The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  The girls went to sleep that night with this image of their father in their minds. The next morning, Phaedra woke up upset. After her mother died, Phaedra couldn’t remember her dreams. Regardless of what the dreams were about, they left their mark on her and it was not unusual for Phaedra to wake up shaken, her clothes plastered against her skin. She had taken to crawling into Dionne’s bed in the early hours of the morning, which she said was because she thought Dionne might be lonely. Now, she clung to Dionne like a life jacket.

  “Dress over nuh, man. You squeezing me up too tight.” Dionne pried away Phaedra’s fingers, which were fastened in a vise grip around her neck. Phaedra wiped the sleep out of her eyes and looked at her sister, who had wrapped her straightened hair into a kind of tornado around her head, and then tied it down with a scarf to keep it fresh, a trick she’d learned from Saranne.

  “Daddy’s coming to see about us,” Dionne said, looking, as she often was, into the mirror next to her bed. She searched her plump, pink lips for signs of her father, but all she could see was Avril.

  “What?” Phaedra said. She sat up in Dionne’s bed and looked from her sister’s beehive to the fuzz of hair above her own two-week-old braids, which her grandmother hadn’t insisted on redoing. There was a new softness in Hyacinth since her mother died. Phaedra knew that she got her way more often with her grandmother and the other hill women because of her dead mother. She only hoped this new reprieve from hardness would last.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I said Daddy’s going to come look for us.”

  “How do you know that? Who told you?”

  “I can just feel it.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in all that mumbo-jumbo hocus-pocus old-wife-tale business.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I believe in or not. Certain things you just know.” Dionne whipped her silk bathrobe around her, yet another thing she’d gotten from Saranne and kept instead of returning it like Hyacinth had told her to. She flicked on the overhead light and Phaedra groaned.

  “Besides, do you really think that if Daddy knew Mommy had died, he would just leave us here?” Dionne continued.

  “I don’t know, Dionne. Maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. It has been a long time since we’ve seen him.”

  “You just watch. I know that Daddy wouldn’t leave us like that.”

  “OK, D.,” Phaedra said. She sat a while longer watching her sister fuss with the lotions and potions on her vanity, and then she started to burrow beneath the covers.

  “What are you doing?” Dionne asked.

  “Going back to sleep,” Phaedra said.

  “Last time I checked, you had a bed down the hall.”

  “Fine, then.” Phaedra stalked out of the room, and then came back to retrieve the bandana that had fallen off her head during the night.

  More than an hour later, after Phaedra heard her sister slapping her soles on the linoleum tiles on her way back and forth to the bathroom, Dionne emerged in the front room where Phaedra was eating breakfast in front of the television. Dionne was wearing a tight tube top, a denim miniskirt, Keds, and a pair of leg warmers in the same neon pink as her top.

  “How do I look?” Dionne asked.

  “Very, very done.” Phaedra noted the lip gloss and liner her sister was wearing in a shade of gold that made her mouth pop out from her face like a billboard. “You’re not going to VBS?”

  “Nope. Me and Saranne have plans for the day.”

  “But today’s the last day of rehearsals and you’re in one of the plays. How are you going to miss that?”

  “Let me worry about that. If Granny comes home before you leave, just tell her I had to go early for rehearsal.”

  “OK,” Phaedra said, unsure that she would lie if the time came.

  “Love you,” Dionne said on her way out the door.

  “Love you back,” Phaedra said. Ever since Avril died, they had started saying, “I love you.” This time, though, it felt like a bribe.

