Little Earl, who was sitting next to Aunt Al, stretched out his hand, and I passed the medal to him. He held it up, then put the star in his mouth. Aunt Al took it back, polished it with her
dish towel, and passed it to me. “Uncle Clarence was keeping this in memory of his kid brother. But it’s yours now.”
“I don’t want to take it if it’s important to Uncle Clarence,” I said.
“No,” Aunt Al said. “We talked, and Clarence thought about it and decided that Charlie would want his little girl to have it.”
Charlie and Clarence had always been close, Aunt Al went on. Their parents were sharecroppers who had been killed in a tractor accident. It happened one night when they were trying to bring in
the tobacco crop during a big storm and the tractor turned over on a hillside. At the time, Charlie was six and Clarence was eleven. None of their relatives could afford to feed both boys, and
since Charlie was too young to earn his keep, no one wanted him. Clarence told the family taking him in that he would do the work of two hands if they took Charlie as well. The family agreed on a
trial basis, and Clarence worked himself to the bone, dropping out of school to take on the responsibilities of a full-grown man. The brothers stayed together, but those years hardened Clarence,
and when he went to work at the mill, most of the women thought he was downright mean.
“I saw the hurt orphan inside the bitter man,” Aunt Al said. “Clarence just wasn’t used to being cared for.”
“I should thank him for the star,” I said.
“He’s out tending to his garden.”
I walked through the Wyatts’ small, dark living room, which was behind the kitchen, and out the back door. Uncle Clarence, wearing a battered straw hat, was kneeling in a few dirt rows of
green beans, staked tomatoes, and cucumber vines, working a trowel around the base of the plants.
“Uncle Clarence,” I said. “Thank you for giving me my dad’s Silver Star.”
Uncle Clarence didn’t look up.
“Aunt Al said you two were close,” I added.
He nodded. Then he put the trowel down and turned toward me. “Damned shame about your momma going crazy,” he said, “but that woman should have the word ‘trouble’
tattooed on her forehead. Meeting your momma was the worst thing that ever happened to your daddy.”
Liz and I
continued our job hunt the next day. Most of the houses in Byler were old, both the grand ones and the dinky ones, but
late in the afternoon, we turned down a street that had newer ranches and split-levels with breezeways and asphalt driveways and little saplings surrounded by pine-needle mulch. One of the houses
had a chain-link fence around the front yard with a bunch of hubcaps hanging on it. A shiny black car was parked in the driveway and a man had his head under the hood, fiddling with the engine,
while a girl sat in the driver’s seat.
The man shouted at the girl to turn the engine over, but she gave it too much gas and when the engine roared, he jerked his head up, banging it on the hood. He started cussing loudly, yelling
that the girl was trying to kill him, and then he turned around and saw us.
“Sorry, ladies. Didn’t know you were there,” he said. “I’m trying to fix this damned engine, and my girl here’s not being much help.”
He was a big man. Not fat, just big, like a bull. He pulled up his T-shirt and used it to wipe his face, exposing his broad, hairy belly, then wiped his hands on his jeans.
“Maybe we can help,” Liz said.
“We’re looking for work,” I said.
“That so? What kind of work?”
The man walked over to where we were standing. His walk was lumbering but also strangely light-footed, as though he could move very quickly if he needed to. His arms were thick as hams, his
fingers were thick, too, and his neck was actually thicker than his head. He had short blond hair, small but very bright blue eyes, and a broad nose with flaring nostrils.
“Any kind of work,” Liz said. “Yard work, babysitting, housecleaning.”
The man was looking us up and down. “I haven’t seen you two around before.”
“We’ve only been here a few weeks,” I said.
“Your family move here?” he asked.
“We’re just kind of visiting,” Liz said.
“Kind of visiting,” he said. “What’s that mean?”
“We’re staying with our uncle for a while,” I said.
“Why are you doing that?”
“Well, we’re just spending the summer with him,” Liz said.
“We were born here,” I said. “But we haven’t been back since we were little.”
Liz gave me the look that said I was talking too much, but I didn’t see how we were going to get jobs if we didn’t answer the man’s questions.
“Oh, really?” he said. “And who’s your uncle?”
“Tinsley Holladay,” I said.
“Oh, really?” he said again, leaning in like he was suddenly interested. He was so big that when he got close and looked down on us, it felt like he was swallowing up the sky.
