Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

Dionne surged forward, toward the trouble, and Isaiah pulled her back. His hands felt different from the men and women who’d held her away from her mother’s grave. This time, she wouldn’t relax into his arms; she didn’t want to, even though his strength was more than that of the entire Usher’s Guild. She writhed out of his grasp and tried to peel back the hulk of her father, and the men who’d joined him, off Jean. She felt blows land on her shoulders and forehead and one that she thought would take her out, on her lower back. But even that wouldn’t stop her.

Errol forced himself back into the melee to stop people from throwing their confused, tired blows at Dionne, which was easy, because by then they were full on the meal they’d made of Jean’s humiliation. Once the crowd thinned, Errol puffed out his chest and yelled, “This nasty so-and-so get what he deserve. I don’t know what kind of place Barbados is turning into where a buller think he can dance on me and it’s all right. It could be Crop Over or Christmas, but it could never be right.” The people around Errol murmured in agreement, and Dionne looked at her father, and then at Jean, and then at her father again. She could see the fire in Errol’s eyes, the same fire that had burned her mother, and she knew that the smolder was what the women and the men saw in him and what they thought they wanted, before it scorched them too.

Dionne stopped looking to her father for an answer she knew wouldn’t come, and focused instead on Jean. Because there, lying beneath the pile of revelers that dispersed once the truck’s engine coughed into action and the speakers blared a gospel song, there, as the MC made platitudes for peace and a return to all that was Christian, there, beneath it all, in threat of being trampled, but still breathing, was Jean.

Isaiah, who Dionne could now see was a man and not the boy she’d taken him for, helped her carry Jean to the doorway of a pharmacy. Space opened up for the three of them, as if the crowd, which had been thick just moments before, didn’t want to catch whatever it was they had.

“Mind he don’t give you that AIDS business, y’hear,” one woman said, and Dionne wanted to take her on, but she was too focused on getting Jean to safety to respond.

When they reached the pharmacy, they laid Jean down on the pavement. Dionne looked at Jean’s pulpy, bloody face, and then at her own reflection in the glass. For the first time that she could remember, Dionne didn’t care about whether or not she was beautiful. Her only concern was that the ragged breaths Jean took would deepen, that somehow he, she, they would be made whole again. Isaiah looked at her, his eyes asking her permission to keep going, to catch up with the band that was edging down Spring Garden now, her father and Evangeline with it. She knew he was going to leave, and so she nodded, the same way she did when her mother would leave, to make the leaving easier on him. Isaiah knelt down to kiss her on her cheek, but she wouldn’t give him this. She edged closer to Jean and eased her weight back onto her heels, trying to figure out what to do.

There were several bands behind the one that swept away Evangeline and Errol and Isaiah. The music went on and people danced and drank, and Jean and Dionne blended into the parade route. In the same way that she couldn’t summon the courage to ask Errol why he’d left them, Dionne was afraid now to ask for help, unsure whether the crowd that had pounced upon Jean would rally to his aid. And so she sat, trying to devise a plan, shrinking away from the stares of the people who occasionally squeezed by her and Jean, scrutinizing them but not helping. A couple of women her mother’s age asked if she was all right, and Dionne nodded yes. She thought that maybe once the parade was over, Jean would be feeling strong enough for them to walk to someone’s house and ask if they could use the phone. In the meantime, she sat with Jean’s head in her lap, letting the people and music and food smells swirl around her. The whole time, she kept talking to Jean, asked him questions and told him stories, anything to keep him alert until they were able to get help. She settled for Jean’s one-word answers, and then, when he was too tired to talk, his fist’s strong grasp.

Just as the last band was turning onto Black Rock, an older woman seemed to appear out of nowhere. She was, not unlike Hyacinth, dressed in white. Dionne could only see the whites of her eyes and her teeth as the sun had already set by then, the darkness come to swallow up the shadows. The sunsets in Barbados, which Dionne sometimes watched from Hyacinth’s gallery, were a marvel, a fantastic light show of oranges and pinks and reds, and on days when it had been stormy, purples. Such a contrast, that dance of color to the pitch black that followed it, as if God wanted Bajans to appreciate the portion of abundant sunshine He granted them in the daytime. It was into that darkness that sirens blared. Having gone for so long without help, Dionne didn’t really believe the woman when she offered to call the police from her house. But she did. And then she returned with a bucket of water and rags to clean Jean’s face. And once she’d cleaned him up, she waited with them, and then watched as Jean was put onto the stretcher and Dionne climbed into the ambulance behind him.

Dionne, who couldn’t rightfully claim to be Jean’s family, made it to the reception desk of the Accident and Emergency Department at Queen Elizabeth Hospital before she was told that she couldn’t go any further. Dionne would have stayed there longer, trying to figure out a way home by herself, had she not remembered Clotel Gumbs bragging that a relative of hers worked at QEH. Clotel’s aunt, a nurse in a starched uniform and a pointy cap whose officiousness echoed Mrs. Gumbs’s, was paged and came downstairs. She sat Dionne down in the waiting room with a packet of stale corn curls and went to the nurses’ station to call her sister. From where she sat, Dionne could hear the woman’s loud voice. “Yes, we have the girl,” she said loudly, confirming the details of Mrs. Gumbs driving into town to collect her. Something seemed righted by Dionne being referred to as a girl, and the logistics of her return home being taken care of for her. Because right then, adrenaline was draining out of Dionne like air from a blown tire, and what she wanted more than anything was her bed and sleep. For the first time that summer, Dionne thought of Hyacinth’s house with longing. Errol’s behavior had made it clear that Bird Hill was the closest thing she had to home.

Dionne wondered what exactly had set her father off, because the trouble between him and Jean seemed to have roots that were planted well before Kadooment Day. She resigned herself to the fact that she might never know. Something Avril had always said made her feel more at peace. “You get exactly what you need when you need it,” Avril had told her, trying to tamp down Dionne’s longing for better and more — clothes, friends, boys. Dionne didn’t know how badly she’d needed to see the truth of who her father was, and now she wasn’t quite sure what to do with what she knew.

“Apparently everyone’s been looking for you,” the nurse said to Dionne when she got off the phone. Dionne felt the woman’s intense scrutiny and drew her head back in like a turtle. She stared into the bag of chips that was smeared with salt and oil, grateful for anywhere else to place her attention besides herself.

And then the receptionists and the nurses and some of the patients looked at Dionne, as if seeing her for the first time. One of them said, “This is the girl in truth.” Dionne shrunk away from their attention. She knew that being “the girl in truth” was just a prelude to whatever judgments they would make of her or her grandmother or, worse, her mother. More important, Dionne knew that the fact that her eighth-grade graduation photo had made its way onto the CBC news meant that Hyacinth would likely be in a state beyond anger when Dionne saw her again.