The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls

We listened to him clambering down the steps. I noticed a small refrigerator next to the sink, and that was when I realized I was starving. I opened the refrigerator, but it was empty and unplugged. We decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to pester Uncle Tinsley about food. I was resigned to going to bed on an empty stomach, but a few minutes later, we heard footsteps on the stairs again. Uncle Tinsley appeared in the door, carrying a silver tray with a small pot, two bowls, a pitcher of water, and two wineglasses.

  “Venison stew,” he said. He unloaded the tray onto the table. “It’s dark in here. You need some light.” He flipped a switch on the wall, and an overhead bulb came on. “You all have a good night’s sleep,” he said, and closed the door again.

  Liz filled the bowls, and we sat down at the table. I took a bite of the stew. “What’s venison?” I asked.

  “Deer.”

  “Oh.”

  I took another bite.

  “It’s pretty good,” I said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The birds woke me early the next morning. I had never heard such noisy birds. I went to the window, and they were everywhere—in the trees right outside, on the ground, swooping in and out of the barn like they owned the place, all the different chirps and tweets and warbling making this incredible commotion.

  Liz and I got dressed and walked down to the house. When we knocked on the front door, there was no answer, so we went around to the back. Through a window, we could see Uncle Tinsley moving around inside the kitchen. Liz rapped on the windowpane, and Uncle Tinsley opened the door but blocked it like he had the night before. He had shaved, his wet hair was combed, the part was straight, and instead of his bathrobe, he was wearing gray trousers and a light blue shirt with TMH monogrammed on the pocket.

  “How did you girls sleep?” he asked.

  “Just fine,” Liz said.

  “The birds sure are noisy,” I said.

  “I don’t use pesticides, so the birds love it around here,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  “Did Mom call, by any chance?” Liz asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  “She does have the number, right?” I asked.

  “This number hasn’t changed since we got it—two, four, six, eight,” he said. “First phone number handed out in Byler, so we got to choose it. Speaking of choosing, how do you like your poached eggs?”

  “Hard!” I said.

  “Soft,” Liz said.

  “Have a seat over there.” He pointed to some rusty cast-iron lawn furniture.

  A few minutes later, he came out carrying that same silver tray, loaded up with a stack of toast and three plates that each had a poached egg in the center. The plates had gold curlicues around the rim, but the edges were chipped. I picked up a corner of my egg and scooted a piece of toast under it, then stabbed the yolk with my fork, chopped up the white part of the egg, and mushed it all together.

  “Bean always mutilates her food,” Liz told Uncle Tinsley. “It’s disgusting.”

  “It tastes better mixed up,” I said. “But that’s not the only reason. First of all, you don’t have to take as many bites, so it saves time. Second, you don’t have to work as hard chewing, because if it’s all mushed up, it’s sort of prechewed. Finally, food gets all mixed up in your stomach anyway, so that’s obviously the way it was meant to be.”

  Uncle Tinsley gave a little chuckle and turned to Liz. “Is she always like this?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Liz said. “She’s the Beanhead.”

  We offered to wash the dishes, but Uncle Tinsley insisted it was easier if he did them himself, without a couple of kids underfoot. He told us to go off and do whatever girls our age did.

  Liz and I walked around to the front of the house, where there were two big trees with shiny dark leaves and big white flowers. Beyond them, on the far side of the lawn, was a row of huge green bushes with a gap in the middle. We walked through the gap and found ourselves in an area surrounded by the dark green bushes. A few tough irises pushed up through the weeds in old, overgrown flower beds. In the center was a round brick-edged pond. It was full of dead leaves, but in the water beneath, I saw a flash of brilliant orange.

  “Fish!” I yelled. “Goldfish! There’s goldfish in this pond!”

  We knelt and studied the orange fish fluttering in and out of the shadows beneath the clumps of dead leaves. I decided this would be a great place for Fido to have a swim. The poor turtle had to be feeling cooped up after all that time in his box.

