The Star Side of Bird Hill (12 page)

On the fourth morning, Phaedra and Dionne eyed each other across the kitchen table with the last slice of cake between them. Dionne said, “Fuck this,” and then, “You can have it, P.,” because she could hear her sister's belly rumbling. Dionne went on a mission to pick through the places where her mother might have dropped money, knowing full well that she'd cased those spots before and come up empty. Still, she made a show of it for Phaedra, digging around the indents her mother's body had made in the sofa bed's lumpy frame, rifling through the kitchen drawers, shaking an empty piggy bank. Finally, Dionne put on her sneakers, through which anyone with eyes could see her toes pressing. “Be right back,” she said.

By dark, Dionne was home as she promised, smelling of cheap menthols and the bar around the corner where her boyfriend, Darren, worked, Liquid Love. Dionne smiled, a smile Phaedra knew meant that she and her sister were picking up their game where they'd left it. She watched as Dionne pulled groceries from her book bag: bread and milk and peanut
butter and grape jelly, Steak-umms and a head of broccoli and chicken breasts that looked like permanent residents of the bodega's freezer section. For Dionne, a cherry pie. For Phaedra, yellow cupcakes crisscrossed with white icing. Ten packs of Now and Laters for them both, which Dionne pulled from the hidden pocket of her backpack like a magic trick. Phaedra was grateful to Dionne for taking care of her, but she knew how her corniness ruined things, so she resisted the urge she had to throw her arms around Dionne's neck. Instead, Phaedra rifled through the kitchen drawer for candles to top her cupcakes. Before she blew out the flames, she made a wish for Avril to get well. Phaedra was glad that birthday wishes were secret, because she knew Dionne would have said her wish was a waste.

Instead of reprising her half birthday, on Bird Hill, Phaedra became obsessed with the idea of half Christmas, insisting that they celebrate now since they wouldn't get to spend the holidays with Hyacinth. For weeks, she'd been pestering Hyacinth about half Christmas, and even though Hyacinth pretended to be bothered by Phaedra, in truth, she was already sad that they would be leaving. And it was for this reason, and because it was hard to refuse Phaedra anything, that there was a black cake soaking in rum in the pantry and salt pork boiling down on the stove for Hyacinth's special Christmas jug-jug on the day when Hyacinth got the call about Avril.

Hyacinth came home and found Phaedra where she'd left her, sitting cross-legged on the floor, stringing colored popcorn onto thread. Hyacinth knew that Phaedra was serious
about this half-Christmas thing when she sacrificed her weekly ration of sickly sweet popcorn for decorations. From the kitchen, she could see the intense concentration on Phaedra's face and Dionne with her legs curled beneath her on the sofa, reading a magazine. She turned down the water on the pot and made her way into the living room.

“Well, darlings, it looks like wunna going to spend half Christmas and Christmas with me too,” Hyacinth said.

Dionne saw the ball Hyacinth was making with her skirt and fist, and she knew that something was wrong, because her grandmother was never anything but deliberate in her movements. She looked up from her magazine and narrowed her eyes. “Sorry?” Dionne clutched the smooth ebony arm of the sofa her grandfather had made, and waited for the blow.

“Really, Gran?” Phaedra asked, not looking up from her project. A stray pink kernel slipped from her hand, and she reached out for it and put it in her mouth.

“Phaedra Ann Braithwaite, that is disgusting. I bet you would eat that even if it fell into the toilet,” Dionne said.

“Would not!”

“Would too!”

“Stop it!” Hyacinth said, and then immediately wished she hadn't. The girls didn't know it yet, but they would need extra helpings of tenderness for what lay ahead of them. Like so much else, Hyacinth didn't know where she would find extra from to give them.

“I have something important to tell you,” she continued.

“Either you're sick or Mommy's dead. Which one is it?”
Dionne said, throwing her shoulders back. She thought, wrongly, that Hyacinth's news would land more softly if she braced herself for it.

“Your mother killed herself.”

“Good for her. It was a waste anyway,” Dionne said. Her voice was hard, but Phaedra and Hyacinth could both hear the pain dammed behind her bravado.

“What was a waste?” Hyacinth said.

“Her life.”

“How could you say that, Dionne?”

“I'm just saying what you're thinking. She stopped living a long time ago. I'm glad she finally had the good sense to let go.”

Hyacinth put her right hand up in front of her, as if it could stop the flow of Dionne's invective.

“So, how'd she do it?” Dionne said. Her eyes were cold, both feet planted on the floor. Someone looking at her might have mistaken her for an animal ready to pounce on its prey.

“Dionne, I don't think we should talk about this in front of your sister.”

“How'd she do it? Just tell us. You and I both know that in five minutes every one of these silly people will be talking about it.”

