When she met Kenny, Hyacinth didn’t trust her heart. What she’d thought was love with the first man who courted her turned out to be that man’s desire to consume her; the fire of what Hyacinth thought was first love had burned her. But Kenny was patient, happy to chip away at her defenses one day at a time. Maybe it was the fact that he didn’t want to change her, or that he kept all his promises, from the time he said he would pick her up when they went out together to the way he’d built the house they lived in by hand, just as he’d said he would. And so even though there was so much that was difficult about him, there was so much that Hyacinth was willing to forgive in her husband because he loved her as she was and did exactly what he said he would do.
When she was young, Hyacinth believed that she had a choice about whether or not to heed the call that beckoned her mother and her grandmother before her, to work roots and deliver children as she’d been taught. Hyacinth, who was not given to doing things because people recommended them, who in fact was least likely to do the things recommended to her, needed to have a reason besides Kenny’s insistence to be baptized. She settled on her belief that maybe baptism in the church might change the course of her destiny. Never mind that none of the women in her family, saved or not, had been able to sidestep the heritage that was theirs. Hyacinth thought she would be the first. Hyacinth’s mother’s and grandmother’s work and their aloneness—their men barely lasted long enough to see their children born—were two fates Hyacinth wanted to avoid. And so, she was baptized on Easter Saturday 1949, in the water just at the bottom of the hill. By Palm Sunday of the next year she and Kenny were married.
But no amount of holy water or determination to resist her destiny could turn Hyacinth’s feet from the path on which her steps had been ordered. Kenny died soon after Avril’s thirtieth birthday, a few years after Phaedra was born. The work that Hyacinth had been ambivalent about all her life would be the thing that sustained her once she no longer had her husband or her child to depend on. Within a few months of her husband’s passing, Hyacinth was delivering babies and handing out advice and tinctures to the hill women who sought her out, as the women in her family before her had done. Just as she was trying to remember what song they’d sung when she was dipped into the water that Easter Saturday, she found that she couldn’t, and the lost memory bothered her.
A few feet away from Hyacinth, Errol’s woman sat with her breasts and exposed belly button turned up toward the sky. She spoke first.
“I never had a chance to meet your daughter, but from everything Errol says, it sounds like she was lovely.”
“You clearly haven’t known Errol long enough to know when not to believe his lies.”
“It all seemed true to me. He said she was a great mother before she got sick.”
“Sick?”
“Errol said that she suffered from depression, that he’d wanted to stay with her but then she turned away from him. He said that eventually he just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“I’m sure you would believe any version of history that makes Errol a hero.”
“I don’t see why he’d make that up. He said that for days and days she could barely get out of the—”
“Why are you so interested in my child?” Hyacinth said sharply.
“I don’t know, really. I guess it just seems like I’d know Errol better if I understood why his last relationship didn’t work out. She’s always been like a ghost haunting us. I guess she really is one now.”
Hyacinth sighed, remembering that this was what she liked least about Americans, their desire to pry open shut doors. They liked unearthing things. And the silence where Hyacinth spent most of her time unnerved them.
“Well, I guess we all have ghosts, don’t we?” Hyacinth said.
“We do.”
And with that Evangeline saw the shutters of Hyacinth’s openness close and felt their conversation come to an end.
• • •
ON THE DAY Errol was to take the children to choose their costumes, the sun was hot, the kind of hot that had over the course of the summer turned Phaedra’s scalp a deep, dark brown, imprinted the crisscross of her jelly sandals on her feet and the underside of her Cabbage Patch Kids watch on her wrist. Hyacinth knew that seeing Errol meant a break from the children running in her garden, singing the VBS songs they knew by heart so blasted loud she was sure even the good Lord would shush them, and making weapons out of Pine Hill Dairy juice boxes. Because while Trevor and Dionne’s relationship had soured, Phaedra and Chris still got on famously and were always giving either Hyacinth or Mrs. Loving a headache with their enthusiasm for everything from salting slugs to chasing lizards to stealing ackees from the Jeremiahs’ tree. Donna rounded out their crew, and it wasn’t unusual to find her at the top of a fruit tree, taking instructions from Phaedra and Chris about which ones to shake down. Still, Hyacinth would take the children bothering up her head any day over the questionable parenting of her former son-in-law.
