Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

When the last mourners had taken their plates of wrapped food and said their good-byes, once Phaedra was asleep, it was just Hyacinth and Dionne sitting in the front room, leaning together into the night, which felt darker now because it lacked the comfort of the other hill women’s company. Hyacinth asked Dionne what on earth had come over her to make her want to climb on top of Avril’s coffin. And Dionne, of whom Hyacinth would say after this conversation that she was her mother’s own child, said, “What I did was nothing worse than what my mother’s done to me. If I had been able to see her even once before she died, I would have told her that she shouldn’t get off that easy.” Hyacinth looked at this child, at her flinty eyes, and saw how much she believed that she was not only right, but also justified. And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas. She knew that this was Avril’s undoing, not that she’d made the wrong choices, but that she’d been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage; this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth had taught Hyacinth that it wasn’t so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband’s fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the men who grieved too deeply the lives they’d wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them. Hyacinth worried about Dionne because of her hard way of being in the world, the way she could only see the world through the lens of her own flawed feelings.

FOR THE ENTIRE NINE NIGHTS that the hill mourned Avril, Phaedra and Dionne and Hyacinth were together almost every minute of every day. The girls and their grandmother formed a web between them that they wanted to believe was indestructible. They ate food their neighbors cooked for them and wiled the days away in prayer. On the last night, they took long soaks beneath moonlight in baths filled with bark and berries. They tried to build a new alliance with stories about Avril. Hyacinth, who was known less for her stories than for her carefully chosen words that awed with their precision, dug back into her vault of memories from the time when she herself was young and a mother, trying to reconcile what she thought motherhood might be with the reality of her sweet, impulsive child.

Phaedra and Dionne listened as Hyacinth told them about the time their mother had driven with the church all the way out to Folkestone for the church picnic, singing hymns and shaking tambourines the whole way. After everyone had had their fill of food, Avril and Mrs. Loving rushed out in the cold water and did headstands on the seafloor, their gangly limbs kicking up above the water, and the skirts of their dresses falling down around their necks so that all the church people could see their puffy bloomers and their legs waving above them. Hyacinth had barely recovered from the embarrassment of that incident when Avril brought home Errol. He said he was a musician, and Hyacinth knew that meant he was definitely a layabout and possibly a criminal. Dionne perked up when she heard her father’s name and she asked Hyacinth what he looked like when she met him.

“Well, when your mother dragged that young man in here, I could see from the way she looked at him like he was a bowl of milk and she was the hungriest cat that nothing good would come of them. I wondered to myself what would dead them first, his dreaming or her faith in him. He was wearing a cream linen suit and he had pretty pretty pretty hazel eyes and red-red skin. But I could see it was his mouth, the same mouth you have, that your mother fell in love with.”

The girls went to sleep that night with this image of their father in their minds. The next morning, Phaedra woke up upset. After her mother died, Phaedra couldn’t remember her dreams. Regardless of what the dreams were about, they left their mark on her and it was not unusual for Phaedra to wake up shaken, her clothes plastered against her skin. She had taken to crawling into Dionne’s bed in the early hours of the morning, which she said was because she thought Dionne might be lonely. Now, she clung to Dionne like a life jacket.

“Dress over nuh, man. You squeezing me up too tight.” Dionne pried away Phaedra’s fingers, which were fastened in a vise grip around her neck. Phaedra wiped the sleep out of her eyes and looked at her sister, who had wrapped her straightened hair into a kind of tornado around her head, and then tied it down with a scarf to keep it fresh, a trick she’d learned from Saranne.

“Daddy’s coming to see about us,” Dionne said, looking, as she often was, into the mirror next to her bed. She searched her plump, pink lips for signs of her father, but all she could see was Avril.

“What?” Phaedra said. She sat up in Dionne’s bed and looked from her sister’s beehive to the fuzz of hair above her own two-week-old braids, which her grandmother hadn’t insisted on redoing. There was a new softness in Hyacinth since her mother died. Phaedra knew that she got her way more often with her grandmother and the other hill women because of her dead mother. She only hoped this new reprieve from hardness would last.

“What are you talking about?”

“I said Daddy’s going to come look for us.”

“How do you know that? Who told you?”

“I can just feel it.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in all that mumbo-jumbo hocus-pocus old-wife-tale business.”

“Doesn’t matter what I believe in or not. Certain things you just know.” Dionne whipped her silk bathrobe around her, yet another thing she’d gotten from Saranne and kept instead of returning it like Hyacinth had told her to. She flicked on the overhead light and Phaedra groaned.

“Besides, do you really think that if Daddy knew Mommy had died, he would just leave us here?” Dionne continued.

“I don’t know, Dionne. Maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. It has been a long time since we’ve seen him.”

“You just watch. I know that Daddy wouldn’t leave us like that.”

“OK, D.,” Phaedra said. She sat a while longer watching her sister fuss with the lotions and potions on her vanity, and then she started to burrow beneath the covers.

“What are you doing?” Dionne asked.

“Going back to sleep,” Phaedra said.

“Last time I checked, you had a bed down the hall.”

“Fine, then.” Phaedra stalked out of the room, and then came back to retrieve the bandana that had fallen off her head during the night.

More than an hour later, after Phaedra heard her sister slapping her soles on the linoleum tiles on her way back and forth to the bathroom, Dionne emerged in the front room where Phaedra was eating breakfast in front of the television. Dionne was wearing a tight tube top, a denim miniskirt, Keds, and a pair of leg warmers in the same neon pink as her top.

“How do I look?” Dionne asked.

“Very, very done.” Phaedra noted the lip gloss and liner her sister was wearing in a shade of gold that made her mouth pop out from her face like a billboard. “You’re not going to VBS?”

“Nope. Me and Saranne have plans for the day.”

“But today’s the last day of rehearsals and you’re in one of the plays. How are you going to miss that?”

“Let me worry about that. If Granny comes home before you leave, just tell her I had to go early for rehearsal.”

“OK,” Phaedra said, unsure that she would lie if the time came.

“Love you,” Dionne said on her way out the door.