The Last Noel by Michael Malone Page B

give way in his arm and she could feel his shoulder turn almost imperceptibly toward her. She leaned against him. “How's the puppy?”
    He just shrugged.
    She tried a few casual comments, but it became clear that Kaye wasn’t going to talk to her. So she opened her music book. She struggled to study the notes of a Schumann piece she would have to play for her teacher after school, but instead she found herself thinking, on the slow ride through Moors, about the last conversation she’d had with her brother Gordon.
    They’d been at the airport, the whole family. Gordon, in his new lieutenant's uniform, was going overseas, leaving his hometown—although none of them knew it—for the last time. He’d asked the ten-year-old Noni to come have a “private Coke” with him.
    It was then that he’d told her about a September morning back when he’d been a high school sophomore. The first Negro students were entering the segregated Moors High School that day. There were only two, he said, a girl and a boy. The girl wore glasses and a starched white blouse and the boyhad on a navy blue suit and a tie. Yelling at them from the sidewalks were thirty or forty white parents. (One of these red-faced women—Gordon told Noni that he’d emphasized this fact to their mother to make her sympathetic to the Negroes—had been smoking in public, and wearing a quilted bathrobe.)
    He said three police cars sat parked at the curb in front of the school, but the policemen didn’t get out of them or try to stop the crowd of adults from screaming at the two children. But five members of the student council organized by Mindy Breckenridge (Bunny's older sister) were waiting on the sidewalk with two teachers, the music teacher Miss Clooney and the English teacher Mr. Altman. And they made what Miss Clooney called “an honor guard” (“And the honor is ours,” she’d said) around the two Negroes and they’d walked them past the shouting parents and into the school. Gordon, the sophomore class vice president (“and that was a joke”), was one of this honor guard.
    Day after day these school officers met Dorothy and Arthur after their classes, walked with them through the halls, sat with them in the cafeteria, walked with them out of the school and into the bus.
    â€œYou know what, Noni?” Gordon told his little sister as they drank their Cokes in the airport. “It's the only thing in my life I’m proud of. That I showed up that morning when Mindy called me. The only thing.”
    Upset, Noni tried to make her brother feel good about himself. “Aren’t you proud to be a soldier?”
    â€œNo. I just don’t have the guts to fight Mom and the rest of it. That's what I’m telling you, Noni. It's so damn easy to give in. They make it so damn easy. So don’t get scared. Don’t let them.”
    Unsure of what he meant, she ran around the chair to him, hugging him tightly. “Oh, Gordon. Please don’t go!”
    â€œI’ve got to. You take care of Dad, okay? You know what I mean, the drinking? Nonibaloneymacaroni?”
    On the bus ride now, Noni was thinking about Gordon's funeral, how the rain was falling from the shiny brim of the honor guard's hat in St. John's Cemetery as he handed the American flag to their mother. And how their father had cried so terribly, his face twisted in a way she’d never seen before, when he put his hand on Lt. Gordon Tilden's rose-covered casket. She was wondering now whether the young black woman she’d seen that day standing under an umbrella next to an ivy-covered tomb of another Gordon who’d died in a war, Capt. E.D.R. Gordon Jr., C.S.A., 1842–1864, whether the woman had been the girl Dorothy, beside whom Noni's brother had been so proud to walk.
    When the school bus stopped, Kaye pushed around Noni out of their seat and hurried up the aisle. She had to move quickly to