million things Tat could do.” Amma scooped the gingerbread Santas onto the baking sheet. “Help me withthe million things I do. Sit behind my sales table in his wheelchair and free me up to do my work. He could help me sew. A man can sew, same as a woman.”
    â€œYou said he