“So you’re Tinsley Holladay’s nieces?” He smiled, as if the idea of that was amusing. “Well, Tinsley’s nieces, do you have names?”
“I’m Liz, and this is my sister, Bean.”
“Bean? What kind of name is that?”
“A nickname,” I said. “It rhymes with my real name, Jean. Liz is always rhyming and giving things her own names.”
“Okay, Liz and Bean-rhymes-with-Jean, I’m Jerry Maddox. And that’s my girl, Cindy.” He motioned at her with his finger. “Cindy, come over here and meet Tinsley
Holladay’s nieces.”
The girl got out of the car. She was a few years younger than me, thin with blond hair like her dad’s that came down to her shoulders, and she walked with a slight limp. Mr. Maddox put his
arm around her. Liz and I said hi, and I smiled at Cindy. She said hi, but she didn’t smile back, just stared at us with the same blue eyes as her father’s.
“Well, I might have some work for Tinsley Holladay’s nieces,” Mr. Maddox said. “I just might. Either of you ever been behind the wheel of a car?”
“Mom has let me drive up and down the driveway,” Liz said.
“Mom? That would be Tinsley Holladay’s sister.”
“Yes,” Liz said. “That’s right.”
“Charlotte Holladay, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Do you know her?” I asked.
“Never met her, but I’ve heard of her.” He smiled again, and it seemed that what Uncle Tinsley said was true—everyone in town knew Mom’s story.
Mr. Maddox had Liz get in the driver’s seat where Cindy had been. Liz had the privilege, he told us, of sitting behind the wheel of a Pontiac Le Mans, one of the classiest cars Detroit had
ever turned out, but only the real buffs appreciated it, the suckers falling for the GTO just because it cost more. He had Liz turn the engine on and off, then operate the turn signal and tap the
brakes while he had me walk around the Le Mans, checking all the lights. Then he told Liz to gun the engine. He checked the timing, adjusted the carburetor, tested the belts, and had me hold the
funnel while he added oil. Cindy stood by silently, watching it all.
Finally satisfied, Mr. Maddox stood up and slammed down the hood. “All tuned up and ready to go,” he said. “You girls are good at taking orders.” He pulled a wad of money
out of his pants pocket and riffled through it. “Looking for something small, but all I have is tens and twenties,” he said. “Oh, here we go.” He pulled out two fives and
passed one to each of us. “I think we can work together,” he said. “Come back Saturday after lunch.”
“I told you we’d get jobs,” Liz said on the way home. She was practically crowing. “Didn’t I say that, Bean?”
“Sure did. You’re always right.”
Halfway back to the house, we passed the field with the two emus. Usually, they were out of sight or on the far side of the field, but now they were walking along the fence line right by the
road.
“Look,” I said. “They want to meet us.”
“Mom would call it a sign,” Liz said.
We stopped to watch the emus. They moved slowly and deliberately, their long necks swaying from side to side as they cocked their heads. They had curling turquoise stripes on the sides of their
heads, tiny stunted wings, and big, scaly feet with these sharp-taloned toes. A gurgly drumming noise that didn’t sound like any birdcall I’d ever heard came from deep in their
throats.
“They’re so weird,” I said.
“Beautifully weird.”
“They’re too big to be birds. They have wings, but they can’t fly. They look like they shouldn’t exist.”
“That’s what makes them so special.”
When we showed
up at the Maddoxes’ on Saturday, Cindy answered the door. I started to say hello, but she turned away and
called out, “They’re here.”
We followed Cindy into the house. The living room was filled with boxes and appliances, including a portable black-and-white TV on top of a console color TV. Both TVs were on and tuned to
different stations, but the sound on the black-and-white TV was turned down. A pregnant woman with mousy blond hair sat on a black Naugahyde couch, nursing a large baby. She looked up at us and
shouted, “Jerry.”
Mr. Maddox came out of the back, introduced the woman as his wife, Doris, and gestured to us to follow him down the hall. One of the funny things about the Maddox house was that there
wasn’t a single thing up on the walls: no pictures, no posters, no bulletin boards, no family photographs, no happy sayings or Bible verses, just these bare hospital-white walls.