  AFTER AVRIL DIED, Hyacinth ran out of reasons why Phaedra couldn’t pierce her ears. Phaedra insisted that she needed it done because she had the VBS play coming up and she wanted to wear earrings. Since she was playing a woman, Martha, in the play, it followed that her look should be a little bit more grown up. Really, what Phaedra wanted was to perm her hair so that she could start school with her hair flouncing down her back. At her old school in Brooklyn, the other girls’ mothers had said they could straighten their hair for fifth-grade graduation. But Hyacinth shut Phaedra down early on in the summer, saying that if her hair was to be straightened, that was something her mother should decide. Because Dionne’s hair had been relaxed before she came to Barbados, she and Hyacinth sat once a month while Jean creamed their hair, having observed a whole week of not scratching their scalps and carefully combing their hair, a ritual and talk Phaedra wanted to be part of. Phaedra came home buzzing after the second of these visits, when she’d sat in Jean’s front room watching television and saw the advertisement for Brother D’s, a jewelry store in town: “Barbados Women Should Be in Chains. Brother D’s Chains.” Before the ad went off, Phaedra noticed that they also did ear piercing. She gathered up courage to talk to Hyacinth during her best time, the late mornings when she had just finished working in her garden, and a sheen coated her face. This was the closest time she ever came to seeing her grandmother happy.

  “Granny?”

  “Yes, Phaedra.”

  “When do you think I could pierce my ears?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, child. Why you in such a rush to bore holes in your ears?”

  “It’s just that the play is coming up and all the girls are going to be wearing gold earrings.”

  “If all the girls went down to the careenage and jumped in the water, you would do that too?”

  Phaedra shuddered at the thought of the green-gray, murky water against her skin. “No, ma’am. I just thought it would look nice, and be good for my role.”

  “The Lord ain’t studying what you wearing.” Hyacinth sat down to take off her gardening boots but was beat there by Phaedra, who squatted in the grass, pulled them off, and started massaging her grandmother’s feet in a circular motion that made Hyacinth throw back her head and say, “You know what to do, girl.”

  “That feels nice, Gran?”

  “Better than Christmas.”

  Hyacinth let her shoulders drop back against the bench her husband made for her when they were still young and in love. Back then the house and her garden were as new to Hyacinth as she and her husband were to each other. He would come home in the afternoons for lunch and they’d make love for so long that he’d have to rush back to his work at the mechanic shop with his belly rumbling and his full lunch tin banging against his shin. He’d made the bench for Hyacinth because he said that she deserved a place where she could relax and admire God’s work. She looked at the frangipani tree, whose fragrant flowers blanketed the ground. They were beautiful, but cleaning them up was a job that strained her back now. Hyacinth smiled to herself, knowing that her husband had made this house, this garden, this bench by hand so that she’d have something of him to hold on to when he was gone.

  Hyacinth relaxed into Phaedra’s touch and let her mind wander. Would Phaedra keep up the house when she was gone? Or would she and Dionne leave, like Avril, the first chance they got? She knew Dionne had a hot foot, but with Phaedra there was hope she’d stay. A couple days before Avril’s funeral, Hyacinth showed the girls the safe where she kept her money, her most important papers, and the simple white dress she wanted to wear to her funeral. She’d had to tell Dionne, who stood in the doorway with her fists at her waist and her lips pursed like she was sucking lemons, that if she thought death was something she could catch like a cold, she was more foolish than she’d already shown herself to be. It was Phaedra who sat down next to Hyacinth whil
e she explained that the plot she wanted to be buried in was already paid for and then listed out the hymns she wanted to be sung at the memorial service. Hyacinth pinned her hope on the chance that Phaedra’s steadiness might balance out her sister’s hotheadedness, that the two of them would take care of each other after she was gone.

  Hyacinth looked down at Phaedra kneading her feet. “OK, you little wretch. Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing. Give me time to go about my business today and then when evening comes, we’ll see about you and your ears.”

  “But Gran, don’t the buses stop running into town after dark?”

  “What we going in town for?”

  “We’re not going to Brother D’s?”

  Phaedra had imagined herself seated on a pink leather stool, careful to keep her elbows off the glass cases, smelling perfume on the lady who would take a gun to her ears while she sat valiantly still, no tears. Maybe her grandmother would let her try on one of those thick gold chains. Despite being a mostly sensible girl, Avril said, and it was true, that Phaedra had flashy taste like her father.

