The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  Jean motioned for Phaedra to turn toward him, and began measuring the length from her hip to her knee. She giggled as the cold tape touched her bare skin.

  “So did you make a lot of friends this summer?” Jean asked.

  “Is two a lot?” Phaedra said.

  Jean smiled. “Your mother was the same way. It’s funny, because people always wanted to be her friend, but Avril said she didn’t need any crowd of people following behind her.”

  “But you were one of her friends, right?” Phaedra said. She wanted to change the image forming in her mind of her mother as a lonely girl. All summer, she’d wondered who her mother talked to in Brooklyn since she and Dionne and her father were gone, and she didn’t have many friends to begin with. Phaedra wondered who would keep her mother company now that she was dead. Death seemed like another friendless place, even more lonesome than the life Avril left behind.

  “Oh yes. And I’ve never met a better friend before or since.”

  “What made her a good friend?”

  “Well, some people will tell you having a good friend is about having someone to go to parties with, or someone to go shopping with, a liming partner basically. But a real friend only has to do two things. The first is to listen to you. And the second is to claim you.”

  “Claim you?”

  “Did your mother ever tell you about sleepaway camp?” Jean asked. He pushed aside the pincushion and measuring tape, and then he patted the bed next to him for Phaedra to sit down. She hesitated, because Hyacinth always told her that she shouldn’t sit on people’s beds, especially not a man’s. But Jean was different. He invited her again and she eased onto the edge of the comforter.

  “So did she tell you about how they used to call her a buller man’s wife?”

  “Yeah,” Phaedra said, recalling her mother’s famous stories about sleepaway camp. She didn’t want to let on that she didn’t understand exactly what being a buller man’s wife meant.

  “Well, I don’t know if your mother told you that she took on those girls who used to taunt her, all six of them at once.”

  “She said she fought them, but she never said how.”

  “Well, your mother was on mess hall duty one morning. On her way to the canteen, she gathered all these red ants into an old t-shirt. And when the cook’s back was turned, she poured them into the mean girls’ cereal bowls.”

  “Didn’t she get in trouble?”

  “Your mother hated that camp so much, the best thing she could imagine happening was being sent home early, except she didn’t want to leave me there by myself.”

  “Wow, I wish I was as brave as she was,” Phaedra said.

  “Sure as you stand here before me, I know that if Avril spit you out, you have more than enough courage to go around. I’m more afraid for whoever finally makes you use it.”

  “I want you to make me look like my mother does in this picture,” Phaedra said, bringing them back to the photo Jean had shown her of Avril.

  Jean looked down at the photograph in Phaedra’s hand, at the goldenrod jersey dress that Avril loved, and that he’d made for her himself. Then, he went over to the bolts of fabric and picked out one of the black cotton ones.

  “So, little miss. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll sew some hibiscus on this fabric for you.”

  “Can you make the flowers red?”

  “I can make them purple or white.”

  “Purple.”

  “Deal,” Jean said. He checked his notebook to be sure that he had everything he needed, and then he bade Phaedra goodbye. And although her original destination was her grandmother’s house, on her walk home, something made her turn in at the Lovings’ gate to find Chris.

  Mrs. Loving sat on her gallery with a cassette player on a shaky card table beside her, wailers songs streaming out beneath the huge cross that dwarfed the Lovings’ front door. Mrs. Loving gestured for Phaedra to come, and she did. Phaedra was grateful for the fact that Mrs. Loving looked at her with the same far-off stare she’d had before her mother’s death. Phaedra found her persistent melancholy comforting, in contrast to the newfound pity that poured out of the other hill women’s mouths and onto her head like hot coals. Just that morning Phaedra had looked in the mirror and wondered if people could tell just by looking at her that her mother was dead. There was mercy in Mrs. Loving’s cloud of private pain that never lifted enough for her to see the people around her clearly.

  “I know just the person you’re looking for, but the boys are gone to see their grandmother in St. Philip,” Mrs. Loving said. She reached to turn the cassette player’s volume down. Phaedra nodded, disappointed. “Why don’t you sit for a bit? I wouldn’t mind the company and your face is so long it looks like you could use some too.”

  Phaedra relaxed into one of the chair’s soft cushions. The way that her bottom sank into the seat reminded her that the chairs on her grandmother’s gallery were castoffs from when the church had upgraded its hall. She sat up straight again.

  “When I was your age, my mother died too. Everybody was walking around talking about what happened for weeks, about the way she waded into one of the rough beaches on the east coast, and never turned back. Me and my brother were on the beach, and I was pushing the last fist of sand below his chin when it happened, burying him. I turned around and there was just the top of her hair floating above the water, that same pretty hair she brushed every night and sometimes let me brush for her. After her head disappeared under the water, I stayed stuck like that, not talking until my brother saw me frozen and got up to see what happened. Afterwards, everybody said it was my fault for not saying something, that somebody might have fished her out if I acted quicker, but the truth was that she wanted to die, and she would have, if not that day, then another. I didn’t talk for a whole year after that happened. And when I did, the big voice I used to sing with on the junior choir was gone.”