Hyacinth was glad when she saw that Evangeline wasn’t in the passenger seat, even though it meant she had to referee an argument between Phaedra, Donna, and Chris, who each wanted to ride shotgun. Errol decided that Chris would ride up front with him first, Donna would switch seats with him at the petrol station, and Phaedra would have the honor of riding in front the whole way back. Phaedra was already tired of her father calling her his little princess, but after their day at the beach and now, with him taking her and her friends to the band house, she hated Errol a little less than she had when he first showed up. That said, she still was rankled by Chris’s unabashed admiration of her father, from the jeans that he sported to his encyclopedic knowledge of automobiles that enriched their game of “that’s my car” once they were on the road.
“I really like those glasses, Uncle Errol,” Chris said, referring to the aviator sunglasses Errol was wearing, which even Phaedra could tell were expensive.
“Thanks, big man,” Errol said, punching Chris affectionately on the shoulder.
When Donna and Chris changed seats, Phaedra turned to Chris and rolled her eyes at him. She said, “If I didn’t know you better, Christopher, I would say that you have a crush on my father.”
“Ewww,” Chris said.
“Now that’s not the sort of thing I would expect from my little princess,” Errol said.
“Maybe I’m not your little princess,” Phaedra said, low enough so only Chris could hear.
They drove for what seemed like hours, first dropping down to the bottom of the hill where they watched the rough waters smash against the old train tracks at Martin’s Bay. When they zipped past the cane fields in St. George, the kids stuck their heads out of the car windows to feel the wind against their faces and the stalks against their outstretched palms. In Oistins, they crept along in the late afternoon traffic and watched the fishermen’s wet, dark faces as they chopped and sold dolphin, marlin, and flying fish. Phaedra and Donna called to the birds that strutted along the edges of the fish market hoping for a stray meal.
Just past the first beach on the south coast road, they pulled into a driveway with streamers and balloons that declared this spot to be the Legendary Mas Camp band house.
A girl stood outside crying while her grandmother talked loud enough so that anyone passing by could hear. “I don’t know why you would want to go up there and embarrass yourself, as tall as you are. You would be towering over those children. You want to go up there and look like a poppet? That’s what you want? Wipe your face, y’hear.” Phaedra watched as the girl tried to stop her tears; she felt grateful for the fact that her grandmother never spoke to her with that kind of harshness.
Errol called “Inside!” to the house where a radio announcer was talking excitedly about the finals for the soca monarch competition, which was happening that evening at the stadium. Ten days before Grand Kadooment, Barbados was pulsing with Crop Over fever. It was hard t
o have a conversation about anything else, and everyone had an opinion about who might be crowned champion of the singing competition that night.
An older woman with a spritely air greeted them. “You come to look about costumes?” A coral necklace the woman wore shook against her wizened skin as she spoke. Phaedra’s grandmother told her that in the same way she could tell a woman’s pregnancy by her ankles, you could read a woman’s age from her neck. This woman’s neck was definitely older than Hyacinth’s, Phaedra thought.
“Yes, we did. It’s Mrs. Alleyne, right?” Errol asked. He cupped both her small hands in his large ones and gazed into her eyes.
“That’s me. But you can drop the ‘Mrs.’ Mr. Alleyne was my father and he’s gone on to better pastures.”
“All right then, Ms. A.,” Errol said. Phaedra watched the woman’s smile widen, and it made her remember how women acted around her father. One of the cashiers at Allan’s Bakery in Brooklyn had given Phaedra extra currant rolls for months, thinking that her stomach was the way to her father’s heart. During the brief period when her father, mother, Dionne, and Phaedra all went to church together, Errol caused such a stir among the women, who started fighting to set aside the largest slices of sweetbread for him at bake sales and finding excuses for Errol to work with them on various projects. Phaedra watched this older woman fall under her father’s spell, and wondered exactly what it was made of.
