Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

Once, when there was a lull in conversation, Simone Saveur’s roving eyes settled on Phaedra. Simone tried to explain the concept of cooking a dirt pot, but Phaedra was not at all interested in cooking, not even for play, much less near her grandmother’s outhouse, which she was still too chicken to use, even when Dionne was taking forever in the inside bathroom, and she was dying to go. She knew she wouldn’t be playing any such game, or spending time with girls who thought this was a good time. Phaedra’s mouth corners turned down and soon everyone was saying their good-byes. Phaedra’s mother said that her daughter’s gloomy face could rain out a good time. In this case, Phaedra thought the force of her foul mood came in handy; it encouraged a quick end to what had been an uncomfortable, bordering on unpleasant, afternoon.

That summer, Chris and Phaedra were inseparable. Phaedra could barely trouble herself to remember the other girls’ names, having put them in the category of “just girls,” which was the same as dumping them into the rubbish bin of her mind. With Chris, there was ease to their play, a rough-and-tumbleness that she welcomed. Chris made Phaedra most happy by not asking her too many questions. Because while most of the Bird Hill girls were too polite to ask, she knew they most wanted to know about the thing she least wanted to talk about — her mother.

Phaedra liked to look at Christopher, who had the same sloe-eyed gaze as his mother’s, an ever-ready smile, and pink lips that made him seem more tender than other boys his age. Now she watched as he stuffed the stocky fingers of his eternally ashy hands into his pockets and surveyed the land below the hill, mimicking the firm stance he’d seen his father take in the pulpit.

From where they stood, Phaedra and Chris could see the fishermen’s boats at Martin’s Bay, the buoys bobbing up and down in the blue-green water. Further east, a riot of rock formations, vestiges of an island long since gone, jutted out at Bathsheba. It was Phaedra’s first summer in Barbados, and she wanted more than anything to feel the sand between her toes and to look at her feet through the clear-clear water. With its natural beauty, Barbados was far superior to Brooklyn; you were more likely to find a syringe than a seashell on the beach at Coney Island. She stood next to Chris, looking out at three rocks at Bathsheba that she and Chris had nicknamed the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It was hard to explain, but she had a feeling, standing there, that she’d never felt before in Brooklyn, not that she owned these things, but that she was somehow part of them. When Phaedra went on a class trip to the Empire State Building and looked down at the city from 102 stories above the sidewalk, she didn’t have that feeling. The city was beautiful in its own way, but it wasn’t hers. She didn’t try to explain how she felt to Chris. What she most liked about their friendship was how much space there was for silence, the kind of quiet she’d never found with girls her age.

Chris turned his back to the sea, toward Phaedra.

“Touch it,” Chris said. He dared Phaedra to touch the grave of her namesake, her great-aunt Marguerite Phaedra Hill, who had died from cholera like the others.

“What if I don’t want to touch it?” Phaedra said.

“Then I’ll make you.”

Chris picked up an enormous rock and threw it at Phaedra. It opened her right temple in the same place where she had a dime-sized birthmark she had seen the Bird Hill girls looking at and straining not to ask about. The force of the blow knocked Phaedra off her feet.

The dull thud of stone against skull roused Dionne and Trevor from their mischievousness. Dionne ran to see what happened and gasped when she saw her sister lying prone on the grave, blood running down the side of her head.

“But what happen here?” Dionne said, breaking into the patois that usually lay hidden beneath her tongue.

“Why did you do that?” Trevor asked Chris.

“Mummy say wail woman head can’t break,” Chris said incredulously, over and over again, as blood seeped out of Phaedra’s head and commingled with the hill’s red dirt. Phaedra didn’t know what wail women were yet, but Chris leaned on those two words in a way that made it clear to anyone within earshot that being called one wasn’t a compliment.

Dionne took off up the hill with Trevor trailing behind her. She pressed her hands to her breasts to still them as she ran. (She’d already outgrown the bras that she brought with her; the homemade ones her grandmother had sewn lay unused at the bottom of her mother’s old chest of drawers.) She swept past the church and stopped at the rectory, a white clapboard house with a view of all the other houses on the hill.

Chris’s mother was where she always was, sitting on her veranda, listening to Jamaican rockers on her radio. The way that Mrs. Loving stared out for hours over the hillside, unmoving, reminded Dionne of her own mother.

“Phaedra got hit in the head by a rock in the cemetery,” Dionne blurted out before she made it to the veranda steps.

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Loving said. She went running behind Dionne, moving unexpectedly fast.

Hill women were busy putting laundry out on the line, picking okra for cou-cou, humming along to the grand old gospel of salvation on family radio. They formed a circle at the hill’s bottom, looking on.

“Christopher Alexander Loving, what have you done?” Chris’s mother bellowed as she walked toward him. Upon hearing his full name, Chris would usually have run to hide. Instead, he stood at Phaedra’s feet, shading her from the noon-high sun. He looked down at Phaedra, transfixed, mumbling to himself.

Mrs. Loving took Phaedra’s head into her lap and let the blood soak her dress. She slapped gently at her face. “Come now, child, don’t let sleep take you.”

Finally, Phaedra opened up her eyes. “Mommy, what happened? Everything’s starry.”

“Hush, child, hush. Mummy’s not here, but she soon come,” Mrs. Loving whispered.

Phaedra looked up at Chris’s long shadow and then at Mrs. Loving above her. She was struck then, for the first time, by the heaviness of her head, the aching there, and the oddness of someone other than her mother trying to comfort her.

DIONNE HATED MOST THINGS about Barbados, especially the weather. She disliked the cool damp of the mornings, followed by the unforgiving heat and insistent afternoon rains that drowned any hopes of going outside. During the long, wet days when she was forced to keep watch over her sister, Dionne felt like one of the sick and shut-in from the church bulletin. Maybe this is what growing old was like, she thought. Maybe the world gets smaller and smaller until there’s nothing but the walls around you to show you where you end and the rest of the world begins.

The weather was just one thing on a long list of gripes that Dionne kept in her head, and occasionally wrote in the margins of the fashion magazines she’d brought with her from Brooklyn. Chief among her complaints was that there was nothing to do to entertain herself. The days just seemed to drag on and on. She sometimes looked up at the clock thinking an hour must have passed, when in fact it had only been a few minutes. And while she always resented the long list of things she had to do back in Brooklyn — prodding her mother, Avril, to get up and bathe each day, making sure Phaedra was dressed and her hair decently combed, cooking dinner and packing lunches for herself and her sister — in Barbados she felt like she had been demoted back to childhood, asked to put on a pair of too-small shoes by being responsible only for herself.

Hyacinth believed that idle hands were the devil’s playground, and so she gave the girls chores to do and signed them up for not one but two sessions of Vacation Bible School. Still, Dionne felt a restlessness welling up in her. Dionne thought Bird Hill was provincial, far too small a stage for a girl like her. There was a flash of excitement when a talent scout for the Miss Teen Barbados pageant came to Bird Hill. For a brief moment, something like joy washed across Dionne’s face when the other girls pushed her forward, saying that she would surely win. But when the scout heard her accent, the woman — whom Dionne later pronounced both too fat and too ugly to be scouting for a beauty pageant — asked whether she was of both Barbadian heritage and Barbadian citizenship, and she’d had to admit that she was in fact an American citizen. Just like that, Dionne’s dreams of emancipation from the lot of the fatally dull girls in Bird Hill were dashed.