Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Mmm. You late for that,” Hyacinth grunted, and then planted her fist on her waist in a way that Phaedra knew meant business.

“So do you plan to let us in or do we have to stand outside in the sun?” Errol said. He pulled the woman who was with him close, grabbed her by the cream waistband of her white dress. Phaedra didn’t know much about drinking because she had been so young when her father left, but she looked at his quaking and thought her father’s grip was more for steadiness than affection.

“Anything you and I have to talk about can be discussed right here,” Hyacinth replied. She clicked the padlock on the gate inside the door closed.

“Well, you always were a battle-axe. You know what they say about the apple and everything.”

“My tree ain’t stop growing yet. But tell me, really, Errol, what kind of business you have here. You finally see my daughter exactly where you want her, in the ground. What more you want? The nails in her coffin screw in already.”

Errol swayed then, a movement that, like a personal earthquake, started in his shoes and went right up to his head. “I came to see about my girls.”

“Your girls?”

“My daughters.”

“Sweetheart, aren’t you going to say hello to your daddy? You must be Faye,” the woman in the white dress said to Phaedra, who had planted her face inside Hyacinth’s crooked elbow. The scent of rum was on the woman too.

“My name is Phaedra,” she said. She’d never been well-liked enough to earn a nickname at school, and the sound of her shortened name was strange in this new woman’s mouth.

“And what is this, Errol?” Hyacinth asked, pointing her mouth at the woman beside him.

“This is Evangeline. I brought her along to help me with the children. She’s a great cook, keeps the house together for me back in Miami.”

“How you find yourself all the way down there?”

“It’s a long walk from New York, a short flight from Miami.”

“Errol, you must take me for a poppet or a fool. You think that you could just put down your children one day like an old toy and come back another day and pick them up? I have no intentions of handing these girls over to you. You have exactly sixty seconds to clear yourself, and this, this person, off my porch, y’hear?”

“Don’t make this any harder than it has to be, Hyacinth. I have a lawyer that I consulted.”

“I thought you were below the law.”

“Tell me which judge would give a woman like you custody. You think obeah women make good guardians?”

Hyacinth got close enough to Errol to speak in his ear. Phaedra couldn’t hear what she said, but her words pushed Errol and the woman off the gallery. Whatever spirit had dragged Evangeline down into the mud earlier now summoned the wind to reveal the red bloomers beneath her white dress. Later, Hyacinth would tell Phaedra that women wore red underwear to ensure that their dead husbands would not visit them in the night after they’d died. Phaedra couldn’t understand why she would be wearing red underwear when the person who had died was her mother, and she said as much to her grandmother. Hyacinth looked at her, and Phaedra understood that this, like so much else, was something she would only come to understand in time.

For now, Phaedra dug her knees into the crinkly plastic cover on the sofa and watched as they walked away from the house. The woman was whispering something to Errol, a thing that clearly annoyed him and which he dismissed with a wave of his hands. Before they tumbled out into the road, the woman lifted up her dress, squatted, and pulled aside her panties to relieve herself in Hyacinth’s rose bed. Hyacinth, who did not deign to deal with every and anybody, especially this kind of childish behavior coming from what she would call a big hard-backed woman, responded by making a loud show of shutting the louvers. Phaedra heard but did not see the thorns tear at the woman’s dress when she tried to get up.

“You see that, Phaedra? You see how common dog does bark in church?” Hyacinth said.

Phaedra nodded her head although she didn’t really understand.

“That is all right, though, because the good Lord takes care of his flock and their foes. Some fights you don’t need your own fists for.”

“Yes, Gran,” Phaedra said, and then she tried to remember what she was doing before her father came.

• • •

WHEN DIONNE CAME HOME from a day of hanging out with Saranne, the last bits of light were casting slits and shadows over her grandmother’s kitchen. She used the key that Hyacinth gave her after Avril died, when she started locking up the house at night. Dionne saw the television’s blue screen that meant that there was no more programming for the evening. Phaedra sat reading a book in the vestigial light even though she had been warned countless times about ruining her eyesight this way. Dionne turned on the lamp beside Phaedra and sat down on the sofa.

“So I heard we had a visitor today,” Dionne started, and then waited for Phaedra to take the bait.

“Who’d you hear that from?”

“I have my sources.”

“So, you know, then.”

“Know what?”

“Know that Daddy wants to take us back with him to Miami.”

“Daddy was here?”

“I thought you said you knew.”

“Trevor said that his cousin said that she saw a man and a woman dressed in white over by my grandmother’s house. He didn’t say it was our father,” Dionne said, leaning her long body forward so that her elbows and knees met.

“Your father.”

“OK. So, Daddy was here. And he wants to take us to Miami. When’s he coming back to pick us up?”

“What are you talking about, Dionne? Going to live with our father and his, his woman is not a good idea.”

“What woman?”

“Some brown-skinned black American lady. She got stuck in that pile of mud behind Ms. Zelma’s house. And then she peed in Granny’s rose bed.”

“What? So what did Granny do?” Dionne said, barely containing a laugh.

“She didn’t do anything. She just shut the louvers.”

“So, was she pretty?”

“I wouldn’t say she was ugly, but definitely not pretty like Mommy. Daddy said she could cook.”

“Huh. Fat or slim?”

“Round.” Phaedra sighed. She was so tired of her sister’s obsession with other women’s size, which started right around the time Dionne’s body turned into a riot of arms and legs and breasts.

“And she can cook.”

“That’s what Daddy says.”

“You don’t believe him?”

“Why would I?”

“How could you say that about Daddy?”

“How could I not? Nothing I remember about him is any good.”

“I’m surprised you remember anything at all. You were all of five when he left. Did he look good today? Healthy?”

“He looked fat to me. Well, more like puffy.”

Dionne leaned back and closed her eyes as if putting her father together in her mind. “Well, he did always have a belly. But now he’s puffy? I find that hard to believe.”

“Well, that’s what I saw. And there’s no way that I’m going to live with him.”

“What are you talking about? He’s living in Miami and clearly has enough money to buy a plane ticket and come down to Barbados to look for us. So, he must be doing well. You would rather stay here with Granny and go to school with these backwards children instead of going home?”

“Miami is not home.”

“Don’t you remember what Mommy used to say about how home is between your teeth? Daddy is the closest family we have left. I’m going.”

“You would leave me here?”

“Do you really think that you could stay here if you wanted to? Exactly what would be your defense? That you have more spells to learn before you start school again?”