The Silver Star(52)

“Don’t think about it like that. You did get away.”

After the bath, Liz got into bed and pulled the covers up over her head, saying she wanted to be alone. I went back downstairs. Uncle Tinsley was in the living room, poking at the fire he’d built. I tried calling Mom to ask what we should do about pressing charges, but there was no answer.

“We should go to the police,” I said.

“That’s not a good idea,” Uncle Tinsley said.

“Or at least talk to a lawyer.”

“These things are best kept in the family.”

“It’s worse than Wayne said. Liz told me Maddox tried to rape her.”

“Oh Christ,” he said. “That poor girl.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Still, nothing you can do will undo the damage. It’ll only make things worse.”

“But Maddox can’t get away with this.”

“You don’t know Maddox,” he said. We may have been working for Maddox, he continued, but we didn’t understand what kind of man he really was. Maddox loved nothing better than a fight. A lot of people think a fight is over when they knock their opponent down, but people like Maddox think that’s the time to start kicking hard.

Maddox did a lot of his fighting in the courthouse, Uncle Tinsley went on. The county clerk had a docket a mile long, listing all the cases he’d been involved in. He sued neighbors over boundary disputes. He sued doctors for malpractice. He sued dry cleaners, claiming they shrank his clothes. He sued mechanics, claiming they didn’t fix his car. He sued town officials if there was a pothole on his street. While most people saw the court as a place to seek justice, Maddox saw it as a place to take down anyone who happened to stand in his way or get on his wrong side.

This was something Maddox had learned years ago, Uncle Tinsley said, when he was living in a boardinghouse in Rhode Island and stole some jewelry from his landlady. The police searched his room and found the jewelry, and Maddox was convicted. Then along came a civil rights lawyer who argued that the police didn’t have the right to search Maddox’s room without his permission. The case went all the way to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. Maddox won, although everyone knew he was guilty as sin. And that was when Maddox became a voracious student of the law, because he realized that guilt and innocence were incidental, that people who understood the law could also figure out how to bend the law.

“He brags about winning that case,” Uncle Tinsley said. “He fights dirty. That’s why you don’t want to tangle with Maddox.”

“What do we do? Pretend nothing happened?”

Uncle Tinsley gave the burning logs a hard jab with the poker, and sparks flew up into the chimney.


I went back up to the bird wing. Uncle Tinsley wanting to pretend nothing happened made me wonder if maybe what Mom had said about her family was true—they were all experts at pretending.

Liz still had the covers over her head. I took my dad’s photo and his Silver Star from the cigar box that I kept in the white cradle and brought them into the bathroom to study them in the light.

I ran my finger over the tiny silver star that was inside the bigger gold star, and I wondered what advice my dad would give me if he were around. I looked at his crooked grin and the cocky way his arms were crossed as he leaned against the doorframe, and I knew the one thing Charlie Wyatt would never do. He would never pretend nothing happened.





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


The next morning, I woke up before Liz and went downstairs to make her a cup of tea. Uncle Tinsley was puttering around in the kitchen. He started talking about what a hard frost we’d had during the night, and how this time of year the birds, especially the blue jays, were always flying into windows and banging their heads on the glass. “Always startles me,” he said. “Startles them more, I expect. Sometimes they just bounce off, sometimes they hit so hard, it knocks them senseless.”

It was clear that Uncle Tinsley wasn’t going to make any reference to what had happened with Maddox, in the hope that we would put it all behind us and get on with life. Lying in bed, I had decided during the night that Liz and I should at least see a lawyer. I didn’t know much about the police and the courts and the law, but I did know that everyone got a lawyer, even the poor black guy in To Kill a Mockingbird. I figured Uncle Tinsley knew every lawyer in town, but since he wanted us to forget the whole thing, there was no point in asking him for a recommendation or telling him about the plan. I had a classmate, Billy Corbin, whose father was a lawyer. I could look him up in the phone book.

When I brought the cup of tea up to Liz, she was awake, lying in bed. Her face was even more swollen and bruised than the night before. “There’s no way I’m going to school,” she said.