The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  Errol swayed then, a movement that, like a personal earthquake, started in his shoes and went right up to his head. “I came to see about my girls.”

  “Your girls?”

  “My daughters.”

  “Sweetheart, aren’t you going to say hello to your daddy? You must be Faye,” the woman in the white dress said to Phaedra, who had planted her face inside Hyacinth’s crooked elbow. The scent of rum was on the woman too.

  “My name is Phaedra,” she said. She’d never been well-liked enough to earn a nickname at school, and the sound of her shortened name was strange in this new woman’s mouth.

  “And what is this, Errol?” Hyacinth asked, pointing her mouth at the woman beside him.

  “This is Evangeline. I brought her along to help me with the children. She’s a great cook, keeps the house together for me back in Miami.”

  “How you find yourself all the way down there?”

  “It’s a long walk from New York, a short flight from Miami.”

  “Errol, you must take me for a poppet or a fool. You think that you could just put down your children one day like an old toy and come back another day and pick them up? I have no intentions of handing these girls over to you. You have exactly sixty seconds to clear yourself, and this, this person, off my porch, y’hear?”

  “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be, Hyacinth. I have a lawyer that I consulted.”

  “I thought you were below the law.”

  “Tell me which judge would give a woman like you custody. You think obeah women make good guardians?”

  Hyacinth got close enough to Errol to speak in his ear. Phaedra couldn’t hear what she said, but her words pushed Errol and the woman off the gallery. Whatever spirit had dragged Evangeline down into the mud earlier now summoned the wind to reveal the red bloomers beneath her white dress. Later, Hyacinth would tell Phaedra that women wore red underwear to ensure that their dead husbands would not visit them in the night after they’d died. Phaedra couldn’t understand why she would be wearing red underwear when the person who had died was her mother, and she said as much to her grandmother. Hyacinth looked at her, and Phaedra understood that this, like so much else, was something she would only come to understand in time.

  For now, Phaedra dug her knees into the crinkly plastic cover on the sofa and watched as they walked away from the house. The woman was whispering something to Errol, a thing that clearly annoyed him and which he dismissed with a wave of his hands. Before they tumbled out into the road, the woman lifted up her dress, squatted, and pulled aside her panties to relieve herself in Hyacinth’s rose bed. Hyacinth, who did not deign to deal with every and anybody, especially this kind of childish behavior coming from what she would call a big hard-backed woman, responded by making a loud show of shutting the louvers. Phaedra heard but did not see the thorns tear at the woman’s dress when she tried to get up.

  “You see that, Phaedra? You see how common dog does bark in church?” Hyacinth said.

  Phaedra nodded her head although she didn’t really understand.

  “That is all right, though, because the good Lord takes care of his flock and their foes. Some fights you don’t need your own fists for.”

  “Yes, Gran,” Phaedra said, and then she tried to remember what she was doing before her father came.

  • • •

  WHEN DIONNE CAME HOME from a day of hanging out with Saranne, the last bits of light were casting slits and shadows over her grandmother’s kitchen. She used the key that Hyacinth gave her after Avril died, when she started locking up the house at night. Dionne saw the television’s blue screen that meant that there was no more programming for the evening. Phaedra sat reading a book in the vestigial light even though she had been warned countless times about ruining her eyesight this way. Dionne turned on the lamp beside Phaedra and sat down on the sofa.

  “So I heard we had a visitor today,” Dionne started, and then waited for Phaedra to take the bait.

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “So, you know, then.”

  “Know what?”

  “Know that Daddy wants to take us back with him to Miami.”

  “Daddy was here?”

  “I thought you said you knew.”

  “Trevor said that his cousin said that she saw a man and a woman dressed in white over by my grandmother’s house. He didn’t say it was our father,” Dionne said, leaning her long body forward so that her elbows and knees met.

  “Your father.”

  “OK. So, Daddy was here. And he wants to take us to Miami. When’s he coming back to pick us up?”

