The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls

  “I’ll allow it,” the judge said.

  “So why aren’t you living with your momma?”

  I looked over at Mom. She was sitting very erect with her lips pressed together. “It’s sort of complicated,” I said.

  “You strike me as a very smart young lady. I’m sure you can explain to the jury something that’s sort of complicated.”

  “Mom had some stuff she needed to do, so we decided to visit Uncle Tinsley.”

  “Stuff? What stuff?”

  “Personal stuff.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  I glanced at Mom again. She looked like she was about to explode. I turned to the judge. “Do I have to answer that?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” the judge said.

  “But it’s personal.”

  “Personal matters often come out in a court of law.”

  “Well”—I took a deep breath—“Mom had sort of a meltdown, and she needed some time to herself to figure things out, so we decided to come visit Uncle Tinsley.”

  “So you two girls came to Virginia on your own. All the way from California. Did your momma even know you were coming?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Brave girls. Has your momma ever done that before? Left you on your own?”

  “Just for short periods. And she always made sure there were plenty of chicken potpies for us to eat.”

  “Well, that was real responsible of her.” Leland Hayes glanced at the jury. Tammy Elbert had swiveled around to look at Mom, whose face was almost as red as her velvet jacket.

  “So your mother is a performer?”

  “A singer and a songwriter.”

  “And performance is a form of make-believe, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Does your mother engage in a lot of make-believe?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Has she ever, say, made up a boyfriend who didn’t really exist?”

  “Objection!” Dickey Bryson shouted. “Irrelevant.”

  Mom was looking over at the jury and violently shaking her head.

  “I’ll withdraw the question.” Leland Hayes cleared his throat. “When your mother had her meltdown, she left you to survive on your own. That’s tough. It meant you had to do whatever it took to get by. Even tell lies if you felt you had to.”

  “Objection. Argumentative.”

  “Sustained.”

  “I’ll rephrase. Have you ever needed to lie to get by?”

  “Nope,” I said emphatically.

  “Did you or did you not lie to your Uncle Tinsley about working for Mr. Maddox?”

  “That wasn’t exactly a lie,” I said. “We just decided not to mention it.”

  “So you didn’t lie to your uncle, who had let you into his house and was feeding you and taking care of you. You just misled him?”

  “I guess.”

  “You like your Uncle Tinsley, don’t you?”

  “He’s great.”

  “He’s looking after you because your mother wasn’t. So you want to make him happy, and you want to try to please him. When you’re not misleading him. Isn’t that correct?”

  “I guess,” I said again. I could see another setup coming, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Has your uncle ever told you that he dislikes Mr. Maddox?”

  “He had a good reason to.”

  “Because Mr. Maddox recommended that the owners of Holladay Textiles terminate your uncle’s relationship with the mill?”

  “Other things, too. Uncle Tinsley thought he treated the workers bad—”

  The judge cut me off. “Just answer yes or no.”

  “So would you ever lie about Mr. Maddox if you thought it would make your uncle happy?”

  “Objection!” Dickey Bryson shouted.

  “Sustained,” the judge said.

  Leland Hayes looked at his legal pad again. “Just a couple more things,” he said. “Did you eat food from the Maddoxes’ refrigerator without their permission?”

  “If I was making the kids sandwiches, I’d sometimes make myself one, too.”

  “So you did eat the Maddoxes’ food without their permission?”

  “I didn’t think I needed it.”

  “Did you also drink Mr. Maddox’s vodka without his permission, which was one reason he had to fire you?”

  “What?”

  “Yes or no.”

  “No!” I shouted.

  “Did you steal money from his dresser drawer, which was the other reason he had to fire you?”

  “No!”

  “Do you have a vendetta against Mr. Maddox?”

  “No.”

  “Is Joe Wyatt your cousin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you and Joe Wyatt slash the tires of Mr. Maddox’s car?”

  I looked down at my hands. “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “So Joe Wyatt did it?”