  These were the most words that anyone had spoken to Phaedra since her mother died, not cooing or talking over her head to her grandmother or to Dionne, but addressed directly to her. News of Phaedra’s singing to herself had gotten around the hill, starting with Hyacinth’s whispers to Ms. Zelma that what worried her more than anything was that Phaedra had taken to dragging hymns through her throat until they were extended dirges, woeful things that cast another layer of pallor over the house. In the hill women’s mouths, the tip of Phaedra’s hand toward madness was another indictment of Avril. “Look how the child walking about here like she one step away from the mental. Just mind she don’t come in like her mother,” they clucked. Phaedra was lucky enough to be spared these pronouncements because when the hill women saw her, all they would say was “cuhdear” and ask after her granny and offer their best. But sometimes, in the thick of the songs that settled around her, even Phaedra wondered if what was wrong with her mother was not also wrong with her.

  In the beginning, when Avril first took to her bed, Phaedra was always within a few feet of her mother, sensing that her presence, even if unacknowledged, was a kind of balm. Phaedra would sleep curled up at the foot of her mother’s sofa bed, stand behind her, oiling and brushing her scalp, keep her cups of tea fresh, milky, and lukewarm. But over time, as the thing that got ahold of Avril dug deeper and deeper into her, Phaedra retreated into her books and solitude, angling her body away in the rare moments when Avril remembered her children and gave them awkward, short-lived bouts of attention. It didn’t help when the girls from her school, who never liked her, found new ammunition for their taunts, saying that Phaedra’s mother was crazy, and that crazy was catching, and if everybody knew what was best for them, they would stay as far away as possible from Phaedra. Phaedra thought about lashing out; in her mind, she dragged the ringleader by her pigtails down the glass-strewn concrete steps in the school yard. But she knew that would only make their lies seem true, and so she’d stewed by herself, counting down un
til the last day of school. Now, with the full extent of her mother’s madness proven by her suicide, it was hard for Phaedra not to wonder whether she’d inherited Avril’s madness. Maybe, if she was lucky, Phaedra thought, Avril had passed down a portion of her bravery too.

  Phaedra relaxed as Mrs. Loving’s reggae music took over the dreadful hymn that had been her company that day, “Rock of Ages.” She let Mrs. Loving’s story wash over her. And then she spoke, her tongue molasses thick, but moving.

  “You knew her?”

  “Knew who, sweetheart?”

  “My mother.”

  “Of course I knew your mother. Impossible to live here and not know her. When I came here with my husband, she was the first friend I made. And when she moved to New York, I was inconsolable. I still remember when Dionne and Trevor were born, we used to walk them all over the place. You sister could cry from the time she woke up in the morning until she went to bed at nighttime, and the only thing to help was to keep her moving.”

  Phaedra tried to reconcile what she knew of her mother and her sister and Mrs. Loving’s son Trevor with who they had been back then. It was easy to imagine movement comforting her sister, because even now, Dionne seemed most happy when she wasn’t still.

  “When we were pregnant, we did everything together. We said that if we had a boy and a girl, they would marry one day. Nobody could tear us apart from one another, you know. When Avril came to tell me she was leaving, I put on one piece of crying and carrying on. I didn’t think I could make it in this place without her. And in a way, I didn’t.” Mrs. Loving gathered her dress between her thighs and turned the volume up on her cassette player in a way that indicated to Phaedra that their conversation was over.

  Phaedra started to walk away, hearing this song and carrying away some part of Mrs. Loving’s sorrow: “This train is bound to glory/ This train don’t carry no unholy . . .”

  But some part of Phaedra was unhinged by Mrs. Loving’s stories. When she reached the last step of the gallery, she turned back.

  “Mrs. Loving, have you ever thought about what would happen if someone you loved also loved someone else?”

  “Oh, darling. Aren’t you a little young to be worrying your head with that sort of thing? I know that you’re all that Christopher talks about.” Mrs. Loving said these words wistfully, as if she wished she could borrow some of the shine her son reserved for Phaedra.

  Phaedra trembled with what was beating its way from her belly and up out of her throat. Ever since she’d helped her grandmother deliver Donna’s mother’s baby boy, she couldn’t get the image of Father Loving and his lit cigarette burning up the darkness out of her head. “You don’t wonder where Father Loving goes at nighttime?”

  “Dear heart,” Mrs. Loving said, looking down to the valley below and the sea beyond it, “when night comes, I have my music and my boys and that is enough.”

  A new song was on now, with different words, but the same guitar strains and drumroll. Mrs. Loving turned up the music and started humming along in a mournful tone that swept Phaedra off the veranda and onto the road.

  FOR ALL OF DIONNE’S ROMPS inside the Bird Hill cemetery that summer, when the day of her mother’s funeral came, all the resources previously at her disposal—humor, indifference, denial—abandoned her, and there was no place to escape from her mother’s body and the people who had gathered to see her home. Trevor stood across from her with his face so filled with mourning you would have thought it was his own mother being buried and not Avril. As the minutes stretched with Father Loving’s prayers and the hill women’s graveside songs, Trevor tried to catch Dionne’s eye. She glanced at him briefly and noticed for the first time the way that his hairline peaked in the center of his forehead like his father and his younger brother; the intensity of their resemblance mocked her grief. For years, Dionne had looked to her mother for clues as to what she would look like when she got older. It was hard to imagine what kind of woman she would be without the road map of her mother’s body to guide her. Dionne denied Trevor the gift of her gaze.