  “What are you talking about, Dionne? Going to live with our father and his, his woman is not a good idea.”

  “What woman?”

  “Some brown-skinned black American lady. She got stuck in that pile of mud behind Ms. Zelma’s house. And then she peed in Granny’s rose bed.”

  “What? So what did Granny do?” Dionne said, barely containing a laugh.

  “She didn’t do anything. She just shut the louvers.”

  “So, was she pretty?”

  “I wouldn’t say she was ugly, but definitely not pretty like Mommy. Daddy said she could cook.”

  “Huh. Fat or slim?”

  “Round.” Phaedra sighed. She was so tired of her sister’s obsession with other women’s size, which started right around the time Dionne’s body turned into a riot of arms and legs and breasts.

  “And she can cook.”

  “That’s what Daddy says.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  “Why would I?”

  “How could you say that about Daddy?”

  “How could I not? Nothing I remember about him is any good.”

  “I’m surprised you remember anything at all. You were all of five when he left. Did he look good today? Healthy?”

  “He looked fat to me. Well, more like puffy.”

  Dionne leaned back and closed her eyes as if putting her father together in her mind. “Well, he did always have a belly. But now he’s puffy? I find that hard to believe.”

  “Well, that’s what I saw. And there’s no way that I’m going to live with him.”

  “What are you talking about? He’s living in Miami and clearly has enough money to buy a plane ticket and come down to Barbados to look for us. So, he must be doing well. You would rather stay here with Granny and go to school with these backwards children instead of going home?”

  “Miami is not home.”

  “Don’t you remember what Mommy used to say about how home is between your teeth? Daddy is the closest family we have left. I’m going.”

  “You would leave me here?”

  “Do you really think that you could stay here if you wanted to? Exactly what would be your defense? That you have more spells to learn before you start school again?”

  “I’m staying here with Granny.”

  “Suit yourself. I’m leaving,” Dionne said.

  And with that, Dionne went to her room. From where she sat in the living room, Phaedra could hear her sister opening and closing drawers, as if she were already packing.

  THE NEXT DAY, early in the morning, when the cocks were conferring in the front yard and the sun was not yet high in the sky, Errol returned. Hyacinth rose while Phaedra and Dionne were still asleep and went outside in the cool of the morning to speak with him. This time, he was clean-shaven. And the scent of rum was gone, although there was sourness on him that Hyacinth smelled and knew to be the sign of a greater sickness. He came alone, with his head bowed, to make a simple request. He only had a couple days left in Barbados, and wanted to take the girls to the beach and to Kiddie Kadooment, the children’s version of the Grand Kadooment parade that marked the end of Crop Over season.

  Hy
acinth agreed begrudgingly, mostly because Phaedra had been whining about how badly she wanted to play mas. Hyacinth was not up for taking the children to Kiddie Kadooment, as the heat and the crowds and the money to buy costumes was more than too much. Besides, she thought that the celebrations were just an excuse for slackness and getting on bad. According to Hyacinth, the whole business of planting crops and harvesting them and the slavery on which the island’s wealth was built and her ancestors’ lives were lost was forgotten in the revelry. All summer, in spite of her grandmother’s grumpiness, Phaedra stopped whatever she was doing whenever anything about Crop Over came on the television. She would sit transfixed, watching the children her age in fabulous costumes parading around the stadium, imagining herself among them. After a while, she knew better than to ask Hyacinth if she could play mas, as not even she could bear her grandmother’s tirades and her corny line about how she couldn’t wait for Crop Over to be over. While Hyacinth was not holding her breath about Errol making good on his promise, a part of her was happy to see Phaedra excited about something again.