  I ran back to the barn, but when I opened the Tupperware, Fido was floating in the water. He’d seemed fine when I fed him earlier. I set him down on the tabletop, scooting him along with my finger, trying to jump-start him, even though I knew it was hopeless. Fido was dead, and it was all my fault. I had thought I could protect Fido and take care of him, but that bus trip had been too much for the poor little guy. He’d have been better off if I’d left him in Lost Lake.

  I put Fido back in the Tupperware dish and carried him out to the pond. Liz put an arm around me and said we needed to ask Uncle Tinsley where to bury him.

  Uncle Tinsley was still puttering in the kitchen when we knocked.

  “I thought the two of you were going to go off and play,” he said.

  “Fido died,” I said.

  Uncle Tinsley glanced at Liz.

  “Bean’s turtle,” she said.

  “We need to know where to bury him,” I said.

  Uncle Tinsley stepped out of the house and closed the door behind him. I handed him the Tupperware dish, and he looked down at Fido. “We bury all the family pets in the family cemetery,” he said. He led us back to the barn, where he picked up a shovel with a long wooden handle, then we all headed up the hill behind it.

  “Fido’s a peculiar name for a turtle,” he said as we walked along.

  “Bean really wanted a dog,” Liz said, explaining how Mom had told us it was always the kids who wanted the pet but the mother who ended up taking care of it, and she had no interest in walking and cleaning up after a dog. So she’d bought me a turtle.

  “Fido means ‘I am faithful,’ ” I said. “Fido was a very faithful turtle.”

  “I bet he was,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  Beyond the barn were a bunch of dilapidated wooden buildings. Uncle Tinsley pointed out the smokehouse, the milking shed and the foaling shed, the henhouse, the icehouse, and the springhouse, explaining that Mayfield used to be a real working farm, though hands did most of the work. He still had all 205 acres, including a stretch of woods, as well as the big hay field where the cemetery was. These days, a farmer up the road, Mr. Muncie, hayed the field and gave Uncle Tinsley eggs and vegetables in return.

  We passed through an orchard, Uncle Tinsley showing us the apple, peach, and cherry trees, and out into a large pasture. At the top of the pasture, a cluster of trees shaded the family cemetery, which was surrounded by a rusting wrought-iron fence. The cemetery was weedy, and a number of the weathered old headstones had toppled over. Uncle Tinsley led us to one well-tended grave with a newish headstone. This was Martha’s, he said, with a vacant spot next to it for him when the time came.

  The pets, he explained, were buried around the perimeter, near their owners. “Let’s put Fido near Martha,” Uncle Tinsley said. “I think she would have liked him.”

  Uncle Tinsley dug a small hole, and I placed Fido in it, using the Tupperware dish as his coffin. I found a nice piece of white quartz for a headstone. Uncle Tinsley gave a short eulogy. Fido had been a brave and indeed a faithful turtle, he said, who had made the long and perilous journey from California in order to serve as a guardian for his two sister-owners. Once he’d gotten them safely to Virginia, Fido’s job was over, and he felt free to leave them for that secret island in the middle of the ocean that is turtle heaven.

  The eulogy made me feel a lot better about both Fido and Uncle Tinsley. On the way back down the hill, I asked about the goldfish we’d found in the pond. “The fish are koi,” Uncle Tinsley said. “That was Mother�
�s garden. One of the finest private gardens in all of Virginia, back in the day. Mother won prizes for it. She was the envy of every lady in the garden club.”

  We swung around the barn and the big white house came into view. I started telling Uncle Tinsley about my house dream and how, when we first arrived at Mayfield, I realized it was the actual house in the dream.

  Uncle Tinsley became thoughtful. He rested the shovel against an old water trough in front of the barn. “I guess you’d better see the inside of the house, then,” he said. “Just to make sure.”

  We followed Uncle Tinsley up the big porch steps. He took a deep breath and opened the door.

  The front hall was large and dark, with a lot of wooden cabinets that had glass doors. Everything was a mess. Newspapers, magazines, books, and mail were stacked high on the tables and the floor, alongside boxes of rocks and bottles filled with dirt and sand and liquids.

  “It may look a tad cluttered,” he said, “but that’s because I’m in the middle of reorganizing everything.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Liz said. “It just needs a little tidying up.”

