The Star Side of Bird Hill

by Naomi Jackson

  Isaiah, who Dionne could now see was a man and not the boy she’d taken him for, helped her carry Jean to the doorway of a pharmacy. Space opened up for the three of them, as if the crowd, which had been thick just moments before, didn’t want to catch whatever it was they had.

  “Mind he don’t give you that AIDS business, y’hear,” one woman said, and Dionne wanted to take her on, but she was too focused on getting Jean to safety to respond.

  When they reached the pharmacy, they laid Jean down on the pavement. Dionne looked at Jean’s pulpy, bloody face, and then at her own reflection in the glass. For the first time that she could remember, Dionne didn’t care about whether or not she was beautiful. Her only concern was that the ragged breaths Jean took would deepen, that somehow he, she, they would be made whole again. Isaiah looked at her, his eyes asking her permission to keep going, to catch up with the band that was edging down Spring Garden now, her father and Evangeline with it. She knew he was going to leave, and so she nodded, the same way she did when her mother would leave, to make the leaving easier on him. Isaiah knelt down to kiss her on her cheek, but she wouldn’t give him this. She edged closer to Jean and eased her weight back onto her heels, trying to figure out what to do.

  There were several bands behind the one that swept away Evangeline and Errol and Isaiah. The music went on and people danced and drank, and Jean and Dionne blended into the parade route. In the same way that she couldn’t summon the courage to ask Errol why he’d left them, Dionne was afraid now to ask for help, unsure whether the crowd that had pounced upon Jean would rally to his aid. And so she sat, trying to devise a plan, shrinking away from the stares of the people who occasionally squeezed by her and Jean, scrutinizing them but not helping. A couple of women her mother’s age asked if she was all right, and Dionne nodded yes. She thought that maybe once the parade was over, Jean would be feeling strong enough for them to walk to someone’s house and ask if they could use the phone. In the meantime, she sat with Jean’s head in her lap, letting the people and music and food smells swirl around her. The whole time, she kept talking to Jean, asked him questions and told him stories, anything to keep him alert until they were able to get help. She settled for Jean’s one-word answers, and then, when he was too tired to talk, his fist’s strong grasp.

  Just as the last band was turning onto Black Rock, an older woman seemed to appear out of nowhere. She was, not unlike Hyacinth, dressed in white. Dionne could only see the whites of her eyes and her teeth as the sun had already set by then, the darkness come to swallow up the shadows. The sunsets in Barbados, which Dionne sometimes watched from Hyacinth’s gallery, were a marvel, a fantastic light show of oranges and pinks and reds, and on days when it had been stormy, purples. Such a contrast, that dance of color to the pitch black that followed it, as if God wanted Bajans to appreciate the portion of abundant sunshine He granted them in the daytime. It was into that darkness that sirens blared. Having gone for so long without help, Dionne didn’t really believe the woman when she offered to call the police from her house. But she did. And then she returned with a bucket of water and rags to clean Jean’s face. And once she’d cleaned him up, she waited with them, and then watched as Jean was put onto the stretcher and Dionne climbed into the ambulance behind him.

  Dionne, who couldn’t rightfully claim to be Jean’s family, made it to the reception desk of the Accident and Emergency Department at Queen Elizabeth Hospital before she was told that she couldn’t go any further. Dionne would have stayed there longer, trying to figure out a way home by herself, had she not remembered Clotel Gumbs bragging that a relative of hers worked at QEH. Clotel’s aunt, a nurse in a starched uniform and a pointy cap whose officiousness echoed Mrs. Gumbs’s, was paged and came downstairs. She sat Dionne down in the waiting room with a packet of stale corn curls and went to the nurses’ station to call her sister. From where she sat, Dionne could hear the woman’s loud voice. “Yes, we have the girl,” she said loudly, confirming the details of Mrs. Gumbs driving into town to collect her. Something seemed righted by Dionne being referred to as a girl, and the logistics of her return home being taken care of for her. Because right then, adrenaline was draining out of Dionne like air from a blown tire, and what she wanted more than anything was her bed and sleep. For the first time that summer, Dionne thought of Hyacinth’s house with longing. Errol’s behavior had made it clear that Bird Hill was the closest thing she had to home.