  I shrugged. “How would I know?”

  “Maybe because you were there. Remember, Miss Holladay, that you’re under oath. Did you help Joe Wyatt plan or carry out this crime?”

  “It’s because Maddox was trying to kill us!” I shouted. “He was all the time trying to run us over with that Le Mans. We had to protect ourselves. It was self-defense—”

  “I think we get the picture,” Leland Hayes said. “A nasty little feud. No further questions.”

  “But I need to explain—”

  “I said no further questions.”

  “You’re not giving me a chance to explain!”

  “Young lady, that will be all,” the judge said.

  Once Leland Hayes sat down, Dickey Bryson stood up again. He asked me to tell the jury what I’d meant by saying Maddox tried to run us down, and I told them how, when we were walking to the bus stop, he’d come barreling down the road in his Le Mans and swerve at us and we had to jump into the ditch to get out of his way.

  Then Leland Hayes had another turn. “Did you ever report these alleged incidents to the police?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “So there’s no record of these alleged incidents ever taking place.”

  “But they did.”

  “The jury can decide that. What you are admitting is that you and Mr. Maddox were feuding?”

  “I guess you could call it that. But it all started because he—”

  “No further questions.”

  The judge told me to step down, but I could hardly move. I had just betrayed Mom. I had ratted out Joe. And I had admitted lying to Uncle Tinsley. How did that happen? I believed I was in the right. In fact, I knew I was in the right. All I wanted to do was get up and tell the truth about what Maddox did to Liz, and I ended up looking like a lying, stealing, feuding tire-slitter. Part of me was outraged, but part of me just wanted to slink out of the courtroom and crawl down some deep, dark hole and stay there.

  I finally stepped down from the witness stand. Dickey Bryson told me that since I’d finished testifying, I could sit in the gallery. As I walked by Maddox, he shook his head and looked at the jury as if to say, Now you see the kind of kid I’ve had to deal with.

  I took a seat between Mom and Uncle Tinsley. He patted my arm, but Mom just sat there, rigid as stone.

  Dickey Bryson asked the bailiff to bring in Wayne Clemmons, who’d been pacing up and down in the hallway, smoking cigarettes. He was wearing a gray windbreaker, and he hadn’t bothered to shave. After he swore his oath and took a seat, he mumbled his name, keeping his head down like he was studying the laces of his work boots.

  Dickey Bryson asked him to describe what he had witnessed on the night in question.

  “Nothing much,” Wayne said. “All’s I know is Maddox and the girl was in the back of my car, arguing about money. She wanted money from him. But I didn’t really witness nothing.”

  Dickey Bryson looked up, startled. “Are you certain?”

  “I was driving the car. My eyes was on the road.”

&nb
sp; The lawyer riffled through his accordion file and held up a piece of paper. “Mr. Clemmons, did you or did you not give a statement to the police saying that you had observed Jerry Maddox physically and sexually assaulting Liz Holladay in the back of your taxi?”

  “I don’t recollect what I told the police,” Wayne said. “I was drinking at the time, and my memory’s been all shot to hell since I came back from ’Nam. I forget things that did happen and remember things that didn’t happen.”

  “Mr. Clemmons, let me remind you that you’re under oath here.”

  “Like I said, my eyes was on the road. How was I supposed to know what was going on in the backseat of the car?”

  Before I even realized what I was doing, I was on my feet. “That’s a pack of lies!” I shouted.

  The judge banged his gavel down hard and said, “I’ll have order in this court.”

  “But he can’t sit there and lie—”

  The judge banged his gavel again and roared, “Order!”

  Then he motioned to the bailiff, whispered in his ear, and the bailiff left through the side door. A few moments later, I felt a hand clutch my shoulder hard. I swiveled around, and there was the bailiff. He beckoned me with his finger. I stood up and glared at Wayne Clemmons, who was still looking down at his boot laces. The bailiff led me out of the courtroom, and after he closed the door, he said, “Judge don’t want you back inside for the duration.”

