The Star Side of Bird Hill (22 page)

“The same way that your father's people blood run through your veins, you have a strong line of women behind you, Bertha and her mother and her mother before her. If they could still stand up after what they did and what had been done to them, you have more than enough legs to stand up on now. Your heart is going to heal, you know. Your hand too.”

“What did they do to make their masters set them free?” Dionne asked.

“Oh, dear heart. They didn't ask for their freedom. They took it.”

“But Bertha was an old woman then. What could she do?”

“Being old and being dead isn't the same thing. She was a wise woman. She never turned her back on the things her mother brought over with her from Africa. So even though
she wasn't in battle herself, she cleared the way for the people who could fight.”

“You mean to tell me that it was some spells that took down the planters?” Dionne said. She turned to look at her grandmother. From this angle, she could see the wiry gray hairs that sprouted like wildfire at Hyacinth's temples after Avril died.

“It was some spells that brought you back here after your father took you away.”

“Spells that drowned my father too?” Dionne said, straightening her back the way she'd seen Errol do.

“You already know the answer to that.”

Dionne searched Hyacinth's face, although she wasn't sure exactly what guilt would look like when she found it.

“I don't practice the kind of magic that hurts people. And if you think that I killed your father, then you don't know me half as well as you think you do,” Hyacinth said.

“Apparently you don't practice the kind of magic that helps people either,” Dionne said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what I said. All these years you've been helping all these women on Bird Hill. And not once did you say to yourself, well, let me go check on my child and see how she's doing. Or I wonder how my granddaughters are.”

“You don't think I thought about you?” Hyacinth asked.

“Thinking about someone and helping them is not the same thing. That's the problem with all you old-time people here. You believe that if you just pray for something, ‘watching
and waiting' for it, then it will appear. But the world doesn't work like that. Don't you remember what Father Loving said about how when you pray you have to move your feet?”

Hyacinth went to hold Dionne, as the tears her story had dried were back. She said something that she'd never said to Avril, though she'd always wondered if saying it might have brought her home. “I'm sorry, Dionne. I'm so, so sorry. If I could bring Avril back or go back and change the way things were for you, I would,” she said.

“I know,” Dionne said. “I know.”

And they stayed there like that for a while, feeling the newness of embrace and apology until the pressure cooker's whistle called them back to themselves.

“Well, child, this food is not going to cook itself. I'll let you finish the cou-cou. Your cooking is getting so good I just want to lay back with my two long hands now,” Hyacinth said.

“Yes, Gran,” Dionne replied. She followed her grandmother into the kitchen where neat piles of okra and cornmeal lay on the counter. And then she went back to making the meal that was so close to Hyacinth's heart it was like second skin.

OLD YEAR'S NIGHT IN
BIRD HILL
found the new moon with a copper ring licking its edges. Watch night service started at seven o'clock, and by eleven, low notes and a hum of hymns were laying the ground for Father Loving's sermon, the words that would carry them over into a new year. At home, black-eyed peas that had been cooking all day stood cooling on the stove. The black cake that wasn't eaten at Christmas was wrapped carefully in waxed paper. Oranges that would be passed around at midnight, to give the bittersweet taste that the year ahead would certainly bring, were in coolers by the baptismal font. All who could come had come, because the people on the hill thought that if the new year found them on their knees, the months that followed might bring what they prayed for.

In the pews, hill women tried to keep their minds on the
Lord, but their thoughts strayed. Hyacinth wondered whether her jug-jug would keep. As they were saying prayers for the church they had adopted in a country in Africa whose name Hyacinth could never pronounce, all she could think of was how long she'd spent making the dish even though she was sure only the old-timers would eat it. The young people were corralled into the church hall, a couple teenagers left to keep watch, because the five-hour church service was too much to ask of a child.