“And who do we have here?” the woman asked Errol, bending down to look at the children in a way that bothered Phaedra.
“This is my daughter Phaedra. And her friends Donna and Chris.”
“That’s funny, we don’t have many fathers coming in. Mostly mums.”
“Phaedra’s mother just passed away,” Errol said, pressing the meaty flesh of his palms into Phaedra’s shoulders.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” the woman said mechanically, and Phaedra felt another spark fly from the woman to her father.
“Well, children,” the woman said, “the hour is late, but I can show you what I have left. We still have some ixora and flamboyant and birds-of-paradise for the girls. And for the boy . . . we’ll find something for the boy.”
Where the front room would usually have been, half-made sculptures of chicken wire, fabric, and sequins stood. Phaedra expected a dining room right past the arch in the living room, but instead there was a long worktable covered in costumes in various stages of progress. Two women and one man sat at the table, gluing, sewing, and cutting, their heads all bent in concentration.
Ms. Alleyne showed them to one of the back bedrooms, where the finished costumes hung on racks. Phaedra and Donna fingered the soft fabrics, the reds and oranges and pinks.
Ms. Alleyne let the girls look around before she said to Donna, “I have a girl from New York who was supposed to be a desert rose, but she’s not coming down again. What do you think of this costume?” she said, picking up a stretchy fuchsia top, a matching skirt, and a headpiece of petals made from painted cardboard.
Donna, who couldn’t resist the idea of having something made for a girl from the States, said excitedly, “We could wear that, right, Phaedra?”
Phaedra was awed by the costumes, their colors and then her imagination making them come alive in the same perfect design as her grandmother’s garden. She nodded and then went with Donna into the next room to try on the costumes. She could hear Ms. Alleyne speaking to Chris. The band house, like Hyacinth’s house on Bird Hill, was small, and sound carried over its plywood room dividers. “I’ve been waiting for a boy like you. My king costume is a royal palm tree, and it needs just the right person to wear it. Would you like to try it?”
Just then Phaedra and Donna came out in their costumes. Phaedra’s face was a perfect oval peeking out between the petals; the dusty pink color of the costume popped against the brick red of her arms and legs. Donna was eclipsed by the shine that radiated off Phaedra. Chris couldn’t speak, but Phaedra’s father did.
“I don’t know how you get to be so lovely, but I can see it, Phaedra, I can see you getting your looks,” Errol said.
Phaedra blushed in spite of herself. She looked down at her sandals and at the layers of ribbon and fabric that lined the floor of the band house.
“We’ll take them,” Errol declared.
Chris and Donna each pulled out tight wads of cash their mothers had given them, but Errol shooed them away. “This is my treat, kids. I know you all are going to be fantastic. If you win, I’ll take you out to Chefette.”
“What if we don’t win?” Phaedra asked.
“We can still go to Chefette,” Errol said.
“Yes!” the kids shouted, already placing their future orders for chicken and ice cream, not sure which was better, playing mas or the promise of afterward.
In the car on the way home, Phaedra took the passenger seat next to her father while Donna and Chris slept in the back. Just as they passed Miami Beach, where cars whose inhabitants thought they were parked away from prying eyes lined up facing the sunset, Phaedra turned to her father. She liked him better when it was just the two of them. She admired the ramrod posture he’d tried and failed to instill in her. “Daddy?” she said.
“Darling?” he said, turning down the radio, which was blasting one of the same five songs that played on a seemingly endless loop.
“What happened that day you came to the house?”
“What day, P.?”
“The day that you came and you were knocking down the door and Mommy wouldn’t let you in.”
A cloud settled over Errol’s face as he searched his memory. He heaved a deep breath and then spoke. “You mean, days.”
