The Star Side of Bird Hill (3 page)

The front steps of the church at the top of the hill were always lit for travelers on their way home. Phaedra felt some of her fear drop away as they approached it, her heartbeat descend back to her chest from where it had taken residence inside her eardrums. When they came closer to the Lovings' house, the rectory next to the church, Phaedra felt her heart quicken again. Trevor leaned against the metal gate and Chris
did the same, imitating his older brother's ease. The girls met up with the boys and then split off into their usual pairs, Dionne and Trevor holding hands, Phaedra's and Chris's arms grazing.

Phaedra and Chris climbed over the railing that enclosed Phaedra's great-aunt's grave. Chris pulled out a flashlight and a handkerchief to wipe the dusty wet. Then, he indicated that Phaedra should sit down. Phaedra, suspicious of this extra attention, chose to stand.

“It's cold,” Phaedra said. She felt the cool of the night's small hours travel beneath her layers and make contact with her clammy skin.

“You want my jersey?” Chris asked.

“No, I do not want your sweater, Christopher. What I do want is a reason why you thought it would be a good idea to try and kill me with the biggest rock you could find.”

“I just wanted to know.”

“Know what? Know what I looked like lying unconscious? What exactly is so interesting about that?”

“I'm not saying that. I just was curious about . . . you know.”

“No, I do not know. What are you talking about?”

“I wanted to know if it's true what people say about your family. If it's true that you can't die.”

“Who told you that?” Phaedra grabbed the flesh on Chris's arm and pulled, wringing it until she felt his skin grow hot.

“Nobody. Nobody told me,” Chris said, trying to wrestle out of her hold.

“Besides, how could you even believe that when we're sitting on the very real grave of my very dead great-aunt? How stupid could you be?”

Phaedra waited for Chris to say something. When she heard nothing, she turned to step out of the grave, which was enclosed by a knee-high ring of intricately wrought iron. She tripped and Chris caught her before she fell.

“You all right?”

“I'm fine. Glad that it was my own two feet that tripped me this time and not you.”

“Come on, Phaedra. You're fine now.”

“Tell me who told you.”

“It's not just one person. Everybody knows.”

Phaedra felt the weight of this truth as another blow to her already fragile sense of belonging. She shook her head, not wanting to believe that she was as much an outsider here as in Brooklyn.

“I'm leaving.”

“Wait. I wanted to give you these,” Chris said. He pressed three blue marbles into her palm.

“Why?”

“I wanted you to have something of mine . . . something almost as beautiful as you.”

Phaedra grunted, a sound that was halfway between dismissal and thanks. Then she closed her fingers around the marbles.

Phaedra and Chris used the beams from Chris's flashlight
and the murmurs of Dionne's and Trevor's voices to lead them to their siblings' hiding place. Chris cleared his throat as they approached, giving Dionne and Trevor a chance to untangle themselves from each other. If she'd been on the hill longer, Dionne would have known that years of experience had taught Chris not to interrupt his brother's flow with girls who let him touch them. But Dionne was new to the hill, and her relationship with Trevor depended on her believing that she was his first or, at least for this summer, his only.

“Yes?” Dionne said from the cocoon of Trevor's arms.

“I'm going to walk Phaedra home,” Chris said.

“You know the way?” Dionne asked, although she was unlikely to leave the comfort of Trevor's embrace to give directions or lead them anywhere.

“Of course,” Chris said.

“I'm only letting him walk me because he asked,” Phaedra said.

“That's my boy,” Trevor said. He went to give his little brother a high five, but their palms missed each other in the dark.

“That's my sister, you ass,” Dionne said, and then started play-punching Trevor.

Phaedra, who knew that, for Dionne, anger was often a prelude to affection, understood that they'd been dismissed. She tugged at Chris's elbow to indicate it was time to go.

Chris lit their way back onto the main road. And although Phaedra told Chris that she could find her way home from
here, thank you very much, when they reached the rectory, he continued to shine his light at their feet. Just as they rounded the last ring of road at the hill's bottom, there were footsteps on the path in front of them. They ducked into a sugarcane field, afraid to be caught by an adult or, worse, met by a jumbie. Phaedra had always been afraid of ghosts, and being in Barbados hadn't done anything to lessen that fear.

In the night, Hyacinth was a rustle mostly of air, hurrying along without the aid of her walking stick, like she had important business to attend to. Gone was the white turban that she wore; shocks of kinky platinum hair stood up all over her head. She was freer, too, her hands hanging loosely about her, her gait that of a much younger woman. If hill women had been watching, they might have said that Hyacinth looked freer than before she was baptized.

