The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  Hyacinth could not imagine any safer place to bring a child than a police station, and so Phaedra was in tow when the secretary told Hyacinth that the inspector was a very busy man and asked her what business she had with him. Hyacinth announced herself as Mrs. Braithwaite, midwife, and told the inspector’s secretary that he would know what her business was. In no fewer than the four minutes it took him to finish up a phone call, Inspector Joseph was hugging up Hyacinth as if she were a long-lost aunty, pinching Phaedra’s cheeks in a way that she expected that an uncle might if she had one. After listening to Hyacinth’s story, the inspector put out an all-points bulletin and dispatched his available men, with a special detail to the airport, where he thought Errol might try to leave with Dionne.

  By the time the six o’clock news came on, a picture of Dionne from her eighth-grade graduation appeared alongside her name on the CBC, along with instructions to call with any information regarding her whereabouts. As soon as the news went off, neighbors started streaming into Hyacinth’s house, offering their condolences, stories about the time they’d last seen Dionne, offering to pray or cook or both. Phaedra watched her grandmother carefully, and tried to make sense of how this woman, whom she’d taken for granted as part of the backwater her mother always complained about, had been able to make the search happen. She concluded that there was so much about Hyacinth that she still didn’t know.

  WHEN ERROL SUGGESTED the sneak out of the stadium before the end of Kiddie Kadooment, Dionne hesitated. She reminded her father of the promise they made to Phaedra and the other kids to stay until the end and take them out after. It didn’t take much convincing, really only Errol glancing down at the tennis bracelet he’d bought Dionne at a duty-free shop in town, to get her to go along. What he’d said—“I ain’t know that one summer in Barbados could turn you into a real grandmother’s child”—shut down Dionne’s protest. She tripped as they squeezed past the other people in their row, her head turned to see if she could spot Phaedra in the band that was being called onto the stage. She and her father took deep breaths once they got to the stairwell, because it was free of the press of people in the stands, but Dionne regretted it once she inhaled the rank odor: the pee smell from people who’d relieved themselves beneath the stadium all Crop Over season was at about the same volume as the music onstage.

  They left the stadium and went to the hotel where Errol was staying with Evangeline. Dionne thought to call Ms. Zelma’s house for her grandmother. But years of watching Taneisha and Saranne and other popular girls had taught her not to assert herself until she’d seen what the dominant girl, or boy, or man, in this case, would do. And so, once Errol took off his heavy gold watch and placed it on the nightstand, pulled a bottle from the mini fridge, and turned on the television, all without any mention of Phaedra or Hyacinth, she was sure they were in for the night, and didn’t dare ask to use the telephone. I’m with my father, she thought, trying to convince herself that everything was fine.

  Dionne watched Errol pour three glasses of wine, then set one in front of her and another in front of Evangeline. She sipped hers slowly, unused to the bittersweet taste.

  “You don’t like it,” Evangeline said.

  “No, I like it,” Dionne said too quickly to be convincing.

  “It’s OK. Certain things take getting used to,” Evangeline said.

  Dionne watched her father pour himself a second glass, all before she’d gotten halfway through her first.

  “Dionne, you know, you really starting to get your looks. I deal with a lot of pretty girls in my work, and I can see now that you could go toe-to-toe with any one of them,” Errol said.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” Dionne replied. She wanted to ask exactly what kind of work her father was doing now, but she knew that it was better to have Errol offer details about his life than to pry.

  “When your mother was your age, she was the prettiest girl.”

  Dionne watched the bulge of Errol’s belly move up and down as he talked.

  “And when I’m saying the prettiest, I’m not saying the prettiest for Bird Hill, I’m saying the prettiest girl in Barbados. And she was smart, too, almost too smart for her own good.”

  “So what happened to her?” Dionne surprised herself by asking.

  “Life is a funny thing, you know. Just when you think you know what you’re doing, which way you’re headed, the target moves. At first we thought all we had to do was get out of Barbados, and everything we wanted would fall into place. You couldn’t tell us that everything we dreamed for wouldn’t rain down from the sky the moment we set foot in New York.”

  Errol took a big gulp from his wineglass, and then he leaned down to scratch a lesion on his ankle. Dionne watched Evangeline watch her father, noted the way that she hung on his every word and movement, noted the fact that she was now fetching lotion for his dry feet. Dionne wondered if this kind of deference was what a relationship with a man required.

  “As soon as we started to get ahold of things there, you came barreling along. And I couldn’t say I was sorry. When you were born, everyone we knew in New York, all my partners from my band, even a couple aunts I didn’t know your mother had, they came to see you. I sat up in the hospital all night holding you. I wouldn’t put you down no matter what. And when they came to take you to the nursery, I bawled bloody murder until one of the nurses brought you back to me. Your first morning, it was my face you opened your eyes on.”

  Dionne relaxed into the story she’d heard her father tell so many times; hearing it again stitched back a piece of her heart she didn’t know needed repair.

