Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

In the beginning, when Avril first took to her bed, Phaedra was always within a few feet of her mother, sensing that her presence, even if unacknowledged, was a kind of balm. Phaedra would sleep curled up at the foot of her mother’s sofa bed, stand behind her, oiling and brushing her scalp, keep her cups of tea fresh, milky, and lukewarm. But over time, as the thing that got ahold of Avril dug deeper and deeper into her, Phaedra retreated into her books and solitude, angling her body away in the rare moments when Avril remembered her children and gave them awkward, short-lived bouts of attention. It didn’t help when the girls from her school, who never liked her, found new ammunition for their taunts, saying that Phaedra’s mother was crazy, and that crazy was catching, and if everybody knew what was best for them, they would stay as far away as possible from Phaedra. Phaedra thought about lashing out; in her mind, she dragged the ringleader by her pigtails down the glass-strewn concrete steps in the school yard. But she knew that would only make their lies seem true, and so she’d stewed by herself, counting down until the last day of school. Now, with the full extent of her mother’s madness proven by her suicide, it was hard for Phaedra not to wonder whether she’d inherited Avril’s madness. Maybe, if she was lucky, Phaedra thought, Avril had passed down a portion of her bravery too.

Phaedra relaxed as Mrs. Loving’s reggae music took over the dreadful hymn that had been her company that day, “Rock of Ages.” She let Mrs. Loving’s story wash over her. And then she spoke, her tongue molasses thick, but moving.

“You knew her?”

“Knew who, sweetheart?”

“My mother.”

“Of course I knew your mother. Impossible to live here and not know her. When I came here with my husband, she was the first friend I made. And when she moved to New York, I was inconsolable. I still remember when Dionne and Trevor were born, we used to walk them all over the place. You sister could cry from the time she woke up in the morning until she went to bed at nighttime, and the only thing to help was to keep her moving.”

Phaedra tried to reconcile what she knew of her mother and her sister and Mrs. Loving’s son Trevor with who they had been back then. It was easy to imagine movement comforting her sister, because even now, Dionne seemed most happy when she wasn’t still.

“When we were pregnant, we did everything together. We said that if we had a boy and a girl, they would marry one day. Nobody could tear us apart from one another, you know. When Avril came to tell me she was leaving, I put on one piece of crying and carrying on. I didn’t think I could make it in this place without her. And in a way, I didn’t.” Mrs. Loving gathered her dress between her thighs and turned the volume up on her cassette player in a way that indicated to Phaedra that their conversation was over.

Phaedra started to walk away, hearing this song and carrying away some part of Mrs. Loving’s sorrow: “This train is bound to glory/ This train don’t carry no unholy…”

But some part of Phaedra was unhinged by Mrs. Loving’s stories. When she reached the last step of the gallery, she turned back.

“Mrs. Loving, have you ever thought about what would happen if someone you loved also loved someone else?”

“Oh, darling. Aren’t you a little young to be worrying your head with that sort of thing? I know that you’re all that Christopher talks about.” Mrs. Loving said these words wistfully, as if she wished she could borrow some of the shine her son reserved for Phaedra.

Phaedra trembled with what was beating its way from her belly and up out of her throat. Ever since she’d helped her grandmother deliver Donna’s mother’s baby boy, she couldn’t get the image of Father Loving and his lit cigarette burning up the darkness out of her head. “You don’t wonder where Father Loving goes at nighttime?”

“Dear heart,” Mrs. Loving said, looking down to the valley below and the sea beyond it, “when night comes, I have my music and my boys and that is enough.”

A new song was on now, with different words, but the same guitar strains and drumroll. Mrs. Loving turned up the music and started humming along in a mournful tone that swept Phaedra off the veranda and onto the road.

FOR ALL OF DIONNE’S ROMPS inside the Bird Hill cemetery that summer, when the day of her mother’s funeral came, all the resources previously at her disposal — humor, indifference, denial — abandoned her, and there was no place to escape from her mother’s body and the people who had gathered to see her home. Trevor stood across from her with his face so filled with mourning you would have thought it was his own mother being buried and not Avril. As the minutes stretched with Father Loving’s prayers and the hill women’s graveside songs, Trevor tried to catch Dionne’s eye. She glanced at him briefly and noticed for the first time the way that his hairline peaked in the center of his forehead like his father and his younger brother; the intensity of their resemblance mocked her grief. For years, Dionne had looked to her mother for clues as to what she would look like when she got older. It was hard to imagine what kind of woman she would be without the road map of her mother’s body to guide her. Dionne denied Trevor the gift of her gaze.

It wasn’t until she saw the coffin being lowered into the ground that the fact that her mother was not coming back, not in some undefined “soon” as Avril pointed to in her letters, not next week or the week after, not when summer was over, not before school in the States started, not ever, became clear to Dionne. Dionne’s eyes had been dry since her mother died and where she’d expected to cry at the graveside, she felt instead an insistent fire at her heels and then an urge stronger than any she’d ever felt before to see her mother’s face. All the anger at her mother that Dionne had been holding back her whole life rushed to her throat and threatened to choke her. This last leaving was too much. Dionne thought that if she could just see Avril’s face, she’d be able to tell her that she couldn’t leave, not yet.

Dionne lunged from where she stood with her arms around Phaedra, her sister’s tears traveling between the black lace eyelets of Dionne’s dress and pressing against her skin. She strode toward the grave’s open mouth. And the hill women, the same ushers she’d seen wave fans at the brows of enraptured women, hold down grown men as they spoke the unintelligible, terrible words that God threw down on them like lightning, they came for her. She’d never known these strong arms herself. But now Mrs. Jeremiah’s sinewy forearms wrapped around her midsection and pulled her back. Mrs. Gumbs’s bosom and belly engulfed her. The women said things she couldn’t understand, things she knew were meant to calm her and keep her safe inside their embrace. And then, she wasn’t sure how, exactly, Dionne was beside her grandmother and her sister, at the edge of her mother’s grave. And before she knew what her body was doing, her feet were making contact with the wreath of lilies on Avril’s coffin. There was a gasp as the hill women watched a group of men, including Trevor, drag Dionne up and out of the grave.

The men pulled her to solid ground, and then Dionne felt the women’s fearsome power gather around her, but she wasn’t fighting anymore. She fell back into them, wishing they could take her anger from her, because it was heavy, what she felt, her rage at Avril for abandoning them in this godforsaken place with a grandmother they barely knew. It seemed unfair that Avril should have it so easy, that she could die and leave them behind just like that. Dionne fell back into the stalwart arms of the hill women who held her. And it was either Dionne’s feet or theirs that led her back to Hyacinth’s house for the wake.