Uncle Tinsley was glad to see Liz up and dressed. To celebrate he opened a can of Vienna sausages to go with our poached eggs. After breakfast, we rode the Schwinns over to the hill. Aunt Al was, as always, in the kitchen. She had a pot of grits going and was grating cheese into it. As soon as she saw us, she gave us great big hugs, then offered us some grits. Liz said we’d already eaten and she was full.
“I’ve still got some room left,” I said.
Aunt Al laughed and passed me a bowl.
“I hope you all know, I believe every word of your story,” she said to Liz. The whole town was divided over the charges, she continued. “A lot of folks don’t believe you—but there’s a lot who do.” Thing was, she went on, most of them that believed Liz wouldn’t come out and say so. They were good people, Aunt Al said, but they were scared. They had jobs they couldn’t afford to lose, and they didn’t want to take sides against Jerry Maddox. But they were all too happy to see someone else stand up to him. “You’re one gutsy girl.”
“Or crazy,” Liz said.
“It’s not crazy,” I said. “What would be crazy would be to pretend nothing happened.”
Aunt Al patted my arm. “You got more than a lick of your dad in you, child.”
Joe came into the kitchen carrying two flour sacks. “Go get another sack for Liz,” Aunt Al said. “Come to think of it, get me one, too. I don’t hardly get out of this house except to go do my shift at that dang mill.”
Joe hoisted Earl onto his shoulders and led us up a trail through the woods behind the Wyatts’ house. At first the ground was covered with dense brambles, but when we got farther into the woods, the brambles thinned out. The leaves had mostly fallen, the sun shining down through the naked branches, and you could see the dead tree trunks and downed limbs and thick vines twisting up into the treetops.
For a woman who spent most of her time in the kitchen, Aunt Al acted right at home in the woods, booking up the trail like a kid out exploring. When she was a girl, she told us, gathering chestnuts was her favorite chore. Her family’s farm had been on the edge of a forest full of chestnut trees, some of them so big that three grown men locking hands couldn’t wrap their arms all the way around the trunks. One big chestnut was right next to the house, and at first frost, she went on, the nuts came falling down so thick they sounded like a hard rain on the tin roof. She and her ten brothers and sisters would get up before dawn to gather chestnuts, which they sold in town to buy goods like shoes and calico.
In the thirties, when she was about eight, the blight that made its way from China started killing off the chestnuts in her neck of the woods. Within a few years, all the beautiful giant trees had become lurking dead hulks. “People said it looked like the end of the world, and in a way, it was,” she said. The wild turkeys and deer that ate the chestnuts disappeared, and the farm families who hunted the game and counted on the chestnuts for a cash crop were forced off the land. They moved into towns like Byler, where they took jobs in the mills.
“There’s a few chestnuts left,” Aunt Al said. “Joe knows where some of them are, but he won’t show them to most folks.”
“They need to be left alone,” Joe said.
After a while, the trail started sloping sharply uphill. When we came to an old tractor tire lying on the ground, we turned off the trail and pushed through the branches. After a few minutes, Joe pointed through the woods to a tree with dark bark. It had two straight trunks that soared upward and some yellowing toothy leaves still clung to the branches.
“The first time Joe showed me this tree,” Aunt Al said, “I won’t lie to you, I fell on my knees and cried like a baby.”
When we reached the base of the tree, Joe set Earl on a fallen log, picked up a thorny chestnut hull, and held it out to me. It weighed almost nothing. He pointed out a rust-colored spot in the tree’s bark, about the size of a saucer. “She’s got the blight, but it ain’t killed her yet,” he said. He also pointed out four smaller chestnut trees and some young saplings sprouting out of an old stump. “I do believe they’re figuring out a way to fight off that blight.”
“Job, chapter fourteen, verse seven,” Aunt Al said. “ ‘For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease.’ ”
I looked over at Liz. She was staring up at the twin trunks of the big chestnut rising to the sky. “What are you thinking about?” I asked her.