  It wasn’t until she saw the coffin being lowered into the ground that the fact that her mother was not coming back, not in some undefined “soon” as Avril pointed to in her letters, not next week or the week after, not when summer was over, not before school in the States started, not ever, became clear to Dionne. Dionne’s eyes had been dry since her mother died and where she’d expected to cry at the graveside, she felt instead an insistent fire at her heels and then an urge stronger than any she’d ever felt before to see her mother’s face. All the anger at her mother that Dionne had been holding back her whole life rushed to her throat and threatened to choke her. This last leaving was too much. Dionne thought that if she could just see Avril’s face, she’d be able to tell her that she couldn’t leave, not yet.

  Dionne lunged from where she stood with her arms around Phaedra, her sister’s tears traveling between the black lace eyelets of Dionne’s dress and pressing against her skin. She strode toward the grave’s open mouth. And the hill women, the same ushers she’d seen wave fans at the brows of enraptured women, hold down grown men as they spoke the unintelligible, terrible words that God threw down on them like lightning, they came for her. She’d never known these strong arms herself. But now Mrs. Jeremiah’s sinewy forearms wrapped around her midsection and pulled her back. Mrs. Gumbs’s bosom and belly engulfed her. The women said things she couldn’t understand, things she knew were meant to calm her and keep her safe inside their embrace. And then, she wasn’t sure how, exactly, Dionne was beside her grandmother and her sister, at the edge of her mother’s grave. And before she knew what her body was doing, her feet were making contact with the wreath of lilies on Avril’s coffin. There was a gasp as the hill women watched a group of men, including Trevor, drag Dionne up and out of the grave.

  The men pulled her to solid ground, and then Dionne felt the women’s fearsome power gather around her, but she wasn’t fighting anymore. She fell back into them, wishing they could take her anger from her, because it was heavy, what she felt, her rage at Avril for abandoning them in this godforsaken place with a grandmother they barely knew. It seemed unfair that Avril should have it so easy, that she could die and leave them behind just like that. Dionne fell back into the stalwart arms of the hill women who held her. And it was either Dionne’s feet or theirs that led her back to Hyacinth’s house for the wake.

  When the last mourners had taken their plates of wrapped food and said their good-byes, once Phaedra was asleep, it was just Hyacinth and Dionne sitting in the front room, leaning together into the night, which felt darker now because it lacked the comfort of the other hill women’s company. Hyacinth asked Dionne what on earth had come over her to make her want to climb on top of Avril’s coffin. And Dionne, of whom Hyacinth would say after this conversation that she was her mother’s own child, said, “What I did was nothing worse than what my mother’s done to me. If I had been able to see her even once before she died, I would have told her that she shouldn’t get off that easy.” Hyacinth looked at this child, at her flinty eyes, and saw how much she believed that she was not only right, but also justified. And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas. She knew that this was Avril’s undoing, not that she’d made the wrong choices, but that she’d been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage; this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth had taught Hyacinth that it wasn’t so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband’s fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the men who grieved too deeply the lives they’d wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them. Hyacinth worried a
bout Dionne because of her hard way of being in the world, the way she could only see the world through the lens of her own flawed feelings.

  FOR THE ENTIRE NINE NIGHTS that the hill mourned Avril, Phaedra and Dionne and Hyacinth were together almost every minute of every day. The girls and their grandmother formed a web between them that they wanted to believe was indestructible. They ate food their neighbors cooked for them and wiled the days away in prayer. On the last night, they took long soaks beneath moonlight in baths filled with bark and berries. They tried to build a new alliance with stories about Avril. Hyacinth, who was known less for her stories than for her carefully chosen words that awed with their precision, dug back into her vault of memories from the time when she herself was young and a mother, trying to reconcile what she thought motherhood might be with the reality of her sweet, impulsive child.

  Phaedra and Dionne listened as Hyacinth told them about the time their mother had driven with the church all the way out to Folkestone for the church picnic, singing hymns and shaking tambourines the whole way. After everyone had had their fill of food, Avril and Mrs. Loving rushed out in the cold water and did headstands on the seafloor, their gangly limbs kicking up above the water, and the skirts of their dresses falling down around their necks so that all the church people could see their puffy bloomers and their legs waving above them. Hyacinth had barely recovered from the embarrassment of that incident when Avril brought home Errol. He said he was a musician, and Hyacinth knew that meant he was definitely a layabout and possibly a criminal. Dionne perked up when she heard her father’s name and she asked Hyacinth what he looked like when she met him.

  “Well, when your mother dragged that young man in here, I could see from the way she looked at him like he was a bowl of milk and she was the hungriest cat that nothing good would come of them. I wondered to myself what would dead them first, his dreaming or her faith in him. He was wearing a cream linen suit and he had pretty pretty pretty hazel eyes and red-red skin. But I could see it was his mouth, the same mouth you have, that your mother fell in love with.”