The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls

  “Don’t be getting all cantankerous, Clarence,” Aunt Al said. “Go sit down and catch your breath.” Uncle Clarence left the room coughing.

  “My husband can be a little crotchety,” Aunt Al told us. “He’s a good man, but his lot ain’t been an easy one—what with his bad back and the white lung he got from working in the mill—and he’s sour on a lot of people. He also worries hisself sick about Truman being over in Vietnam, but he ain’t going to admit it. We’ve lost three Byler boys to the war, and I pray for my son and all those boys over there every night. Anyways, how about some pie?”

  She cut us each a fat slice. “Best peaches in the county,” she said with a grin.

  “And you can’t beat the price,” I said.

  Aunt Al burst into laughter again. “You’re going to fit right in, Bean.”

  We sat down at the kitchen table next to Earl and dug into the pie, which was unbelievably yummy.

  “How’s your momma doing?”

  “She’s fine,” Liz said.

  “She ain’t been back to Byler in years, has she?”

  “Not since Bean was a baby,” Liz said.

  “Can’t say I fault her for that.”

  “Did my dad look like Uncle Clarence?” I asked.

  “Different as night and day, though you could still tell they was brothers. You never seen a picture of your poppa?”

  I shook my head.

  Aunt Al studied the dish towel that she seemed to carry everywhere, then folded it into a neat square. “I got something to show you.” She left the room and came back with a thick scrapbook. Sitting next to me, she started paging through it, then pointed to a black-and-white photograph of a young man leaning in a doorway with his arms crossed and his hip cocked. “There he is,” she said. “Charlie. Your daddy.”

  She slid the album over toward me. I almost heard the blood rushing in my head. I started to touch the photograph but realized that my hands were damp with nervous sweat, so I wiped them on Aunt Al’s dish towel. Then I bent down until my face was inches away from the picture. I wanted to take in every detail about my dad.

  He was wearing a tight-fitting white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes folded into one of the sleeves. He had wiry muscles and dark hair, just like mine, though it was slicked back the way they did in those days. He had dark eyes, also just like mine. What struck me most was his crooked grin, like he saw the world in his own special way and got a kick out of it.

  “He sure was handsome,” I said.

  “Oh, he was a looker, all right,” Aunt Al said. “The ladies all loved Charlie. It wasn’t just his looks. It was mainly the way he lit up the room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Aunt Al eyed me. “You don’t know too much about your daddy, do you, sugar?”

  I shook my head.

  Charlie had been a loom fixer at the mill, Aunt Al said. He could repair anything. Had a head for it. He never got much in the way of a formal education, but he was real smart and all the time on the go. He always had to be doing something. And when Charlie arrived at a party, that was when it started.

  “You got his spark, I do believe,” Aunt Al told me. But Charlie Wyatt also had the wild streak that ran in their family, she went on, and that’s what got him killed.

  “I thought he died in a mill accident,” Liz said. “That’s what Mom told us.”

  Aunt Al looked like she was considering something. “No, hon,” she finally said. “Your daddy was shot.”

  “What?”

  “Gunned down in cold blood by the brother of the man he’d killed.”

  I stared at Aunt Al.

  “You’re old enough,” she said. “You ought to know.”

  After Liz’s dad ran off, Aunt Al explained, Charlotte left Richmond and came home to Mayfield, changing her name back to Holladay. She was feeling pretty mixed up about it all and dated around a bit. Then she and Charlie became sweet on each other. She ended up in a family way, and Charlie wanted to marry her, not just because it was the honorable thing to do but because he loved her. But Charlotte’s father, Mercer Holladay, was of no mind to let his little girl marry one of the loom fixers from his very own mill. Charlotte also seemed to feel that, as much fun as he was, Charlie was beneath her station.