“How sad it must have been for the tree to stand there all those years while the blight was killing off her brothers and sisters,” she said. “Do you think she wondered why she was the only one to survive?”
“Trees don’t wonder about things,” Joe said. “They just grow.”
“Now, we don’t know that for a fact,” Aunt Al said. “What I do know is that wondering why you survived don’t help you survive.”
The woods were quiet except for an occasional squirrel stirring up the damp leaves when it darted along the forest floor. We all knelt down and started gathering chestnuts.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
By Monday, Liz’s face was looking a lot better, and although she didn’t want to do it, Uncle Tinsley and I decided it was time for her to go back to school. Sitting in the bird wing, brooding and listening to her voices, wasn’t doing her any good.
Liz took forever getting dressed that morning, moving like she was underwater, pulling socks on and then taking them off, shuffling through her shirts and saying she couldn’t find the one she wanted. I was afraid we’d miss the bus and kept urging her to hurry up, telling her she was dawdling, but she insisted she was moving as fast as she could. We did miss the bus, and since Uncle Tinsley hated wasting gas on unnecessary car trips, we decided to walk to school. Classes had started by the time we arrived, and we both got tardies—our first.
I hadn’t told Liz about the way I’d been teased since she filed the charges. It would give her one more reason not to return to school. When we walked down the hall, people made a point of avoiding her, leaning away and stepping back. Girls who had ignored her now went out of their way to whisper loud enough for her to hear, some of them giving little shrieks and saying things like “Here she comes!” and “Crazy Lizzie!” and “We’ve got to get away!” At lunch hour, a whole line of them fell in behind her, imitating her walk while the rest of the girls in the hallway cracked up, cupping their hands over their mouths.
That night Liz joked that she felt like Moses parting the Red Sea, but it was horrible. She started to hate coming to school, and every morning I had to drag her out of bed and get her dressed. At school, it just got worse, with the other girls openly taunting her, mimicking her voice, and tripping her when she walked by.
At the end of the week, I ran into Lisa Saunders standing with a group of girls on one of the stairway landings. Lisa was one of the cheerleaders who had quit the squad when the football team was integrated. She had a bony nose and wore her blond hair in a high ponytail. Her father owned the Chevy dealership, and she was one of the few kids at Byler who had her own car. If she wasn’t with her boyfriend, who always had his arm around her, she was surrounded by other girls, all of them whispering together.
Lisa held a stack of mimeographed papers and was passing them out to the kids on the stairs. “Here, Bean, I’m taking applications for friends. Fill this out if you want.”
There were several pages stapled together. The title said “Application for Friendship,” and it looked like a test, with a bunch of questions and multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank answers. Most were what you’d expect: “Name your favorite TV show.” “Give the model and color of your dream car.” But some were spiky, like “What teacher would you most like to see fired?” and “What member of your class would you least want to date?” I heard Lisa’s friends giggling, but I didn’t understand why until I got to the last page. The final question was:
If a boy goes on a date with Liz Holladay, what should he bring for protection?
A) A rubber
B) A bar of soap
C) A gun
D) Jerry Maddox
My face started burning and my hands clenched up like they needed to grab something and tear it to shreds and without thinking about what I was doing, I leaped at Lisa Saunders, shouting, “You think you’re special, but I’m going to hurt you bad!”
After that, it was all a mess of hair I pulled on, skin I scratched at, arms I pounded against, and clothes I tore up. Lisa Saunders’s fingers were in my face, clawing and scratching back, but it didn’t hurt. All I felt was anger. We were rolling on the floor, grunting and screaming and kicking and gouging and flailing. Very quickly, other kids circled around to watch, cheering and hollering encouragement, not to me or even to Lisa but generally, to urge it all on. Fight! Fight! Hit her! Hit her good!