“Sorry?”
“You mean, days. It was four days that I came to see about you-all. Your mother had you locked up in there and every time I called she wouldn’t answer the phone.”
Phaedra remembered how the phone’s shrill ring filled the otherwise quiet apartment. Eventually her mother took the phone off the hook, but not before picking up and telling the person on the other line to stop harassing them, that they didn’t do anything to deserve this.
“Why wouldn’t she answer the phone?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Phaedra. Your mother was a strange woman. She had her ways. She was always convinced that somebody or something was trying to hurt you or hurt her.”
“So you weren’t trying to hurt us?”
“Nothing could be further from the truth. All I wanted was for her to let you and your sister leave the house. I didn’t think it could be good for you girls to be cooped up in there like that.”
“And the police?”
“You know you and your mother are the same way; once you set your mind to something you’re not turning back no matter what.”
Phaedra smiled a half smile. “So, you were the one who called the police.”
“I thought that was the only way I might get her to see sense,” Errol said in a small voice. His back curled over the steering wheel like he was trying to protect his heart, or the memory.
“Did it work?”
“They came and she opened the door. You would know better than me whether it worked,” Errol said.
Phaedra’s head spun as she tried to reconcile the version of events she thought she’d known with what her father told her. She wanted to sleep, but every time she closed her eyes, all she could see was her mother and that day, the phone and the bathtub and the sirens, her father’s knocking, her mother finally caving and moving the furniture that barricaded the door. When they arrived home, Phaedra had never been happier to see her grandmother’s front porch and the question, “Why worry?” written in script at the top.
IT WAS ONE IN THE AFTERNOON, and the sun was beating down on the children from Legendary Mas Camp, who were made up to look like flowers and plants from Barbados. The heat was threatening to wilt them all. There we
re a few Legendary mothers who kept ginger ale and smelling salts in their fanny packs for the occasional stomachache or fainting spell. Their job was to keep the stragglers moving in time with the music, break up squabbles, and try to make sure the kids kept themselves distinct from the other bands. Donna’s mother was home taking care of the baby. So Chris’s mother kissed each of the kids good-bye, wished them good luck at the drop-off point, and promised to meet them at the north corner of the stadium when it was over.
That morning, Errol drove the children and Mrs. Loving to town and then went to find a seat with Dionne in the stadium. Some part of Phaedra leapt up, knowing that her sister and father would be watching. It was too soon to say that Phaedra trusted Errol, but he was growing on her, in no small part for having finally made good on her parents’ promise to let her play mas. Every West Indian Day parade on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn when Errol was still around, Phaedra sat on her father’s shoulders and cried when the men dressed as blue devils came by. She wanted desperately to be one of the children masquerading with troupes like Sesame Flyers and Burrokeet. But her parents said she was too small to play mas, that she’d be tired from jumping up and dancing before the parade even got going. Once she was big enough, Errol was gone and her mother was definitely not up for that kind of thing.
The bass line and trumpets of that year’s road march blared through the speakers, and Legendary Mas Camp was called onstage. Phaedra started to dance to the music that she’d been committing to memory for this very moment. A solid month of memorizing lyrics from the radio finally paid off as she sang “Leggo I Hand” along with all the other children. She looked back at Chris, noting the way he loomed over everyone with the beanstalk height he’d grown to over the summer, carrying the weight of his royal palm tree costume with a majesty she’d never seen on him before. Phaedra and Donna chipped across the stage in their desert rose costumes, and soon their faces were covered in sweat, sequins, and glitter. They danced proudly, slowing down and then making their movements bigger when they neared the judges’ bandstand. Phaedra and Donna both looked to it as if it were the promised land because their feet were aching in the old tennis shoes they’d dyed to match their costumes. All the kids put on their best smiles and flew across the stage, and then it was over, a rumble of chat and an echo of applause filling the stadium, and offstage the sound of somebody’s child crying.
The Star Side of Bird Hill Page 16