The Silver Star (23 page)

Mom gave her little smile, and I thought she was going to say something sarcastic, but then her face softened. “It’s funny,” she said. “The Holladays used to be such a
big deal.” She raised her glass. “To the four of us,” she said. “We’re all that’s left.”

Liz stayed home all winter with Mom, who took her job as a teacher pretty seriously. Mom and Liz read Hermann Hesse and e. e. cummings and some guy called Gurdjieff she’d
heard about on her spiritual retreat. Mom made up an entire course about Edgar Allan Poe. Liz was particularly drawn to poems like “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” and “The
Bells,” with lines such as “And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” and “To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells,
bells, bells.” She got such a charge out of the word “tintinnabulation” that she wrote an entire paper on its Latin roots and its place in music.

Uncle Tinsley was working on his geology papers and genealogical charts, as well as making the occasional hunting trip, coming home a couple of times with a dead doe strapped to the hood of the
Woody. He also pitched in on Liz’s schooling, giving her lectures about calculus, the geology of the Culpeper Basin, and the composition of Virginia’s orange clay, explaining C. Vann
Woodward and why in point of fact the Civil War should not be called the Civil War—“There was nothing civil about it, for one thing”—and should instead be called the War
Between the States.

Maddox kept trying to mow me down with the Le Mans and its new whitewall tires, but since Liz was never with me, I stopped worrying about him as much and started to enjoy school a little more.
Miss Jarvis, who was the yearbook adviser as well as my English teacher, talked me into joining the yearbook staff, which was more fun than I expected it to be—more fun than the pep squad. It
was also a lot of work. We had to take photos, write captions and sell advertising, come up with the memorial page for the senior who got killed in a car crash—Miss Jarvis said it happened
pretty much every year—and create themes for the candid shots, like “Caught Off Guard” and “Silly Dance Moves.”

Meanwhile, the kids were getting used to the idea of integration. The football team had a terrible year, and there were still occasional fights between black and white students, but the
basketball team was doing better thanks to a couple of really tall black players. One guy was so big that he was called Tyrone “The Tower” Perry, or sometimes just Tower, and he was
such a good player that we gave him an entire page in the yearbook. The cheerleaders were also looking more like a team, the black girls doing a little less dancing and the white girls doing a
little more. Vanessa’s mother, who owned a beauty parlor for black women and sold Avon cosmetics, had a powder-blue Cadillac, and she started driving a group of black and white cheerleaders,
including Ruth, to the away games.

With Liz and Mom wrapped up in their homeschooling, I ended up spending a lot of time at the Wyatts’ house. That beating had really changed Joe. He pulled into himself
and talked even less than before. But then Dog came along.

Joe had always wanted a dog. Uncle Clarence thought a dog that didn’t hunt or herd sheep and just sat around scarfing down dog food was a waste of money. After the beating, however, Aunt
Al talked him into letting her get one for Joe, saying the dog could live off table scraps. We all went to the pound, where Joe picked out a black-and-white dog that was a mix of a bunch of breeds,
Aunt Al said, some border collie, probably some hound, maybe a little terrier. Joe called him a purebred mutt and named him Dog.

“You’re lucky,” I told Joe. “I wish I had a dog.”

“We can share him,” Joe said.

Dog was a smart, saucy little guy who followed Joe everywhere. He went with Joe to the bus stop every morning, and when Joe got off the bus in the afternoon, Dog was sitting there waiting for
him, regardless of the weather. That mutt really lifted Joe’s spirits.

It actually snowed a couple of times that winter, and Joe and I got into some fierce snowball fights with the other mill hill kids, the whole gang of us interrupting the fight to pelt passing
cars and everyone, including Dog, running for the woods when the drivers got out to try and chase us down, shouting, “Come back here, you lintheads!”

When all was said and done, except for the Maddox mess, I was having a great time in Byler.

I had a
pretty good feeling about the trial. We met a couple of times with Dickey Bryson, the prosecuting attorney. He was a bulky
man and although his ties always seemed too tight, he smiled a lot and loved to tell jokes. He’d been a star linebacker on the Byler Bulldogs, his picture hung on the wall of the Bulldog
Diner, and some people still called him by his high school nickname, Blitz.