Then I felt a different pair of hands on me, a man’s hands. The science teacher Mr. Belcher had pushed through the crowd, and he broke us apart. I was panting like a dog, shaking with rage, but I was glad to see that I had done some serious damage to Lisa Saunders. Her bony nose was bleeding, her mascara was running down her face, and I’d pulled out her ponytail holder along with a fistful of blond hair.
Lisa Saunders’s friends began accusing me of starting the whole thing. When Mr. Belcher dragged both of us by the arm down to the principal’s office, they followed behind, going on about how Bean Holladay jumped on Lisa out of the blue for no reason at all.
The principal was out, so Mr. Belcher shoved us into the office of Miss Clay, the vice principal. “Hall fight,” he said.
Miss Clay looked up at us over her reading glasses. “Thank you, Mr. Belcher,” she said. “Take a seat, girls.” She passed us a box of Kleenex. I started to explain about the friendship application, since that was what the fight was about, but Miss Clay cut me off. “That’s neither here nor there.” She launched into a lecture, saying how disappointed she was in us for engaging in such inappropriate behavior and going on about what was and wasn’t proper conduct at Byler High. “Girls hitting each other,” she said. “It’s so unladylike.”
“Unladylike?” I asked. “Do you think I care what’s ladylike and what’s not?”
I was still completely worked up. I had gotten even hotter when I realized that Miss Clay wasn’t going to let me tell her about the repulsive friendship application. I went on to say that if the teachers had been doing their jobs and looking after their students instead of turning a blind eye when one of them got picked on, these girls wouldn’t be going after my sister, and I wouldn’t have to be defending her.
Miss Clay jerked off her reading glasses. “Don’t use that tone of voice with me, young lady. You need to respect your elders.”
“I respect people who do their jobs,” I said. “Respecting people just because they’re older is a bunch of malarkey. Jerry Maddox is older. Am I supposed to respect him?”
“Don’t try to change the subject,” she said. “Jerry Maddox has nothing to do with this.”
“He sure as heck does,” I said. “You know it, too, and if you pretend you don’t, you’ve got your head up your butt just like all the rest of them.”
“Jean Holladay, you have one ugly mouth on you. You’re suspended.”
“What?”
“You can spend the next three days at home, thinking about your behavior.”
“What about her?” I pointed over at Lisa Saunders, who hadn’t said a word and instead had been sitting there with her ankles crossed, daubing at her runny mascara with the Kleenex and doing her best to look innocent. “She was fighting, too. And she wrote that thing about Liz that I’ve been trying to explain to you.”
“I’m not interested in whatever the two of you were squabbling about,” Miss Clay said. “School officials never get to the bottom of these quarrels, and in my mind, we shouldn’t try. You’re not being suspended for fighting. You’re being suspended for using unseemly language with the vice principal.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Uncle Tinsley was pretty upset when I told him I’d been suspended. “This is mortifying,” he said. “Another first for the Holladay family.” Once I explained that I’d been standing up for Liz, he said, “Well, I guess you did what you felt you had to do, but it won’t exactly boost our standing in the community.”
The funny thing was, it sort of did. When I got back to school at the end of November, the other kids treated me differently. Now I wasn’t Day-Glo Girl, I was the Girl Who Beat Up Lisa Saunders. I guessed that it was, if nothing else, a step up. The teasing mostly stopped, and a few kids actually went out of their way to be friendly. It was as if they thought going to the cops and filing charges against Maddox was being a tattletale—like running to the teacher when someone picked on you—but throwing punches, now, that got their respect.
Kids continued to give Liz a hard time, but then the judge set a date in March for the trial, and it became clear to everyone in town that the case wasn’t going to go away. That was when we realized we had a lot more to worry about than bony-nosed Lisa Saunders and her girlfriends.
Piles of garbage started appearing on the lawn and driveway at Mayfield. We’d get up in the morning, and it would be strewn all over the place—used Pampers, empty bottles of RC and cans of SpaghettiOs, plastic bags, shredded paper, and those cylindrical Pringles containers. All that stuff practically had Maddox’s name on it.
