Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Phaedra,” Hyacinth called with urgency from the front room.

“Yes, Gran,” she said, as she struggled to mount the step stool and pull the towels down from the cupboard.

“Bring those things now.”

Phaedra hustled toward the front of the house. She nudged the kitchen door open with her shoulder, then placed the towels next to the mattress.

“Oh, God,” Donna’s mother moaned over and over again, her breath coming hard and ragged.

“That’s right. Only He can help you through this. Now if you want this baby to come you have to push.”

Donna’s mother’s body dwarfed the mattress, the sheets a rusty red river of blood and shit. Having been in labor for three days, she was beyond tears, the shine on her moon-shaped face a kind of beatific exhaustion. Hyacinth grabbed two of the clean towels and placed them beneath Ms. Husbands’s body. Then she motioned for Phaedra to squat and hold Donna’s mother beneath her right shoulder while she took the left shoulder, as the woman’s strength had all but gone out of her. Something about the way that Donna’s mother flopped her sweat-slick body around reminded Phaedra of the unit they’d done on whales in fourth grade, ending with a film on how they gave birth. All the boys had eww -ed and the girls had covered their eyes, everyone except Phaedra, who said that the way the calves slid out of their mothers was beautiful. The girls at her school counted this as just another way in which Phaedra was strange; but having seen that film, she was unperturbed by what she was being called to witness now.

Donna, who had been watching from the sofa, went to fetch the boiling water from the stove. She poured the water carefully into a bowl and held the sides with a towel so as not to burn herself. Without being told to, she went to look for clean sheets in the linen closet. Before she returned, there was a whimper and a scream. Her mother collapsed against the mattress, spent.

After the baby boy was cleaned and the cord cut by Phaedra, the sheets changed and the floor mopped, Hyacinth held the child to her chest, rocking him and singing him a morning song. As the minutes and then an hour passed, black-and-blue marks bloomed on his tiny body, mixing with his original jaundiced color. Donna’s mother slept with her back turned, her breath a symphony of sighs. Donna busied herself with making a new bed for the baby in the room she shared with her mother, padding a bottom dresser drawer with blankets and towels.

“Take good care of your mother and the baby, y’hear?” Hyacinth told Donna before she left.

“Yes, Ms. B., I will. Hold on a minute there. Mummy said she had something for you.”

“All right.”

Donna went inside the house, and came back with a thin airmail envelope filled with red, green, and blue Barbados dollars, a set of three carbolic soaps, and a loaf of sweetbread. Hyacinth accepted the gifts and she and Phaedra stepped off the gallery.

“Open your mouth then, child. I know you’re full to bursting with questions,” Hyacinth said to Phaedra as they made their way back home, this time under a sun that was pushing the silver out of the sky.

“How come the baby came out all black and blue?”

“He had a long fight to get out.”

“Why wouldn’t she hold him?”

“Just wait. She will hold him yet.”

Phaedra had other questions, and she tried to hold on to them, to let the quiet lead them into morning. But when they reached the final turnoff before their house, Phaedra turned to see the church and the top of the hill, and the question inside her barreled forward.

“Gran, what do you do with someone else’s secrets?” Phaedra asked.

“It depends, darling. Who tell you to keep secret?”

“It’s not that anybody told me. It’s just that I wonder about Father Loving…”

“Delivering a baby is one of the most sacred things someone can ever ask for your help in. Our job is not to judge or jabber our mouths, just to do the work we were made for.”

“But what if the secret is hurting someone else?”

“It’s not our job to fix that kind of hurt. The only kind of work we worry about is the kind we can do with our hands.”

Phaedra watched the sun rise, and realized that the boy Donna’s mother gave birth to was the one her dreams of fish had pointed to. The summer had taught her that no amount of prayer could make the summer go by faster, or her mother well, or her sister kinder. Dreams were a bridge between the waking world and the sleeping one, but prayer, prayer was something else entirely.

DIONNE BOUNDED INTO her grandmother’s house with a netball cradled in her forearm and a red singlet plastered against her chest. Hyacinth could see beneath her shirt the imprint of not one but two bras that melded Dionne’s breasts into an undifferentiated mass. Hyacinth wanted to say something about it, but she knew that criticizing Dionne would invite her prickliness. Just the week before, Hyacinth had asked Dionne to go see Jean and have him make new clothes for her. There was a standoff in which Dionne insisted that her clothes still fit. What Dionne had said exactly, below her breath, was that she didn’t see why she had to let some buller man ruin her clothes like he’d ruined her hair on her birthday. Hyacinth, who believed that calling someone outside of their name was a grave offense, pounded her foot on the ground so that the few pieces of good china and crystal in the hutch shook. “What did you say?”

“Nothing, Granny.”

“I know you couldn’t be talking that kind of nonsense in my house. I beg you to leave whatever slackness you pick up in those streets when you wipe your feet on these steps. Jean isn’t a buller man. And I won’t have you going about here saying so. You hearing me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dionne said to the floorboards.

The compromise was that Jean would mend the places where her thighs had rubbed holes into her pants and let out her tops and skirts and dresses. Never mind that Dionne’s clothes were in need of replacing well before she’d come to Barbados, a fact that Hyacinth lamented when she and Phaedra unpacked their suitcases, asking if “wunna mother think that it’s a department store she sending you to,” ranting about the sad state of their wardrobes until Phaedra’s face flushed and she tried to snatch back a t-shirt pocked with pills and holes that her grandmother held up with one finger. Hyacinth did not tolerate rudeness from children. When Phaedra tried to wrest the t-shirt from her that evening, she pulled the little girl close and said, “I know Avril ain’t teach you to grab things from grown people. If that’s what you did in New York, you won’t do it in my house. That can’t fly in here at all.”

Hyacinth could tell from looking at the girls when they arrived that shame was not something new to them. Each of them wore it differently, Dionne with a bravado that belied what she knew about herself and her family, which was that neither she nor they ever had enough of what they needed. Phaedra had taken the teasing from the girls at school in Brooklyn and turned it against herself; she sometimes wondered if she wasn’t the dirty, worthless girl her classmates called her. One particularly rough week, Phaedra had to wear the same two tops to school because there was no money to go to the Laundromat. Never mind that Dionne made Phaedra take off her clothes as soon as she got home, then washed them in the bathroom sink and hung them to dry on the shower curtain rod each evening. Phaedra knew that the safest response to these kinds of assaults was silence, because although she wanted to say that at least she didn’t smell like Mercy, whom the other girls called an African booty scratcher, she knew that wouldn’t get her anywhere. As time passed that summer, Phaedra could feel herself standing taller, as if she could tap into the better parts of herself more readily in Bird Hill than she could in Brooklyn. Dionne, though, felt her armor clink into place more securely in Barbados, felt each passing day as evidence of their mother’s betrayal.