While Hyacinth and the other hill women and some of its men tried to stay focused on the Lord, Phaedra sat in the church hall with Donna, Chris, and Angelique Ward, who, after the mango-eating incident, had joined their crew. They ate sweetbread Hyacinth made and Phaedra tried to avoid getting her birthday licks by reminding everyone that her birthday was technically almost over. Something about turning eleven in Barbados made the fact of Avril's death real for Phaedra. This time there was no hope for her mother's arrival, because Avril was where she would always be now, silent and below the ground. And this fact, rather than saddening Phaedra, settled in beside her, the way that the hill's red dust filmed her white clothes, the way that sand lined her pockets days and weeks after she'd come home from the beach. It was always there, a reminder of what had come before.

They were all on their third and fourth cups of Fanta and the feeling in the air was one of sugar-fueled giddiness, of sitting on the precipice of the unknown. The children, who were too young to be fearful or resigned about the future, were
considering what to do next, when Simone Saveur left her roost at the center of her girlfriends to approach Phaedra and her friends.

“So I hear you have a birthday?” Simone said.

Phaedra nodded.

“Congrats,” she said, and Phaedra knew not to accept at face value either the question or her goodwill. “Wunna tell she already about the fire hag?” Simone asked Donna and Chris and Angelique, as if Bajan were a foreign tongue Phaedra could not understand.

“Oh, don't start with that nonsense,” Angelique said. Despite having broken off from the clique of Simone Saveur and her henchwomen, Angelique retained her favored status because of her beauty and the trips she took to England each year to see her father. She could brush off Simone with a confidence the others didn't dare.

“What story?” Phaedra said, leaning forward and directly addressing Simone, which was easier to do now that they'd spent an entire term together in school.

“How old you say you turning again?” Simone asked.

“Eleven,” Phaedra said.

“Well, if I were you, I would be careful walking home tonight. The fire hag does like to take girls on their eleventh birthdays.”

Angelique touched Phaedra's shoulders, trying to smooth the curves alarm had etched into them. “It's just an old wife's tale. They told me the same story to try and scare me on my birthday,” Angelique said breezily.

Donna, a notorious frighten Friday, was edging out of her seat and toward the snack table. Phaedra grabbed Donna by the wrists and pulled her down to her seat.

“I want to hear it,” Phaedra said. She felt for the braids her grandmother had plaited for her, loose like she liked, and tucked under so her neck could stay cool.

“I don't know why you want to hear that foolishness. All it's going to do is get you worked up,” Angelique cautioned.

Tanya Tompkins had assumed her place as Simone Saveur's yes-woman in the power vacuum created by Angelique's defection. She walked over in her new low-heeled patent leather shoes from her clique's spot below the cross. “Well, it can't be total foolishness if everybody says it's true. My cousin said that she knew a girl who knew a girl who had a friend who had a cousin that it happened to,” Tanya said.

“That certainly sounds believable,” Angelique said, throwing her hair over her right shoulder.

“Nobody ain't ask you, Angelique. Phaedra, you want to hear the story or not?” Simone said.

“Yes, please,” Phaedra said, and leaned back into the folding chair around which Chris had draped his arm. The smell of his underarms was pleasant to Phaedra. It was funny to Chris, the weird things she liked about him. Her affection for him always came as a surprise, and he cherished it more for the ways in which it was unexpected, peculiarly Phaedra.

“You want to tell it then, Pokie?” Simone asked. Angelique furrowed her lips at the sound of her nickname. The sixth-formers called her Pocahontas because of the two braids
that ran thick and glossy down her back. Phaedra looked at Angelique's hair and wondered at her friend's confidence in wearing her power openly.

“Fine, then, I'll tell it,” Angelique said. She stood up and started in a voice that was so smooth it sounded like she'd just drunk her nightly dose of cod-liver oil.

“Back in the old, old times, the Arawaks and the Caribs roamed Barbados. They mostly lived peacefully but occasionally a fight would break out among the tribes and then they would go to war. There was one Arawak woman who was a witch doctor. She was the sole survivor of an attack on her village in which everyone was killed.”