  “So what happened to Mommy?” Dionne asked again.

  “You know, Dionne. That is it. That is the million-dollar question. The only one that needs answering. Your mother was hard to know. Twelve years together, eleven of them married, and I couldn’t begin to tell you what was going on in that woman’s head half the time.”

  Errol slid open the door that separated the hotel room from its balcony. Dionne heard the sound of the sea rush in, and she followed him outside, where the waves were crashing against the boulders. They stood there, inhaling the brine and listening to the sea’s chatter. There was so much Dionne wanted to say, to ask, but she didn’t want to disturb the moment, the first time she’d been alone with her father in years.

  “You want a next drink?” Errol asked, and then turned to go back inside.

  “No, please,” Dionne said, feeling the wine hit her head like the waves. She wanted to ask her father why he left them, had been wanting to ask him since he’d showed up at Hyacinth’s house. She stumbled over the metal grating of the glass doors, thrown off kilter by the drinking and her questions and her cowardice. She saw Evangeline, who’d changed into her nightgown and was pinning up her hair when they got back inside, and knew it was a question she didn’t want to ask in front of her.

  “You all right?” Errol asked. He pressed a meaty palm against the small of Dionne’s back to steady her.

  “I’m fine, Daddy,” Dionne said. And although she wanted to say more, the simple gift of her father’s hands, exactly what she’d missed most of him since he left, stopped her. She was afraid that asking Errol why he’d left might mean he’d never hug her again, and she didn’t want to do anything to lose another parent’s touch. And so she said again, “I’m fine” and then, “Good night,” and crawled into one of the double beds.

  Dionne pretended to be asleep when she heard Errol moving on top of and then inside Evangeline. She felt ashamed by the heat that swept over her body as she listened to them, and then a new wave of shame washed in when she wanted to know if the sounds they made were like or unlike the sounds Errol had made with her mother. Dionne couldn’t get to sleep after that and so she was happy to be shaken awake from what was really just a nap to get on the road for the Grand Kadooment parade.

  All Kadooment Day, Dionne and her dance partner, Isaiah, Er
rol and Evangeline, and the rest of the people in their band danced and drank, and sometimes stopped to eat snacks from the food vendors on the parade route. They didn’t have any fancy costumes like the other revelers, just beat-up shorts and t-shirts. By the end of the day these rags would be better thrown away than tossed in the laundry, soiled by sweat (their own and others’), baby powder, paint, and all manner of other grime. Every once in a while Dionne looked out of the corner of her eye at her father, and saw him dancing, waving a rag in the air that was steadily turning from white to gray as they progressed. Errol was enjoying himself, dancing with Evangeline with abandon. Dionne realized she hadn’t seen him that happy in a long time. Something had shifted between Dionne and Errol, and he seemed less like a father to her that day, more like a friend.

  Dionne was sure that her dance partner’s crotch would soon be imprinted on the back of her shorts. His full name was Isaiah, but he’d told her to call him Izzy. She was glad that the music and people were too loud for her to call him anything, much less that nickname, which she thought was odd for a boy. At one point, when the liquor made the muscles in Dionne’s shoulders tighten and her head feel light, she mused to herself about whether she’d be able to clean him off her like the dirt she felt graveling her skin, and which she’d long since stopped trying to wipe away. She ground her behind into the hard pants front of Isaiah, who was not unlike Chad or Trevor or Darren, winding her waist like Taneisha had taught her to do on Sunday nights when they listened to Dahved Levy’s radio show, collapsing with laughter every time he interrupted the music with his trademark “Rocking you, rocking you, rocking you” tagline.

  Like the others and like her father, Isaiah was tall and red-skinned. Other girls would have called Dionne’s suitors cute, but it was their flaws that drew Dionne in. In the case of Trevor, it was his razor-sharp widow’s peak. With Darren, a lisp he hid by not talking much, which only made him more mysterious and attractive. When Isaiah walked up to her that morning holding a cup of orange juice like an offering plate, she noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other, and this endeared him to her.

  “You have to keep up your strength once we get going,” he said. She wondered how Isaiah would manage with his mismatched legs on the long parade route, but by the late afternoon he had, as he promised, not let her out of his sight, and he didn’t show any signs of slowing down anytime soon.

  All the shops along the parade route were closed, and some of the more cautious owners boarded up their windows, lest they become the victims of overzealous revelers. Because while most of the partying on Kadooment Day was in good fun, it wasn’t unusual to see people whose quarrels had been brewing since the year before use the day to settle scores. Most of the brawls ended soon after they started, but sometimes blood mixed in with the other residue of the day. It was no more surprising to see drunk, injured people taking breaks on the side of the road on Kadooment Day than it was to see children in their uniforms on their way to school on a Monday morning.

