The Star Side of Bird Hill (15 page)

NO ONE CELEBRATED
the last week of Vacation Bible School more than Phaedra Braithwaite. Someone who didn't know Phaedra might have seen the way that she was carrying on—singing more loudly than all the other girls during praise song, playing Martha in the final rehearsals with such gusto—and mistaken her enthusiasm for joy and not the relief of knowing that this particular form of torture would soon end. For while her mother's death meant that she could take an entire week off from VBS, the following Monday she was back. And just as she'd feared, the girls whose disdain had previously spilled over Phaedra like Milo now eyed her with uniform pity. In no time, she'd gone from being the Yankee girl with the long hair to the Yankee girl with the dead mother. As their mothers had instructed them to
do, the girls said “So sorry for your loss” and “Sorry to hear about your Mummy.” Simone Saveur even invited Phaedra to have lunch with her clique at the tables in the front of the church hall. But once Phaedra knew that she was invited and Donna, the closest thing she had to a girlfriend, was not, she refused. It wasn't so much that she liked Donna, but that she held fast to her role of outsider now. And some part of her wondered about the limits of the new courage she'd earned, the true nature of the swagger that was hers now that she was a motherless child. She heard that song on the radio the Sunday after her mother's body had been flown down and the lyrics stuck in her chest, a tape whose damaged brown plastic she thought might spool out of her mouth one day. There it was, the “sometimes” and “feel” cresting when she wasn't speaking, the doleful tune stuck in her throat where she held it. If she concentrated, the song would take over; an entire day of VBS could be survived on just one extended chorus.

Having rejected the questionable charity of her classmates, Phaedra sat down to eat with Donna. During her friend's awkward monologue about her new baby brother, Phaedra took gulps of watered-down Kool-Aid and bites of the cheese and cracker sandwiches she'd packed onto a napkin, nodding at intervals to show her appreciation of Donna's stories. Phaedra found herself both bored and hungry after she'd finished her lunch. She turned to Donna and tried to redirect the flow of her chatter.

“So, is it true what they say, that you can climb trees?” Phaedra asked.

“Sorry?” Donna looked up from her third cheese sandwich.

“I said, is it true you can climb trees?” Phaedra said, watching Donna work the soft white bread from the roof of her mouth.

Donna's face brightened. “Oh yes. Coconut tree, pawpaw tree, breadfruit tree. Fig tree. Although you can't really climb a fig tree, since the figs grow close to the ground.”

“You climb that mango tree outside yet?”

“Which one?”

“The one behind the church.”

“Oh, sure. Last year, me and Chris had a contest to see who could pull down the most mangoes.”

“Who won?”

“Me, of course.”

“Of course.” Phaedra smiled because there was something about finally finding the place where Donna shone that delighted her.

Donna stayed quiet for a moment, waiting for the thrill of being directly asked about something she cared about to return.

“Come,” Phaedra said. Donna followed Phaedra outside where the girls from their class were taking a break from jumping rope to play in each other's hair on the church hall's back stairs. Angelique, whose hair was wavy and weighed down by the coconut oil her mother brushed into it every
night, sat on one of the concrete steps, her ponytail open and her hair spread over the laps of three girls who admired it with their hands. Angelique hadn't spoken more than two words to Phaedra since she had beaten her decisively in the Bible verse memorization championship. Phaedra had won by remembering that the Lord said to Jeremiah, “They will fight against you but will not overcome you, for I am with you and will rescue you.” Angelique hemmed and hawed while she tried to remember Psalm 127, verses 3 to 5. Even after Father Loving, who favored Angelique, gave her the word “arrows” as a hint, she still couldn't produce the verse about how children are a heritage of the Lord. Just that morning, when the other girls mumbled their condolences, Angelique just looked at Phaedra and said, “Morning.” Phaedra was grateful for the steadiness of Angelique's spite.

Phaedra thought to say excuse me to the girls who were blocking their way out, but instead she jumped off the side of the steps, and Donna hopped down too.

“Pick some mangoes for me, nuh,” Phaedra commanded. She shaded her eyes and looked up into the branches of the fruit-heavy tree.

“How many you want?”

“Donna Husbands, I know you are not going to climb that tree with your skirt on.” Simone Saveur spoke from where she sat clasping a fistful of Angelique's slicked-down hair.

“I have shorts on underneath,” Donna said to the crowd, which was gathering now, as it always did when she climbed.

“You don't have to explain yourself to those dusty girls,” Phaedra said.

“How many you want?” Donna asked, sizing up the tree. The ripest ones were also the highest.

