The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  “I have something important to tell you,” she continued.

  “Either you’re sick or Mommy’s dead. Which one is it?” Dionne said, throwing her shoulders back. She thought, wrongly, that Hyacinth’s news would land more softly if she braced herself for it.

  “Your mother killed herself.”

  “Good for her. It was a waste anyway,” Dionne said. Her voice was hard, but Phaedra and Hyacinth could both hear the pain dammed behind her bravado.

  “What was a waste?” Hyacinth said.

  “Her life.”

  “How could you say that, Dionne?”

  “I’m just saying what you’re thinking. She stopped living a long time ago. I’m glad she finally had the good sense to let go.”

  Hyacinth put her right hand up in front of her, as if it could stop the flow of Dionne’s invective.

  “So, how’d she do it?” Dionne said. Her eyes were cold, both feet planted on the floor. Someone looking at her might have mistaken her for an animal ready to pounce on its prey.

  “Dionne, I don’t think we should talk about this in front of your sister.”

  “How’d she do it? Just tell us. You and I both know that in five minutes every one of these silly people will be talking about it.”

  “I want to know too,” Phaedra added from her spot on the floor. It was the first thing she could say. Tears were streaming down her cheeks and her chest was starting to heave with the “ugly cry” Dionne teased her about.

  “The train,” Hyacinth said.

  “The train?” Phaedra asked.

  “Classic. Mommy always was one for the spotlight,” Dionne said. She pushed on her shoes and walked out of the house with her head tie still on, no direction in mind besides away. She left the door wide open behind her, so that the full measure of their grief, and of her anger, was on display.

  WHEN THE NEWS of Avril’s death first spread, it was at the top of everyone’s minds and on all the hill women’s lips. The women held their children and grandchildren closer to them and asked, “Can you imagine?” because they couldn’t imagine it, not how Avril had lived her life, nor how she had ended it. Some of them said that because of the way she had died, by right, there shouldn’t be the nine-night vigil that was always held when someone from the hill passed away. But Hyacinth had never been one to live her life by right. It was she who had single-handedly led a successful campaign to stop the practice of Saturday baptisms for the children who had no fathers to sign their birth certificates. Hyacinth gave her rousing Sunday-morning testimony from the seventh pew of Bird Hill Church of God in Christ where she sat every week, speaking plainly the truth everyone knew—Easter Sunday had seen only one child baptized, while the day before, mothers had lined up at the back of the church with their children like there was a carnival ride on offer. Father Loving’s father, whom the hill women called Big Loving to distinguish him from his son of the same name, tried to stop Hyacinth, saying that the sanctity of marriage had to be upheld. But Hyacinth only had to mention her deliveries of his two outside children, no less than two months apart the year before, and that was enough to settle the matter of his challenge. The next month, on Baptism Sunday, all the newborn children, fatherless and not, were dipped in holy water before the congregation.

  Given her history, Hyacinth wasn’t much for “should.” She would accept nothing less than the nine-night vigil and the grave-digging ceremony that marked the end of it to send her child to her final rest. What she’d said exactly was that wherever a few are gathered in the presence of the Lord there He is also, which was her way of saying that she was planning to keep vigil whether anyone joined her or not. The force of Hyacinth’s conviction could fell the walls of Jericho. And so, while Avril’s body stayed on ice at the funeral home in town, Mr. Jeremiah opened up the church hall for the vigil and left it open so people could come and go as the spirit moved them. And the hill women, even those who had grumbled about by right and mortal sin, even the ones who had already started churning the details of Avril’s death in their mouths, crafting cautionary tales for their own daughters and spreading the news of her passing from the hill to their relations in Toronto and London and New York, those women showed up.

