The Silver Star (26 page)

“Miss Clay at school says I got myself one ugly mouth.”

“She’s right,” Mom said. “And if you can make it work for you, that ugly mouth will get you far.”

Liz stayed in
bed all that day and slept through the night. The next morning, she still refused to get up. After breakfast, Uncle
Tinsley asked me to help him clean the gutters. We were walking back from the barn, each carrying one end of the aluminum extension ladder, when all of a sudden those two emus came wandering up the
driveway. The birds didn’t seem afraid at all, cocking their heads and looking around with their enormous caramel-colored eyes.

“They must have gotten loose from Scruggs’s field,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Scruggs never did tend his fences.”

We set the ladder on the ground, the emus studied it warily, and I ran inside to get Liz, who pulled on a pair of jeans and rushed down the stairs. By then, the emus were moseying up toward the
barn, making that gurgly drumming noise deep in their throats. They took those long, deliberate steps, bobbing their heads each time they raised a leg. The smaller emu had one foot that turned to
the side and dragged slightly when it walked, as if the foot had once been injured. Their movements were somehow both awkward and graceful, and they kept glancing back and forth as if to reassure
each other that it was safe.

Uncle Tinsley decided he’d better get in touch with Scruggs, who needed to know about any loose livestock, and he went inside to make the call. When he came back out, he said he’d
spoken with Scruggs and the emus actually belonged to Scruggs’s son-in-law, Tater, who was working a job over in the valley and wouldn’t be back until the day after tomorrow. Tater was
the only one who knew how to catch the birds, so Scruggs had asked if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition for us to keep them until Tater returned.

“I reckon that’s the neighborly thing to do,” Uncle Tinsley said. “But we’ll need to get them into the pasture.”

The emus had meandered past the barn into the orchard. They were a few feet from the gate that led into the main pasture, which was surrounded by old three-board fencing. Walking slowly behind
the emus, our arms stretched out, we were able to herd them the short distance to the open gate. Once they had gone through, Liz quickly shut the gate and latched it.

Later that morning, we brought Mom up to the field to show her the emus, but when she got a good look at them up close, the size of their talons unnerved her, and she said she wanted nothing to
do with them. Liz, however, found them captivating. While Uncle Tinsley and I got back to the business of cleaning the gutters, which were so clogged that little green sprouts were growing out of
them, Liz spent the whole afternoon leaning on the fence, watching the emus. She couldn’t believe anything so strange-looking as those two emus would just show up. They seemed not of this
world, she said, like creatures from a prehistoric era, or aliens from another planet, or maybe even angels. She decided that the bigger one was a male and the smaller was a female, and she named
them Eugene and Eunice.

Not only did Liz love the emus, she also fell in love with the word “emu.” She pronounced it “emyou” and also “emooo,” drawing out the sound like a mooing
cow. She pointed out that “emu” was “youme” backward, and she came up with a whole list of neat words that rhymed with “emus,” everything from
“refuse” to “snooze” to “blues” to “choose” and “chews.”

That night, she looked up emus in Uncle Tinsley’s
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and kept bombarding us with information about them, how they came from Australia, how they could run
forty-five miles an hour, how the males sat on the nest, how they had these unique double feathers with two plumes growing from each quill.

“They’re so weird and so beautiful,” she said.

“Like you,” I said.

I meant it as a joke, but Liz nodded. She felt that she was sort of like an emu herself, she said. Maybe that was why she’d had flying dreams ever since she was a little girl—at
heart, she was an emu. She was sure the emus also dreamed of flying. It was another thing they had in common. Both she and the emus wanted to fly—they just didn’t have the wings they
needed.

On Monday morning,
I went back to school. The trial had been over for two days, but we still hadn’t figured out what we were
going to do next. Mom was set on clearing out of Byler. She kept talking about that harebrained road trip and also about going to the Catskills, or maybe Chincoteague Island to see the wild ponies.
Liz, meanwhile, kept refusing to go to school. When she wasn’t watching the emus, she was in our room, obsessively writing emu poetry. One poem went:

Another one went:

And then there was:

On Wednesday afternoon, Tater and a couple of buddies arrived in a pickup with an empty cattle trailer attached to it. Tater was a small, slope-shouldered guy with sandy hair
and a tight, unsmiling mouth. He barely thanked us for keeping his emus, and immediately started complaining about those stupid birds, what a trouble they were, worst deal he ever made. Some guy up
in Culpeper County sold them to him as a breeding pair after convincing him that emu meat and emu eggs would be the next big thing, but this pair wouldn’t breed or even lay eggs. He’d
have barbecued them a long time ago, only he’d learned that the meat was gamier than hell—tasted like shoe leather—so all the damn birds did now was walk around scaring the cattle
and shitting those big emu piles everywhere. Good for nothing but bear bait.

With Uncle Tinsley directing, Tater backed the trailer up to the pasture gate. We all trooped into the field, though Mom hung back, complaining that she wasn’t wearing the right shoes.
Besides, she didn’t trust those emus—they could turn on us in an instant.

Liz had brought some bread along and tried luring the emus into the trailer, but when they got near the ramp, they peered into the dark, confining interior, gave Liz one of their funny
cross-eyed looks, and scurried off. We spent over an hour hollering and waving our arms, trying to shoo the emus toward the trailer. It didn’t work. Whenever we got them close, the emus
screamed and flapped their stunted little wings and dodged away. Once Tater managed to get a hand on Eugene’s neck, but the bird kicked out with one of his huge taloned feet, and Tater had to
jump back. “Goddamn birds,” he said. “They’re so stupid. I should just shoot them.”

“They’re not stupid,” Liz told him. “They just don’t want to do what you want them to do. And why would they?”

“Well, I hate the ugly buggers,” he said.

“You hate them?” Liz asked. “I love them.”

Tater stopped and looked at Liz. “You love them?” he asked. “You can have them.”

“Oh my God,” Liz said. And she actually fell to her knees and held her arms out. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Tater looked at Liz like she was insane.

“Wait a minute,” Uncle Tinsley said. “We can’t just take these emus. Who’s going to look after them?”

“Me,” Liz said.

“I’ll help,” I said.

“Please,” Liz said.

“We’re talking about a serious long-term commitment here,” Uncle Tinsley said.

“That’s right,” Mom said. “Anyway, we’re not staying in Byler. We’re moving. To the Catskills. Or wherever.”

“We can’t just leave these emus,” Liz said.

Mom got a puzzled expression. “You’re telling me you want to stay in Byler because you fell in love with a couple of big, disgusting birds that happened to walk up the
driveway?”

“They need me. There’s no one else to look after them.”

“We don’t belong here,” Mom said.

“The emus don’t belong here, either,” Liz said, “but they’re here.”

Mom started to say something and then stopped.

“We’ll keep the darn birds,” Uncle Tinsley told Tater. Then he looked at Liz. “But only if you go back to school.”

“All right,” Liz said. “I’ll go back to school.”

“What about you, Mom?” I asked. “What are you going to do?” I watched Mom. She studied the sun setting behind the distant blue mountains.

“I can’t stay here,” she finally said. “I just can’t.”

The next day, Liz went back to school and Mom packed to return to New York. Everything was going to turn out for the best, she said. When she got to New York, she would find a
publisher for Liz’s emu poetry. She was also going to find a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side where we could all live real cheap, and then she would get us into one of those
special public schools for gifted kids. She also talked about how maybe we could all spend the summer in the Catskills.

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.

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.

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.