Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

NO ONE CELEBRATED the last week of Vacation Bible School more than Phaedra Braithwaite. Someone who didn’t know Phaedra might have seen the way that she was carrying on — singing more loudly than all the other girls during praise song, playing Martha in the final rehearsals with such gusto — and mistaken her enthusiasm for joy and not the relief of knowing that this particular form of torture would soon end. For while her mother’s death meant that she could take an entire week off from VBS, the following Monday she was back. And just as she’d feared, the girls whose disdain had previously spilled over Phaedra like Milo now eyed her with uniform pity. In no time, she’d gone from being the Yankee girl with the long hair to the Yankee girl with the dead mother. As their mothers had instructed them to do, the girls said “So sorry for your loss” and “Sorry to hear about your Mummy.” Simone Saveur even invited Phaedra to have lunch with her clique at the tables in the front of the church hall. But once Phaedra knew that she was invited and Donna, the closest thing she had to a girlfriend, was not, she refused. It wasn’t so much that she liked Donna, but that she held fast to her role of outsider now. And some part of her wondered about the limits of the new courage she’d earned, the true nature of the swagger that was hers now that she was a motherless child. She heard that song on the radio the Sunday after her mother’s body had been flown down and the lyrics stuck in her chest, a tape whose damaged brown plastic she thought might spool out of her mouth one day. There it was, the “sometimes” and “feel” cresting when she wasn’t speaking, the doleful tune stuck in her throat where she held it. If she concentrated, the song would take over; an entire day of VBS could be survived on just one extended chorus.

Having rejected the questionable charity of her classmates, Phaedra sat down to eat with Donna. During her friend’s awkward monologue about her new baby brother, Phaedra took gulps of watered-down Kool-Aid and bites of the cheese and cracker sandwiches she’d packed onto a napkin, nodding at intervals to show her appreciation of Donna’s stories. Phaedra found herself both bored and hungry after she’d finished her lunch. She turned to Donna and tried to redirect the flow of her chatter.

“So, is it true what they say, that you can climb trees?” Phaedra asked.

“Sorry?” Donna looked up from her third cheese sandwich.

“I said, is it true you can climb trees?” Phaedra said, watching Donna work the soft white bread from the roof of her mouth.

Donna’s face brightened. “Oh yes. Coconut tree, pawpaw tree, breadfruit tree. Fig tree. Although you can’t really climb a fig tree, since the figs grow close to the ground.”

“You climb that mango tree outside yet?”

“Which one?”

“The one behind the church.”

“Oh, sure. Last year, me and Chris had a contest to see who could pull down the most mangoes.”

“Who won?”

“Me, of course.”

“Of course.” Phaedra smiled because there was something about finally finding the place where Donna shone that delighted her.

Donna stayed quiet for a moment, waiting for the thrill of being directly asked about something she cared about to return.

“Come,” Phaedra said. Donna followed Phaedra outside where the girls from their class were taking a break from jumping rope to play in each other’s hair on the church hall’s back stairs. Angelique, whose hair was wavy and weighed down by the coconut oil her mother brushed into it every night, sat on one of the concrete steps, her ponytail open and her hair spread over the laps of three girls who admired it with their hands. Angelique hadn’t spoken more than two words to Phaedra since she had beaten her decisively in the Bible verse memorization championship. Phaedra had won by remembering that the Lord said to Jeremiah, “They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you.” Angelique hemmed and hawed while she tried to remember Psalm 127, verses 3 to 5. Even after Father Loving, who favored Angelique, gave her the word “arrows” as a hint, she still couldn’t produce the verse about how children are a heritage of the Lord. Just that morning, when the other girls mumbled their condolences, Angelique just looked at Phaedra and said, “Morning.” Phaedra was grateful for the steadiness of Angelique’s spite.

Phaedra thought to say excuse me to the girls who were blocking their way out, but instead she jumped off the side of the steps, and Donna hopped down too.

“Pick some mangoes for me, nuh,” Phaedra commanded. She shaded her eyes and looked up into the branches of the fruit-heavy tree.

“How many you want?”

“Donna Husbands, I know you are not going to climb that tree with your skirt on.” Simone Saveur spoke from where she sat clasping a fistful of Angelique’s slicked-down hair.

“I have shorts on underneath,” Donna said to the crowd, which was gathering now, as it always did when she climbed.

“You don’t have to explain yourself to those dusty girls,” Phaedra said.

“How many you want?” Donna asked, sizing up the tree. The ripest ones were also the highest.

“As many as you can get.”

“What did you say?” Simone Saveur spat from her seat.

“I said she doesn’t have to explain herself to any dusty girls. If she wants to climb a tree, she can climb a tree. Go ahead, Donna.”

Simone walked over to where Phaedra stood and planted herself directly in front of her. “Oh, so you think because you come from America, you can call us names? No one cares if your mother was too damn mad to know better than to kill herself. The two of you make a nice pair. The daughter of a whore and the daughter of a madwoman.”

A roar started among the children who could hear the fight inside Simone’s words.

“I see you have plenty chat when your boyfriend is around, and now your mouth not working so fast,” Simone baited.

“Excuse me, Simone,” Phaedra said, trying to push her gently aside. But the mountain of Simone Saveur, who had tree trunks for thighs like her five older sisters, would not budge. Their father had left after the last of the girls, twins with the same fierceness as the ones who preceded them, were born. The hill women had offered their condolences to the mother but no one could blame him for seeking somewhere he could be a man.

“What?” Simone spat back.

“I can’t see what Donna’s doing with you standing there,” Phaedra said.

“I’ll show you who’s dusty now.” Simone grabbed a handful of dirt and grass and threw it in Phaedra’s face. Phaedra grabbed at the doorknob breasts poking out from Simone’s shirt and turned one of them. The girls clutched each other, and then fell to the ground, rolling and trying to land licks. It was hard for the crowd to know whether to look up at Donna scaling the tree, or to look down at Simone and Phaedra rolling around in the dirt. While the girls fought, Donna defied gravity, using the parts of her body that usually jiggled and waddled in service of her task. When she reached the top of the tree, she shook the branches and mangoes rained down, sending the children running away from the tree and toward the church. Simone Saveur was on top of Phaedra landing blows as the crowd cried, “Cuff her” and “Beat her.” But then Simone took three mangoes to the head, and fell off Phaedra.

Timothy, of the snot-nosed twins, was raising Phaedra’s arm to declare her the winner when Ms. Taylor came outside, summoned out of the staff’s lunchtime prayer meeting by the noise. She broke up the crowd and sent both girls home for the rest of the day. Simone left, and Phaedra walked down to the graveyard to spend the rest of the afternoon napping among the headstones. She wanted to sleep near her mother’s grave, but the new grass scratched her legs, and she couldn’t get comfortable enough to stay there for very long. She settled on her great-aunt’s grave instead. When VBS let out for the day, she called out to Donna, who cautiously stepped just to the edge of the cemetery.