  Dionne wondered what exactly had set her father off, because the trouble between him and Jean seemed to have roots that were planted well before Kadooment Day. She resigned herself to the fact that she might never know. Something Avril had always said made her feel more at peace. “You get exactly what you need when you need it,” Avril had told her, trying to tamp down Dionne’s longing for better and more—clothes, friends, boys. Dionne didn’t know how badly she’d needed to see the truth of who her father was, and now she wasn’t quite sure what to do with what she knew.

  “Apparently everyone’s been looking for you,” the nurse said to Dionne when she got off the phone. Dionne felt the woman’s intense scrutiny and drew her head back in like a turtle. She stared into the bag of chips that was smeared with salt and oil, grateful for anywhere else to place her attention besides herself.

  And then the receptionists and the nurses and some of the patients looked at Dionne, as if seeing her for the first time. One of them said, “This is the girl in truth.” Dionne shrunk away from their attention. She knew that being “the girl in truth” was just a prelude to whatever judgments they would make of her or her grandmother or, worse, her mother. More important, Dionne knew that the fact that her eighth-grade graduation photo had made its way onto the CBC news meant that Hyacinth would likely be in a state beyond anger when Dionne saw her again.

  Dionne settled into the hard blue seat in the waiting room, and tried to drown out the women’s clucking. She fixed her ears instead on the ticking clock above her head.

  • • •

  “EVENING,” DIONNE SAID when she’d made her way from Mrs. Gumbs’s car to her grandmother’s front steps.

  “Evening,” Hyacinth said, more fact than greeting.

  Dionne looked up at her grandmother and held her gaze. She’d never really noticed the blue-gray rings around Hyacinth’s irises before, and she thought the cataracts had their own kind of beauty. She could tell that Hyacinth was too tired to argue. Since Mrs. Gumbs was in the car idling behind her, Dionne knew that Hyacinth wouldn’t say much of anything, lest she give the self-righteous cow any material for her performance of Dionne’s downfall. Dionne put her dirty sneaker on the whitewashed front step, as if to come inside the house.

  “Eh eh. If you think you coming in here with those filthy clothes, you must have left more than your good sense out in whatever place you washed up from,” Hyacinth said.

  Dionne stood with her head hung low, awaiting instruction.

  “Go behind the house and take off those clothes before you come in here.” And Dionne, who now knew every inch of her grandmother’s property in the same way that she knew the apartment she’d shared with her sister and mother in Brooklyn, walked to the back, past the chicken coop and the hydrangea and the rosebushes and the goats watching her from their perch beneath the house. She stripped down to her underwear and put the rags in the rubbish bin. When she’d finished bathing and put on the nightclothes Hyacinth had laid out for her in the bathroom, Dionne went to her room and was startled to find her grandmother there, sitting on her bed.

  “Sit down, pet,” Hyacinth said, patting the bedspread.

  Dionne eased onto the bed, wary because her punishment was so long in coming.

  “Granny, I—”

  “Don’t start, child.”

  “It’s just that, if you let me explain—”

  “I already heard everything I need to hear.”

  Dionne was quiet then, because even though what
had happened had happened in town, she knew that the island was small, and news traveled fast, and Hyacinth had eyes everywhere.

  “So you know what happened to Jean?”

  Hyacinth nodded.

  “And you’re not mad at me.”

  “You did the most honorable thing you knew how to do.”

  “Daddy left.”

  “Did you think he would stay?” Hyacinth said. She went to smooth the thin cotton of Dionne’s nightdress against her knee, and Dionne jumped a bit with surprise, so rare was the gift of her grandmother’s touch.

  “I thought he was going to take me with him.”

  “Of course you did, darling. And now?”

  “I don’t know. I mean. Seeing him do what he did, it’s like I hardly knew him.”

