The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, my child was all dressed to go, I mean, to the nines, hair, makeup, everything. And she was just about to put on her shoes when her father came out of the room where he’d been stewing. He walked into the front room just as her date was pulling up, and started taking off his belt.”

  “Who was her date?”

  “Oh, you know back then, Avril and Jean were thick as thieves. Jean’s father had died just a few months before the school dance, but not before spoiling that child rotten. Anything he wanted, a trip, shoes, clothes, a car, he got it. It was the car his father had bought him, a fast car the same red of Avril’s dress, that he picked her up in. But you getting me off track.”

  “So Mommy went to the dance with Buller—I mean, Jean?”

  “The one and the same. But child, you missing the heart of the story with all your questions. If you’d talk less, you would hear more. Anyways, your grandfather came in here pulling off his belt. And before Avril could even buckle the strap on the left shoe, much less the right, he had both shoes in his hands. And then he threw them into the cane field next door. Now, that time was before Ms. Zelma and Ms. Zelma’s house were here, and all those houses you see lined up out there were pure cane fields, and your grandfather could throw far. Your mother, as God is my witness, walked out of this house in her bare feet. I thought she was going to go into the cane to look for the shoes, but she stepped right past her father, and got into the car that was waiting for her. And from that day forward, whenever Avril and her father would see each other, it was in passing, and they never said anything to each other beyond what was strictly necessary.”

  “Wow,” Dionne said. She looked at the front room’s shut louvers and tried to imagine the scene, her mother in a red dress she’d made for herself and her grandfather chucking her high heels through the window. She couldn’t really form a picture of her grandfather. It was true, Dionne had always thought of her mother as springing from Hyacinth fully formed.

  “What was Granddad like?” Dionne asked.

  She watched something like a curtain close over Hyacinth’s eyes. What Hyacinth didn’t say, what she couldn’t, was that the night she’d called Avril to tell her that her father died, when Phaedra answered the phone crying into the receiver and Errol was in the background demanding to know who was on the line, she knew that Avril wouldn’t come home for the funeral. Hyacinth knew it was for show when Avril begged for a few days to see if she could buy a plane ticket. She’d tried to accept the money that Avril wired to help bury her father with a joyful heart. But she wished that Avril had known that Hyacinth needed her presence more than her money. It wasn’t so much that Hyacinth wanted someone to lean on, because Hyacinth was more than capable of standing upright in the face of the most difficult things, even her husband’s death. Hyacinth just wanted to know that she could shift her weight to one side and it wouldn’t be just the air and the force of her will holding her up, but the support of her family too. Hyacinth thought life was not just easier, but sweeter with family by her side. That’s what she’d been raised up to believe, and what her heart told her was still true now. She wondered why she hadn’t been able to pass this truth on to her own daughter. She wanted to know whether and how her grandchildren might learn this for themselves.

  “You don’t get enough stories for one night, child? Go to bed and don’t worry your head with all these old-time things,” Hyacinth said.

  Dionne got up and felt fatigue settle over her. She offered Hyacinth a hand to get up, but she shook her head and kept looking somewhere beyond Dionne. As the time between Avril’s letters lengthened, Dionne had become accustomed to finding her grandmother asleep in the colorfully patterned living room chair, as if she wanted to be there waiting the moment Avril decided to come home.

  “Night, Gran,” Dionne said. She shuffled toward her room, her mother’s letter and her grandmother’s story animating the inside of her eyelids.