“I want to know too,” Phaedra added from her spot on the floor. It was the first thing she could say. Tears were streaming down her cheeks and her chest was starting to heave with the “ugly cry” Dionne teased her about.

“The train,” Hyacinth said.

“The train?” Phaedra asked.

“Classic. Mommy always was one for the spotlight,” Dionne said. She pushed on her shoes and walked out of the house with her head tie still on, no direction in mind besides away. She left the door wide open behind her, so that the full measure of their grief, and of her anger, was on
display.

WHEN THE NEWS
of Avril's death first spread, it was at the top of everyone's minds and on all the hill women's lips. The women held their children and grandchildren closer to them and asked, “Can you imagine?” because they couldn't imagine it, not how Avril had lived her life, nor how she had ended it. Some of them said that because of the way she had died, by right, there shouldn't be the nine-night vigil that was always held when someone from the hill passed away. But Hyacinth had never been one to live her life by right. It was she who had single-handedly led a successful campaign to stop the practice of Saturday baptisms for the children who had no fathers to sign their birth certificates. Hyacinth gave her rousing Sunday-morning testimony from the seventh pew of Bird Hill Church of God in Christ where she sat every week, speaking plainly the truth everyone knew—Easter Sunday had seen only one
child baptized, while the day before, mothers had lined up at the back of the church with their children like there was a carnival ride on offer. Father Loving's father, whom the hill women called Big Loving to distinguish him from his son of the same name, tried to stop Hyacinth, saying that the sanctity of marriage had to be upheld. But Hyacinth only had to mention her deliveries of his two outside children, no less than two months apart the year before, and that was enough to settle the matter of his challenge. The next month, on Baptism Sunday, all the newborn children, fatherless and not, were dipped in holy water before the congregation.

Given her history, Hyacinth wasn't much for “should.” She would accept nothing less than the nine-night vigil and the grave-digging ceremony that marked the end of it to send her child to her final rest. What she'd said exactly was that wherever a few are gathered in the presence of the Lord there He is also, which was her way of saying that she was planning to keep vigil whether anyone joined her or not. The force of Hyacinth's conviction could fell the walls of Jericho. And so, while Avril's body stayed on ice at the funeral home in town, Mr. Jeremiah opened up the church hall for the vigil and left it open so people could come and go as the spirit moved them. And the hill women, even those who had grumbled about
by right
and
mortal sin
, even the ones who had already started churning the details of Avril's death in their mouths, crafting cautionary tales for their own daughters and spreading the news of her passing from the hill to their relations in Toronto and London and New York, those women showed up.

The first night of the vigil, a cool breeze blew off the sea. Hyacinth dug inside the trunk beneath her bed for a sweater Avril had brought her from her first trip to England, the trip that she'd returned from looking down at everything and everybody on the hill, the moment that Hyacinth would mark when Avril first started her steady journey away from her. Hyacinth pulled on the white sweater with red snowflakes embroidered on its back and went outside, the musty scent of mothballs clinging to her. On the road she could see old women not unlike herself, each moving slowly and steadily, with their Bibles and hymnbooks held firmly in their hands or secreted away in their purses. There was her neighbor Ms. Zelma closing her front gate and turning on her porch light. She noticed Mrs. Loving shuffling toward her as if she were one of the older women and not Avril's age.

“Evening,” Hyacinth said.

“Evening,” Mrs. Loving replied. She slipped her arm through the crook of Hyacinth's right elbow and they started to walk together. “Ms. B., I don't really know how you making out. They say there's nothing worse than burying your own child.”

“God doesn't give any one of us any more than we can bear.”

“I know that is true. Doesn't mean that your back won't bend from the pressure.”

“Mmm,” Hyacinth said. She had never spent much time contemplating what might break her, and didn't intend to start now. “Tell me something. When was the last time you heard from her?”

Mrs. Loving fluttered her hand to her temples as if the answer were there. “Must be Easter now that I think about it, you know. It was Easter, because she sent me two cards, one for Easter and one for my birthday. She always said that I shouldn't let a little holiday steal my thunder.”

Hyacinth laughed at that, a tinkle that started in her throat. The kind of laughter that came from her belly deserted her after Avril's passing. “She was always like that, ain't?”

“Always wanted to be on the right side of right.”

“I wonder where she got that from,” Mrs. Loving said.

Hyacinth batted away Mrs. Loving with her free hand. She had never been one to go in for compliments.

Even from the front steps, Hyacinth could smell the coffee brewing in the back of the church hall. She already knew what she would find when she went inside, a table laid out with Styrofoam cups, packets of Wibisco crackers and New Zealand cheddar cheese that would have sweated the saran wrap on a hotter night. If it weren't for the wooden cross draped in black cloth and the blown-up picture of Avril from her high school graduation on the raised platform, Hyacinth might have been able to pretend that it was just another after-service repast. She let Mrs. Loving go in first, then took a deep breath and walked to her seat in the circle of brown folding chairs.