“As many as you can get.”

“What did you say?” Simone Saveur spat from her seat.

“I said she doesn't have to explain herself to any dusty girls. If she wants to climb a tree, she can climb a tree. Go ahead, Donna.”

Simone walked over to where Phaedra stood and planted herself directly in front of her. “Oh, so you think because you come from America, you can call us names? No one cares if your mother was too damn mad to know better than to kill herself. The two of you make a nice pair. The daughter of a whore and the daughter of a madwoman.”

A roar started among the children who could hear the fight inside Simone's words.

“I see you have plenty chat when your boyfriend is around, and now your mouth not working so fast,” Simone baited.

“Excuse me, Simone,” Phaedra said, trying to push her gently aside. But the mountain of Simone Saveur, who had tree trunks for thighs like her five older sisters, would not budge. Their father had left after the last of the girls, twins with the same fierceness as the ones who preceded them, were born. The hill women had offered their condolences to the mother but no one could blame him for seeking somewhere he could be a man.

“What?” Simone spat back.

“I can't see what Donna's doing with you standing there,” Phaedra said.

“I'll show you who's dusty now.” Simone grabbed a handful of dirt and grass and threw it in Phaedra's face. Phaedra grabbed at the doorknob breasts poking out from Simone's shirt and turned one of them. The girls clutched each other, and then fell to the ground, rolling and trying to land licks. It was hard for the crowd to know whether to look up at Donna scaling the tree, or to look down at Simone and Phaedra rolling around in the dirt. While the girls fought, Donna defied gravity, using the parts of her body that usually jiggled and waddled in service of her task. When she reached the top of the tree, she shook the branches and mangoes rained down, sending the children running away from the tree and toward the church. Simone Saveur was on top of Phaedra landing blows as the crowd cried, “Cuff her” and “Beat her.” But then Simone took three mangoes to the head, and fell off Phaedra.

Timothy, of the snot-nosed twins, was raising Phaedra's arm to declare her the winner when Ms. Taylor came outside, summoned out of the staff's lunchtime prayer meeting by the noise. She broke up the crowd and sent both girls home for the rest of the day. Simone left, and Phaedra walked down to the graveyard to spend the rest of the afternoon napping among the headstones. She wanted to sleep near her mother's grave, but the new grass scratched her legs, and she couldn't get comfortable enough to stay there for very long. She settled on her great-aunt's grave instead. When VBS let out for the
day, she called out to Donna, who cautiously stepped just to the edge of the cemetery.

“You not going home?” Donna asked.

“Not just yet. You go ahead. I have some things to do here,” Phaedra said.

“All right, then. See you.” Then Donna turned and said, “I'm sorry about what happened.”

“What do you mean? What are you sorry about?” Phaedra said sharply, on guard for any delayed condolences. She had had enough talk about her mother for one day.

“I didn't mean for you to fight for me.”

“Oh,” Phaedra, said, relieved. “Donna?” Phaedra called after her friend, who she knew was rushing home to relieve her mother. “Thanks, y'hear?”

“Sure.”

Phaedra sat under the mango tree in the cemetery until she could feel dusk creep around her shoulders. She gathered the fallen mangoes and started sucking and biting at the fruit, until her tongue turned orange and her stomach gurgled a warning to stop. When she was done, she stretched out beneath the tree. Since her mother's passing, sleep was Phaedra's only refuge where talk and song and memories of her mother could not find her.

She woke up to her nemesis Angelique kneeling above her, shaking her shoulder.

“You don't know mango will run your belly?”

“What?” Phaedra said, wiping the sleep from her eyes with her sticky fingers.

“You sit down here alone and eat off all these mangoes?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Angelique sat down next to Phaedra, and Phaedra felt her wavy hair touch her shoulder. Feeling its softness, Phaedra understood some part of why all the girls wanted to be like her. “Who don't hear will feel. That's what my mother says,” Angelique offered, stressing “mother.” And then, tugging at Phaedra's grimy t-shirt, “Come.” This was the most Angelique would ever say about Avril's passing. She was one of those rare humans who made it her business not to worry about the why or how of the way things were, but to accept them. It was this solid ground of meeting each other squarely, without pity or false knowing, that thawed and then prepared the ground for a friendship between Phaedra and Angelique.

But for now, it was enough for Phaedra to let Angelique help her up and then to walk home, where she knew that the news of her behavior had already reached.

 • • • 

SLEEP TOOK
PHAEDRA TO
its bosom and didn't let go until the small hours of the morning, when she awoke sweating and dizzy. Hyacinth sat on the side of the bed, watching over her.