Phaedra, upon seeing her grandmother, backed up so far into the cane that she hit upon a well. She remembered her mother's warning that, despite how enticing they seemed, sugarcane fields were as rank as New York City subway platforms and as dangerous too. The year before, a girl was found dead in one of the wells just up the road from Hyacinth's house, her body disposed of in the countryside by a scorned boyfriend who thought nobody would look for her there. Avril had said, “You think the cane pretty? Well, think so from far. If you must have some cane, then take some from the outside part. You hear me, child? You hear?”

Phaedra recalled the way that rage creased the corners of her mother's eyes, and she was glad she wouldn't be seeing her
for a couple more months at least. She shook her head, trying to push the thought, which she knew was disloyal, away from her. It was nice, Phaedra thought as the cane scratched her, to have a break from defending her mother, from the pressure to do as Dionne commanded and keep their family business to herself. Where Dionne found ease in making things up to get along, lying about Avril and their life strained the limits of Phaedra's earnestness. What a relief it was, Phaedra felt, to be somewhere where she didn't have secrets to keep.

Chris pushed through the thick stalks of cane, looking for Phaedra. “How you find yourself all the way here?” he said when he saw Phaedra backed up against the well like it was holding her up.

“Move from me, Christopher. I'm ready to go now. Stand up in this field too long and soon I'll have leptospirosis.”

“What's that?”

“Rat pee poison.”

“Oh. That could kill you?”

“Dead.”

“I wouldn't like that, Phaedra. I wouldn't like it at all if you died.”

“What kind of foolishness you talking? Don't confuffle your head and think that I'm paying you any mind, Christopher Loving.”

“I like it when you try to talk Bajan,” Chris said.

Phaedra was so mad then that she couldn't speak; she could only draw in air to make one of the epically long suck-teeth sounds she had learned from Avril. Chris was lucky it was
dark, so he couldn't see just how much Phaedra tried to dislike him in that moment.

When both their hearts started beating slower, they left the field and made their way back to the road. Chris walked Phaedra back home, not leaving until he heard all the latches lock.

THE NEXT MORNING
found Phaedra nestled in the bluebird bedsheets she loved and her already long face stretched to its limits. The swelling on her head had all but gone away, but the wound was a crescent moon on the right side of her forehead, indigo at its heart with shades of lavender at its edges. A new clover of bruised flesh blossomed on her behind where she'd backed up against the well in the sugarcane field the night before.

Unlike the other hill women, Hyacinth woke up well past cock's crow and left her bed only when the spirit moved her. Phaedra found it odd that her grandmother would sleep in. But having known her mother, whose quiet struck in the late hours of the evening, Phaedra knew that the Braithwaite women were anything but predictable, and that it was best not to
disturb her grandmother's sleep. Phaedra was nothing if not an expert at making herself small for the sake of other women's need for peace.

It was well past daybreak when Hyacinth came into the room she shared with Phaedra, bringing her scent of nutmeg, mint, and the cherry chew sticks she kept posted in her mouth's corners. Phaedra rubbed the sleep from her eyes and searched her grandmother's face for traces of the woman she'd seen the night before. But there she was, exactly the same as the daytime Hyacinth with whom Phaedra was becoming familiar, dressed in white from the turban on her head to the socks on her feet. Hyacinth pressed a heavy, moist hand to Phaedra's forehead and neck, checking to see if the fever that rose when Chris hit her had finally broken.

Phaedra took in their room, noticing the table in the corner where she and Hyacinth dashed cold water on their faces each morning. She felt some pride in having finally figured out how to draw water so that she didn't hold up the line while the other children laughed at her, the Yankee girl who didn't even know how to make water flow from the standpipe. Hyacinth insisted that Phaedra wash the night off her face and brush the evening off her teeth as soon as she got up each morning. This never made sense to Phaedra since she just got dirty all over again when she ate her breakfast of salt bread and cheese and the Ovaltine Hyacinth made her drink, even when the sun was already high in the sky and pouring heat through the windows, because she said that she needed to have something
hot on her belly. Hyacinth said that it was a gift to greet a new day, and that you needed to meet it in a way that showed how grateful you were to have your life spared. Phaedra wasn't sure what Hyacinth meant, exactly, but she did like the routines and rituals they had, the way they made a kind of container so her mind could wander to the things she thought and felt and dreamed about. The sameness of the days in Bird Hill comforted Phaedra as much as it rattled Dionne.

“You vex with somebody, Phaedra? Or somebody vex with you?” Hyacinth asked, drawing her palm away from Phaedra's cool brow.

“No, Granny. Why would you say that?”

“Just the way I see you lying down here still in bed. The Phaedra I know would have already had her breakfast and tea, and be bringing me mine by now.”

