The Silver Star (20 page)

When it came time for me and Vanessa to rile up the seventh-graders so our class could win the spirit stick, we walked out onto the gym floor and started pumping our fists in the air. We got no
reaction from the crowd. Most of the kids sitting in the bleachers were just staring, as if they couldn’t believe I had the nerve to be out there. I kept trying to rev them up, and a few kids
cheered halfheartedly, but then there was a boo, then a few more boos. Then the trash started coming—spit wads, a bag of Corn Nuts, pennies, a roll of Certs. I glanced at Vanessa. She was
pushing right through it, wearing the same steely expression I’d seen on her sister’s face after she got hit with the soda cup during the football game. I tried to follow
Vanessa’s example, ignoring the trash and the booing, but it only got louder and the cheering died out altogether, and I could see it was pointless to continue. I walked off the floor,
leaving Vanessa to shake the spirit stick on her own.

Terri Pruitt was standing by the door. “Are you all right, Bean?” she asked.

I nodded. “But I think I’m quitting the pep squad.”

She squeezed my shoulder. “It’s probably for the best,” she said.

That afternoon, before I boarded the bus in the parking lot for the ride home, a few boys from the hill started crowding around me, shoving me with their shoulders, and saying
things like “I’m Jerry Maddox. Are you scared of me?” A teacher saw what was happening but looked away. Joe Wyatt also saw what was happening, and he came over.

“Hey, cuz, how you doing?” he said. Then he turned to the boys. “You all know she’s my cousin, don’t you?”

The boys backed off, but they had kept me from catching my bus, so Joe offered to walk me home. “Some people are jerks,” he said.

We walked along in silence for a while. It was a crisp November afternoon, and out of town, on the road to Mayfield, you could smell the woodsmoke drifting from the farmhouse chimneys. “If
you want to talk about it all, you can,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk about it all, we can talk about chestnuts.”

By then the last thing I wanted to do was rehash the whole mess. “Let’s talk about chestnuts,” I said.

It was the time of the year for gathering chestnuts, Joe said. Most chestnut trees had died out during the great blight, but he knew where a few survivors were holding on up in the hills. After
he gathered the chestnuts, his mom roasted them over a fire he made in an old oil drum. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, “we should go get us some chestnuts.”

Liz hadn’t set
foot out of the house since going to the cops four days earlier. She’d hardly even left the bird wing and
I’d been bringing up bowls of stew on the silver tray. She kept obsessing about whether filing the charges had been the right thing to do and whether the whole mess was all her fault because
she’d been stupid enough to think she could get her money back if she got in the car with Mr. Maddox. She wondered whether we’d have been better off if the bandersnatches had taken us
away back in Lost Lake.

“Don’t think like that,” I said.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “I can’t control my thoughts.” The argument going on inside her head was so heated, she said, that she felt like different voices
were making the cases for and against her. One voice kept talking about Alice in Wonderland’s “Eat Me” cake, saying a slice of it would make her grow so tall that people would be
scared of her. Another voice recommended Alice’s “Drink Me” bottle—a sip would make her so small, no one would notice her. She knew the voices weren’t real, but that
was what they sounded like, actual voices.

Liz and her voices had me worried. I’d kept trying to call Mom without any luck, but I figured she’d say what Liz needed was to get out of the house, breathe some fresh air, and
clear her head. So on Saturday morning, I insisted that she come with me to the Wyatts’ to gather chestnuts.

“I don’t feel like it,” Liz said. “And my face is still a mess.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “You’ve got to get out.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Too bad. You’re getting out. You can’t stay in here forever.”

Liz was sitting in bed in her pajamas. I started pulling her clothes out of the chest of drawers, throwing them at her, and snapping my fingers to speed her up.

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.

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:

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.