  PHAEDRA STOOD BESIDE her gradnmother at the bus stop at the bottom of Bird Hill, praying that no one she knew would see her in the straw sun hat Hyacinth made her wear. The white elastic string tickled her chin. She’d tried to push the string under the brim, but then a strong wind lifted it up and off her head. Hyacinth stood in the middle of the road while Phaedra scurried across after the hat; she knew what was good for her, and so kept it securely, if uncomfortably, fastened after that. It was early on a Saturday morning, market day, and Phaedra was sure that the girls most likely to make fun of her were home doing their chores. Donna was helping her mother with the new baby, and had dark circles below her eyes and a new ring of fat around her belly to show for it. Christopher was probably out with his B-team of bandits, a boy named Thomas, who was constantly digging in his nose like he was mining for gold, and his twin brother, Timothy, who was his shadow, always parroting what he said and finishing his sentences. Phaedra knew that the boys were probably shooting at fruit and birds with the slingshots Father Loving made for Christopher that summer. She was sad not to be with them, but then she remembered Christopher’s response when Phaedra pointed out that he played with other kids when she wasn’t around. He said that he had to keep his mind off Phaedra somehow, and reminded her that she would always be on his A-team. Knowing she and Christopher were a team, Phaedra found that imagining him playing with the dumbbell twins didn’t bother her so much.

  Dionne stood behind her sister and grandmother in the shade of a tree whose wide, waxy green leaves made this part of the hill feel like a slice of rain forest. After they’d been waiting for the better part of an hour, the bus, blue and yellow like the colors of the Barbados flag, barreled toward them. Dionne and Phaedra walked past Hyacinth and onto the bus while she painstakingly counted out change for their fares. Hyacinth nodded at the only other passenger, a dapper man with coarse white hair pocking his jaw, wearing a suit so carefully pressed it looked as if it had been ironed directly onto him. Phaedra took a seat with Hyacinth in the front of the bus and Dionne sat directly behind them.

  “Granny, was this the same bus Mommy used to take to school?”

  “Not this one exactly, but one like it.”

  Phaedra closed her eyes and tried to imagine her mother riding the bus in the gray school uniform she’d seen pictures of Avril wearing.

  “And how long would it take, Gran?”

  Hyacinth craned her neck to look at the man in the back of the bus, whose eyes she could feel on her. She threw a “Morning” and then “Do I know you, sir?” over her shoulder. The man, his voice smoother than his salt-and-pepper hair would suggest, said, “I would like to think you do.”

  Phaedra looked at her grandmother, and tried to see what the man saw. Hyacinth kissed her teeth, and Phaedra realized from where Avril had inherited her fantastically loud and long suck-teeth.

  “What you saying now, pet?” Hyacinth said, returning her attention to Phaedra.

  “I was asking you how long it is from here to Mommy’s school.”

  “About an hour, maybe more, maybe less, depending.”

  “That’s a long way to go to school.”

  “It was the best one she could get into.”

  “Was she smart?”

  “The brightest.”

  “Was she sad?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I mean, sometimes Mommy would seem so down it was like she couldn’t get up if she tried, and it just makes me wonder if that’s how she always was.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes what?”

  “Sometimes she was sad. There was a whole term when she was in second form that I’d have to force her to eat breakfast and then walk her down to the stop myself and watch her get on the bus.” Hyacinth looked out of the bus as it traveled past an old sugar plantation where the rusted hands of a windmill stood motionless. As silly as it was, she found herself searching for Avril on the street outside
the window. “Months she was like that and no amount of anybody asking her what was troubling her helped. Just when we were thinking about sending her to my cousin in England, that dark thing lifted and she was almost like herself again.”

  Phaedra looked out the window and saw a desert rose tree with all its flowers skirting the bottom of its trunk, as if someone had made it their business to steal its beauty.

  “So there was nothing you could do to make it better.”

  “I wish I could say there was.” Hyacinth sighed and motioned for Phaedra to move closer to her, since the bus was starting to fill with people; Phaedra let herself sink into the cushion of flesh at her grandmother’s side. Hyacinth spoke again, as if Phaedra had asked her another question. “There’s nothing like wishing someone you love well, and knowing just wishing isn’t enough.”