“I still don't feel quite like myself,” Phaedra said. Despite everything she knew about the women in her family, Phaedra still hoped that her sickness might elicit sympathy.

“Cuhdear. Well, I don't think that all that late-night walking about is helping your case.”

Phaedra hesitated, weighing her options. She considered denial, protest, blame, then settled finally on projection. “Well, what were you doing out there? I was surprised to see you out on the road like that.”

“Sometimes I need nightfall to hear myself properly.”

Hyacinth pulled back the sheets to reveal the street clothes Phaedra had slept in.

“Oho. So the thief in the night was too busy to even change her clothes.”

“I was so sleepy when I came in last night.”

“Don't worry, darling. Just more proof that it's time for you to get out of the sickbed. You practice being one kind of thing too long, and soon enough that's who you become. Besides, don't you want to go play with your friends?”

Hyacinth's use of the plural, “friends,” was generous.

“The one friend I had did this to me,” Phaedra said, pointing at the bruise.

“Boys are like that. I had one boy who would punch me every day in primary school. When I finally hit him back, he told me that he liked me but he just didn't have the words to tell me so.”

“Well, I have enough words to say that I am done with Christopher Loving for good.”

“What did he do to you?”

“What do you mean, what did he do to me? He's the reason why I look like this.”

“That much I know is true. But the way you're going on, I know that there must be something else there. Something that wound you below the skin.”

Phaedra considered whether to tell her. “Chris said that I'm like you and my mother, that no matter what I do, I can't die.”

“So that's what has you so upset?” A small laugh escaped from Hyacinth's generous mouth.

“Don't make fun of me. I'm tired of everyone treating me like such a baby.”

Hyacinth sighed. Her ample bosom heaved as she pushed Phaedra from her perch and started stripping the sick-sheets from the bed. “People say we can't die, but there's no man who won't go when God calls him home. That's just people trying to make sense of something they don't understand. Let's make a deal. You go out and play. Soon, I'll start to show you what it all means.”

“Really?”

“You have my word. Now, out!” Hyacinth said. She pushed her granddaughter out into the bright of day.

 • • • 

PHAEDR
A
WAS
WALKING
to the back of the house when she glimpsed her sister in the mirror through the open bathroom door, her feet planted firmly and a pink toolbox full of makeup and hair-related paraphernalia splayed open on the toilet seat. After her breakfast, Phaedra wanted badly to pee. She knew her sister would tell her to use the outhouse or stop being so scary and just pull the curtain in front of the toilet while Dionne fixed her face. But Phaedra had inherited her shy bottom from her mother so she liked privacy when she used the bathroom. Besides, she wasn't in the mood to beg Dionne for anything.

“You think those goats are going to milk themselves?” Dionne said, with a bobby pin clenched between her teeth. It was hard to tell what hairstyle she was fashioning, but knowing Dionne, even though she didn't have anywhere special to go that day, it would be elaborate.

“I'm going to milk them right now.”

“Well, nobody's stopping you. And I don't need an audience,” Dionne said, noting the fact that Phaedra was still standing inside the door frame.

“You sure about that?” Phaedra asked.

“Will you please stop ugly-ing up my mirror and do what you're doing before I tell Granny it's been days that I've been doing your chores for you while you pretend to be ill?”

“Do you know how many hours of your life you'd get back if you stopped spending your time on that mess?”

“It takes time to look this good.”

“I'm just saying, you could be reading a book or painting or—”

“Ahem. Is Phaedra Ann Braithwaite, tomboy of tomboys, trying to give me beauty advice?”

“I didn't say that. I'm just saying that—”

“Go say whatever you're saying to the goats. They look like they might listen to you.”

Phaedra felt sweat drench her face the minute she opened the back door. She put her hand to her forehead and looked out from the top of the three steps that led down into Hyacinth's garden. She was relieved to find Abigail where she expected her, lying on her side in the galvanized tin lean-to; the blue tarp they pulled down when the rains came flapped above the shed. Abigail the goat, which Mr. Jeremiah mated with his goat King David, had had six babies the week before Phaedra and her sister came to Bird Hill. Phaedra was sad she
hadn't been there to witness their birth. The kids liked to roll around in the dirt to stay cool and they enjoyed being chased around the yard with the hose that Phaedra sprayed them with after she watered her grandmother's garden. Phaedra descended the steps and approached Abigail calmly, remembering what Hyacinth had told her about animals greeting humans with the same spirit in which they were approached.

