Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Dionne said she can’t come right now. She said she’ll see us after the picnic,” Phaedra said.

“I’m sorry?” Hyacinth said, not believing her ears.

“She said—”

“You stay here,” Hyacinth commanded. She hauled herself up to the table of slick, gray boulders. She had started bellowing Dionne’s name when she lost her footing and fell down into the shallow water, a few feet below where the boys sat, looking on.

The boy whose hands were resting on Dionne’s exposed shoulders laughed. And Dionne — who wanted nothing more than to be wanted by him, who had just finished asking whether the phone number he’d given her was really the number to his very own apartment — laughed too.

“Oh, so you think it’s funny. You’re going to see what’s funny when I fix your business,” Hyacinth said.

“You might want to fix yours first,” Dionne said and laughed again, pointing to where the white fabric of Hyacinth’s skirt pressed against the front of her big white panties. The gaggle cackled with her.

Hyacinth walked through the water like she was on land. She slapped Dionne in her mouth, and the laughs that were once with Dionne turned direction against her.

Dionne looked at her grandmother once she’d composed herself. A cold glare emptied out of the girl she had been when she arrived. “I don’t have to be here, you know,” she said.

“Oh, you don’t?”

“No, I don’t. My mother is in New York, and I could go home anytime. Besides, I have other places on the island I could go to.”

“Oh, is so grown you be? Well, when you find your mother, tell her hello for me. In the meantime, if you know what’s good for you, you will find some clothes to put on and come.” Hyacinth shook with anger, not fear; the water rippled as she moved through it.

Saranne stood smirking where she’d watched the whole scene unfold.

“I ain’t finish with you yet. You stay there, keeping company like that and watch what going to happen to you. Dionne, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that you lay down with dogs—”

“You get up with fleas,” Dionne said.

“Well, all right then, you can say it but it don’t seem like you know it. I’m not telling you again to come.”

Dionne motioned to one of the boys to throw down the bag where she’d stuffed her clothes. She didn’t turn back to say good-bye to Saranne or the boys, just walked out of the water in her grandmother’s wake, wishing the sea would swallow her whole.

PHAEDRA’S BODY PULLED at the light, testing the softer side of midnight. Hyacinth usually slipped out of bed in the middle of the night, careful to fit her rustle inside Phaedra’s dreams. This time, she troubled the quiet with the whoosh of her matchbook and then the sound of her oil lamp lighting. The flames’ shadows danced across the plywood walls and bounced off the zinc roof before coming down again. Phaedra stirred and looked through the sleep shrouding her eyes to see her grandmother standing at the foot of the bed, fully dressed in the indigo blue she wore to births, her kit slung over one shoulder.

“Well, you say you want to learn how baby born.”

“Huh?” Phaedra asked, wiping the cold from her eyes’ corners. She coughed on the thick smoke of the mosquito coil that was burning at the foot of their bed.

“Phaedra Ann, you have exactly five minutes to put on your clothes and come. You think Ms. Husbands’s baby going to wait on you to wipe the yampie out you eye?”

“Ms. Husbands?”

“Your friend Donna, her mother.”

“Oh.” Phaedra did not initially take the bulge beneath Donna’s mother’s clothes for a baby. When she asked her grandmother how she knew she was pregnant, she said that even with a fat woman, you could always tell by her ankles and sometimes by a darkening at her neck whether she was in the family way.

“Time waits for no one,” Hyacinth said, turning toward the door. “If you learn anything, you must learn that babies come exactly when they’re ready, not a minute later and not a minute before. There’s no such thing as rushing them out. Or pushing them back in once they come.”

“Back in?” Phaedra asked. She was still sleepy but curiosity got her out of her nightie and into her street clothes, which were folded neatly on a chair between the bed and the window. Even Phaedra, who was a lover of sleep, knew that this was something worth waking for.

The hush of the night enveloped them. With her grandmother by her side, Phaedra felt safe, sure that she knew where she was going, and that no harm would come to them when they were together. They walked for fifteen minutes before they came to a fork in the road and followed it to the right. Up ahead, three houses in, a light was on in the front room. On the gallery, a man sat smoking, the glowing ember of his cigarette the brightest thing in the darkness.

“I thought you would never reach. I called Ms. Zelma’s phone looking for you hours ago,” he said, his voice a grumble laced with relief.

“Everything in its own time. Find yourself somewhere to catch for the night and come back in the morning.”

In the dark, Phaedra couldn’t see the man’s face, but the voice’s commanding cadence put her in mind of someone she knew. She started to ask if the man smoking on the veranda was Father Loving, but thought better of it. Phaedra had learned that asking too many questions made grown-ups remember her age. As she was mulling over the identity of the man on the gallery, a groan unlike any Phaedra had heard before came from inside the house. Hyacinth took the three front steps gingerly, her walking stick stretched in front of her to ward off any sleeping dogs.

When they reached the scratchy welcome mat, Hyacinth said confidently, “Inside.”

Donna came to the door and turned on the porch light. She looked three shades paler than usual, her t-shirt stained with rum raisin ice cream, her hair uncombed. She who was usually so full of chatter opened the door silently and led them to the front room, where her mother was beached on a mattress on the floor. Phaedra was distracted momentarily from the hulking mass at the center of the room by the photographs that lined the walls, old-time pictures of black people, some posed in a photo studio, some with horses and donkeys, some in front of the church, all variations on Donna and her mother. Phaedra compared these images to the ones that lined the walls of her grandmother’s house, all graduation photos from kindergarten onward for Avril, Dionne, and Phaedra, a kind of shrine to their education, because Hyacinth said that even though she didn’t reach high school, every one of her girls would go to college.

“Get your nose out of your behind, child. Go boil some water and bring me clean towels,” Hyacinth said.

Phaedra did as she was told, backing out of the room with Donna in tow.

“There’s water on the stove,” Donna said.

“Did you boil it already?” Phaedra asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Mummy said it wasn’t time,” Donna said.

“Wasn’t time for what?”

“Time for the baby to come.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“It’s just this week I find out.”

“This week? You mean to tell me your mother was pregnant for nine months and you just now realize it?” Phaedra reveled in assuming the position of expert.

“How would I know?”

Phaedra stopped at what she thought was a fair question. She used a long match to light the pilot like she’d seen her grandmother do, and set the water to boil. Donna crumpled into herself, leaning into the relief of someone more capable taking over, feeling the demand for her false competence subside. Phaedra moved past the kitchen and found the linen cabinet exactly where she expected it, just above her head on the right-hand side of the hallway outside the bathroom.