  Crop Over was a chance to see and be seen and, for some, to tinkle a little extra change into their pockets. People were lined up three deep along the road, cheering on the masqueraders, singing and dancing and eating, making jokes about which fat women did not belong in their costumes, which guys and girls were fit and ripe for the picking, judging for themselves which bands had the best music and the most beautiful costumes. Some opened up their houses for parties, and other, more enterprising folks made their money by charging to use their bathrooms, or selling water and cool drinks.

  By the time the band Dionne and Isaiah were dancing with neared the turn onto Spring Garden, it was four o’clock, and the parade was almost over, and everyone was wondering when the rain that came every Kadooment Day would pour down on their heads. If you asked a reveler, they might have told you that God was holding his water back stingily, making them beg for relief from the heat and the reassurance that this year was like any other year.

  The turnoff from Black Rock Main Road onto Spring Garden Highway was a tight one, barely wide enough for the two lanes of car and foot traffic it usually fit, much less the trucks with their outsize speakers and respective masses dancing beside and behind them. The music was turned down so that the truck could turn without injuring anyone. And it was into that cavern of relative quiet, over the echoes of music from the bands ahead and behind them, above the DJ’s awkward small talk and bad jokes, that Dionne heard the unmistakable sound of fists landing on flesh.

  Dionne’s drink turned over with the commotion. The coconut cocktail slicked her wrist, and she looked up. Just a moment before, her right hand had clasped a length of rope that distinguished their band from the crowd of onlookers. Her beverage was at a precarious lean in her left hand. Dionne’s entire midsection was plastered to Isaiah as they marched in time to “left right/left right/in the government boots/the government boots.” She felt the rain in the air and she wondered what her hair looked like. She was sure that so many hours of dancing had sweated out her perm.

  Now, Dionne felt the crowd push her and Isaiah forward, and they were, impossibly, closer than they had been before. The motion lifted Dionne off her feet, and she felt Isaiah’s hands at her hips, trying to hold her down. Her father, who just a minute before had been sweating next to her, and working up on Evangeline, was beating on someone whom she took at first for a woman, until the crowd joined in. She could see Errol’s sweat glistening on the roll of flesh below his blue baseball cap. And then suddenly his cap was up and off his head, propelled by the men who had jumped in to pound their victim. Some threw punches, others branches, and then rocks of all sizes. Finally, clouds that had been holding rain back all day broke open. Dionne could hear shouting and rocks whistling through the air and breaking glass and the deafening roar of rain. Above the underwater feeling of rum sloshing against her skull, Dionne made out the words: “You nasty buller man!”

  And then she saw the signature band of hair ties on Jean’s wrist.

  “So I see you come back determined to destroy every last thing Avril had. I always knew you wouldn’t rest until you tore her down to the last bits,” Jean shouted.

  “You want me to shut your blasted mouth?” Errol said, leaning in to Jean, whom he had pinned on the ground. The men were close enough that they could see each other’s eyes, but Errol was still talking loud enough for the crowd to hear. “I knew from the first time I saw you, all you wanted was my cock in your mouth. If that is what you want, I could give it to you, you know,” Errol said, making a motion to unbuckle his pants.

  “From what Avril said, it wasn’t much to write home about,” Jean replied.

  “Looks like I’m going to have to shut your fucking mouth since you won’t do it yourself.” And with that, Errol landed blows on Jean’s head and shoulders, pummeling him until Jean’s lips were both the size and color of plums. Jean tried to fight back, but his punches were no match for Errol’s heft and thick fists.

  Dionne surged forward, toward the trouble, and Isaiah pulled her back. His hands felt different from the men and women who’d held her away from her mother’s grave. This time, she wouldn’t relax into his arms; she didn’t want to, even though his strength was more than that of the entire Usher’s Guild. She writhed out of his grasp and tried to peel back the hulk of her father, and the men who’d joined him, off Jean. She felt blows land on her shoulders and forehead and one that she thought would take her out, on her lower back. But even that wouldn’t stop her.

  Errol forced himself back into the melee to stop people from throwing their confused, tired blows at Dionne, which was easy, because by then they were full on the meal they’d made of Jean’s humiliation. Once the crowd thinned, Errol puffed out his chest and yelled, “This nasty so-and-so get what he deserve. I don’t know what kind of place Barbados is turning into where a buller think he can dance on me and it’s all right. It could be Crop Over or Christmas, but it could never be right.”
The people around Errol murmured in agreement, and Dionne looked at her father, and then at Jean, and then at her father again. She could see the fire in Errol’s eyes, the same fire that had burned her mother, and she knew that the smolder was what the women and the men saw in him and what they thought they wanted, before it scorched them too.

  Dionne stopped looking to her father for an answer she knew wouldn’t come, and focused instead on Jean. Because there, lying beneath the pile of revelers that dispersed once the truck’s engine coughed into action and the speakers blared a gospel song, there, as the MC made platitudes for peace and a return to all that was Christian, there, beneath it all, in threat of being trampled, but still breathing, was Jean.