  Phaedra nodded and felt the bus roll past the signal station at Gun Hill. A few minutes later she drew in air when the water came into view. No matter how many times Phaedra saw it, the sea exploded her sense of wonder, especially when the dense tree cover gave way to the blue-blue water lapping against the shore. Watching the women walking by on their way to run errands, the fishermen strolling along the beach, she wondered at their nonchalance in the face of such a marvelous sight. Phaedra inched toward the windows, burying her bony elbows in Hyacinth’s ample lap. And then she watched as the south coast blurred by and the sea got gobbled up by the hotels and resorts, only peeking out between openings in the concrete. She turned back to stick her tongue out at her sister, but Dionne was so deep in her own world, she didn’t even slap Phaedra in the back of her head like she usually would.

  They got off the bus at the depot in town and Hyacinth gripped Phaedra’s and Dionne’s hands. Each of the girls could feel their grandmother’s fingers, sharp-nailed and gnarled by bursitis. Dionne tried to shake out of Hyacinth’s grip, but she settled instead on holding her head down. It was nearly impossible she’d run into anyone who knew her, but just in case, Dionne had spent hours trying on, selecting, and then ironing two possible outfits. Dionne was the kind of girl who always wanted to be prepared for the event of someone else’s judgment, even a stranger’s.

  They crossed the street, careful to avoid the slimy hunter green sewage that snaked down the gutters between the sidewalk and the street. Phaedra shaded her eyes so she could see the boats lined up at the careenage at Independence Square. They went inside the market and Phaedra dropped her free hand from her forehead, felt Hyacinth’s hold on her loosen. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dark, her nose to the damp, dank smell, her ears to the sounds of people shouting prices and engaging in friendly arguments Phaedra thought were hostile until she saw her grandmother walk up to one of the vendors, inspect her pawpaws, and then start a shouting match that ended in laughter and the woman giving her extra fruit that weighed down Phaedra’s left hand. This ritual was repeated at the stalls where each woman greeted Hyacinth by her first name or, more often, Ms. B. Sometimes her grandmother would walk away in the middle of a negotiation, occasionally enticed back by the offer of a good price; sometimes she moved on for good. Phaedra loved the drama of it, and seeing her grandmother for the proud, powerful woman she was there. She smiled broadly when Hyacinth introduced her as “the little one for Avril,” hoping her extra teeth would make up for Dionne’s sullenness. They shopped for sweet potatoes, Phaedra listening intently as Hyacinth showed her how to check for hairs on the tubers’ rough brown skin, which was how you knew they’d be sweet. Hyacinth was about to pay for one when she noticed that Dionne, who had been lagging behind them, was gone.

  Hyacinth and Phaedra looked around, and then saw Dionne standing at one of the stalls off to the side of the market. Its sign read HARD TUNES & TRICKS and it was blasting Jamaican dancehall music, all of which Hyacinth considered abominable, one song’s beat to which Dionne was now freely swaying her behind. Phaedra walked over, leaving her grandmother talking to the sweet potato vendor, who had enough dirt under her fingernails to prove she’d pulled them from the earth that very morning. Hyacinth’s head was tilted to the right. That meant that she was listening, and Phaedra knew from the way their shoulders almost touched that they were talking about something not meant for her ears. She walked past rows of christophine, eddoes, and cassava piled high above her head, all the while watching Dionne, whose elbows were draped over the glass case where cassette tapes and Walkmans were displayed and sold for three times the price in the States.

  “Who’s this little princess?” the guy behind the counter asked when Phaedra entered.

  Phaedra drew back toward the lip of the stall that led into the market.

  “I don’t bite,” the guy said, and Phaedra saw his gold tooth shining. She remembered Hyacinth’s pronouncement on gold teeth—she still had all the teeth the good Lord gave her and jewelry was for the body and not for the teeth.

  “Granny sent me for you, Dionne,” Phaedra said, looking away from the spectacle of his mouth.

  “The morality police calls,” Dionne said, trying to throw hair she didn’t have over her shoulder.

  “Make sure you call me when you reach home. And take care of my princess for me, seen?” the man called after her.

  Phaedra noticed the guy talking in a forced Jamaican accent, which sounded neither better nor worse than the Jamaicans in Brooklyn whose efforts to speak American slang made words like “yo” elongate and turn into something else altogether in their mouths.