  Charlie was still hoping to change Charlotte’s mind when, one night at Gibson’s pool hall, a fellow name Ernie Mullens said something about Charlotte being a loose woman—to put it politely. When Ernie refused to apologize, Charlie took after him. Then Ernie pulled out a knife. Charlie whacked Ernie upside the head with his pool cue, and Ernie fell against the pool table, cracking his skull. It killed him dead. The jury decided it was a case of self-defense. After the trial, Ernie’s brother, Bucky, swore he was going to kill Charlie, and lots of people urged him to get out of town, but he refused. Two weeks later, Bucky Mullens shot Charlie Wyatt down on Holladay Avenue in broad daylight.

  “Your daddy was murdered,” Aunt Al said, “because he defended your momma’s honor.”

  Her Clarence had sworn revenge, she went on, but Bucky was sent to the penitentiary, and when he got out, he left the state before anyone knew about it. Aunt Al said she was glad it had turned out that way, but Bucky disappearing was one more thing that had made Clarence mad at the world.

  Aunt Al took the photograph of my dad out of the scrapbook and placed it in my hand. “This is for you.”

  “I feel like everything’s changed,” I said to Liz. We were walking back to Mayfield, pushing the Schwinn, because I wanted to talk. “Now I know who my dad was.”

  “And now you know who you are,” Liz said. “You’re Charlie Wyatt’s girl.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I had my dad’s eyes and hair—and Aunt Al said I had his spark. “I’m Charlie Wyatt’s girl.”

  As we walked along, we passed the house where the woman had been sweeping her dirt yard. The hardpacked dirt looked as smooth as terra-cotta tile. The woman was sitting on her porch. She waved, and I waved back.

  “Now you’re waving at people you don’t know,” Liz said, and grinned. “You’ve gone native.”

  We reached the bottom of the mill hill. “I think I like the way my dad died,” I said.

  “It was better than some dumb mill accident,” Liz said.

  “Like Aunt Al said, he was defending Mom’s honor.”

  “He wasn’t just another linthead—not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  “I feel like I’ve got a lot to ask Mom,” I said. “So when in the heck is she ever going to call?”

  “She’ll call.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  When we got home, Uncle Tinsley was sitting at the dining room table, working on his big genealogical chart of the Holladay family.

  “How did it go, Bean?” he asked.

  “Well, she found out how her dad died,” Liz said.

  “Did you know?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said. He pointed to a name on the chart. “Charles Joseph Wyatt, 1932 to 1957.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It wasn’t my place,” he said. “But all of Byler sure knew about it. Didn’t talk about anything else for months. Or years, it seemed.”

  Millworkers drinking beer in pool halls were always getting in knockdowns and knife fights, he said, and from time to time, they killed each other. That was no big deal. However, this particular incident involved Charlotte Holladay, the daughter of Mercer Holladay, the man practically everyone in town worked for. By the time Bucky Mullens came to stand trial, Charlotte was showing, and everyone knew she was carrying the child of the pool-hall-brawling linthead Bucky had killed. It was quite the scandal, and Mother and Father were mortified. So were he and Martha. They all felt that the Holladay name—the name on the darned mill, the name on the main street through town—was soiled. Mother stopped going to the garden club, Father stayed off the golf course. Every time Uncle Tinsley walked through town, he said, he knew people were chortling behind his back.

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nbsp; Mother and Father, he went on, couldn’t help letting Charlotte know how they felt. She had come home when her marriage fell apart and expected to be supported. At the same time, she had declared that since she was an adult, she was going to do whatever she pleased. As a result, she brought shame on the entire family. Charlotte, for her part, felt the family had turned on her, and she hated Mother and Father, as well as him and Martha, for feeling the way they did.

  “And so not long after you were born, Bean, she left Byler, vowing never to return,” Uncle Tinsley said. “It was one of the few times in her life she showed good judgment.”

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I was lying there chewing on everything I’d learned that day about Mom and my dad. I had always wanted to know more about my family, but I hadn’t bargained for this.

  In times like these, having your own room really stunk, because there was no one to talk to. I got up and carried my pillow into Liz’s room, crawling under the covers next to her. She wrapped an arm around me.

