The Silver Star

by Jeannette Walls

  Everyone got up early the following morning. A thunderstorm had passed through right before daybreak and you could still smell the electricity in the clear, wet air. Mom put her suitcase in the trunk of the Dart and hugged us all. She was wearing her red velvet jacket. “The Tribe of Three,” she said, “will be together again soon.”

  We watched as the Dart disappeared around the bend in the driveway.

  “She’s gone,” Liz said.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  When Liz returned to school, it had been a week since the trial, and I hoped the other kids would stop teasing her and move on to something else. They didn’t completely, but Liz developed a way of dealing with it. She drifted through the hallways in her own world, as if no one else existed, and after school she played her guitar and worked late into the evening on her emu poetry. She also drew illustrations—emus reading newspapers, emus blowing their noses, emus playing saxophones.

  Despite Mom’s talk about finding a publisher, Liz was terrified to show her poetry to anyone except family. If someone criticized her writing, she’d be crushed—so I took it on myself to copy a bunch of the poems and slip them to Miss Jarvis, who sought out Liz and told her she had real talent. Liz started spending lunch hour in Miss Jarvis’s classroom. A few of the other Byler High outsiders went there as well—Cecil Bailey, who was always talking about Elizabeth Taylor and sometimes got called a queer; Kenneth Daniels, who wore a cape and also wrote poetry; Claire Owens, an albino who said she saw auras around people; and Calvin Sweely, a guy with a head so big that, when his class was studying the solar system, some smart aleck nicknamed him Jupiterhead, and it stuck. No one at Miss Jarvis’s lunch hour made fun of anyone else, and she encouraged them and praised their individuality. Liz had felt like such a scorned outsider at Byler that she hadn’t realized the school had other outsiders as well. Discovering them was a real revelation.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  I’d been so busy with Liz and the emus that I hadn’t seen much of the Wyatts since the trial, but one April afternoon shortly after I turned thirteen, Liz and I came home from school to find Uncle Tinsley and Aunt Al sitting on the front porch.

  “Big goings-on down at the mill,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  “Your Mr. Maddox went and got hisself fired,” Aunt Al said.

  “What?” Liz said like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I punched her in the shoulder.

  “Al here was an eyewitness,” Uncle Tinsley said. “She walked all the way out here to tell you what happened.”

  “And a fine walk it was, too,” Aunt Al said. The verdict acquitting Maddox had really gone to his head, she explained. Wayne Clemmons had left the county the day after testifying, and people were saying Maddox had gotten to him one way or another—bribed him or threatened him. Some even believed that Maddox had attacked Liz in the taxi because he knew that he’d be able to turn Wayne into a witness on his behalf.

  Anyway, once the trial was over, Maddox became convinced he could get away with anything, could do whatever he wanted to anyone he wanted, both on the mill floor and around town. He had been a pushy son of a gun before the trial, Aunt Al said, but after he was acquitted, he went completely out of control, cursing and shoving the men and groping the bosoms and bottoms of the women. He caught one girl eating an egg-salad sandwich at her loom when it wasn’t lunchtime, and he smashed the sandwich in her face. That was when the slowdowns started. The workers had just had more than they could take from Maddox, and they were going to do whatever they could get away with to cause trouble for him. Thread got tangled. Looms and spindles started breaking, and repairs took forever. Lights went out. Toilets got clogged, and drains backed up.

  The mill owners expected the foremen to get results, whatever that took, and if one of them didn’t, it was his fault. The owners didn’t want excuses. Maddox began riding the workers harder, and they fought back with even more slowdowns.

  It started to get to Maddox, Aunt Al went on, and last night he plumb lost it. He got into an argument with Julius Johnson, a beefy black man who was Vanessa’s uncle, over Julius taking a long bathroom break. Maddox started yelling at Julius, poking him in the chest. There had been a rumor that Maddox hit on Leticia, the cheerleader—though the coloreds kept those things to themselves, Aunt Al added—and that may have been on Julius’s mind. Anyway, Julius, who was almost as big as Maddox, grabbed his hand and told Maddox not to be poking on him, he needed to start showing people a little respect. Maddox slapped Julius across the face, right there in front of the whole shift. That sure brought the place to a halt, but before anyone could even say boo, Julius tackled Maddox, and those two big fellows ended up down on the shop floor trading punches until the security guard pulled them apart.