  “I will,” Dionne shouted over her shoulder as she exaggerated the swing of her hips. And then to Phaedra, “Why are you so opposed to me enjoying myself in this lifetime?”

  “Dionne.” Now it was Phaedra who was losing her patience. “I was just doing what Granny told me.”

  “Well, bless your heart,” Dionne said, imitating the signature phrase of Phaedra’s VBS teacher, Ms. Taylor.

  They went back to following their grandmother around on a seemingly endless circuit from stall to stall. At the butcher, where Hyacinth called out for modest cuts of pork and beef, the flies’ conference around the upside-down hanging slabs of meat made Phaedra’s breakfast curdle in her throat. By the time the shopping was done, they were all so tired it was all they could do to drag themselves back to the bus station. Phaedra wanted to squat on her haunches like she saw the boys do, but she knew without asking that it was better not to. She watched the orderly way people lined up around the metal dividers, and realized she’d never seen anyone queue for a bus in Brooklyn. The quiet of exhaustion wrapped itself around Hyacinth and her girls, a cocoon in which they traveled all the way home to Bird Hill.

  At home that evening, Phaedra and Dionne and Hyacinth sat at the dining room table eating beef rotis that Hyacinth bought in town. Because Hyacinth was not the type to eat on the street or even in a restaurant, by the time they sat down, they were beyond hungry. Phaedra sat with her legs crossed on the plastic seat covers to avoid the mosquitoes that congregated beneath the table hoping to make meals of her ankles. They had put away the groceries, washed their hands, and heated the food in the oven. The girls’ excitement had mostly dissipated, and the meal felt like fuel rather than the treat it was intended to be.

  “Watch yourself, Dionne,” Hyacinth said once everyone had polished off their food, and only stray streaks of curry and channa and roti skins stuck to their plates.

  “Sorry?” Dionne said. She pushed her chair back from the table and piled Phaedra’s and Hyacinth’s plates on top of hers.

  “Just as sure as I’m looking at you, I know you’re hearing me,” Hyacinth said. “I don’t see why you need to find yourself in public grinding up yourself on grown men and shaking your behind like a thoroughfare.”

  “A thoroughfare?”

  “The kind of woman who everybody passes through.”

  “Oh,” Dionne said. “I was just trying to have a good time.”

  “You know what kind of g
ood time that guy was looking with you? If you do know, you’re more stupid than you look,” Hyacinth replied.

  “Mommy always said that if we misbehaved she’d send us home. So here I am. The worst thing that could have happened to me already has.”

  “Don’t tempt the devil, darling. He’ll give you the worse bits you asked for, plus what you couldn’t even imagine.”

  “I’ll talk loud enough for him to hear, then, loud enough for anyone to hear,” Dionne said, her voice rising as she snatched her plate and stormed into the kitchen. Her protest of heavy feet and slamming dishes was one that still acknowledged it was her responsibility to clean up the kitchen after dinner.

  “I’m sure you will scream loud enough to make the devil hear, darling. I’m sure you will,” Hyacinth said, certain that Dionne could still hear her, even above the clamor she was making.

  ALWAYS, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, Hyacinth thought that Avril would come home. When Avril said that she was sending the girls home for the summer, Hyacinth was glad to have Phaedra and Dionne in the fullest versions of themselves, as seeing the girls day in and day out was so much better than the phone calls and pictures she’d been living off of for years. What Avril had said exactly was that she needed a break so that she could sort herself out and lay a better foundation for the girls. She kept using that word, “foundation,” pressing on it for emphasis the way you pound a table or a Bible, and in her mind, Hyacinth saw concrete being poured into the foundation of a house. Hyacinth thought it was no coincidence that from Ms. Zelma’s kitchen, when she stood talking on the phone to Avril, she could see a house whose foundation had been poured, its walls erected, but never finished. Hyacinth had lived long enough to know that laying down roots was an illusion that made people more comfortable, secure, a pillar they could hold on to until they got shaken to the core again.