  “I actually know something about my dad now,” I said. “It really gives you a lot to think about. Maybe, when Mom gets here, you should talk to her about getting in touch with your dad.”

  “No,” Liz said sharply. “After the way he walked out on Mom and me, I will never have anything to do with him. Ever.” She took a deep breath. “In a way, you’re lucky. Your dad’s dead. Mine left.”

  We lay there in silence for a while. I was waiting for Liz to say something smart and Liz-like that would help me make sense of everything we’d learned that day. Instead, she began coming up with jokey wordplay the way she did when something upset her and she needed to make light of it.

  Liz started with the word “lintheads.” First she spoonerized it as “hint leads.” Then she said that lintheads were people who had no heads of their own, so people with spare heads lent heads to them. Sometimes they charged for the heads, in which case the people were known as rent heads, and once their money was gone, they were called spent heads. If the heads were damaged, they were called dent heads or bent heads.

  “That’s not funny,” I said.

  Liz was quiet for a moment. “You’re right,” she said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The next morning, I was pulling weeds in the flower beds around the koi pond, still thinking about being Charlie Wyatt’s daughter and how Mom’s getting pregnant with me had created so many problems for everyone. The sound of a woodpecker hammering in the sycamores made me look up, and through the opening in the big dark bushes, I saw Joe Wyatt walking up the driveway, his burlap bag over his shoulder. I stood up. When he saw me, he headed my way, ambling along like he was out for a stroll and just happened to run into me.

  “Hey,” he said when he was a few feet away.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Ma said I should come over and say hello, seeing as how we’re related and all.”

  I looked at him and realized he had the same dark eyes as my dad and me. “I guess we’re cousins.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Sorry about calling you a thief.”

  He looked down, and I could see a grin spreading across his face. “Been called worse,” he said. “Anyway, cuz, you particular to blackberries?”

  Cuz. I liked that. “You bet I am.”

  “Well, then, let’s go get us some.”

  I ran up to the barn to find my own sack.

  It was the end of June, and the humidity had kept climbing. The ground was damp from rain the night before, and we crossed the big pasture, squishing in the mud where the land was poorly drained. Grasshoppers, butterflies, and little birds skittered up out of the grass in front of us. We came to a rusting barbed-wire fence line separating the pasture from the woods. Since blackberries loved the sun, Joe said, the best places to find them were along the sides of trails and where the forest met up with the fields. Walking the fence line, we soon came across huge clumps of thorny, brambly bushes thick with fat, dark berries. The first one I ate was so sour, I spit it out. Joe explained that you only picked the ones that came off when you barely touched them. The ones you had to pull weren’t ripe enough to eat.

  We made our way up the hill along the fence line, picking blackberries and eating as many as we kept. Joe told me that he spent much of the summer in the woods picking wineberries, mulberries, blackberries, and pawpaws—which some folks called hillbilly bananas—and raiding orchards for cherries, peaches, and apples, as well as now and then sneaking into someone’s garden for a haul of tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, and beans.

  “Only if they’ve got more than enough,” he said. “I never take what would be missed. That would be stealing.”

  “It’s more like scavenging,” I said. “Like what birds and raccoons do.”

  “There you go, cuz. Though I got to admit, not everyone looks on it kindly.”

  From time to time, he said, farmers who spotted him in their orchards or cornfields took potshots at him. On one occasion, he was up in an apple tree in the backyard of this dentist’s fancy house in Byler, and when the family came out to have lunch on the patio, he had to sit in the tree without moving a muscle for an hour until they left, still as a squirrel hoping the hunter wouldn’t notice him. The worst that had ever happened was when someone’s yard dog came after him and he lost part of a finger before making it over the fence. Joe grinned at the memory and held up his hand. “Wasn’t a picking finger.”

  When our bags were full, we headed back down the hedgerow to Mayfield. The woods beyond the fence were quiet in the midday heat. At the barn we stopped to get a drink from the faucet above the watering trough, sticking our heads under the spigot, the water splashing on our faces.