  The first night of the vigil, a cool breeze blew off the sea. Hyacinth dug inside the trunk beneath her bed for a sweater Avril had brought her from her first trip to England, the trip that she’d returned from looking down at everything and everybody on the hill, the moment that Hyacinth would mark when Avril first started her steady journey away from her. Hyacinth pulled on the white sweater with red snowflakes embroidered on its back and went outside, the musty scent of mothballs clinging to her. On the road she could see old women not unlike herself, each moving slowly and steadily, with their Bibles and hymnbooks held firmly in their hands or secreted away in their purses. There was her neighbor Ms. Zelma closing her front gate and turning on her porch light. She noticed Mrs. Loving shuffling toward her as if she were one of the older women and not Avril’s age.

  “Evening,” Hyacinth said.

  “Evening,” Mrs. Loving replied. She slipped her arm through the crook of Hyacinth’s right elbow and they started to walk together. “Ms. B., I don’t really know how you making out. They say there’s nothing worse than burying your own child.”

  “God doesn’t give any one of us any more than we can bear.”

  “I know that is true. Doesn’t mean that your back won’t bend from the pressure.”

  “Mmm,” Hyacinth said. She had never spent much time contemplating what might break her, and didn’t intend to start now. “Tell me something. When was the last time you heard from her?”

  Mrs. Loving fluttered her hand to her temples as if the answer were there. “Must be Easter now that I think about it, you know. It was Easter, because she sent me two cards, one for Easter and one for my birthday. She always said that I shouldn’t let a little holiday steal my thunder.”

  Hyacinth laughed at that, a tinkle that started in her throat. The kind of laughter that came from her belly deserted her after Avril’s passing. “She was always like that, ain’t?”

  “Always wanted to be on the right side of right.”

  “I wonder where she got that from,” Mrs. Loving said.

  Hyacinth batted away Mrs. Loving with her free hand. She had never been one to go in for compliments.

  Even from the front steps, Hyacinth could smell the coffee brewing in the back of the church hall. She already knew what she would find when she went inside, a table laid out with Styrofoam cups, packets of Wibisco crackers and New Zealand cheddar cheese that would have sweated the saran wrap on a hotter night. If it weren’t for the wooden cross draped in black cloth and the blown-up picture of Avril from her high school graduation on the raised platform, Hyacinth might have been able to pretend that it was just another after-service repast. She let Mrs. Loving go in first, then took a deep breath and walked to her seat in the circle of brown folding chairs.

  Hyacinth looked up at the picture of Avril standing next to a hibiscus tree holding one of its flowers, her hair feathered around her face and shoulders, none of the fat that would become her second skin in the States yet on her. Hyacinth recognized the look on her daughter’s face as joy, and remembered that she never saw that look on her face again after she met Errol. To other people, the way Avril was in her initial courtship with Errol was joyful, but what Hyacinth saw in Errol was not an ambassador of happiness, but someone who would take her daughter as far as possible away from home and everyone who loved her. As for the nice person everyone saw in Errol, Hyacinth knew, because her mother had told her and she had come to find it out for herself, every skin teeth ain’t a laugh.

  When Avril’s body first arrived, Hyacinth didn’t believe that her child was really inside the coffin. She asked Mr. Jeremiah, who picked the body up at the airport, to check and make sure it was Avril. He found the dog-sh
aped birthmark on the inside of Avril’s left wrist that Hyacinth told him to look for and came to her house afterward with his face ashen, balling his baseball cap in his fist. The look on Mr. Jeremiah’s face told Hyacinth that she didn’t want to see the body for herself.

  The first of the nine nights, it was Mrs. Jeremiah who started them singing. All the women who had gathered, eight in total, had their hymnals with them, and the books weren’t exactly for show, but these were older women, women who had buried fathers, mothers, cousins, husbands, brothers, and sisters, women who had all the songs they needed in their hearts. It was a question not of what they would sing but in what order, at what tempo, a question of how many choruses and with what feeling. Mrs. Jeremiah opened her mouth and her nasal soprano took the first verse of the first song.

  Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

  Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

  Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

  Hallelujah, Hallelujah, we are going to see the king

  The women joined in, a fiery bellowing of low notes, their altos and Ms. Zelma’s tenor filling the church hall so that soon it was packed to its rafters with sound. Mrs. Jeremiah started clapping and the other women joined in and then there was only song and the sounds of their hands moving. Some of the sorrow that had sunk into the room began to lift, to ride the women’s voices. After they’d gone at the hymn hard and then soft, the white candles flickering at each end of Avril’s picture and the evening dropping down into night, they were together, bonded by lyric and melody. When Mrs. Jeremiah felt the air begin to settle, she slowed down the hallelujahs and brought them to a close. The women sat together in the buzzing quiet, some whispering “Amen” and other sounds of assent, some dabbing their brows and necks, all retreating into the private place where their own dead were with them.

  And then, Mrs. Jeremiah spoke.

  “We are gathered together this night and for the ones to come to send home the spirit of our sister Hyacinth’s daughter, Avril. We call upon our most high God now and ask Him to wash His faithful servant Avril in the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We rebuke every evil thing that stomped out her spirit in life and any evil thing that might want to trap her spirit here now. We call upon and claim this space as her final resting place. We say to our sister Avril that your workday is done and it’s time now to go be with your Father in heaven. And to Hyacinth we say with heavy hearts that your tears are our tears, your sorrows are our sorrows, your fears our fears. We know as well as you do that joy comes in the morning, but that the nights can be long and hard. We will watch these nights with you.”

  Hyacinth looked up at Mrs. Jeremiah, at her black dress that hung loose at her knees, and the long chain for spectacles that hung from her neck. It was strange to hear the words she’d spoken to other grieving women now spoken to her. She looked at the picture of Avril again and the song that was on her heart came out of her.

  When peace like a river descendeth my way

  When sorrows like sea billows roll

  Whatever my lot, thou has taught me to say

  The hill women’s chorus swelled as they sang, “It is well/It is well/With my soul.”

  And then Hyacinth heard a smaller voice behind her, and felt a tap on her right shoulder. She turned around to see Phaedra. She didn’t shoo her home or ask what had happened to Dionne, whom she’d left at home in charge of things. She tried to draw Phaedra onto her lap, but she was too big for that. Phaedra wriggled off and settled into the empty chair beside Hyacinth. She closed her eyes and slipped into the heave and flow of the women’s song. By right, children shouldn’t be at a nine-night. But there was no one brave or silly enough to try to stop Hyacinth or anyone who belonged to her from doing what they were determined to do.

  Phaedra felt the next song begin inside her chest. Since her mother died, melodies haunted her at odd times of the day. When she was brushing her teeth or washing the dishes, dusting the coffee table. The hardest part of losing her mother was that there were minutes and hours and almost whole days that would go by when Phaedra would forget that Avril was dead. And then she would remember. At these moments, there was the fact of her mother’s irreversible absence and then also the music that her mother loved. Avril was never religious, but she loved to sing and her voice when it soared gave her flight above her pain.

  “Jesus loves the little children,” Phaedra started in a tiny voice that hardly passed her lips. When joined by Hyacinth and the other women, Phaedra’s voice grew wings.

  “Jesus loves the little children/All the children of the world,” they sang, and all wanted so much to believe.

  PHAEDRA TURNED HER BACK to Jean and felt his fingers and measuring tape indent her skin. Jean was the darkest shade of chestnut; he had close-cropped hair, a lanky frame with arms that stretched almost to his knees, and thick, plum-colored lips. In another place, outside the hill, he might have been called beautiful, but here he was Buller Man Jean, and the son of his mother, Trixie, and neither allowed space for anything beyond a kind of grudging tolerance. To be the son of a whore, born into sin, was one thing. To be a homosexual, to choose a life of sin, was something else entirely, a way of sloughing off the obligations of common decency and flaunting the shame that was his birthright. The hill, like every place, had its deviants, and like other small places, what it demanded of them was sublimation. Phaedra could feel Jean’s sadness behind his tough exterior, and experienced it as a kind of gravitational pull. Phaedra didn’t complain about the rough, quick way that Jean calculated the length and width of her. She knew that, like her mother, beneath Jean’s sandpaper exterior lay a tender, bruised heart.