The case was pretty simple, Dickey Bryson told us, and the trial would be, too. He’d start with the deputy who took Liz’s statement and the photos, then he’d put me and Uncle
Tinsley on the stand to testify about Liz’s beat-up condition when she came home, then he’d put Wayne on to testify as to what he’d witnessed when he drove Liz and Maddox around,
and finally, he’d put Liz on to give her version of events.

It seemed to me like a slam-dunk case. Maddox did what he did. He knew it, we knew it, and once the jurors heard the truth, they’d know it, too. After all, we had an eyewitness, and he
wasn’t biased, he wasn’t a relative or a friend. He was completely impartial. How could we not win?

I kept repeating this to Liz, but as the trial date got nearer, she became a nervous wreck and sometimes would gag like she was going to throw up.

The morning of the trial, the sky was clear, but it was so wickedly cold that the rhododendron leaves were curled up like skinny cigars. Liz, Mom, and I were getting dressed in
the bird wing when Liz put her hand to her mouth and rushed into the bathroom. Her stomach was empty, but I could hear her retching and heaving over the toilet. When Liz came out, wiping her mouth
with the back of her hand, Mom handed her a box of mints. “Nerves aren’t necessarily a bad thing,” she said. “Most performers have anxiety at showtime. Katharine Hepburn
used to throw up every night before going onstage.”

I put on the lime-green pants I hadn’t worn since the first day of school, and Liz got out her orange-and-purple skirt. We wanted to look respectable, and these were the only dressy
clothes we had—I mostly wore jeans, and Liz had gypsy-like outfits she’d put together from Mom’s old stuff in the attic. We’d burned all the clothes Maddox had bought us. I
was afraid Mom was going to wear one of her hippie dresses or, even worse, one that showed off her cleavage. Instead, she pulled out a pair of black pants and her red velvet jacket, like she was
the one going onstage.

“Mom, you sure that’s the right thing to wear?” I asked.

“You two can dress for the judge if you want,” she said. “I’m dressing for the jury.”

Uncle Tinsley was waiting for us at the foot of the stairs. He had on a pin-striped suit with a vest and a little gold chain hanging from the watch pocket. No one felt like eating breakfast, so
we piled into the Woody. During the trip into town, we all kept trying to buck Liz up.

“Don’t let Maddox scare you,” I said. “He’s just a bully.”

“You’ve got the facts and the law on your side,” Uncle Tinsley said. “You’ll do fine.”

“Keep eye contact,” Mom said, “take deep breaths, and channel your chi.”

“Just what I need—platitudes from the pep squad,” Liz said. “You’re all so excruciating.”

That ended the bucking up. We rode along in silence for a couple of minutes, then Liz said, “I’m sorry. I know you’re all trying to help. I just want this to be
over.”

The courthouse, on Holladay Avenue, was a big stone building with turrets and tall windows and a statue of a Confederate soldier in front. We pushed through the revolving brass door and found
just about everyone involved in the whole mess milling about in the lobby. Maddox was there, wearing a shiny dark blue suit, and so were Doris and the Maddox kids. Doris was carrying the new baby,
with Jerry Jr. hanging on her skirt. Cindy held Randy, who by then was two. When Maddox saw us, he glared. I glared right back. If it was a staring contest he wanted, I’d give him one.

Dickey Bryson was talking to another man in a suit and said something that made the other man laugh. The man turned around and started talking to Maddox while Dickey Bryson came over to us
carrying an accordion file under one arm. He told us that the man talking to Maddox was his attorney, Leland Hayes. He’d be cross-examining us.

“Are you supposed to be joking around with Maddox’s lawyer like that?” I asked.

“Byler’s a small place,” he said. “It pays to be friendly to everyone.”

Just before nine o’clock, Joe and Aunt Al pushed through the revolving glass doors, followed by Wayne Clemmons, who took a final drag from a cigarette and stubbed it out in the lobby
ashtray. Before I could catch his eye, the bailiff opened the doors to the courtroom and ushered us in.

The courtroom had a high ceiling with a row of heavy brass chandeliers, and the tall windows let in the pale March light. It all had a solemn feel, and the benches and wooden jury chairs looked
hard, as if they were designed to make sure no one got too comfortable.