  Almost immediately, the door to the courtroom opened, and Wayne walked out.

  “Why’d you lie?” I blurted out.

  “Enough, young lady,” the bailiff said.

  Wayne just shook his head and lit a cigarette as he walked down the hallway and out the revolving door.

  “Don’t go back into the witness room,” the bailiff said, “and no talking to the other witnesses.”

  I sat down on a bench in the hallway. After a couple of minutes, the bailiff came back out and opened the door to the witness room. “You’re up, miss,” he said. Liz walked out and followed him into the courtroom, not once looking my way.

  It was past one o’clock by the time the doors to the courtroom opened and everyone filed out. Liz came through the doors flanked by Mom and Uncle Tinsley, like they were guarding her. She had her arms crossed and her head down. Joe and Aunt Al were behind them.

  “How did it go?” I asked Liz, but she walked right past me without saying anything.

  “Just hunky-dory,” Mom said.

  “That attorney was pretty hard on her,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Then Maddox took the stand. He basically said he fired you for stealing, and the two of you made this all up to get back at him.”

  “Dirtbag liar!” I said. “They couldn’t possibly believe that.”

  “I think they don’t know what to believe,” Uncle Tinsley said. “But we really shouldn’t be talking about it until the trial’s over.”

  We went over to the Bulldog Diner and took a table in the back, under the photographs of Bulldog players, including the one of Dickey “Blitz” Bryson. The lawyers and the judge came in and took a table in the middle, followed by some of the jurors, who sat at the counter. Just as we were getting our menus, the Maddoxes came in and took a table in the front.

  “There’s the dirtbag!” I said.

  “Hush,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Don’t talk about the case. You want to cause a mistrial?”

  “How can we eat in the same room as him? I’m going to spew this time.”

  “Everyone from the courthouse always eats here,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  “It’s one of the joys of small-town life,” Mom said.

  The waitress came over and asked what we wanted.

  “We should all be ordering baloney,” I said loudly.

  After lunch, we went back to the courthouse and sat on the uncomfortable benches in the hallway as the jury began deliberating. I figured they’d be there for the long haul, sorting through the evidence and debating legal issues, but in less than an hour, the bailiff called everyone back into the courtroom. He told me that, since the testimony was over and the jury had reached a verdict, the judge was allowing me to return to the courtroom.

  The jurors filed in. When I looked at Tammy Elbert, she kept her eyes on the judge. The clerk passed the judge a piece of paper. He unfolded it, read it, and refolded it. “The verdict is not guilty on all charges,” he said.

  Aunt Al gasped and Mom shouted, “No!”

  The judge banged his gavel. “Court dismissed.”

  Maddox slapped Leland Hayes on the back and went over and started shaking the jurors’ hands. Liz and I sat there in silence. I felt completely confused, like the world had turned upside down, and we were living in a place where the guilty were innocent and the innocent were guilty. I didn’t know what to do. How were you supposed to behave in a world like that?

  Dickey Bryson stuffed his papers back into his accordion file and came over to where we were sitting. “These he-said-she-said cases are tough to prove,” he said.

  “But we had a witness,” I said.

  “Not today you didn’t.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  We got into the Woody. Uncle Tinsley headed down Holladay Avenue saying nothing. I took Liz’s hand, but she pulled it away and leaned against the door. Mom was so agitated that she could hardly contain herself. Her fingers trembled as she lit a cigarette. That defense attorney was a monster, she told us. All those outrageous, untrue things he had said about her. And the way he had behaved toward her girls was hideous. He had treated Liz even worse than he had me, she went on. He had taken Liz’s imagination and creativity and used them against her. He accused her of constantly making things up—for example, changing the endings of the stories she read to Maddox’s daughter, Cindy. He said Liz’s banged-up face in the police photos could have been caused by Tinsley Holladay smacking her for coming home late. He asked Liz about the perv we’d ditched in New Orleans, then told the jury that this was evidence she called men “perverts” without any proof and that she considered outsmarting them a game and a challenge. The lawyer actually said that Liz’s two favorite authors, Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe, were themselves perverts. He declared that Liz was essentially a habitual liar with an overactive imagination and an obsession with the idea of perverts—and that in itself, he told the jurors, was more than a little perverted.