  Before they left New York, Avril told Dionne and Phaedra to give her love to Jean. Once they were safely out of their mother’s earshot, Dionne said that she wasn’t giving any love to her mother’s faggot friend. But the cost of making fast friends with Jean’s cousin Saranne was that Dionne had to see Jean every day when she sought escape from the heat and Hyacinth’s rule in Trixie’s air-conditioned shop. Over time, Dionne’s initial iciness toward Jean, who she thought was eccentric in a way that reminded her of Avril, thawed. Dionne still believed that Jean’s problem, and Avril’s too, was that they held too tightly to their status as outsiders, which Dionne couldn’t understand, given how much she wanted a normal family, a normal life, and how little their being different had profited them.

  Dionne and Saranne were usually the only people in the shop where Trixie sold detergent and other sundries; the hill women only patronized her when either rain or desperation forced them to produce something for her besides scorn, and even then they would make only the barest of greetings and point to the things they wanted with their mouths. Phaedra, on the other hand, visited Jean often, finding pleasure in his easy way, a respite from the demand for good behavior and idle chatter that she found everywhere else on the hill. While Jean took her measurements, Phaedra admired the bolts of fabric that lined the walls of Jean’s sewing studio, which was really just his bedroom, off to the side of his mother’s shop. Since Avril had died, Hyacinth’s house pulsed with reminders of her—her school pictures, the clothes Dionne unearthed from her closet and hung all over her room in a kind of tribute, the rocking chair where Phaedra liked to read and into which Avril had carved her initials, in every new crease and crag in her grandmother’s face. It was a relief to be somewhere with bright things, things that were not Avril’s. She pointed to the fabric that she liked, yellow cotton with red hibiscus stamped on it.

  “That’s what I want,” Phaedra said.

  “That kind of thing don’t wear to funeral,” Jean replied.

  “Why not?”

  “People wear black or white or purple. You have to respect the dead.”

  “But Mommy’s favorite flower is hibiscus.”

  “That’s true. That makes me think. Have you ever seen pictu
res of your mother from when she was younger?”

  “Only a few.”

  Jean took the needle that was parked in the corner of his mouth and stuck it on a pincushion. He reached under his neatly made bed, which became a seating area for clients during their fittings, and then opened a red faux-leather photo album over his knees.

  “You went to New York?” Phaedra asked. As the summer wore on, Phaedra had started to divide people into categories according to who had seen her city and so could understand her, and people who had not. She was surprised that Jean made it onto her short list of the highly favored. She looked at the picture of her mother with Jean’s arm wrapped around her waist. To the right, almost outside the frame, a man stood by the railing, closer to the Statue of Liberty than to Jean and Avril.

  “Of course I’ve been to New York. And not just once either,” Jean said.

  “Who’s that?” Phaedra asked, pressing her stubby pointer finger against the Polaroid.

  “You don’t know your own father, P.?”

  Phaedra squinted her eyes and pulled the photo carefully from its plastic cover, toward her face. “That doesn’t look like my father.”

  “The very same.”

  “No, Daddy has a belly.”

  “That’s right. I forget how wunna does go to America and get fat. I see you slim down since you come.” Phaedra felt her cheeks go hot. She remembered the way that her mother would ask her when she was eating which man wanted a fat wife even as, sometimes in the next breath, she would tell Dionne that only a dog wants a bone. All summer, she’d been grateful for the fact that on the hill, body talk was matter of fact, merely descriptive and not some indication of her future, or a symptom of failure. Still, talk of her body and its doings made her blush.