Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

While Dionne was saying her prayers on the ride to her grandmother’s house, Chad was humming the song that was on when they first met. The lyrics went “Country girls does be sweet sweet/Country girls does be sweet sweet sweet.” When he first sang it, Dionne found it catchy and endearing. But now that she knew that she was the song’s sweetmeat, it grated on her nerves; she counted the minutes until she could be away from the insistent beat of his fingers on the dusty dashboard. When they pulled up in front of Hyacinth’s house, Dionne saw her grandmother sitting on the veranda. Chad tried to lean in for a final kiss, but Dionne gave his face the flat side of her palm instead.

“Not even a thank-you for driving you all the way out here?” Chad asked. Dionne slammed the car door without speaking.

Dionne got to the house’s rickety bottom step and said to its splinters, “Morning.”

“Oh, so the sun rose and you thought it might be a good time to come home?” Hyacinth said.

Dionne stuck out her chest, having become accustomed to using her body’s maturity as a proxy for the good sense she didn’t yet have. “We went to a party and then it was getting late so we decided to stay the night.”

“Who is we?”

“I went with Saranne. I told Phaedra to tell you we’d gone out.”

“They didn’t have phones where you were?”

“You don’t have a phone here, Gran.”

“You could have phoned Ms. Zelma and she would have called me to come.” Hyacinth looked up at the sun, which she could see stretching its face above the water now. “Look, Dionne, your mother already gave me my fair share of problems and I’m determined not to lose my head with worry over you and what you do and who you’re doing it with. I can see from what you’re showing me now that you are determined to try to send me to an early grave. Please move out of my face before I do something I don’t want to do,” Hyacinth said, waving Dionne inside.

Dionne walked up the stairs. She hugged the wall because it was cool and because she didn’t want to be in the path of her grandmother’s hands, which were as heavy as ripe pawpaws.

“Mind how you go in there. Your sister’s sick.”

“What’s new?” Dionne sighed.

“What did you say?” Hyacinth hissed. When Hyacinth stood, her chin was at Dionne’s chest. What she lacked in height she made up for in girth and fortitude.

“I said, what’s new? Every time I turn around Phaedra’s sick and somebody’s running behind her to clean up the mess. At least this time it didn’t have to be me.”

Hyacinth slapped Dionne with a mighty blow that Dionne was glad none of her neighbors were outside to witness, although she was sure at least Ms. Zelma could hear it. When she brought her face back up to meet her grandmother’s, it was with the imprint of Hyacinth’s palm on her check.

“Me and your sister is the only blood you have. You can go on with a lot of things, but I will not tolerate you disrespecting your family.”

“Family? Where was family when my mother was lying in her bed day after day after day wasting away? I was the one who bathed her and cleaned the house and made sure Phaedra went to school looking halfway decent. I was the one who did the shopping and went out every day pretending like everything was normal. Every time I needed something, it was my own damn self that I had to depend on. I didn’t see anybody called family coming to help me then.”

“Dionne, if it’s one thing I hope you learn, it’s to stop blaming everybody else for your problems. When you walk past this door, nobody is going to care whether you had a sick mother or a sister you had to care for. All that is past and only you can make your future. You at a crossroads, child. I see you there. I only hope you know which way you turning next.”

Dionne walked into the house, making a ton of racket as she shed her clothes. She was sure that she would never wear them again. And she didn’t care whether Phaedra or Hyacinth or anyone else, for that matter, heard her.

BEFORE ERROL EVEN SET his white wingtips on the steps of Hyacinth’s chattel house, Phaedra could smell the bad on him. She knew without being told that nothing good could come from her father’s unannounced arrival in Bird Hill. By this time, when her skin was a deep ochre and her feet had a new layer of callus from walking outside barefoot, she could see more clearly with her heart and her eyes. Phaedra looked through the window at Errol and at the woman he had brought with him, who struggled as her stiletto heels dug deeper into the mud. Errol’s woman’s whole foot sank inside the wet earth, and her shoes turned the same color brown as her skin, so that she looked as if she were a part of the hill rather than temporarily stuck to it. The wind whipped her white, wide-brimmed hat into the pile of mud behind her. Once both her feet were on solid ground again, the woman tried to fluff out her hat hair, but there was still a broad band around her forehead that made her look marked.

Phaedra wasn’t afraid, just alert. There was nothing, she thought, that between her and her grandmother, they couldn’t handle. Dionne could help, too, although Phaedra worried about her sister more these days, wondered if there wasn’t a way to make her see that the thing she was searching for was something she already had.

When Errol’s foot tapped the top step, Phaedra shouted, “Granny, look trouble come.”

Hyacinth, who had just wiped her gardening boots off on the back steps, heard Phaedra and asked, “What you saying, child?”

“I said, look trouble come.”

“I don’t know what kind of foolishness you talking,” Hyacinth said. And then she went to the front door, which Errol was knocking down like the police.

A memory shivered up Phaedra’s spine, the sound of her father’s knocking on the front door of their apartment in Brooklyn while she and her sister cowered in the bathtub. Their mother dragged the love seat, and then a dresser, and finally the dining room table to shore up the door, which was already triple-bolted. In the bathroom, along with the sound of the water dripping from the leaky faucet onto Dionne’s house shoes, Phaedra heard the pounding of her father’s knuckles. If Phaedra wasn’t sure before whether this man in white, fleshy around the edges of his face and with a beard, was her father, she was sure now.

Hyacinth wedged the door open and eyed the red-skinned man grinning at her in his white suit. When Errol opened up his mouth to speak and she saw the glint of gold from his front teeth, Hyacinth was sure that it was, indeed, her dead daughter’s husband. When he’d first started courting Avril, Hyacinth warned her against dating any man who had more money in his mouth than in his bank account. But Avril’s eyes were blinded by Errol’s shine, her better judgment overcome by the songs he strummed on his guitar. When his visa to the States came through, Avril wondered not whether to leave with him, but when.

Hyacinth shifted her weight to the right, obscuring Phaedra’s view. As quickly as the question of who had come to her door was answered, the problem of how to keep him away from her grandchildren filled the first question’s emptied space.

“Hyacinth,” Errol slurred. From where she stood behind her grandmother, Phaedra could smell the rum wafting from his mouth, which hung slightly open like a dog’s even when he wasn’t speaking.

“Errol,” Hyacinth said.

“Well, I didn’t think these would be circumstances under which we would meet again,” Errol said.

“I had hoped you would dead first.”

“Is that the kind of thing you say to your son-in-law after all these years? I came to pay my respects.”