  After Errol left, the morning passed by slowly in the way that hours do when a thing deeply dreaded or longed for looms. Hyacinth hovered over a steaming pot of pelau, trying to tease the chicken off the bone and salt from the beef she’d bought at the market. Phaedra counted her mosquito bites; she had reached 103 before she had to start all over again because she missed one on her collarbone. While she ran her pointer finger up and down her body, the clock passed one, when Errol was expected, and then it was two o’clock. Phaedra remembered that Hyacinth had told her and Dionne not to get their expectations up about their father. What her grandmother had said exactly was, “Don’t take a six for a nine.” Dionne rolled her eyes when Phaedra said she didn’t understand and Hyacinth explained that you have to learn to see past the face people showed you. Phaedra was about to take off her swimsuit when she heard the car honk outside.

  The swimsuit she was wearing that day was red and brand-new. Mrs. Loving had bought it on her monthly trip into town to shop for Father Loving and the boys. Since Avril died, Phaedra had become accustomed to the hill women, who channeled their initial judgment of Avril into the task of mothering Phaedra and Dionne, offering her things. Hyacinth was proud, and therefore a stranger to charity, but Mrs. Loving was Avril’s old friend. And Phaedra showed such delight in the sporty swimsuit with the trademark swoosh on her chest that Hyacinth couldn’t bear to tell Mrs. Loving “No, thank you” as she’d said to the other women and their gifts. The day that Mrs. Loving brought the suit by, Phaedra wore it around the house nonstop; she ate dinner in it, watched TV in it, and was only convinced by the threat of an extra dose of cod-liver oil to take it off and change into her nightie.

  Hyacinth shook her head at the whole affair, which reminded her how poorly equipped she was for the task of raising this pair of strong-willed girls. Her hands, which swelled when it rained, were no match for Phaedra’s unruly mountain of hair, and she wondered how she would deal with Dionne’s determination to face her time in Barbados like a prison sentence and Hyacinth as her jailer. There was something else, too, about the way that Christopher looked at Phaedra when she tried on the suit—from which Mrs. Loving had smartly removed the price tag—in Hyacinth’s living room. Slack-jawed, his admiration of Phaedra on full display, Christopher’s face told Hyacinth she’d be worrying about him chasing at Phaedra’s skirt before too long.

  When the rental car finally pulled up with Errol and his woman in the front seats, Dionne waved a heavy hand to them. She had her beach bag packed and had been sitting on the steps the whole morning on her hands, which at first moved too much and then fell asleep from the pressure. She ran to the car, shaking the pins and needles from her fingers.

  Dionne went to kiss her father. Earlier in the summer, when they were closer, Dionne and Trevor had practiced drinking with Father Loving’s secret stash of hard liquor, which he kept in the linen cupboard behind his vestments. They passed bottles back and forth in Father Loving’s study, waiting for the warmth to spread across their chests. When Dionne leaned over to kiss her father and shake his girlfriend’s limp, lotioned hand, she recognized the sweet halos of Mount Gay rum that hovered above them—and also what two people looked like when they knew each other’s bodies well. They waited with the engine running while Phaedra and Hyacinth locked up the house.

  Hyacinth huffed her body into the backseat and spoke to Errol before he had a chance to drive off. “How far we going?” she asked.

  “Just down to Pebbles Beach,” Errol said.

  “All right,” Hyacinth said. She made sure the girls were strapped into their seats and then turned to watch the familiar houses on the hill pass by as they rumbled downward. At the bottom of the hill, the girlfriend, who looked as if her stomach might heave from the turbulence, turned to face the backseat.

  “I don’t think we’ve officially met,” she said.

  Dionne had been studying the woman, especially the way her weave was expertly attached to her real hair so that the tracks didn’t show. She spoke first.

  “I don’t think we have. I’m Dionne. Phaedra, have you said good afternoon?”

  Phaedra glared at her sister and then mumbled a greeting.

  “I’m Evangeline.”

  And Hyacinth said, “Of course.”

