The Silver Star (12 page)

Mr. Maddox was always thinking like that. He’d figure out more efficient and improved ways of doing things, then order everybody to do it his new way. That was why he’d been hired at
the mill, he told us, to increase efficiency. He’d had to kick some butt to do it, but he’d kicked the butt, and it had gotten done.

Mr. Maddox was fascinated by the law. He subscribed to several newspapers and clipped out articles about lawsuits, bankruptcies, swindles, and foreclosures. His side dealings included buying up
and renting out old millhouses. He had several houses on one street and was trying to get the town to change its name to Maddox Avenue. He also had a business loaning money to millworkers who
needed to get to the next paycheck, and from time to time, he said, he was forced to take legal action against people who owed him money or were trying to stiff him or thought they could play him
for a fool.

A lot of Mr. Maddox’s business dealings required meetings. While I stayed at the house helping out Doris, Liz accompanied Mr. Maddox in the black Le Mans to collect rents and take meetings
at bars, coffee shops, and offices, where he introduced her as his personal assistant, Liz Holladay of the Holladay family. Liz carried his briefcase, passed him documents when he asked for them,
and took notes. Back at the house, she would file paperwork, call to set up his appointments, and answer Mr. Maddox’s phone. He told her to tell everyone who called that he was in a meeting,
so he could dodge the people he didn’t want to talk to and impress those he did.

We never worked regular hours. Instead, Mr. Maddox would tell us when he’d need us next. And we never received regular pay. Mr. Maddox paid us what he thought we deserved depending on how
hard we’d worked that day. Liz thought we should be paid by the hour, but Mr. Maddox said in his experience, that encouraged laziness, and people were more motivated to work hard if they were
paid by the job.

Mr. Maddox also bought us clothes. We showed up for work one morning, and he presented each of us with a pale blue dress, saying they were a bonus. A week later, he actually took Liz to the
store and had her try on several outfits before choosing the one he liked best.

We didn’t have to wear the pale blue dresses every day, only when Mr. Maddox told us to. I didn’t particularly like the dress, which felt like a uniform. I would rather have gotten
my bonus in cash, but Mr. Maddox said since I was working in his house and Liz was representing him in meetings with his business associates, we needed to dress in a way that he felt was
appropriate. And, he added, the cost of the clothes was more than any cash bonus he would have given us, so we were coming out ahead. “I’m doing you a big favor here,” he
said.

One thing about Mr. Maddox, he always made it darned hard to argue with him.

We hadn’t been
working for the Maddoxes long when it dawned on me that Doris and the kids hardly ever left the house except to
go into the front yard. Some days I’d sit on the front steps watching Cindy, Jerry Jr., and Randy and studying the extensive hubcap collection that hung on the chain-link fence. There was
something hypnotic about those rows and rows of hubcaps—shiny and bold, like shields, with spokes or arrowheads or sunburst patterns—and when they caught the sun, they were almost
blinding.

The funny thing was, even when the kids were out in the yard, they didn’t really play. They just sat on the grass or in the plastic toy cars bleached by the Virginia sun, staring straight
ahead, and I couldn’t for the life of me get them to pretend to drive or even make car noises.

But they didn’t even go into the yard that often. One reason was because Mr. Maddox and Doris had a fixation about germs and bacteria. That was why they were always having me scrub down
their walls, floors, and countertops and why they had more cleaning products than I knew existed: ammonia, Clorox, Lysol, different cleaners for carpets, leather, glass, wood, sinks, toilets,
upholstery, chrome, brass, even a special aerosol spray to remove stains from neckties.

Cindy Maddox was the most obsessed with the idea of contamination. She wouldn’t eat her food if other food had touched it. The grease from the burger wasn’t allowed to run onto the
potatoes, the canned corn couldn’t bump up against the meat loaf, and she wouldn’t eat eggs at all because the white and the yolk had shared the shell. Cindy didn’t like her toys
to be touched, either. Most of her dolls were still in their boxes, lined up on a shelf in her room, staring out from behind the cellophane.

Cindy was the only Maddox kid who was school-age. Her parents homeschooled her, however, because Doris was afraid she’d catch germs. Cindy hadn’t done well on the last exam
she’d been given, so even though it was summer, she had schoolwork. But Cindy wasn’t really interested in learning, and Doris wasn’t really interested in teaching. The two of them
usually sat on the Naugahyde couch, watching TV together. Sometimes Doris had Liz or me read to Cindy. Cindy loved being read to. She also loved the way Liz would change the ending to a story if
Cindy found it upsetting, having the little match girl survive instead of freezing to death, or saving the one-legged tin soldier and the paper ballerina rather than letting them wind up in the
fire.