  “We can help,” I said.

  “Oh, no. Everything’s under control. Everything has its place, and I know where everything is.”

  Uncle Tinsley showed us the parlor, the dining room, and the ballroom. Oil paintings hung crooked on the walls and a few were falling out of their frames. The Persian carpets were worn and frayed, the silk curtains were faded and torn, and the stained wallpaper was peeling away from the walls. A grand piano covered with a dark green velvet cloth stood in the big ballroom with the French doors. There was all this stuff piled on every available surface—more stacks of paper and notebooks, antique binoculars, pendulum clocks, rolled-up maps, stacks of chipped china, old pistols, ships in bottles, statues of rearing horses, framed photographs, and all these little wooden boxes, one filled with coins, another with buttons, another with old medals. Everything was coated with a thick layer of dust.

  “There sure is a ton of stuff in here,” I said.

  “Yes, but every single thing you see has value,” Uncle Tinsley said. “If you have the brains to appreciate it.”

  He led us up a curving staircase and down a long hall. At the end of the hall, he stopped in front of a pair of doors that faced each other. Both had brass door knockers shaped like birds. “This is the bird wing,” Uncle Tinsley told us. “This is where you’ll stay. Until your mother comes to pick you up.”

  “We’re not sleeping in the barn anymore?” I asked.

  “Not without Fido there to protect you.”

  Uncle Tinsley opened the doors. We each had our own room, he told us. Both were wallpapered with bird motifs—common birds, like robins and cardinals, and exotic birds, like cockatiels and flamingos. The bird wing, he explained, had been designed for his twin aunts, who were little girls when the house was built. They had loved birds and kept a big Victorian birdhouse full of different kinds of finches.

  “Where was Mom’s room?” I asked.

  “She never mentioned it?” he asked. “The whole bird wing was hers.” He pointed through the door of one room. “When she brought you back from the hospital after you were born, she put you in that cradle in the corner there.”

  I looked over at the cradle. It was small and white and made of wicker, and I couldn’t understand quite why, but it made me feel very safe.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next morning, over our poached eggs, Liz and I tried to talk Uncle Tinsley into letting us help him clean up the house just a little bit. But he insisted that nothing in the house could be thrown out or even moved. Everything, he said, was either a family treasure or part of one of his collections or necessary for his geological research.

  We spent the morning following Uncle Tinsley around the house as he explained what all the stuff meant to him. He’d pick something up, say an ivory-handled letter opener or a tricornered hat, and give us a long explanation of where it came from, who had owned it, and why it had extraordinary significance. I came to realize that everything was, in fact, organized in a way that only he fully understood.

  “This place is like a museum,” I said.

  “And you’re the curator,” Liz told Uncle Tinsley.

  “Well said,” he replied. “But it’s been a good while since I gave my last tour.” We were standing in the ballroom. Uncle Tinsley looked around. “I admit the place is a tad cluttered. That was the phrase Martha liked to use. I’ve always loved to collect things, but when she was alive, she helped me keep the impulse in check.”

  Uncle Tinsley finally agreed to let us throw out some of the old newspapers and magazines and carry up to the attic and down to the basement boxes of mineral samples, spools of thread from the mill, and Confederate paper money. We washed windows, aired out rooms, scrubbed floors and counters, and vacuumed the rugs and curtains with this old Hoover from the 1950s that reminded me of a little spaceship.

  By the end of the week, the house looked a lot better. Still, it didn’t meet most people’s definition of neat and tidy, and you had to accept the fact that you weren’t living in a regular house but a place more like a junk shop crammed with all kinds of fascinating stuff—if you had the brains to see its value.

  Venison stew and eggs were the staples of Uncle Tinsley’s diet. He didn’t shoot big bucks for trophies, he explained, but if he bagged two or three does during deer season, had the meat processed and double-wrapped, then stored it in the basement freezer, he had enough to last the entire year. So most nights we had venison stew with things like carrots, onions, tomatoes, and potatoes and barley mixed in. The meat was a lot tougher than the chicken in potpies, and sometimes you really had to work your jaws before you could swallow it, but it was also spicier and tastier.