Hyacinth looked up at the picture of Avril standing next to a hibiscus tree holding one of its flowers, her hair feathered around her face and shoulders, none of the fat that would become her second skin in the States yet on her. Hyacinth recognized the look on her daughter's face as joy, and remembered
that she never saw that look on her face again after she met Errol. To other people, the way Avril was in her initial courtship with Errol was joyful, but what Hyacinth saw in Errol was not an ambassador of happiness, but someone who would take her daughter as far as possible away from home and everyone who loved her. As for the nice person everyone saw in Errol, Hyacinth knew, because her mother had told her and she had come to find it out for herself, every skin teeth ain't a laugh.

When Avril's body first arrived, Hyacinth didn't believe that her child was really inside the coffin. She asked Mr. Jeremiah, who picked the body up at the airport, to check and make sure it was Avril. He found the dog-shaped birthmark on the inside of Avril's left wrist that Hyacinth told him to look for and came to her house afterward with his face ashen, balling his baseball cap in his fist. The look on Mr. Jeremiah's face told Hyacinth that she didn't want to see the body for herself.

The first of the nine nights, it was Mrs. Jeremiah who started them singing. All the women who had gathered, eight in total, had their hymnals with them, and the books weren't exactly for show, but these were older women, women who had buried fathers, mothers, cousins, husbands, brothers, and sisters, women who had all the songs they needed in their hearts. It was a question not of what they would sing but in what order, at what tempo, a question of how many choruses and with what feeling. Mrs. Jeremiah opened her mouth and her nasal soprano took the first verse of the first song.

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, we are going to see the king

The women joined in, a fiery bellowing of low notes, their altos and Ms. Zelma's tenor filling the church hall so that soon it was packed to its rafters with sound. Mrs. Jeremiah started clapping and the other women joined in and then there was only song and the sounds of their hands moving. Some of the sorrow that had sunk into the room began to lift, to ride the women's voices. After they'd gone at the hymn hard and then soft, the white candles flickering at each end of Avril's picture and the evening dropping down into night, they were together, bonded by lyric and melody. When Mrs. Jeremiah felt the air begin to settle, she slowed down the hallelujahs and brought them to a close. The women sat together in the buzzing quiet, some whispering “Amen” and other sounds of assent, some dabbing their brows and necks, all retreating into the private place where their own dead were with them.

And then, Mrs. Jeremiah spoke.

“We are gathered together this night and for the ones to come to send home the spirit of our sister Hyacinth's daughter, Avril. We call upon our most high God now and ask Him to wash His faithful servant Avril in the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We rebuke every evil thing that stomped out her spirit in life and any evil thing that might want to trap her spirit here now. We call upon and claim this
space as her final resting place. We say to our sister Avril that your workday is done and it's time now to go be with your Father in heaven. And to Hyacinth we say with heavy hearts that your tears are our tears, your sorrows are our sorrows, your fears our fears. We know as well as you do that joy comes in the morning, but that the nights can be long and hard. We will watch these nights with you.”

Hyacinth looked up at Mrs. Jeremiah, at her black dress that hung loose at her knees, and the long chain for spectacles that hung from her neck. It was strange to hear the words she'd spoken to other grieving women now spoken to her. She looked at the picture of Avril again and the song that was on her heart came out of her.

When peace like a river descendeth my way

When sorrows like sea billows roll

Whatever my lot, thou has taught me to say

The hill women's chorus swelled as they sang, “It is well/It is well/With my soul.”

And then Hyacinth heard a smaller voice behind her, and felt a tap on her right shoulder. She turned around to see Phaedra. She didn't shoo her home or ask what had happened to Dionne, whom she'd left at home in charge of things. She tried to draw Phaedra onto her lap, but she was too big for that. Phaedra wriggled off and settled into the empty chair beside Hyacinth. She closed her eyes and slipped into the heave and flow of the women's song. By right, children shouldn't be
at a nine-night. But there was no one brave or silly enough to try to stop Hyacinth or anyone who belonged to her from doing what they were determined to do.

Phaedra felt the next song begin inside her chest. Since her mother died, melodies haunted her at odd times of the day. When she was brushing her teeth or washing the dishes, dusting the coffee table. The hardest part of losing her mother was that there were minutes and hours and almost whole days that would go by when Phaedra would forget that Avril was dead. And then she would remember. At these moments, there was the fact of her mother's irreversible absence and then also the music that her mother loved. Avril was never religious, but she loved to sing and her voice when it soared gave her flight above her pain.

“Jesus loves the little children,” Phaedra started in a tiny voice that hardly passed her lips. When joined by Hyacinth and the other women, Phaedra's voice grew wings.

“Jesus loves the little children/All the children of the world,” they sang, and all wanted so much to believe.