“Why are you up, Gran?” Phaedra asked once her eyes opened and adjusted to the dark.

“I was waiting to see what going to happen to you.”

“What happened?”

“You tell me. You in here smelling like you eat every mango from here to Speightstown. And then I'm hearing that you were rolling around in the ground behind the church like a common so-and-so with one of the Saveur girls.”

“What?” Phaedra said again, and then she remembered everything: VBS, the tree, the fight, her naps, and the walk home that felt endless because she knew what was awaiting her on the other end.

“Why do I feel so hot?” Phaedra touched the back of her neck, which was soaked with sweat, and felt the places where her nightie clung to her.

“Tell me something, P. How many mangoes did you eat?”

“I don't know. Maybe twenty. Maybe more.”

Hyacinth's eyes widened and she pressed the back of her palm to Phaedra's forehead.

“How do you feel?”

“Bad. Hot.”

“Oh, dear heart. Too much of even what you love can hurt you.”

“I have to use the bathroom,” Phaedra said, and made one of many trips down the hallway. Right before dawn, Phaedra started to cry, not for the pain that seized her belly or because of the chills, but because this was the first time she'd been sick and known that her mother could not comfort her, that she never would again.

“Granny?” she said.

“Yes, dear.”

“Could you sing that song Mommy used to sing when I was sick?”

“I don't know which one you're talking about, darling.”

“Of course you wouldn't.”

Hyacinth decided that it was not the right time to put Phaedra in her place. “Sing a few lines for me and maybe I could pick up the tune.”

Phaedra closed her eyes to search her memory. She saw her mother then, moving around the apartment in Brooklyn, trying to make Phaedra comfortable while she wrestled her yearly bout with tonsillitis. She remembered Avril saying that her tonsils were so huge they looked more like extras from Stonehenge than something that belonged in her mouth. Phaedra saw her mother's lips moving and felt her body relax, but she couldn't make out the song. And then the memory was over, and she was back in her grandmother's bed, a miserable, wet mess of a girl. “I can't remember it,” she said, defeated.

“That's all right. When the time comes that you really need it, you'll find it.”

“But I need it now,” Phaedra whined.

“Cuhdear. What you need now is rest. Drink some water and let sleep take you,” Hyacinth said, pushing a glass to Phaedra's lips.

Phaedra drank and then closed her eyes, willing the song and sleep back to her.

“Gran?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Where's Dionne?”

“I haven't seen her since morning.” Phaedra almost said something about Dionne's plans with Saranne, but then she thought better of
it.

THE BOTTOM OF THE SUN
was kissing the top of the ocean when Dionne and Saranne rumbled up Bird Hill in Chad's car. The car was incredibly old, not the slick roadster that Dionne had imagined when she first met him. Had she known what would happen that night, the way his car would wheeze on inclines and take curves on a precarious lean, she might not have dialed the number that he wrote on the inside of her wrist the day of the church picnic. All the way up the hill, Dionne, who hated heights, gripped the car door handle. Under her breath, she whispered: “Help us, Father, now and in our time of need, O Christ our Sanctifier and our Redeemer.” Two months of church in Bird Hill had taught her, at the very least, how to call upon the Lord.

Dionne hoped Chad would drop her off first, but the house Saranne shared with her aunt Trixie and her cousin Jean was
before her grandmother's. The whole ride, up until they'd reached St. George and needed her help with directions, Saranne slept bunched up in the backseat, her head draped over her wrists in a way that made her look more innocent than she was. Dionne was glad that the windows were down because Saranne stank of boys and vomit and the rounds of rum punch they'd downed.

When they dropped Saranne at her house, Dionne could see through the open door that the television was on, and Trixie was pacing in her housedress and hairnet. There were two reasons Trixie didn't box down her niece right then and there—because Saranne stumbled inside and fell on top of her, heaping her foul breath on Trixie, and because she could hear Chad's car engine idling outside. A lot of things could be said about Trixie, but one thing the hill women would say in her defense was that she was discreet. When the hill women's husbands found themselves in need of Trixie's services in the dry spells that followed the birth of children or the eventual hollowing out of desire between man and wife, Trixie's tongue never wagged with news of their husbands' indiscretions or the wild things they wanted, their wives refused, and she offered for a price. When Trixie traveled with her husband before he died, going on trips up to New York and even a cruise around the Caribbean to islands she'd only seen before on maps, she carefully studied the way that white people talked to their children. And so while she was not above giving a headstrong child a good thump, she did adhere to the principle of praising in public, reprimanding in private.

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.