Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“I’m staying here with Granny.”

“Suit yourself. I’m leaving,” Dionne said.

And with that, Dionne went to her room. From where she sat in the living room, Phaedra could hear her sister opening and closing drawers, as if she were already packing.

THE NEXT DAY, early in the morning, when the cocks were conferring in the front yard and the sun was not yet high in the sky, Errol returned. Hyacinth rose while Phaedra and Dionne were still asleep and went outside in the cool of the morning to speak with him. This time, he was clean-shaven. And the scent of rum was gone, although there was sourness on him that Hyacinth smelled and knew to be the sign of a greater sickness. He came alone, with his head bowed, to make a simple request. He only had a couple days left in Barbados, and wanted to take the girls to the beach and to Kiddie Kadooment, the children’s version of the Grand Kadooment parade that marked the end of Crop Over season.

Hyacinth agreed begrudgingly, mostly because Phaedra had been whining about how badly she wanted to play mas. Hyacinth was not up for taking the children to Kiddie Kadooment, as the heat and the crowds and the money to buy costumes was more than too much. Besides, she thought that the celebrations were just an excuse for slackness and getting on bad. According to Hyacinth, the whole business of planting crops and harvesting them and the slavery on which the island’s wealth was built and her ancestors’ lives were lost was forgotten in the revelry. All summer, in spite of her grandmother’s grumpiness, Phaedra stopped whatever she was doing whenever anything about Crop Over came on the television. She would sit transfixed, watching the children her age in fabulous costumes parading around the stadium, imagining herself among them. After a while, she knew better than to ask Hyacinth if she could play mas, as not even she could bear her grandmother’s tirades and her corny line about how she couldn’t wait for Crop Over to be over. While Hyacinth was not holding her breath about Errol making good on his promise, a part of her was happy to see Phaedra excited about something again.

After Errol left, the morning passed by slowly in the way that hours do when a thing deeply dreaded or longed for looms. Hyacinth hovered over a steaming pot of pelau, trying to tease the chicken off the bone and salt from the beef she’d bought at the market. Phaedra counted her mosquito bites; she had reached 103 before she had to start all over again because she missed one on her collarbone. While she ran her pointer finger up and down her body, the clock passed one, when Errol was expected, and then it was two o’clock. Phaedra remembered that Hyacinth had told her and Dionne not to get their expectations up about their father. What her grandmother had said exactly was, “Don’t take a six for a nine.” Dionne rolled her eyes when Phaedra said she didn’t understand and Hyacinth explained that you have to learn to see past the face people showed you. Phaedra was about to take off her swimsuit when she heard the car honk outside.

The swimsuit she was wearing that day was red and brand-new. Mrs. Loving had bought it on her monthly trip into town to shop for Father Loving and the boys. Since Avril died, Phaedra had become accustomed to the hill women, who channeled their initial judgment of Avril into the task of mothering Phaedra and Dionne, offering her things. Hyacinth was proud, and therefore a stranger to charity, but Mrs. Loving was Avril’s old friend. And Phaedra showed such delight in the sporty swimsuit with the trademark swoosh on her chest that Hyacinth couldn’t bear to tell Mrs. Loving “No, thank you” as she’d said to the other women and their gifts. The day that Mrs. Loving brought the suit by, Phaedra wore it around the house nonstop; she ate dinner in it, watched TV in it, and was only convinced by the threat of an extra dose of cod-liver oil to take it off and change into her nightie.

Hyacinth shook her head at the whole affair, which reminded her how poorly equipped she was for the task of raising this pair of strong-willed girls. Her hands, which swelled when it rained, were no match for Phaedra’s unruly mountain of hair, and she wondered how she would deal with Dionne’s determination to face her time in Barbados like a prison sentence and Hyacinth as her jailer. There was something else, too, about the way that Christopher looked at Phaedra when she tried on the suit — from which Mrs. Loving had smartly removed the price tag — in Hyacinth’s living room. Slack-jawed, his admiration of Phaedra on full display, Christopher’s face told Hyacinth she’d be worrying about him chasing at Phaedra’s skirt before too long.

When the rental car finally pulled up with Errol and his woman in the front seats, Dionne waved a heavy hand to them. She had her beach bag packed and had been sitting on the steps the whole morning on her hands, which at first moved too much and then fell asleep from the pressure. She ran to the car, shaking the pins and needles from her fingers.

Dionne went to kiss her father. Earlier in the summer, when they were closer, Dionne and Trevor had practiced drinking with Father Loving’s secret stash of hard liquor, which he kept in the linen cupboard behind his vestments. They passed bottles back and forth in Father Loving’s study, waiting for the warmth to spread across their chests. When Dionne leaned over to kiss her father and shake his girlfriend’s limp, lotioned hand, she recognized the sweet halos of Mount Gay rum that hovered above them — and also what two people looked like when they knew each other’s bodies well. They waited with the engine running while Phaedra and Hyacinth locked up the house.

Hyacinth huffed her body into the backseat and spoke to Errol before he had a chance to drive off. “How far we going?” she asked.

“Just down to Pebbles Beach,” Errol said.

“All right,” Hyacinth said. She made sure the girls were strapped into their seats and then turned to watch the familiar houses on the hill pass by as they rumbled downward. At the bottom of the hill, the girlfriend, who looked as if her stomach might heave from the turbulence, turned to face the backseat.

“I don’t think we’ve officially met,” she said.

Dionne had been studying the woman, especially the way her weave was expertly attached to her real hair so that the tracks didn’t show. She spoke first.

“I don’t think we have. I’m Dionne. Phaedra, have you said good afternoon?”

Phaedra glared at her sister and then mumbled a greeting.

“I’m Evangeline.”

And Hyacinth said, “Of course.”

At the beach, they parked among a seemingly endless row of other cars. The gray rocks that gave Pebbles Beach its name were piled up, creating a barrier that made people work hard for the privilege of touching their feet to the sand. The beach was mostly empty, with the exception of a few bathers. A family was speaking in guttural tones that could have been Dutch or German. The children, a boy and a girl with hair the color of straw, were building a fortress and moat with their shovels and pails. Phaedra looked at the children’s pile of toys and thought that this must be what it was like to be rich, to have toys for home and toys for vacation. She looked down at herself and was suddenly less excited about her swimsuit. She wished Chris were there to tell her it didn’t matter. Knowing him, he’d probably make a joke about how he didn’t know white people got whiter than white when he saw the sunscreen the mother was smothering in thick layers onto her children. That made Phaedra smile a little bit, and she tuned back in to Hyacinth’s lecture about being safe on the beach. “The sea ain’t got no back door,” Hyacinth huffed. When Hyacinth asked for the third time if she and Dionne were wearing panties beneath their bathing suits, she simply said “Yes, Granny,” and tried not to roll her eyes.