Phaedra looked at the children who sat cross-legged around Angelique, the ones who had just moments before been racing the length of the church hall, running the hems of their shirts out of their pants and unraveling their freshly done hair from its barrettes. When she'd first come to Bird Hill the other children had all seemed the same to her, but she could see them more clearly now. There was Samson, the middle child of seven Rastafarian children, whose locks were wrapped in two mounds the size of footballs at the nape of his neck. There were the identical twins Timothy and Thomas, inveterate nose-pickers despite teasing, and Donna's cousin, Kaylin, whose seizures had stopped after her mother finally gave in  and let Hyacinth see about her. Knowing these children, their families, and their stories made Phaedra feel like she belonged, and being among them made the story feel less scary than it was.

“Once she'd buried the last of her people, the witch doctor was thirsty for revenge. The devil knew that he needed to make a pact with her to stop the war. The fire hag, as she was known, was given three powers. She would live forever. She could shape-shift into any animal or human being. And she could fly in a ball of fire as far as she could imagine, leaving her skin behind her. The fire hag was greedy. And so she asked the devil if there was no blood for her in her new power. The devil agreed that as payment for her people that had been wiped out, she could make her own sacrifices.

“Now people say that the fire hag preys on the night of their eleventh birthdays. If she finds these girls alone, she wraps them up in her ball of fire, takes them back to the cave where she lives in Chalky Mount, and cooks them. People say that when the fog is thick over Chalky Mount, it's the smoke from girls the fire hag is cooking that you see.” A shriek went up among the younger kids. Angelique paused until they simmered down, and then she continued.

“Once the fire hag has your daughter, there are only two ways that parents can get her back. Both involve going to her cave at night. If she's taken flight, they can burn the skin that she leaves behind. When the fire hag feels her skin burning, she will return to her cave and give the people's child back to them. Or, if they find her in her skin, they can drop a bag of rice on the floor. The fire hag has to count every grain, and start again if she drops even one piece. While she's counting, the parents can rescue their child.”

Angelique turned to Phaedra, whose skin had blanched.
“Satisfied?” Angelique asked, and looked around for an answer in the crowd that had gathered.

Phaedra jumped when the door between the sanctuary and the church hall banged open. She fully expected the fire hag, and not her grandmother, to be standing there.

On the walk home, Phaedra turned to Hyacinth. “Granny, did you ever hear the story about the fire hag?”

“Yes, why?”

“They said she comes for girls on the night of their eleventh birthday.”

“Phaedra.”

“Yes, Gran?”

“I ain't teach you well enough to know when somebody is pulling your leg?”

“But the things she was talking about sounded real. Tanya Tompkins said her cousin's friend's cousin had it happen to her and her parents had to go looking for her.”

“So, what would you do if the fire hag came for you then?”

Phaedra looked down at her hands, hoping they might somehow hold an answer for her. She remembered a night when her mother, in her cups, her eyes gone glassy, had told her, “The one mistake I made was in thinking that someone could save me. First it was England, and then it was your father, and then it was you girls. You girls are the only things that ever came close. But still. I can tell you for sure one thing. You can't wait for someone else to save you from the life you made for yourself. If I teach you girls anything, I hope it's how to gird up your loins and face the fate that's yours.” Her mother
moaned then, and even now, Phaedra could hear Avril's voice trembling with tears.

“Phaedra Ann Braithwaite, don't you know enough to keep yourself well?” Hyacinth asked.

Phaedra nodded, wanting to be sure. She looked up at the stars and the red-ringed moon for an answer but all she could hear was the sound of her mother's voice, and in it the sea of regrets she'd lived and then drowned in. What she wanted more than anything was to believe what Avril had told her, and the summer had taught her, was true, that she could save herself if she needed to.

“There's nothing that can come for you that between me, you, your sister, and God we can't handle. You hearing me?”

“Yes, Granny,” Phaedra said.

“Right, then,” Hyacinth said, considering the matter settled.