Doris wanted me to tutor Cindy, who knew how to read on her own but didn’t seem to enjoy it. One day I had her read aloud from
The Yearling
. She made it through a chapter just
fine, but when I asked her what she thought of it, she went completely blank. I asked her a few more questions and realized she didn’t understand a darned thing about what she’d just
read. She had no problem with the individual words but couldn’t string them together to mean anything. She treated the words like she did her food, keeping each one separate.

I was trying to explain to Cindy how words depended on other words for their meaning—how the bark of a dog is different from the bark of a tree—when I heard Mr. Maddox start shouting
at Doris in the bedroom. He was going on about how she didn’t need any new clothes. Who was she trying to impress? Or was she trying to seduce someone? I looked at Cindy, who acted as if she
didn’t hear anything at all.

Mr. Maddox came into the living room carrying a cardboard box and he handed it to me. “Put this in the Le Mans,” he said.

Inside the box were Doris’s three faded housedresses and her one pair of street shoes. Doris appeared in the hallway in her nightgown. “Those are my clothes,” she said.
“I don’t have anything to wear.”

“They’re not your clothes,” Mr. Maddox told her. “They’re Jerry Maddox’s clothes. Who bought them? Jerry Maddox. Who worked his butt off to pay for them?
Jerry Maddox. So who do they belong to?”

“Jerry Maddox,” Doris said.

“That’s correct. I just let you wear them when I want. It’s like this house.” He swung his arm around. “Who owns it? Jerry Maddox. But I let you live here.”
He turned back to me. “Now go put that box in the car.”

I felt like I was being drawn into the middle of the fight. Since I worked mainly for Doris, I glanced at her to see what she wanted me to do, half expecting her to tell me to give her the box.
She was just standing there looking defeated, so I carried the box out to the breezeway and put it in the backseat of the Le Mans.

As I closed the car door, Mr. Maddox stepped outside. “You think I was being hard on Doris, don’t you?” he said. “Not for nothing. She’s one of those people who
needs to be disciplined.” Doris was fast when he first met her, Mr. Maddox went on. She wore too much makeup, her skirts were way too short, and she let men take advantage of her. “I
had to step in to protect her from herself. I still do. If I let her go out whenever she wants, she’ll fall back into her old ways. Without her clothes, she can’t go out. If she
can’t go out, she can’t get in trouble. I’m not being mean. I’m doing it for her own good. You see?”

He was looking at me with that direct fixed stare. I just nodded.

Mr. Maddox had
said he didn’t need me working for Doris the next couple of days, but he wanted Liz to come back, so the
following morning, I rode my Schwinn over to the Wyatts’ to see if Joe was up to a little fruit scavenging.

Joe was finishing breakfast. Aunt Al made me a plate, too—gravy over biscuits and eggs fried in bacon fat until they were crispy as french fries. She poured Joe a cup of coffee, which he
drank black, and asked if I wanted some.

“Ugh,” I said. “Kids don’t drink coffee.”

“ ’Round here they do,” Joe said.

Aunt Al gave me a cup of milk, then added a little coffee and two heaping teaspoons of sugar. “Try this,” she said.

I took a sip. The milk and sugar cut the bitterness of the coffee, making it like a soda-fountain drink with a tiny kick.

“Did you all ever find yourselves any work?” Aunt Al asked.

“Sure did,” I said. “Your boss at the mill, Mr. Maddox, he’s our boss, too, now. He hired me and Liz to work around his house.”

“Is that a fact?” Aunt Al set down her coffee. “I’m not too sure how I feel about that. Jerry Maddox can ride people hard. Sure does at the mill, where they all hate him.
My Ruthie used to work for that family, but she just finally couldn’t take it anymore. And she gets along with everyone.”

“Mr. Maddox was the only one who offered me and Liz a job,” I said. “He hasn’t been too hard on us, but he does boss his wife around something awful.”

“That man would boss the calf out of the cow. Your Uncle Tinsley don’t mind you working for him?”