  “Both Maddox and Julius was fired,” Aunt Al said. Julius had become an instant hero among the black folk of Byler, and Samuel Morton of Morton Brothers Funeral Home, which serviced the coloreds, had already offered him a job. People were also saying that the mill owners were actually glad to see Maddox go. He’d become more trouble than he was worth.

  Aunt Al reached over and tapped Liz on the arm. “If some skinny white girl was willing to stand up to Jerry Maddox,” she said, “I reckon Julius Johnson figured he couldn’t do any less.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  We fed the emus when we got home from school, with chicken feed Uncle Tinsley bought on the cheap from Mr. Muncie. It got to the point where as soon as they saw us, they’d come running up to the fence, Eugene leading the way and Eunice following, her gimp leg swinging to the side with each step.

  I loved those ugly overgrown chickens, but not the way Liz did. She positively doted on them. She brought them treats like cookies and broccoli. She followed them around the field, studying their behavior. Eugene would let her get close enough to stroke him, and he even ate out of her hand, but Eunice was more skittish and didn’t want to be touched, ducking away and running off whenever Liz reached out, so Liz left her food on the ground. The emus were her responsibility, she kept saying, she was their protector, and she constantly worried about them. A bobcat might attack them, some boys might shoot them for kicks, they might get loose and end up as roadkill.

  One afternoon a couple of weeks after Maddox got the boot, we went up to the pasture to find the gate open and the emus gone. We ran back to the house and Uncle Tinsley told us that a crew from the power company had come through that morning trimming branches back from the wires, and they must have forgotten to close the gate. Liz was so upset, she was shaking. We piled into the Woody and drove around, finally spotting the emus in a hay field beside a country road a mile from Mayfield.

  The hay field, which was owned by Mr. Muncie, had barbed-wire fencing and an open gate. Liz got out and shut the gate, so the emus were safe for the moment, but none of us knew how to get them home. We’d been able to herd the emus into the big pasture at Mayfield, but they’d been only a few feet from the gate. There was no way we could herd them along the road all the way back to Mayfield. Or transport them. Even with Tater and his crew, we couldn’t get the emus into that cattle trailer. Liz was practically hysterical.

  “We need to rope those birds,” Uncle Tinsley said.

  That night he called Bud Hawkins, a farrier down the road who owned a rodeo horse, to see if he could try lassoing the emus, and Bud said he’d meet us at the hay field the following afternoon. Uncle Tinsley told us to recruit some friends as well. The more hands, the better. The next day at school, I told Joe, who said he’d round up a few buddies. Liz invited her new lunchtime friends, but we didn’t know how many we could count on.

  When we pulled up to the hay field in the Woody that afternoon, Bud Hawkins was already there, leading a sturdy bay horse off his trailer. The emus were on the other side of the field, watching suspiciously. While Bud was saddling up his horse, a green Rambler drove up and Miss Jarvis got out along with a few of the outsiders, including Kenneth Daniels in his black cape. A couple of minutes later, Au
nt Al arrived in a pickup she must have borrowed, with Earl beside her and Joe and his buddies in the bay. Then came the powder-blue Cadillac with Ruth, Vanessa, Leticia, and a couple of the black athletes, including Tower.

  With everyone watching, Liz walked over toward Eugene, carrying a bowl of feed and a big, soft piece of rope with a loop in it. She placed the bowl on the ground, and when Eugene started pecking at the feed, she slipped the loop up past his head and around his neck. Joe brought Earl over, and the boy reached out and stroked Eugene’s neck.

  Meanwhile, Bud trotted his horse toward Eunice. When she took off, he galloped after her, swinging the lariat over his head. Some of the kids were running around trying to help, Kenneth waving his black cape, Tower holding out his long arms, Ruth and Leticia clapping and rooting them on.