“All rise,” the bailiff called, and the noise we made standing in unison reminded me of church. The judge came in, an unsmiling man whose black reading glasses, perched on the end of
his nose, matched his black robe. He took a seat at his big elevated desk and looked through the papers on it without once glancing up at all the people in the courtroom.

“Judge Bradley,” Uncle Tinsley whispered. “He was at Washington and Lee when I was there.”

So far, so good, I thought. The whole trial—with the uniformed deputies, the judge in his robe, the stenographer seated at her strange little typewriter—seemed like it was going to
be a very serious and official proceeding, and I took that as a positive sign.

“Mr. Maddox,” the judge said, “stand and be arraigned.”

Maddox stood up and straightened his shoulders. A woman at a small desk in front of the judge also stood and read the charges against him: attempted rape, aggravated sexual assault, and assault
and battery.

“What is your plea, guilty or not guilty?” the judge asked after each charge.

“Not guilty!” Maddox said each time, his loud voice echoing off the high ceiling.

“You may be seated.”

Maddox sat back down. He and his lawyer were at a table on the far side of the gallery railing. At the table next to them, Dickey Bryson was busily scribbling on a yellow legal pad. I hoped
Maddox could feel my eyes boring into the back of his head. I hadn’t given up on the staring contest.

A uniformed deputy ushered in a group of men and women who sat down on one side of the courtroom. “Jury pool,” Uncle Tinsley whispered. I’d seen a number of them around town,
on the hill, at the football games, or in the grocery store. One of them was Tammy Elbert, the woman who’d driven us to Mayfield when we first arrived in Byler, the one who said she’d
have given anything in high school to be Charlotte Holladay. That seemed like another good sign.

The judge talked for a few minutes about the beauty of our legal system and the duties of jurors and the responsibilities of citizens. Then he asked the witnesses to come up to the front. After
we came forward, he asked the people in the jury pool if any of them knew any of us or any of the attorneys.

One man in a plaid jacket stood up. “I know just about everybody here,” he said. “Reckon we all do.”

“I reckon you do,” the judge said. “Would that prevent any of you from delivering an impartial verdict?”

They looked at one another and shook their heads.

“No one, then? Is there any other reason any of you cannot be impartial or should not serve?”

They shook their heads again.

“Let the record show that no juror believes he cannot be impartial.”

The two lawyers stood up and started reading off names from their legal pads. The people who were called climbed into the jury box. Tammy Elbert was one of them. Within about ten minutes, the
jury box was filled, and the rest of the pool left the courtroom. At that point, the judge asked the witnesses to step outside, so we all followed the deputy through the doors, leaving Mom sitting
on the bench in her red velvet jacket next to Joe and Aunt Al.

Wayne lit a cigarette and headed down the hall toward the ashtray while the deputy led the rest of us into a small room. A percolator of burnt-smelling coffee sat next to a plate of glazed
donuts, but they didn’t whet anyone’s appetite. In less than half an hour the deputy came back, beckoning Uncle Tinsley to follow him. About twenty minutes later, the deputy came back
again and this time he beckoned me. As I closed the door, I gave Liz a thumbs-up.

The clerk swore
me in, and I sat down in the witness chair. Maddox was leaning back with his arms crossed, as if challenging me to
pull this off. In the gallery behind him, Uncle Tinsley had taken a seat next to Mom and was giving me encouraging nods. The jurors in the jury box were studying me like I was some sort of
curiosity.

Sitting in the witness chair, all those people staring at me with cocked heads, made my mouth dry and my throat tight. When Dickey Bryson got up and asked me to state my name, my voice came out
in a little squeak. Yikes, I thought, and glanced at the jury. The man in the plaid jacket grinned like he thought it was funny.

“Take your time,” Dickey Bryson said.

In answer to his questions, I explained how Liz and I had started working for the Maddoxes, how I mostly did stuff for Mrs. Maddox, how Liz was more like Mr. Maddox’s personal assistant,
and how he had set up the passbook savings accounts. Dickey Bryson then asked what happened the night Liz came back with Wayne, and I told the jury everything I could remember. The more I talked,
the more comfortable I felt, and by the time Dickey Bryson said “No further questions,” I thought I had done a fairly good job.