“We haven’t exactly told Uncle Tinsley,” I said, and took a glug of my milk-with-coffee. “He didn’t want us to get jobs. We’re Holladays, he said, and
Holladays don’t work for other people. But we need the money.”

“I hear you there,” she said. “But you ought to know about the history between Mr. Maddox and your uncle.”

Mr. Maddox, Aunt Al explained, was one of the men the new mill owners from Chicago had brought in to run the place. Uncle Tinsley had worked out an arrangement with the buyers to stay on as a
consultant, seeing as how he knew the operations of the mill firsthand and had a history with the clients and the workers. But in no time, he and Mr. Maddox butted heads. Mr. Maddox’s job was
running the shop floor, and the new owners had told him to do everything he could to cut costs and raise production. He followed people around with a stopwatch, pushing them to work faster and
eliminate any unnecessary movements, to fold each pair of socks in two and a half seconds, not three, hollering at them for taking bathroom breaks and insisting they eat lunch at their
workstations. He announced that, every month, he was going to fire the five slowest workers until he’d cut the number of employees by half.

It was at Mr. Maddox’s recommendation that the owners did away with the baseball team and the free hams at Christmas. He then got them to sell off the houses that the mill rented to the
workers, buying up a lot of them himself on the cheap and raising the rent.

The mill had never been an easy place, Aunt Al said, but for the most part, all the workers got along. They felt they were in the same boat. But after Mr. Maddox showed up and started firing
people, former friends turned on one another, even selling out or ratting on their coworkers so they could keep their jobs and feed their families.

Mr. Holladay insisted that a lot of Mr. Maddox’s changes were doing more harm than good, Aunt Al said. He felt that Mr. Maddox was making the workers more miserable, which was making them
less motivated. That meant they’d take less pride in the product, and from time to time, they would even sabotage the machinery just to get a few minutes’ breather from the backbreaking
pace. He and Mr. Maddox kept locking horns, arguing about the best way to run the mill. At one point they got into a shouting match on the shop floor. Mr. Holladay took his complaints to the new
owners, but they sided with Mr. Maddox and forced Mr. Holladay out of the mill.

“The mill with his name on it,” Aunt Al said. “The mill his family had founded, owned, and operated for the better part of a century. After that, a lot of people around Byler
started avoiding your uncle.”

“But he didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

“True enough. But Mr. Maddox won the fight, and he was holding all the cards.”

“I guess that’s why Uncle Tinsley sort of keeps to himself.”

“He lost his parents and his wife and his mill all in the space of a few short years,” Aunt Al said. “The poor man’s just had too much taken from him.”

I finished off the last bite of my eggs and biscuits. “Maybe we should tell Uncle Tinsley that we’re working for Mr. Maddox,” I said. I took my plate over to the sink and
rinsed it. “I feel bad. He’s been good to us, and we’re sneaking around behind his back.”

“I’m none too big on giving advice,” Aunt Al said. “Most times when folks ask for advice, they already know what they should do. They just want to hear it from someone
else.”

“Enough of this jawboning,” Joe said. “Let’s go get us some apples, cuz.”

In the bird wing that night, I told Liz what Aunt Al had said about the bad blood between Mr. Maddox and Uncle Tinsley. “It doesn’t feel right working for someone
Uncle Tinsley hates.”

“We need the money.”

“Still, he’s letting us stay here and sharing his stew, and we’re lying to him.”

“We’re not lying, we’re just not telling him everything,” Liz said. Look, she went on, if Uncle Tinsley would be realistic, admit that we needed money for school clothes
and school supplies, that would be one thing. But as long as he was going to pretend we could wear debutante clothes from the forties and didn’t need to worry about buying schoolbooks and
cafeteria lunches, then we had to do what we had to do. “You don’t need to tell people everything. Keeping something to yourself is not the same as lying.”

Liz had a point, but I still felt funny about it.

The next afternoon, when Liz came back from work, she said she’d asked Mr. Maddox about his clash with Uncle Tinsley. Mr. Maddox had told her that he and Uncle Tinsley
had indeed had some disagreements over how the mill should be run. Uncle Tinsley lost the argument, Mr. Maddox said. He hadn’t mentioned it before because he didn’t want to sound like
he was badmouthing our uncle. But he wasn’t too surprised to find out that Uncle Tinsley, or someone else around town, was badmouthing Jerry Maddox, and he’d be happy to give us the
real story if we wanted to hear it.