Mr. Maddox led us into a bedroom that had been converted into an office, with more boxes and putty-colored metal filing cabinets and a metal desk. He sat down behind the desk and pointed at two
folding chairs in front of it. “Take a seat, ladies,” he said. He picked up a stack of folders, tapped them on the desktop, and slipped them into a drawer. “A lot of people work
for me,” he went on, “and I always ask them about their backgrounds.” He was a foreman at the mill, he explained, but he also had outside business dealings that involved
complicated and sensitive financial and legal matters. He needed to be able to trust the people who worked for him and had access to his home and this office, where he handled the outside dealings.
In order to fully trust the people who worked for him, he needed to know who they were. Due diligence, he called it, standard operating procedure for savvy businessmen. “I can’t have
some surprise come out and bite me in the ass after I’ve hired someone. It’s a two-way street, of course. Any questions about me or my qualifications as an employer?” He paused.
“No? Well, then, tell me about yourselves.”
Liz and I looked at each other. She started hesitantly explaining the part-time jobs we’d held, but Mr. Maddox also wanted to know about our backgrounds, our schooling, our chores,
Mom’s rules, Mom herself. Mr. Maddox listened intently, and the moment he sensed Liz was being evasive about something, he zeroed in with pointed questions. When Liz told him that some of the
information was personal and irrelevant, he said that lots of jobs required security clearance and background checks, and this was one of them. He would treat everything we told him with the utmost
confidence. “You can trust Jerry Maddox,” he said.
It seemed impossible not to answer his questions. The funny thing was, nothing seemed to surprise or disturb him. In fact, he was sympathetic and understanding. He said Mom sounded like a
talented and fascinating individual, and he confided that his own mom was a complicated woman herself—very smart, but boy, did she run hot and cold, and when he came home at day’s end,
he never knew whether he was in for a hugging or a whipping.
That really got us talking, and soon Mr. Maddox had wormed the whole story out of us—Mom taking off, the bandersnatches, the cross-country bus trip. He wanted to know exactly why Mom had
left and exactly why she’d had a meltdown, so I ended up telling him about Mark Parker, the boyfriend who kind of, sort of didn’t really exist. I also told him how we’d dodged the
odious Perv in New Orleans, thinking that the way Liz and I had handled it would impress him.
That was the very word he used. “I’m impressed,” he said. He was leaning back with his hands clasped behind his head. “I like people who know how to deal with difficult
situations. You’re hired.”
So that was how Liz and I began working for the Maddoxes.
I worked mostly
for Doris Maddox. She had light freckles, and eyebrows and eyelashes that were completely white, and she kept her
mousy blond hair in a short ponytail. She was a few years younger than Mom and was the sort of woman Mom would have said could be quite pretty if she’d just fix herself up a little, but she
wore a faded cotton housedress and walked on the backs of her bedroom slippers like it was too much trouble to get them all the way on her feet.
In addition to her daughter, Cindy, Doris had two boys—a toddler, Jerry Jr., and Randy, the baby. She was pregnant with her fourth child and spent most of her time sitting on the couch,
watching TV—game shows in the morning, soap operas in the afternoon—while smoking Salems, drinking RC Colas, and nursing Randy. When Mr. Maddox was in the room, Doris said very little,
but once he’d left, she became more talkative, mostly complaining about the morons on the game shows or the sluts in the stories, as she called the soap operas. She also complained about Mr.
Maddox, how he was always telling her what to do and staying out all hours with God knows who.
Doris had me take care of Randy when she wasn’t nursing him, and also look after Jerry Jr., who was three. My duties included changing their Pampers and heating Randy’s little jars
of Gerber baby food and Jerry Jr.’s SpaghettiOs—that and baloney-and-cheese sandwiches were all he would eat—as well as running to the store for Doris’s RCs and Salems. I
also washed and folded the clothes, cleaned the bathroom, and mopped the floors. Doris told me I was a good, hard worker because I was willing to get down on my hands and knees to scrub.
“Most whites just won’t do that, you know.”
Mr. Maddox was infatuated with the latest gadgets and high-tech gizmos and the house was full of trash compactors, air sanitizers, vacuum cleaners, popcorn poppers, transistor radios, and hi-fi
systems. Most of the boxes throughout the house contained appliances, though a lot had never been opened. The family had two dishwashers because Mr. Maddox had decided that was more efficient. You
could be using one set of dishes while the other was being washed, he said, then load the empty washer and take the clean dishes from the other washer right to the table without having to waste
time putting them away in the cupboard.