  Mom started going on about how much she hated Byler. The town was full of hicks, rubes, crackers, and lintheads. It was small-minded and mean-spirited, backward and prejudiced. Sitting in that courtroom was the most humiliating experience of her life. We were really the ones on trial, not Maddox, put on trial for our values and our lifestyle, for our willingness to go out in the world and do something different and creative with our lives instead of wasting away in this stifling, dying, claustrophobic mill town.

  “Shut up, Charlotte,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  “That’s the problem with this town,” she said. “Everyone’s supposed to just shut up and pretend nothing’s wrong. Little Bean was the only one with the guts to stand up and say it was all a pack of lies.”

  “The jury thought what I said was all a pack of lies,” Liz said in a quiet voice. “Nothing happened. You heard the verdict. Nothing happened.” I was sitting next to her in the back of the Woody. She looked out the window. “Was it a pack of lies,” she said, “or a lack of pies?” She pulled up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Pack of lies. Lack of pies. Plaque of eyes, arranged by size. Or black-eyed lies?” Liz was speaking in a distant monotone, almost to herself. “Plucked-out eyes. Lucked-out lies. Synthesize. Between my thighs.” She paused. “To no surprise, to our demise.” She was still staring out the window. “All the liars told their lies.” There was another pause. “Who denies the lies? Who will scrutinize the lies? The size of lies? Who will pluck the liars’ eyes? Who cries, who spies, who sighs, who dies?”

  “Please stop it,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  The day seemed t
o have gone on forever, but it was only midafternoon by the time we got back to the house. While the morning had been clear, the sky had clouded over, and a cold, foggy drizzle had started up. Liz said she was going up to the bird wing to spend a little time by herself and maybe take a nap. Uncle Tinsley decided to build a fire in the living room and sent me out to fetch kindling from the woodshed. I couldn’t find any good kindling, so I chopped some from a couple of small logs, using the little hatchet that hung on the wall.

  After the trial, it felt good to be doing something simple and physical. You set up the wood on the chopping block, brought the hatchet down hard, and the wood split cleanly into two pieces. Then you stacked it and set up another piece of wood. Everything went the way it was supposed to. No tricks, no surprises.

  When I had enough kindling, I laid it in the canvas tote, added some twigs from the old tack box Uncle Tinsley stored them in while they dried out, then carried it all back to the house, covering the tote with my arm so the wood wouldn’t get rained on.

  Uncle Tinsley was on his knees in front of the fireplace, wadding up newspaper and tearing cardboard into strips. Mom was sitting in a brocade wing chair next to the hearth. She and Uncle Tinsley seemed to have decided that they were tired of fighting. Instead, Uncle Tinsley was going on about the importance, in getting a good blaze going, of the right amount of starting material—paper, cardboard, twigs, kindling, small seasoned pieces—and not until that was burning in a lively way did you add your logs. Otherwise, all it did was smoke.

  “Bean, why don’t you go see if Liz wants to come down,” Mom said. “She could probably use a little primal heat.”

  I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Uncle Tinsley always kept the radiators off except when the temperature fell below freezing, and the hall was chilly. The rain had gotten heavier, and you could hear it drumming on the metal roof. When I opened the door to our room, I saw Liz lying on the bed with her clothes still on. I was going to turn around and let her sleep, but she suddenly made this groggy, gurgling noise that scared me.

  “Liz?” I said. “Liz, are you okay?”

  I sat down next to her, shaking her arm and calling her name, and when she looked up, her eyes were blurry and unfocused. She said a few words in a slurred voice, but I couldn’t understand them. I ran back downstairs. “Something’s wrong with Liz!” I screamed.