The Silver Star(78)

Meanwhile, Bud trotted his horse toward Eunice. When she took off, he galloped after her, swinging the lariat over his head. Some of the kids were running around trying to help, Kenneth waving his black cape, Tower holding out his long arms, Ruth and Leticia clapping and rooting them on.

Despite her bad leg, Eunice could really cover ground, darting to the side every time Bud threw the lariat. After almost an hour of chasing after her, he trotted back to the fence. His shirt was soaked with sweat, and his horse’s chest was covered with lather. “The good news is, the bird’s starting to get wore out,” he said. “The bad news is, we’re completely wore out.”

Uncle Tinsley had been leaning against the Woody watching, but now he took charge, telling everyone to go into the field and gather behind Eunice, then form a long line, arms extended. Liz led Eugene through the gate and onto the road. With the kids in the line behind her touching fingertips, Eunice had nowhere to go but forward. She cautiously followed Eugene.

It was all going pretty well until we got to the corner of Mr. Muncie’s hay field, where the fence line stopped. That was when Eunice panicked and hurled herself at the barbed-wire fence, trying to get back to the safety of the hay field. She squeezed through but tore a bloody raw spot on her back. When Eugene realized that Eunice had taken off, he panicked as well, lurching and hissing so wildly that Liz pulled the rope off, and, just like Eunice, he scrambled through the fence, skinning his back.

I felt like kicking a rock. After more than an hour of work, we were worse off than when we started. The birds were back in the same darned field, and now they were all dinged up. The strange thing was, while Liz and I were really upset, everyone else seemed to be having the time of their lives. Uncle Tinsley was beaming and slapping people on the back, congratulating them on great teamwork, while the kids were hooting and bonking each other and doing head-bobbing, elbow-flapping emu imitations as we all walked back to the cars in the late-afternoon light.





CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR


Now that the weather was warmer, I had gotten into the habit of biking over to the Wyatts’ house on Saturdays to say hello and tuck into a plate of Aunt Al’s eggs fried in bacon fat. Liz usually rode out to check on the emus, Mr. Muncie having said it was fine to keep them in his hay field until we figured out how to get them back. After the failed roundup, Liz decided we wouldn’t be able to capture the emus—we couldn’t outrun them or outsmart them. All we could do was befriend them and try to win their trust, and that was what Liz had started working on.

One Saturday in early May, I walked into the Wyatts’ kitchen to find Aunt Al sitting at the table next to Earl, writing a letter. She’d just heard from Truman, she told me. Though he’d tried hard to be optimistic, he said, he had to admit that despite the best efforts of the U.S. military, the war wasn’t going the way the generals said it was going. The Americans were trying to turn the war over to the Vietnamese, but the Vietnamese didn’t seem to want it, and drugs had become a serious problem on the base. Truman and his girlfriend, Kim-An, who’d been teaching Vietnamese to servicemen at the base, were seriously talking marriage. But Kim-An was worried about her family, since her father also worked for the Americans, and she wanted to know whether, if she and Truman did marry, she could bring her parents and her sister to the States.

“Clarence ain’t none too keen on the idea,” Aunt Al said, “and I always assumed Truman would marry one of our Byler girls. But I’m telling him that if he does bring this Kim-An back home, I’ll move heaven and earth to help get her family over here, because ain’t nothing more important than family.” She folded the letter and put it in an envelope. “How about some eggs?”

As I was mopping up the drippings with toast, Joe came into the kitchen. “I’m going to the dump,” he said to me. “Want to come?” All kinds of neat stuff got left at the dump, and Joe liked to see if he could fix things other people had thrown out. He would find a broken lawn mower or record player or sewing machine, bring it home, take it apart, and put it back together. Sometimes he could even get it to work.

The dump was on the far side of the river, and we walked across the clanking bridge, Dog trotting along behind us. It was a bright but windy spring day, the big flat-bottomed clouds sailing by overhead.

“What do you think about the news from Truman?” I asked.

“About the war or about the Vietnamese girlfriend?”

“Both.”

“Truman’s real smart,” Joe said. “You never win betting against Truman. If he says the war’s going bad, then the war’s going bad, I don’t care what my pa says.”