  Thanks to Mr. Muncie, the eighty-seven-year-old neighbor who hayed the big pasture, Uncle Tinsley didn’t have to buy eggs and vegetables, and he made hot cereal from rolled oats he got at the feed store. But he decided growing girls needed milk and cheese, plus we were short on staples such as salt, so at the end of our first week, Uncle Tinsley declared it was time for a grocery run. We all climbed into the station wagon with the wood panels, which Uncle Tinsley called the Woody. We hadn’t left Mayfield since the day we arrived, and I was itching to check out the area.

  We drove past the white church and the cluster of houses, then along the winding road that led through farmland, with cornrows and grazing cattle, on the way to Byler. I was looking out the window as we passed a big fenced-in field, and I suddenly saw these two huge birdlike creatures. “Liz!” I shouted. “Look at those crazy birds!”

  They reminded me of chickens, only they were the size of ponies, with long necks and legs and dark brown feathers. Their heads bobbed as they moved along with big careful steps.

  “What the heck are they?” I asked.

  Uncle Tinsley gave that little chuckle of his. “Scruggs’s emus.”

  “Like ostriches, right?” Liz said.

  “Near enough.”

  “Are they pets?” I asked.

  “They weren’t supposed to be. Scruggs thought he could make some money off them but never figured out how. So they’re the world’s ugliest lawn ornaments.”

  “They’re not ugly,” Liz said.

  “Take a look at them up close sometime.”

  Once we got to Byler, Uncle Tinsley gave us what he called the nickel tour. The main street, lined with big green trees, was Holladay Avenue. The buildings were old-fashioned, made of brick and stone. Some had pillars and carvings, one had a big round clock with Roman numerals, and you got the feeling that Byler once was a bustling and prosperous place, though it looked like nothing new had been built in the town for fifty years. More than a few of the storefronts were vacant and had masking tape crisscrossing the glass. A sign on one door said BACK IN HALF AN HOUR, as if the shopkeeper had intended to return but never did.

  Maybe it was because of the humid air, but Byler struck me as very s
leepy. People seemed to move slowly, and a lot of them were hardly moving at all, just sitting in chairs under store awnings, some of the men in overalls, talking, whittling, or leaning back, chewing tobacco and reading newspapers.

  “What year are we in here?” Liz joked.

  “The sixties never happened in this town,” Uncle Tinsley said, “and people like it that way.”

  He stopped the Woody at a red light. An older black man wearing a fedora started across the street in front of us. When he got to the middle of the intersection, he looked at us, smiled, and touched his hat. Uncle Tinsley waved.

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “Don’t know him,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  “But you waved at him.”

  “You only wave at people you know? You must be from California.” He burst out laughing.

  The mill stood at the end of Holladay Avenue, right on the river. It was made of dark red brick laid in patterns of arches and diamonds, and it covered an entire block. The windows were two stories high, and smoke poured out of a pair of soaring chimneys. A sign in front said HOLLADAY TEXTILES.

  “Charlotte tell you much of the family history?” Uncle Tinsley asked.

  “It wasn’t Mom’s favorite subject,” Liz said.

  Before the Civil War, Uncle Tinsley explained, the Holladay family had owned a cotton plantation.

  “A plantation?” I asked. “Our family had slaves?”

  “We certainly did.”

  “I wish I didn’t know that,” Liz said.

  “Those slaves were always treated well,” Uncle Tinsley said. “My great-great-grandfather Montgomery Holladay liked to say if he was down to one final crust of bread, he would, by God, have shared it with them.”

  I glanced at Liz, who rolled her eyes.

  If you went back far enough, Uncle Tinsley went on, just about all American families who could afford them owned slaves, not only Southerners. Ben Franklin owned slaves. Anyway, he continued, the Yankees burned down the whole plantation during the war, but the family still knew the cotton business. Once the war was over, Montgomery Holladay decided there was no point in shipping cotton to the factories up north to make the Yankees rich, so he sold the land and moved to Byler, where he used the money to build the mill.