The Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson

As the minutes and then an hour passed, black-and-blue marks bloomed on his tiny body, mixing with his original jaundiced color. Donna’s mother slept with her back turned, her breath a symphony of sighs. Donna busied herself with making a new bed for the baby in the room she shared with her mother, padding a bottom dresser drawer with blankets and towels.
    â€œTake good care of your mother and the baby, y’hear?” Hyacinth told Donna before she left.
    â€œYes, Ms. B., I will. Hold on a minute there. Mummy said she had something for you.”
    â€œAll right.”
    Donna went inside the house, and came back with a thin airmail envelope filled with red, green, and blue Barbados dollars, a set of three carbolic soaps, and a loaf of sweetbread. Hyacinth accepted the gifts and she and Phaedra stepped off the gallery.
    â€œOpen your mouth then, child. I know you’re full to bursting with questions,” Hyacinth said to Phaedra as they made their way back home, this time under a sun that was pushing the silver out of the sky.
    â€œHow come the baby came out all black and blue?”
    â€œHe had a long fight to get out.”
    â€œWhy wouldn’t she hold him?”
    â€œJust wait. She will hold him yet.”
    Phaedra had other questions, and she tried to hold on to them, to let the quiet lead them into morning. But when they reached the final turnoff before their house, Phaedra turned to see the church and the top of the hill, and the question inside her barreled forward.
    â€œGran, what do you do with someone else’s secrets?” Phaedra asked.
    â€œIt depends, darling. Who tell you to keep secret?”
    â€œIt’s not that anybody told me. It’s just that I wonder about Father Loving . . .”
    â€œDelivering a baby is one of the most sacred things someone can ever ask for your help in. Our job is not to judge or jabber our mouths, just to do the work we were made for.”
    â€œBut what if the secret is hurting someone else?”
    â€œIt’s not our job to fix that kind of hurt. The only kind of work we worry about is the kind we can do with our hands.”
    Phaedra watched the sun rise, and realized that the boy Donna’s mother gave birth to was the one her dreams of fish had pointed to. The summer had taught her that no amount of prayer could make the summer go by faster, or her mother well, or her sister kinder. Dreams were a bridge between the waking world and the sleeping one, but prayer, prayer was something else entirely.

DIONNE BOUNDED INTO her grandmother’s house with a netball cradled in her forearm and a red singlet plastered against her chest. Hyacinth could see beneath her shirt the imprint of not one but two bras that melded Dionne’s breasts into an undifferentiated mass. Hyacinth wanted to say something about it, but she knew that criticizing Dionne would invite her prickliness. Just the week before, Hyacinth had asked Dionne to go see Jean and have him make new clothes for her. There was a standoff in which Dionne insisted that her clothes still fit. What Dionne had said exactly, below her breath, was that she didn’t see why she had to let some buller man ruin her clothes like he’d ruined her hair on her birthday. Hyacinth, who believed that calling someone outside of their name was a grave offense, pounded her foot on the ground sothat the few pieces of good china and crystal in the hutch shook. “What did you say?”
    â€œNothing, Granny.”
    â€œI know you couldn’t be talking that kind of nonsense in my house. I beg you to leave whatever slackness you pick up in those streets when you wipe your feet on these steps. Jean isn’t a buller man. And I won’t have you going about here saying so. You hearing me?”
    â€œYes, ma’am,” Dionne said to the floorboards.
    The compromise was that Jean would mend the places where her thighs had rubbed holes into her pants and let