  “Maybe we can do some more scavenging, cuz,” Joe said, wiping his chin.

  “Sure, cuz,” I said, wiping mine.

  He walked down the drive, and I turned to the house. As I reached the front porch, Liz came out of the door.

  “Mom called,” she said. “She’ll be here in a couple of days.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  That afternoon Liz and I sat out by the koi pond, talking about Mom’s arrival and feasting on blackberries until our fingers were stained. It was about time Mom called. It had been five weeks and two days since she had the Mark Parker meltdown and took off. As much as I liked Byler and as thrilled as I was to know Uncle Tinsley and to have met my dad’s family—even that grump Uncle Clarence—I really missed Mom. We were, as she always said, a tribe of three. All we needed was each other. I had tons of things I wanted to discuss with Mom, mostly about my dad, and Liz and I also wanted to know what the plan was. Would we be going back to Lost Lake? Or somewhere else?

  “Maybe we could stay here for a while,” I told Liz.

  “Maybe,” she said. “It’s sort of Mom’s house, too.”

  Ever since we’d arrived, we’d been straightening up Uncle Tinsley’s stuff, but with a place like Mayfield, there was always more to do. Two days after Mom called, we were putting away jars and boxes when we heard the sound of the Dart coming up the driveway.

  Liz and I rushed through the door, across the big porch, and down the steps just as Mom got out of the car, which was pulling a little white-and-orange trailer. She had on her red velvet jacket even though it was summer, and her hair was teased up the way she did it when she was going to an audition. We had a three-way hug in the middle of the driveway, laughing and whooping, with Mom going on about “my darlings,” “my babies,” and “my precious girls.”

  Uncle Tinsley came out of the house and leaned against one of the porch columns, watching us with his arms crossed. “Nice of you to finally drop in, Char,” he said.

  “Nice to see you, too, Tin,” Mom said.

  Mom and Uncle Tinsley stood there looking at each other, so I started jabbering on about all the fun things we’d been doing, staying in her old rooms in the bird wing, clearing the koi pond, riding the Farmall, eating peaches, and gathering blackberries.

  Uncle Tinsley cut me off.
“Where have you been, Char?” he asked. “How could you go off and leave these kids alone?”

  “Don’t pass judgment on me,” Mom told him.

  “Now, please, no fighting,” Liz said.

  “Yes, let’s be civil,” Mom said.

  We all went into the house, and Mom looked around at the clutter. “Jesus, Tin. What would Mother say?”

  “What would she say about someone abandoning her children? But as you said, let’s be civil.”

  Uncle Tinsley went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. Mom started walking around the living room, picking up her mother’s crystal vases and porcelain figurines, her father’s old leather-covered binoculars, the family photographs in their sterling frames. She’d tried so hard to put this place and her past out of her life, she said, and now she was back in the middle of it again. She laughed and shook her head.

  Uncle Tinsley came in with the tea service on the silver tray.

  “Being back here is all too dark and strange,” Mom said. “I feel the old chill. Mother was always so cold and distant. She never truly loved me. All she cared about were appearances and being proper. And Father loved me for the wrong reasons. It was all very inappropriate.”

  “Charlotte, that’s nonsense,” Uncle Tinsley said. “This was always a warm house. You were Daddy’s little girl—at least until your divorce—and you loved it. Nothing inappropriate ever happened under this roof.”

  “That’s what we had to pretend. We had to pretend it was perfect. We were all experts at pretending.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Uncle Tinsley said. “You’ve always exaggerated everything. You’ve always had to create your little dramas.”

  Mom turned to us. “See what I mean, girls? See what happens around here when you try to speak the truth? You get attacked.”

  “Let’s just have tea,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  We all sat down. Liz poured and passed the cups around.

  Mom stared into her tea. “Byler,” she said. “Everyone in this town lives in the past. All they ever talk about is the weather and the Bulldogs. It’s like they don’t know or care about what’s happening in the outside world. Are they even aware that their president is a war criminal?”