  “Or at least you only knew the side of him you wanted to know. You know that they say that everything done in darkness—”

  “Will come to light. I know that. But I didn’t think he’d do something like that.”

  “I knew that you would have to learn for yourself. Your sister, now, she can watch and wait, and see how things go. But you, you’re not taking anything to be the truth unless you have the living proof for yourself.”

  Dionne smiled and then squirmed a bit. It was strange to be so clearly seen, no judgment, just description.

  “Maybe the next time you might listen.”

  Dionne went to protest.

  “Or not,” Hyacinth said, and wearily heaved herself up and off the bed. “I’m just glad you made it home. Night, darling.”

  “Night, Granny,” Dionne said. She lay down and closed her eyes, though she knew it would be some time before sleep found her.

  THE LAST FEW WEEKS of August came and went quickly, the end of summer passing by in a blur as Hyacinth called upon her army of hill women to help her get the children enrolled in and then ready for school. There were uniforms to be fitted for and sewn, placement exams to be written, headmistresses and teachers to be met with, bus routes to be drawn and tested.

  On the Sunday night before Phaedra and Dionne were set to start their new schools, both girls were in bed by seven, where their grandmother had sent them. Hyacinth bustled about the house, double- and then triple-checking their uniforms, which were pressed and hung in the hallway outside their bedrooms, looking to see whether their school shoes needed another polish. She was in the kitchen washing the dinner dishes when she heard Ms. Zelma call to her.

  “Look here a minute, Hy-cee,” Ms. Zelma said. Hyacinth smiled at her friend’s pet name for her. Since Avril died, Ms. Zelma’s living room had become an extension of hers, the girls going back and forth to bring herbs from Hyacinth’s garden or return a dish. Weeknights, they watched television together until the signal went off. During the day, Phaedra and Chris flew kites in the field next to Ms. Zelma’s house, the same field that made Dionne think about her mother’s red shoes landing and taking root there. Now, as they each lay in their beds imagining different versions of their first day at new schools, Phaedra and Dionne felt darkness press down on them, but they couldn’t sleep.

  Hyacinth heard Ms. Zelma’s feet shuffle across her kitchen floor and she smiled at the fact that her friend had never learned to pick up her feet when she walked, a habit no amount of nagging or teasing could break.

  “Hy-cee, you ain’t hearing me? I said come,” Zelma yelled. Hyacinth wiped her hands on a dishrag and went next door.

  “Only the good Lord knows what has you screaming bloody murder,” Hyacinth said when she came through the back door of Ms. Zelma’s house. Her friend patted the sofa beside her but Hyacinth wouldn’t sit down.

  On the TV screen there was a police car chase along the south coast road just past Oistins. The same clip played over and over again, a white car leaping over the promontory at Miami Beach, before falling straight into the sea.

  A man with a snorkel pushed off to the side of his face, spoke into a microphone. “We’re all experienced divers,” he said, pointing to the men in wet suits behind him. “We still haven’t found anything yet, but we’re not giving up hope that we might find something soon.”

  The news cut back to the CBC studio where Taryn Weekes, a woman whose neon lipsticks always matched her scarves, filled the screen, her brow furrowed with practiced concern. “An attempt was made today to arrest Errol Rose, a Bajan national living abroad in New York and Florida for many years, on charges of exploitation of minors. Rose, a onetime jazz guitarist, is accused of throwing several parties during the Crop Over season at which girls as young as thirteen years were made to have sexual encounters with much older men. Upon being found at his cottage hideaway, Rose tried to escape in a rented vehicle. The police gave chase as you saw in that last clip at Miami Beach, and divers are still searching for Mr. Rose and an unidentified woman. The police apprehended several of the men who attended Rose’s parties today, many of them prominent members of Bajan society who were arrested at their homes or places of work. They are being charged with various crimes, including indecent sexual assault and having sex with a minor.”

  The newscaster’s eyes twinkled as the names and pictures of the accused men appeared on the screen beside her.