  “Oh Lord, please deliver me from these Yankee children.”

  “What happen, Granny?”

  “You got Brother D’s money?”

  “No, Gran.”

  “Right, then,” Hyacinth said, and pushed on the flip-flops Phaedra placed near her feet.

  Evening came and Phaedra finished washing the supper dishes. She listened to the night frogs’ song pulsing at the kitchen window and wondered what her grandmother was planning. She went to the front bedroom and saw Hyacinth sitting on the bed, rummaging through her sewing kit.

  “You need help finding something?” Phaedra asked.

  “I’m looking for a needle. You know Granny’s eyes not so good anymore.”

  “What do you need a needle for? I thought you said you were finished with the whole clothes-mending business.”

  “You know, Phaedra, for being such a bright girl, sometimes it seems like you don’t have too much sense knocking about in that head of yours.”

  Phaedra was quiet. Over time, she’d come to accept her grandmother’s way of serving insults and love together.

  “I’m looking for a needle to pierce your ears.”

  “Is that safe?” Phaedra had a flash of her mother, who she thought would be wary of this operation.

  “You think I would do you anything?” Hyacinth asked.

  “No, Gran,” Phaedra said. But Avril had told her to be careful of Hyacinth, past whom she would put nothing. Phaedra knew that the truth about her grandmother lay somewhere between her mother’s occasionally venomous descriptions and the sweet, hard woman she was getting to know. She picked out the best needle she could find, a short silver one that was unthreaded and, as far as she could tell, unused.

  In the kitchen, Phaedra pulled the stool where she usually sat shelling peas or husking garlic, or sometimes just watching her grandmother stir the pots. Hyacinth lit the pilot and put the needle to the fire. She handed Phaedra ice cubes from the freezer and draped dish towels over her shoulders to catch the drip. Phaedra caught a glimpse of herself in the picture window, her hands clutching the ice over her extended earlobes.

  “You have ears just like your mother,” Hyacinth said. When the needle was hot to her liking, she pulled it away from the flame. “Maybe you might be more able to hear with them when I’m talking to you than she was.”

  Phaedra squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth when she felt the pressure of the needle and then the string pulling through her right ear. But she didn’t cry, because she wanted her grandmother to think she was brave.

  NO ONE CELEBRATED the last week of Vacation Bible School more than Phaedra Braithwaite. Someone who didn’t know Phaedra might have seen the way that she was carrying on—singing more loudly than all the other girls during praise song, playing Martha in the final rehearsals with such gusto—and mistaken her enthusiasm for joy and not the relief of knowing that this particular form of torture would soon end. For while her mother’s death meant that she could take an entire week off from VBS, the following Monday she was back. And just as she’d feared, the girls whose disdain had previously spilled over Phaedra like Milo now eyed her with uniform pity. In no time, she’d gone from being the Yankee girl with the long hair to the Yankee girl with the dead mother. As their mothers had instructed them to do, the girls said “So sorry for your loss” and “Sorry to hear about your Mummy.” Simone Saveur even invited Phaedra to have lunch with her clique at the tables in the front of the church hall. But once Phaedra knew that she was invited and Donna, the closest thing she had to a girlfriend, was not, she refused. It wasn’t so much that she liked Donna, but that she held fast to her role of outsider now. And some part of her wondered about the limits of the new courage she’d earned, the true nature of the swagger that was hers now that she was a motherless child. She heard that song on the radio the Sunday after her mother’s body had been flown down and the lyrics stuck in her chest, a tape whose damaged brown plastic she thought might spool out of her mouth one day. There it was, the “sometimes” and “feel” cresting when she wasn’t speaking, the doleful tune stuck in her throat where she held it. If she concentrated, the song would take over; an entire day of VBS could be survived on just one extended chorus.

