The Silver Star(20)

Aunt Al took the photograph of my dad out of the scrapbook and placed it in my hand. “This is for you.”


“I feel like everything’s changed,” I said to Liz. We were walking back to Mayfield, pushing the Schwinn, because I wanted to talk. “Now I know who my dad was.”

“And now you know who you are,” Liz said. “You’re Charlie Wyatt’s girl.”

“Yeah,” I said. I had my dad’s eyes and hair—and Aunt Al said I had his spark. “I’m Charlie Wyatt’s girl.”

As we walked along, we passed the house where the woman had been sweeping her dirt yard. The hardpacked dirt looked as smooth as terra-cotta tile. The woman was sitting on her porch. She waved, and I waved back.

“Now you’re waving at people you don’t know,” Liz said, and grinned. “You’ve gone native.”

We reached the bottom of the mill hill. “I think I like the way my dad died,” I said.

“It was better than some dumb mill accident,” Liz said.

“Like Aunt Al said, he was defending Mom’s honor.”

“He wasn’t just another linthead—not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“I feel like I’ve got a lot to ask Mom,” I said. “So when in the heck is she ever going to call?”

“She’ll call.”





CHAPTER NINE


When we got home, Uncle Tinsley was sitting at the dining room table, working on his big genealogical chart of the Holladay family.

“How did it go, Bean?” he asked.

“Well, she found out how her dad died,” Liz said.

“Did you know?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. He pointed to a name on the chart. “Charles Joseph Wyatt, 1932 to 1957.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It wasn’t my place,” he said. “But all of Byler sure knew about it. Didn’t talk about anything else for months. Or years, it seemed.”

Millworkers drinking beer in pool halls were always getting in knockdowns and knife fights, he said, and from time to time, they killed each other. That was no big deal. However, this particular incident involved Charlotte Holladay, the daughter of Mercer Holladay, the man practically everyone in town worked for. By the time Bucky Mullens came to stand trial, Charlotte was showing, and everyone knew she was carrying the child of the pool-hall-brawling linthead Bucky had killed. It was quite the scandal, and Mother and Father were mortified. So were he and Martha. They all felt that the Holladay name—the name on the darned mill, the name on the main street through town—was soiled. Mother stopped going to the garden club, Father stayed off the golf course. Every time Uncle Tinsley walked through town, he said, he knew people were chortling behind his back.

Mother and Father, he went on, couldn’t help letting Charlotte know how they felt. She had come home when her marriage fell apart and expected to be supported. At the same time, she had declared that since she was an adult, she was going to do whatever she pleased. As a result, she brought shame on the entire family. Charlotte, for her part, felt the family had turned on her, and she hated Mother and Father, as well as him and Martha, for feeling the way they did.

“And so not long after you were born, Bean, she left Byler, vowing never to return,” Uncle Tinsley said. “It was one of the few times in her life she showed good judgment.”


That night I couldn’t sleep. I was lying there chewing on everything I’d learned that day about Mom and my dad. I had always wanted to know more about my family, but I hadn’t bargained for this.

In times like these, having your own room really stunk, because there was no one to talk to. I got up and carried my pillow into Liz’s room, crawling under the covers next to her. She wrapped an arm around me.

“I actually know something about my dad now,” I said. “It really gives you a lot to think about. Maybe, when Mom gets here, you should talk to her about getting in touch with your dad.”

“No,” Liz said sharply. “After the way he walked out on Mom and me, I will never have anything to do with him. Ever.” She took a deep breath. “In a way, you’re lucky. Your dad’s dead. Mine left.”

We lay there in silence for a while. I was waiting for Liz to say something smart and Liz-like that would help me make sense of everything we’d learned that day. Instead, she began coming up with jokey wordplay the way she did when something upset her and she needed to make light of it.

Liz started with the word “lintheads.” First she spoonerized it as “hint leads.” Then she said that lintheads were people who had no heads of their own, so people with spare heads lent heads to them. Sometimes they charged for the heads, in which case the people were known as rent heads, and once their money was gone, they were called spent heads. If the heads were damaged, they were called dent heads or bent heads.