  “Divers continue to work around the clock to find the car and the bodies of Mr. Rose and the woman who was said to be with him. We’ll have more news on this story for you as it develops. For now, good night and God bless.”

  Ms. Zelma turned down the volume on the set and the weight of what they’d seen bore down on them.

  “Well, then,” Hyacinth said, rooting around in her mind for something meaningful to say.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways, don’t you think?”

  Hyacinth just nodded and then said finally, “Yes. Yes, he does.”

  Hyacinth turned to leave, but was pulled back by a question. “When was the last time you saw Errol?” Ms. Zelma asked.

  “Maybe a month ago, when he came to pick up the kids for Kiddie Kadooment. I ain’t lay my eyes on him since then, lucky for him.” Hyacinth knew there was more her friend wanted to ask.

  “Well, everything comes to its own righteous end,” Ms. Zelma said.

  Hyacinth grunted her assent. And then she said good night. On Ms. Zelma’s steps, the moon where it shone above Hyacinth was brilliant. She stopped to consider the way her life was so thoroughly changed by the last few months, and marveled that although she’d watched as the moon waxed and waned, it was still the same. After her grandmother died, Hyacinth had gone on a kind of strike against God. A fragile truce was heralded by her baptism and broken again by her husband’s, and then Avril’s, death. Something seemed righted by Errol’s passing. She could feel the weight of her child’s absence differently now, feel it settling on her in a way she could bear.

  “I KNOW what happened, you know,” Trevor said.

  Dionne looked up from the bowl of rice on her lap. She was so intent on separating the pebbles from the grains that she didn’t notice Trevor walk up or hear him mount the steps to Hyacinth’s house. She’d found solace in being Hyacinth’s shadow in the kitchen, staying so close and quiet that her grandmother never moved too quickly lest she run over Dionne at her elbow or underfoot. Dionne didn’t say anything to encourage Trevor, but he stood there, his gaze intent on a green lizard that was racing across the gallery, a safer place to rest his eyes than on Dionne, where they’d been just moments before.

  “I said, I know what happened,” Trevor tried again.

  “Well, if you know that, then you also know that I’m not deaf,” Dionne said, still looking down and sifting her hands through the rice.

  “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “For the love of God, Trevor, stop talking in circles, man.”

  “They say Jean’s healing nicely.”

  “Oh,” Dionne said, surprised that Trevor, whom she’d heard dismiss Jean as a
nasty so-and-so in front of his friends, didn’t take the chance to rail on about how Jean got exactly what he deserved.

  “He’s better now. Maybe we could go see him one day.”

  Dionne didn’t say anything, hoping that Trevor, who was practically allergic to silence, would eventually become uncomfortable and go away.

  “Your friend Saranne’s gone back to Trinidad.”

  “I know,” Dionne said.

  “T&T.” Trevor moved closer, to the top step where Dionne sat. He stretched his long arms up to the gallery’s awning. From where Dionne sat, she could see his stomach. If she wanted to, she could have leaned in to sniff the scent of the English laundry soap Mrs. Loving used, and she had once loved to smell on Trevor’s clothes.

  “I know that T&T stands for Trinidad and Tobago.”

  “You think you’ll miss her?” Trevor invited himself to sit next to Dionne on the front step. She didn’t move over; his legs dangled over the side of the steps.

  “Not really.”

  “You guys spent so much time together.”

  “You could spend a lot of time with someone and still not really know them.”

  “That’s true,” Trevor said, and then stood. He noticed Dionne squinting up at him and he stepped to his right to block the sun for her.

  “All those years with my mother, and I never saw what she did coming. Sometimes people have bombs ticking inside them, but you can’t hear them until they go off.”

  Trevor nodded, and for the first time in a long time, Dionne didn’t dismiss him or think him stupid, but was actually grateful for his visit. It was a relief to have someone to talk to who wasn’t inscribed in the same circle of grief she shared with her sister and grandmother.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry about?” Dionne craned her neck to get a closer look at Trevor. She could see that he was taller since she saw him last.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to your mother.”