  At the beach, they parked among a seemingly endless row of other cars. The gray rocks that gave Pebbles Beach its name were piled up, creating a barrier that made people work hard for the privilege of touching their feet to the sand. The beach was mostly empty, with the exception of a few bathers. A family was speaking in guttural tones that could have been Dutch or German. The children, a boy and a girl with hair the color of straw, were building a fortress and moat with their shovels and pails. Phaedra looked at the children’s pile of toys and thought that this must be what it was like to be rich, to have toys for home and toys for vacation. She looked down at herself and was suddenly less excited about her swimsuit. She wished Chris were there to tell her it didn’t matter. Knowing him, he’d probably make a joke about how he didn’t know white people got whiter than white when he saw the sunscreen the mother was smothering in thick layers onto her children. That made Phaedra smile a little bit, and she tuned back in to Hyacinth’s lecture about being safe on the beach. “The sea ain’t got no back door,” Hyacinth huffed. When Hyacinth asked for the third time if she and Dionne were wearing panties beneath their bathing suits, she simply said “Yes, Granny,” and tried not to roll her eyes.

  When they made it near the water, Errol’s girlfriend slipped out of her cover-up to reveal a two-piece bathing suit that showed off her large breasts, the sight of which made Hyacinth draw in her breath. Something about Evangeline’s breasts seemed like a call to competition for which Dionne was woefully underprepared, and for the first time that summer, Dionne saw a woman she considered more beautiful than herself, almost as beautiful as her mother. Dionne felt newly self-conscious in the polka-dot bathing suit she’d so proudly worn at the church picnic a few weeks before. She kept her t-shirt on, claiming that it was cool in the shade of the sea grape trees where they parked their beach towels.

  In spite of the tension that drew them together on its taut cord, no one could maintain enmity in the face of sunshine and water. Eventually, after Dionne and Phaedra digested the food that their grandmother made them eat before leaving the house in case “wunna father decide he not coming again,” Hyacinth let them go into the water. She and Evangeline watched as Errol entertained the girls with underwater cartwheels. Phaedra stayed close to the sea’s edge, jumping with each new wave and searching for sand dollars and seashells to add to her collection.

  Dionne pretended to be a weaker swimmer than she was so that Errol would show her how to float and how to breathe between strokes. Floating with her father’s hand beneath her back, Dionne wondered if the sky was this pretty in Brooklyn, since she’d never take
n the time to look up at it and see for herself. Barbados, with no apartment buildings or office towers blocking her view, was beautiful. She marveled at the vastness of the sky and sea, and at her smallness in relation to them. She would have stayed floating like that forever, admiring the clouds. But he let go without warning, and she went under. Dionne’s heart raced when her feet couldn’t find the ocean floor. The moments that she flailed beneath the surface stretched like infinity before Errol dove under and hoisted her onto his shoulders.

  Hyacinth watched Errol dunk and then rescue Dionne; she calmed an urge to go in and drag her granddaughter away from him. She tried to laugh with Evangeline when Errol and Dionne emerged from the water spitting and coughing between guffaws, but the best she could do was to purse her lips and take note that this kind of behavior was exactly the reason she’d decided to come down to the beach with the children.

  A breeze teased the hem of Hyacinth’s long white skirt and a memory was conjured in her mind’s eye. Hyacinth noted that the last time that she’d had a real sea bath was forty years earlier, when she thought baptism might cure her of her destiny, or at the very least secure the love of her husband, Kenny, who was a member in good standing at Bird Hill Church of God in Christ, and courting her then. Kenny insisted that he wouldn’t marry any woman who wasn’t baptized in the church, and then waited patiently for months while Hyacinth decided whether or not to do it. He listened as Hyacinth explained that she was mad at God for taking her grandmother from her, that her church was getting quiet in the grove of guava trees just past her house, where she retreated to on Sunday mornings while all the other hill women and some of the men were praising the Lord. He heard all of Hyacinth’s grievances against God and the church and organized religion, but still, he maintained that his heart couldn’t cleave properly to a woman who hadn’t been washed in the blood of the Lamb.