“Here, girl,” Phaedra said. She knelt down and gave Abigail a few pieces of pineapple. No matter how much Dionne told Phaedra that she was spoiling the goat and Hyacinth insisted that she wasn't cutting up fruit for any animals once Phaedra went back to Brooklyn, Phaedra insisted that the goat was easier to handle after she got what she wanted. Abigail sniffed the fruit and then ate it lying down, making it clear that she would get up when she was good and ready. She stood finally and her kids came running from the cool hiding spot they'd found beneath the house. Phaedra watched the ease with which they latched on and drank their mother's milk, and she was reminded of Avril. Her grandmother's words, about how if you practice being one kind of thing too long, you become that thing, were stuck in her head. Maybe that's what was wrong with Avril, she thought. Maybe it was a matter of her pretending to be sick at first and then, when it was time for her to be well, she didn't know how to be that way anymore.

Phaedra watched the goats eat and remembered feeding her mother ice cubes and pressing cool washcloths to her forehead the summer Avril took to her bed. In the beginning,
Phaedra believed her mother when she said that she just couldn't take the heat in New York, and that's why she stopped going to work at the hospital. She went to a round of doctors, none of whom could find anything wrong with her, but soon she was on medical leave, and then she didn't have any job at all, just checks from the government that came the first of every month like clockwork. Phaedra held out hope that when the fall came, Avril's mood would lift, but she and Dionne went back to school and Avril stayed home, and, after a time, the new state of affairs was old news, and then it was almost normal.

Phaedra was starting to understand how you could become someone else, even if you didn't intend to at first. She never imagined she'd be milking goats every morning and throwing boomerangs in the field behind Ms. Zelma's house with Christopher in the afternoons. The shape of her new life surprised her, and even though it had only been a little while, Phaedra already felt herself becoming a girl from Bird Hill; she could feel herself shedding the armor she needed in Brooklyn.

The baby goats scattered. Phaedra pulled the pail from its hook in the shed and dragged a well-worn stool beneath her. Phaedra got into the rhythm of tugging at Abigail's teats and pressing the milk out with her fingers like her grandmother had taught her. The pail filled at a laborious rate, but Phaedra didn't mind. She liked to be alone with her thoughts and the familiar, musty smell of the animals and Hyacinth's herbs and vegetables and flowers.

Maybe Chris does like me, Phaedra thought. Her hand jerked and milk that was meant for the pail squirted into her right eye and dribbled onto her t-shirt.

“Damn you, Abigail,” Phaedra said. And then she remembered what her grandmother had told her when she kept dropping the clothespins onto the ground while they were hanging clothes out to dry. “When you're doing your work, you have to be really doing it, and not dreaming about something else, child.” Phaedra had nodded, but kept dropping things anyway, and Hyacinth had simply shaken her head and wondered aloud where this child had inherited this habit of daydreaming.

Abigail looked at Phaedra and sat down. No amount of prodding would lift her off the ground. Phaedra gave up and poured milk from the pail, barely filling the bottom of the bottle she'd pulled from a crate on the back steps. At least she'd tried, she thought, which was more than she had been doing the last few days. She walked back to the kitchen in search of something else that might soften up the goat.

 • • • 

ON HER WAY TO
the kitchen, Phaedra felt Dionne's fingers grab the soft flesh at the top of her arm.

“You believe all those old-wife tales Granny tells you?” Dionne said.

“Old-wife tales?”

“All those stories about working roots and spirits and death
and so on. I heard you begging Granny to reveal the secrets of the universe earlier.”

“Yeah. So what, you're saying that her stories aren't true?”

“I thought that you were smart enough not to believe everything you're told.”

“I don't see any reason why Granny would lie.”

“Let me ask you this. If Granny knows so much, why can't she fix what is wrong with her own daughter?”

“You don't think she at least tried?”

“Well, if she did, clearly it didn't work. One month in Barbados and already you're turning into a ninny who believes everything they hear. Not everything is just a matter of walking by faith.”

“I need to pee,” Phaedra said. She tried to push past her sister into the bathroom, but Dionne planted herself in the door frame.

“You think you know everything. It's complicated. And I know more than you do.”

“Did you hear something from Mommy?” Phaedra asked, a tense crackle in her voice where her certainty would usually be.

Dionne pulled her sister into the bathroom, an echo chamber where sound bounced off the walls but didn't travel to the other rooms. It was the closest thing the girls had to privacy.

“I heard Granny talking to Ms. Zelma yesterday. She said, ‘Something tells me that my child is coming home soon,'” Dionne said in her best imitation of Hyacinth's voice. She closed the toilet seat so she could sit down.

“When?”

“She didn't say when. Granny heard me coming up behind her so she stopped talking.”

“You really think she's going to come?” Phaedra asked, forgetting momentarily that Dionne was her tormentor.