  Despite her bad leg, Eunice could really cover ground, darting to the side every time Bud threw the lariat. After almost an hour of chasing after her, he trotted back to the fence. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and his horse’s chest was covered with lather. “The good news is, the bird’s starting to get wore out,” he said. “The bad news is, we’re completely wore out.”

  Uncle Tinsley had been leaning against the Woody watching, but now he took charge, telling everyone to go into the field and gather behind Eunice, then form a long line, arms extended. Liz led Eugene through the gate and onto the road. With the kids in the line behind her touching fingertips, Eunice had nowhere to go but forward. She cautiously followed Eugene.

  It was all going pretty well until we got to the corner of Mr. Muncie’s hay field, where the fence line stopped. That was when Eunice panicked and hurled herself at the barbed-wire fence, trying to get back to the safety of the hay field. She squeezed through but tore a bloody raw spot on her back. When Eugene realized that Eunice had taken off, he panicked as well, lurching and hissing so wildly that Liz pulled the rope off, and, just like Eunice, he scrambled through the fence, skinning his back.

  I felt like kicking a rock. After more than an hour of work, we were worse off than when we started. The birds were back in the same darned field, and now they were all dinged up. The strange thing was, while Liz and I were really upset, everyone else seemed to be having the time of their lives. Uncle Tinsley was beaming and slapping people on the back, congratulating them on great teamwork, while the kids were hooting and bonking each other and doing head-bobbing, elbow-flapping emu imitations as we all walked back to the cars in the late-afternoon light.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Now that the weather was warmer, I had gotten into the habit of biking over to the Wyatts’ house on Saturdays to say hello and tuck into a plate of Aunt Al’s eggs fried in bacon fat. Liz usually rode out to check on the emus, Mr. Muncie having said it was fine to keep them in his hay field until we figured out how to get them back. After the failed roundup, Liz decided we wouldn’t be able to capture the emus—we couldn’t outrun them or outsmart them. All we could do was befriend them and try to win their trust, and that was what Liz had started working on.

  One Saturday in early May, I walked into the Wyatts’ kitchen to find Aunt Al sitting at the table next to Earl, writing a letter. She’d just heard from Truman, she told me. Though he’d tried hard to be optimistic, he said, he had to admit that despite the best efforts of the U.S. military, the war wasn’t going the way the generals said it was going. The Americans were trying to turn the war over to the Vietnamese, but the Vietnamese didn’t seem to want it, and drugs had become a serious problem on the base. Truman and his girlfriend, Kim-An, who’d been teaching Vietnamese to servicemen at the base, were seriously talking marriage. But Kim-An was worried about her family, since her father also worked for the Americans, and she wanted to know whether, if she and Truman did marry, she could bring her parents and her sister to the States.

  “Clarence ain’t none too keen on the idea,” Aunt Al said, “and I always assumed Truman would marry one of our Byler girls. But I’m telling him that if he does bring this Kim-An back home, I’ll move heaven and earth to help get her family over here, because ain’t nothing more important than family.” She folded the letter and put it in an envelope. “How about some eggs?”

  As I was mopping up the drippings with toast, Joe came into the kitchen. “I’m going to the dump,” he said to me. “Want to come?” All kinds of neat stuff got left at the dump, and Joe liked to see if he could fix things other people had thrown out. He would find a broken lawn mower or record player or sewing machine, bring it home, take it apart, and put it back together. Sometimes he could even get it to work.

  The dump was on the far side of the river, and we walked across the clanking bridge, Dog trotting along behind us. It was a bright but windy spring day, the big flat-bottomed clouds sailing by overhead.

  “What do you think about the news from Truman?” I asked.

  “About the war or about the Vietnamese girlfriend?”

  “Both.”

  “Truman’s real smart,” Joe said. “You never win betting against Truman. If he says the war’s going bad, then the war’s going bad, I don’t care what my pa says.”

  We had come to the far side of the bridge. “Does that mean you’re not enlisting?” I asked.

