The Silver Star(17)

My dad, Mom had told us, was a Byler boy. He was a blast to be around, with this incredible energy, but she and he came from different worlds. Besides, he died in a mill accident before I was born. And that was all she would say.

“You knew my dad?” I asked Uncle Tinsley.

“Of course I did.”

That made me so nervous, I started rubbing my hands together. Mom’s account of my dad had always left me hankering for more details, but she said she didn’t want to talk about him and we were both better off if we put it behind us. Mom didn’t have a picture of him, and she wouldn’t tell me his name. I’d always wondered what my dad had looked like. I didn’t look like my mom. Did I look like my dad? Was he handsome? Funny? Smart?

“What was he like?” I asked.

“Charlie. Charlie Wyatt,” Uncle Tinsley said. “He was a cocky fellow.” He paused and looked at me. “He wanted to marry your mother, you know, but she never took him that seriously.”

“How come?”

“Charlie was a fling, as far as she was concerned. Charlotte was pretty shaken up when that wastrel, Liz’s father, decided he didn’t want to be a father after all. She went through a wild-divorcée period and got involved with a number of men whom Mother and Father disapproved of. Charlie was one of them. She never considered marrying him. The way she saw it, he was just a linthead.”

“What’s that?” I’d heard Mom use the word, but I didn’t know what it meant.

“A millworker. They come off their shifts covered in lint.”

I sat there on the floor, trying to take it in. All my life I had wanted to find out more about my dad and his family, and now, when I’d met someone who was related to him—and to me—I’d acted like a nut job, calling him names and throwing peaches at him. And he wasn’t a thief. Since Uncle Tinsley didn’t mind Joe Wyatt taking the peaches, he wasn’t actually stealing. At least, that was one way of looking at it.

“I think I need to go apologize to Joe Wyatt,” I said. “And maybe meet the other Wyatts.”

“Not a bad idea,” Uncle Tinsley said. “They’re good people. The father’s disabled and doesn’t do too much these days. The mother works the night shift. She’s the one holding the family together.” He scratched his chin. “I suppose I could drive you over there.”

Something about the way Uncle Tinsley said that made me realize he didn’t want to do what he’d just volunteered to do. After all, he was a Holladay, the former owner of the mill. He’d be paying a visit to the millworking family of the man who got his sister pregnant. It would be awkward for him to drop me off without coming in but probably more awkward to sit down with the Wyatts and shoot the breeze over a glass of lemonade.

“I’ll go on my own,” I said. “It will be a chance for me to see Byler up close on foot.”

“Good plan,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Better yet, Charlotte’s old bicycle has to be around here someplace. You could ride it into town.”

I went up to the bird wing to tell Liz about the Wyatts. She was sitting in a chair by a window, reading another book she’d found in Uncle Tinsley’s library, this one by Edgar Allan Poe.

When I told her about the Wyatts, Liz jumped up and hugged me. “You’re trembling,” she said.

“I know, I know. I’m nervous,” I said. “What if they’re weirdos? What if they think I’m a weirdo?”

“It’ll be fine. Do you want me to come?”

“Would you?”

“Of course, Beanstalker, you weirdo. We’re in this together.”





CHAPTER EIGHT


The next morning, Uncle Tinsley found the bike Mom rode as a kid. It was in the equipment shed, where he also found his old bike, but it needed a new tire, so Liz and I decided to ride double.

Mom’s bike was a terrific Schwinn like they didn’t make anymore, Uncle Tinsley said. It had a heavy red frame, fat tires, reflectors on the wheels, a speedometer, a horn, and a chrome rack behind the seat. Uncle Tinsley wiped it down, pumped air in the tires, oiled the chain, and drew us a map of the part of town where the Wyatts lived, explaining that it was known as the mill hill, or just the hill. With Liz pedaling and me sitting behind her on the chrome rack, we set off for the hill.

The day was hot and sticky, the sky hazy, and the rack dug into my behind, but along the way, we rode through cool stretches of woods where the branches of these big old trees reached out all the way across the road to create a sort of canopy, and you felt like you were going through a tunnel, with patches of sunlight occasionally flickering between the leaves.