Naomi Jackson - The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Well, I have enough words to say that I am done with Christopher Loving for good.”

“What did he do to you?”

“What do you mean, what did he do to me? He’s the reason why I look like this.”

“That much I know is true. But the way you’re going on, I know that there must be something else there. Something that wound you below the skin.”

Phaedra considered whether to tell her. “Chris said that I’m like you and my mother, that no matter what I do, I can’t die.”

“So that’s what has you so upset?” A small laugh escaped from Hyacinth’s generous mouth.

“Don’t make fun of me. I’m tired of everyone treating me like such a baby.”

Hyacinth sighed. Her ample bosom heaved as she pushed Phaedra from her perch and started stripping the sick-sheets from the bed. “People say we can’t die, but there’s no man who won’t go when God calls him home. That’s just people trying to make sense of something they don’t understand. Let’s make a deal. You go out and play. Soon, I’ll start to show you what it all means.”

“Really?”

“You have my word. Now, out!” Hyacinth said. She pushed her granddaughter out into the bright of day.

• • •

PHAEDRA WAS WALKING to the back of the house when she glimpsed her sister in the mirror through the open bathroom door, her feet planted firmly and a pink toolbox full of makeup and hair-related paraphernalia splayed open on the toilet seat. After her breakfast, Phaedra wanted badly to pee. She knew her sister would tell her to use the outhouse or stop being so scary and just pull the curtain in front of the toilet while Dionne fixed her face. But Phaedra had inherited her shy bottom from her mother so she liked privacy when she used the bathroom. Besides, she wasn’t in the mood to beg Dionne for anything.

“You think those goats are going to milk themselves?” Dionne said, with a bobby pin clenched between her teeth. It was hard to tell what hairstyle she was fashioning, but knowing Dionne, even though she didn’t have anywhere special to go that day, it would be elaborate.

“I’m going to milk them right now.”

“Well, nobody’s stopping you. And I don’t need an audience,” Dionne said, noting the fact that Phaedra was still standing inside the door frame.

“You sure about that?” Phaedra asked.

“Will you please stop ugly-ing up my mirror and do what you’re doing before I tell Granny it’s been days that I’ve been doing your chores for you while you pretend to be ill?”

“Do you know how many hours of your life you’d get back if you stopped spending your time on that mess?”

“It takes time to look this good.”

“I’m just saying, you could be reading a book or painting or—”

“Ahem. Is Phaedra Ann Braithwaite, tomboy of tomboys, trying to give me beauty advice?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that—”

“Go say whatever you’re saying to the goats. They look like they might listen to you.”

Phaedra felt sweat drench her face the minute she opened the back door. She put her hand to her forehead and looked out from the top of the three steps that led down into Hyacinth’s garden. She was relieved to find Abigail where she expected her, lying on her side in the galvanized tin lean-to; the blue tarp they pulled down when the rains came flapped above the shed. Abigail the goat, which Mr. Jeremiah mated with his goat King David, had had six babies the week before Phaedra and her sister came to Bird Hill. Phaedra was sad she hadn’t been there to witness their birth. The kids liked to roll around in the dirt to stay cool and they enjoyed being chased around the yard with the hose that Phaedra sprayed them with after she watered her grandmother’s garden. Phaedra descended the steps and approached Abigail calmly, remembering what Hyacinth had told her about animals greeting humans with the same spirit in which they were approached.

“Here, girl,” Phaedra said. She knelt down and gave Abigail a few pieces of pineapple. No matter how much Dionne told Phaedra that she was spoiling the goat and Hyacinth insisted that she wasn’t cutting up fruit for any animals once Phaedra went back to Brooklyn, Phaedra insisted that the goat was easier to handle after she got what she wanted. Abigail sniffed the fruit and then ate it lying down, making it clear that she would get up when she was good and ready. She stood finally and her kids came running from the cool hiding spot they’d found beneath the house. Phaedra watched the ease with which they latched on and drank their mother’s milk, and she was reminded of Avril. Her grandmother’s words, about how if you practice being one kind of thing too long, you become that thing, were stuck in her head. Maybe that’s what was wrong with Avril, she thought. Maybe it was a matter of her pretending to be sick at first and then, when it was time for her to be well, she didn’t know how to be that way anymore.

Phaedra watched the goats eat and remembered feeding her mother ice cubes and pressing cool washcloths to her forehead the summer Avril took to her bed. In the beginning, Phaedra believed her mother when she said that she just couldn’t take the heat in New York, and that’s why she stopped going to work at the hospital. She went to a round of doctors, none of whom could find anything wrong with her, but soon she was on medical leave, and then she didn’t have any job at all, just checks from the government that came the first of every month like clockwork. Phaedra held out hope that when the fall came, Avril’s mood would lift, but she and Dionne went back to school and Avril stayed home, and, after a time, the new state of affairs was old news, and then it was almost normal.

Phaedra was starting to understand how you could become someone else, even if you didn’t intend to at first. She never imagined she’d be milking goats every morning and throwing boomerangs in the field behind Ms. Zelma’s house with Christopher in the afternoons. The shape of her new life surprised her, and even though it had only been a little while, Phaedra already felt herself becoming a girl from Bird Hill; she could feel herself shedding the armor she needed in Brooklyn.

The baby goats scattered. Phaedra pulled the pail from its hook in the shed and dragged a well-worn stool beneath her. Phaedra got into the rhythm of tugging at Abigail’s teats and pressing the milk out with her fingers like her grandmother had taught her. The pail filled at a laborious rate, but Phaedra didn’t mind. She liked to be alone with her thoughts and the familiar, musty smell of the animals and Hyacinth’s herbs and vegetables and flowers.

Maybe Chris does like me, Phaedra thought. Her hand jerked and milk that was meant for the pail squirted into her right eye and dribbled onto her t-shirt.

“Damn you, Abigail,” Phaedra said. And then she remembered what her grandmother had told her when she kept dropping the clothespins onto the ground while they were hanging clothes out to dry. “When you’re doing your work, you have to be really doing it, and not dreaming about something else, child.” Phaedra had nodded, but kept dropping things anyway, and Hyacinth had simply shaken her head and wondered aloud where this child had inherited this habit of daydreaming.

Abigail looked at Phaedra and sat down. No amount of prodding would lift her off the ground. Phaedra gave up and poured milk from the pail, barely filling the bottom of the bottle she’d pulled from a crate on the back steps. At least she’d tried, she thought, which was more than she had been doing the last few days. She walked back to the kitchen in search of something else that might soften up the goat.

• • •

ON HER WAY TO the kitchen, Phaedra felt Dionne’s fingers grab the soft flesh at the top of her arm.