One day, on our way to the bus stop, Maddox’s black Le Mans appeared out of nowhere. Maddox was behind the wheel, hunched forward like a racecar driver. He gunned the car toward Liz and me, swerving so close that we had to jump into the ditch to keep from getting hit. We felt the whoosh of air as the car passed. I picked up a rock and hurled it after him, but the Le Mans sped off and the rock missed.
After that, it seemed like Maddox cruised around looking for us almost every day, trying to run us off the road when he saw us walking home or riding our bikes into town. It got to the point where, whenever I went outside, I listened for the roar of the Le Mans. I started carrying around a pocketful of rocks, and I did give the car at least one good dent, but most of the time Maddox got away too quickly for me to score a hit.
We didn’t tell Uncle Tinsley. We never seriously considered going to the police, either, since we wouldn’t be able to prove anything, and so far, filing complaints against Maddox had only caused trouble. But Maddox’s campaign was having an effect on Liz. She was terrified and didn’t want to leave the house. She also started talking more and more about the voices and how they were warning her that Maddox was hiding behind every bush and tree.
I kept telling Liz—and myself—that the voices were temporary and would go away once Maddox got convicted and sent to prison. It was now December, with the trial three months away, and I was worried sick that Liz might fall apart by then. That made me wonder if we should drop the case. But if we pulled out now, Maddox would know he had terrorized us into giving up. We’d have to leave town, since I couldn’t imagine riding my bike around Byler knowing I might run into the man and he’d give me that smile bullies give the people they push around. And leaving town wouldn’t solve anything. Maddox would haunt Liz, and that might make the voices get worse.
I decided there was only one thing to do. I couldn’t wait for the trial. I had to kill Jerry Maddox.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I didn’t have a car to mow Maddox down, so I had to strategize. There was a ridge behind the Maddox house with a lot of boulders and big rocks. I’d noticed one in particular when I was working for the Maddoxes, and I’d thought at the time that if it ever rolled down, it might do some serious damage. It might even kill someone. So I decided to roll it down myself.
I would hide on the ridge until Maddox came out to the back porch, which he did every day to check the thermometer and put the stuff from his paper shredder into the trash cans, and then I’d send that rock barreling down the hill and crush him like a bug.
After school the next day, I rode the red Schwinn into Byler, left
it at the library bike stand, and cut through the yard of one of Maddox’s neighbors to the ridge behind his house. I scrambled up through the scrub pines to the rock, which was about as big as an armchair and had one side covered with lichen. I pushed on the rock to see how loose it was, and that was when I discovered I couldn’t budge the thing. It must have weighed a ton.
I needed a partner.
Liz wasn’t cut out for this type of assignment, and asking Uncle Tinsley was out of the question. The only person I could turn to was Joe Wyatt. I’d already told him all about Maddox’s harassment campaign, of course, and so at school the next day, I explained my plan and asked if he’d be willing to help out.
“When do we do it, cuz?” he asked.
I told him how big and heavy the rock was. Joe didn’t make such good grades in school, but he was really smart when it came to doing things, and he told me what we needed to do was lever the rock into motion. His dad, he said, had a tamping bar that would do the job.
The next day, Joe met me at the library, carrying the heavy iron bar. We circled up into the woods behind Maddox’s house, and I showed Joe the rock. He worked the tamping bar under it, but it wouldn’t budge, so he got a smaller rock that he used as a fulcrum, and with both of us pulling down on the long end of the bar, we worked the big rock forward.
“This’ll do it,” Joe said.
“Maddox is a goner,” I said.
We sat down on the pine needles and waited.
After about an hour, we heard the whistle of the train and the wheels rumbling and screeching across the tracks that ran through the middle of Byler. After the noise died away, the back door opened. We jumped up and grabbed the handle of the tamping bar. But instead of Maddox coming out the door, it was Doris. She had just given birth and was carrying her pink-faced newborn in one arm and a bag of trash in the other.
The Silver Star Page 16