  “Don’t mean that at all.” Joe picked up a flat rock and skipped it across the river. “You don’t stop fighting just because you start losing. Truman taught me that.” He turned around. “If Truman gets out in one piece,” he said, “and he wants to bring that girl and her family with him, well, I never figured I’d have slant-eyes for kin, but those Oriental women can be right pretty. Roger Bramwell over in Floyd County came back from the service married to a Filipino gal. They got real cute kids.”

  The dump was surrounded by a chain-link fence and sheets of corrugated tin, with clumps of wild daylilies flowering all happy and orange on the other side. People left appliances and machinery—just about everything potentially salvageable—to the left of the gate and we spent most of the afternoon rummaging through boxes full of broken old stuff, examining eggbeaters, testing typewriters, and spinning the dials on old radios. Dog had a field day chewing on chicken bones and chasing rats. Joe found a neat wind-up clock he thought he could fix, and he brought it with him when we left at the end of the afternoon.

  We walked back across the bridge and along Holladay Avenue, Dog at our heels. After passing the courthouse, we turned down a block lined with old buildings and crepe myrtle, crossed the railroad tracks, then took a shortcut through a cobblestone alley between the drugstore and the insurance agency. Behind the drugstore was a small parking area with a wooden staircase leading up to the building’s second floor. At the bottom of the stairs, parked next to a metal trash can, was Maddox’s Le Mans.

  I hadn’t seen Maddox since the trial, but I knew I was going to run into him sooner or later, and I dreaded it. There was no sign of him, however, or of anyone else, for that matter. As we came up to the Le Mans, Dog trotted ahead, stopped, lifted his leg, and started peeing on one of the whitewall tires. It was almost like he knew who owned the car. Joe burst out laughing, and so did I. It was just about the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

  All of a sudden, the door at the top of the stairs flew open and Maddox came charging down, bellowing with rage about how dare that damn mutt take a piss on his car, it was vandalism, as bad as the tire-slashing we little delinquents did, and this time he’d caught us red-handed.

  Maddox reached down and grabbed Dog by the scruff of the neck, popped the trunk of the Le Mans, and threw Dog in.

  “Don’t you hurt Dog,” I said. “You hurt everything. You hurt my sister and you know it.”

  “Jury didn’t see it that way,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve had enough of you, so shut up. This dog’s a menace, running around without a leash.” He opened the door of the Le Mans and flipped the seat forward. “Now, you two get in the back,” he said. “We’re going to see your folks.”

  Joe and I looked at each other. I’ll admit I was pretty sca
red, but we couldn’t just let Maddox drive off with Dog. Joe threw the clock in the trash can, and we climbed into the car.

  No one said anything on the drive through town. I stared at the back of Maddox’s thick neck, just like I had during the trial, and listened to Dog’s muffled barking from inside the trunk. I couldn’t believe it. I’d thought we were finished with Maddox, but now it seemed like the whole business was starting up again. Winning in court wasn’t enough. He’d always be after us. This feud would go on forever.

  Maddox pulled to a stop in front of the Wyatts’ house. Dusk was approaching and the lights were on. Maddox opened the glove compartment, pulled out a blunt-nosed revolver, and shoved it in the pocket of that hooded black sweatshirt he sometimes wore. Then he got out and popped the trunk again, grabbed Dog by the scruff of the neck, and held him at arm’s length as he marched into the house without bothering to knock. Joe and I followed. Aunt Al was at the kitchen table, cutting the ends off asparagus stalks.

  “Call your husband,” Maddox said.

  Aunt Al looked at Maddox and Dog and then at Joe and me. “What’s going on?”

  “I said call your husband.”

  Aunt Al stood up, moving slowly, like she was buying time while she decided what to do. Before she could say anything, Uncle Clarence appeared in the doorway.

  “You got a gun, Clarence?” Maddox asked.

  “Why you asking?” Uncle Clarence said.

  “Because we need to put this dog down. He’s out of control. He’s a danger.”

  “Did he attack someone?” Aunt Al asked.

  “All he did was pee on Mr. Maddox’s car,” I said. “On the tire.”

  “That’s all?” Aunt Al said. “That’s what dogs do.”

  “Damaged my personal property, is what he did,” Maddox said. “He’s got to go down. I’m not here to discuss it. I’m here to see this dog put down.”