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.
“Both Maddox and Julius was fired,” Aunt Al said. Julius had become an instant hero among the black folk of Byler, and Samuel Morton of Morton Brothers Funeral Home, which serviced the coloreds, had already offered him a job. People were also saying that the mill owners were actually glad to see Maddox go. He’d become more trouble than he was worth.
Aunt Al reached over and tapped Liz on the arm. “If some skinny white girl was willing to stand up to Jerry Maddox,” she said, “I reckon Julius Johnson figured he couldn’t do any less.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
We fed the emus when we got home from school, with chicken feed Uncle Tinsley bought on the cheap from Mr. Muncie. It got to the point where as soon as they saw us, they’d come running up to the fence, Eugene leading the way and Eunice following, her gimp leg swinging to the side with each step.
I loved those ugly overgrown chickens, but not the way Liz did. She positively doted on them. She brought them treats like cookies and broccoli. She followed them around the field, studying their behavior. Eugene would let her get close enough to stroke him, and he even ate out of her hand, but Eunice was more skittish and didn’t want to be touched, ducking away and running off whenever Liz reached out, so Liz left her food on the ground. The emus were her responsibility, she kept saying, she was their protector, and she constantly worried about them. A bobcat might attack them, some boys might shoot them for kicks, they might get loose and end up as roadkill.
One afternoon a couple of weeks after Maddox got the boot, we went up to the pasture to find the gate open and the emus gone. We ran back to the house and Uncle Tinsley told us that a crew from the power company had come through that morning trimming branches back from the wires, and they must have forgotten to close the gate. Liz was so upset, she was shaking. We piled into the Woody and drove around, finally spotting the emus in a hay field beside a country road a mile from Mayfield.
The hay field, which was owned by Mr. Muncie, had barbed-wire fencing and an open gate. Liz got out and shut the gate, so the emus were safe for the moment, but none of us knew how to get them home. We’d been able to herd the emus into the big pasture at Mayfield, but they’d been only a few feet from the gate. There was no way we could herd them along the road all the way back to Mayfield. Or transport them. Even with Tater and his crew, we couldn’t get the emus into that cattle trailer. Liz was practically hysterical.
“We need to rope those birds,” Uncle Tinsley said.
That night he called Bud Hawkins, a farrier down the road who owned a rodeo horse, to see if he could try lassoing the emus, and Bud said he’d meet us at the hay field the following afternoon. Uncle Tinsley told us to recruit some friends as well. The more hands, the better. The next day at school, I told Joe, who said he’d round up a few buddies. Liz invited her new lunchtime friends, but we didn’t know how many we could count on.
When we pulled up to the hay field in the Woody that afternoon, Bud Hawkins was already there, leading a sturdy bay horse off his trailer. The emus were on the other side of the field, watching suspiciously. While Bud was saddling up his horse, a green Rambler drove up and Miss Jarvis got out along with a few of the outsiders, including Kenneth Daniels in his black cape. A couple of minutes later, Aunt Al arrived in a pickup she must have borrowed, with Earl beside her and Joe and his buddies in the bay. Then came the powder-blue Cadillac with Ruth, Vanessa, Leticia, and a couple of the black athletes, including Tower.
With everyone watching, Liz walked over toward Eugene, carrying a bowl of feed and a big, soft piece of rope with a loop in it. She placed the bowl on the ground, and when Eugene started pecking at the feed, she slipped the loop up past his head and around his neck. Joe brought Earl over, and the boy reached out and stroked Eugene’s neck.