The Silver Star(76)

“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.





CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE


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.





CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO


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.