  Having rejected the questionable charity of her classmates, Phaedra sat down to eat with Donna. During her friend’s awkward monologue about her new baby brother, Phaedra took gulps of watered-down Kool-Aid and bites of the cheese and cracker sandwiches she’d packed onto a napkin, nodding at intervals to show her appreciation of Donna’s stories. Phaedra found herself both bored and hungry after she’d finished her lunch. She turned to Donna and tried to redirect the flow of her chatter.

  “So, is it true what they say, that you can climb trees?” Phaedra asked.

  “Sorry?” Donna looked up from her third cheese sandwich.

  “I said, is it true you can climb trees?” Phaedra said, watching Donna work the soft white bread from the roof of her mouth.

  Donna’s face brightened. “Oh yes. Coconut tree, pawpaw tree, breadfruit tree. Fig tree. Although you can’t really climb a fig tree, since the figs grow close to the ground.”

  “You climb that mango tree outside yet?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one behind the church.”

  “Oh, sure. Last year, me and Chris had a contest to see who could pull down the most mangoes.”

  “Who won?”

  “Me, of course.”

  “Of course.” Phaedra smiled because there was something about finally finding the place where Donna shone that delighted her.

  Donna stayed quiet for a moment, waiting for the thrill of being directly asked about something she cared about to return.

  “Come,” Phaedra said. Donna followed Phaedra outside where the girls from their class were taking a break from jumping rope to play in each other’s hair on the church hall’s back stairs. Angelique, whose hair was wavy and weighed down by the coconut oil her mother brushed into it every night, sat on one of the concrete steps, her ponytail open and her hair spread over the laps of three girls who admired it with their hands. Angelique hadn’t spoken more than two words to Phaedra since she had beaten her decisively in the Bible verse memorization championship. Phaedra had won by remembering that the Lord said to Jeremiah, “They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you.” Angelique hemmed and hawed while she tried to remember Psalm 127, verses 3 to 5. Even after Father Loving, who favored Angelique, gave her the word “arrows” as a hint, she still couldn’t produce the verse about how children are a heritage of the Lord. Just that morning, when the other girls mumbled their condolences, Angelique just looked at Phaedra and said, “Morning.” Phaedra was grateful for the steadiness of Angelique’s spite.

  Phaedra t
hought to say excuse me to the girls who were blocking their way out, but instead she jumped off the side of the steps, and Donna hopped down too.

  “Pick some mangoes for me, nuh,” Phaedra commanded. She shaded her eyes and looked up into the branches of the fruit-heavy tree.

  “How many you want?”

  “Donna Husbands, I know you are not going to climb that tree with your skirt on.” Simone Saveur spoke from where she sat clasping a fistful of Angelique’s slicked-down hair.

  “I have shorts on underneath,” Donna said to the crowd, which was gathering now, as it always did when she climbed.

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to those dusty girls,” Phaedra said.

  “How many you want?” Donna asked, sizing up the tree. The ripest ones were also the highest.

  “As many as you can get.”

  “What did you say?” Simone Saveur spat from her seat.

  “I said she doesn’t have to explain herself to any dusty girls. If she wants to climb a tree, she can climb a tree. Go ahead, Donna.”

  Simone walked over to where Phaedra stood and planted herself directly in front of her. “Oh, so you think because you come from America, you can call us names? No one cares if your mother was too damn mad to know better than to kill herself. The two of you make a nice pair. The daughter of a whore and the daughter of a madwoman.”

  A roar started among the children who could hear the fight inside Simone’s words.

  “I see you have plenty chat when your boyfriend is around, and now your mouth not working so fast,” Simone baited.

  “Excuse me, Simone,” Phaedra said, trying to push her gently aside. But the mountain of Simone Saveur, who had tree trunks for thighs like her five older sisters, would not budge. Their father had left after the last of the girls, twins with the same fierceness as the ones who preceded them, were born. The hill women had offered their condolences to the mother but no one could blame him for seeking somewhere he could be a man.