“I feel like everything’s changed,” I said to Liz. We were walking back to Mayfield, pushing the Schwinn, because I wanted to talk. “Now I know who my
dad was.”
“And now you know who you are,” Liz said. “You’re Charlie Wyatt’s girl.”
“Yeah,” I said. I had my dad’s eyes and hair—and Aunt Al said I had his spark. “I’m Charlie Wyatt’s girl.”
As we walked along, we passed the house where the woman had been sweeping her dirt yard. The hardpacked dirt looked as smooth as terra-cotta tile. The woman was sitting on her porch. She waved,
and I waved back.
“Now you’re waving at people you don’t know,” Liz said, and grinned. “You’ve gone native.”
We reached the bottom of the mill hill. “I think I like the way my dad died,” I said.
“It was better than some dumb mill accident,” Liz said.
“Like Aunt Al said, he was defending Mom’s honor.”
“He wasn’t just another linthead—not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“I feel like I’ve got a lot to ask Mom,” I said. “So when in the heck is she ever going to call?”
“She’ll call.”
When we got
home, Uncle Tinsley was sitting at the dining room table, working on his big genealogical chart of the Holladay
family.
“How did it go, Bean?” he asked.
“Well, she found out how her dad died,” Liz said.
“Did you know?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. He pointed to a name on the chart. “Charles Joseph Wyatt, 1932 to 1957.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It wasn’t my place,” he said. “But all of Byler sure knew about it. Didn’t talk about anything else for months. Or years, it seemed.”
Millworkers drinking beer in pool halls were always getting in knockdowns and knife fights, he said, and from time to time, they killed each other. That was no big deal. However, this particular
incident involved Charlotte Holladay, the daughter of Mercer Holladay, the man practically everyone in town worked for. By the time Bucky Mullens came to stand trial, Charlotte was showing, and
everyone knew she was carrying the child of the pool-hall-brawling linthead Bucky had killed. It was quite the scandal, and Mother and Father were mortified. So were he and Martha. They all felt
that the Holladay name—the name on the darned mill, the name on the main street through town—was soiled. Mother stopped going to the garden club, Father stayed off the golf course.
Every time Uncle Tinsley walked through town, he said, he knew people were chortling behind his back.
Mother and Father, he went on, couldn’t help letting Charlotte know how they felt. She had come home when her marriage fell apart and expected to be supported. At the same time, she had
declared that since she was an adult, she was going to do whatever she pleased. As a result, she brought shame on the entire family. Charlotte, for her part, felt the family had turned on her, and
she hated Mother and Father, as well as him and Martha, for feeling the way they did.
“And so not long after you were born, Bean, she left Byler, vowing never to return,” Uncle Tinsley said. “It was one of the few times in her life she showed good
judgment.”
That night I couldn’t sleep. I was lying there chewing on everything I’d learned that day about Mom and my dad. I had always wanted to know more about my family,
but I hadn’t bargained for this.
In times like these, having your own room really stunk, because there was no one to talk to. I got up and carried my pillow into Liz’s room, crawling under the covers next to her. She
wrapped an arm around me.
“I actually know something about my dad now,” I said. “It really gives you a lot to think about. Maybe, when Mom gets here, you should talk to her about getting in touch with
your dad.”
“No,” Liz said sharply. “After the way he walked out on Mom and me, I will never have anything to do with him. Ever.” She took a deep breath. “In a way,
you’re lucky. Your dad’s dead. Mine left.”
We lay there in silence for a while. I was waiting for Liz to say something smart and Liz-like that would help me make sense of everything we’d learned that day. Instead, she began coming
up with jokey wordplay the way she did when something upset her and she needed to make light of it.
Liz started with the word “lintheads.” First she spoonerized it as “hint leads.” Then she said that lintheads were people who had no heads of their own, so people with
spare heads lent heads to them. Sometimes they charged for the heads, in which case the people were known as rent heads, and once their money was gone, they were called spent heads. If the heads
were damaged, they were called dent heads or bent heads.
“That’s not funny,” I said.
Liz was quiet for a moment. “You’re right,” she said.
The next morning,
I was pulling weeds in the flower beds around the koi pond, still thinking about being Charlie Wyatt’s
daughter and how Mom’s getting pregnant with me had created so many problems for everyone. The sound of a woodpecker hammering in the sycamores made me look up, and through the opening in the
big dark bushes, I saw Joe Wyatt walking up the driveway, his burlap bag over his shoulder. I stood up. When he saw me, he headed my way, ambling along like he was out for a stroll and just
happened to run into me.
“Hey,” he said when he was a few feet away.
“Hey,” I said.
“Ma said I should come over and say hello, seeing as how we’re related and all.”
I looked at him and realized he had the same dark eyes as my dad and me. “I guess we’re cousins.”
“Guess so.”
“Sorry about calling you a thief.”
He looked down, and I could see a grin spreading across his face. “Been called worse,” he said. “Anyway, cuz, you particular to blackberries?”
Cuz. I liked that. “You bet I am.”
“Well, then, let’s go get us some.”
I ran up to the barn to find my own sack.
It was the end of June, and the humidity had kept climbing. The ground was damp from rain the night before, and we crossed the big pasture, squishing in the mud where the land was poorly
drained. Grasshoppers, butterflies, and little birds skittered up out of the grass in front of us. We came to a rusting barbed-wire fence line separating the pasture from the woods. Since
blackberries loved the sun, Joe said, the best places to find them were along the sides of trails and where the forest met up with the fields. Walking the fence line, we soon came across huge
clumps of thorny, brambly bushes thick with fat, dark berries. The first one I ate was so sour, I spit it out. Joe explained that you only picked the ones that came off when you barely touched
them. The ones you had to pull weren’t ripe enough to eat.
We made our way up the hill along the fence line, picking blackberries and eating as many as we kept. Joe told me that he spent much of the summer in the woods picking wineberries, mulberries,
blackberries, and pawpaws—which some folks called hillbilly bananas—and raiding orchards for cherries, peaches, and apples, as well as now and then sneaking into someone’s garden
for a haul of tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, and beans.
“Only if they’ve got more than enough,” he said. “I never take what would be missed. That would be stealing.”
“It’s more like scavenging,” I said. “Like what birds and raccoons do.”
“There you go, cuz. Though I got to admit, not everyone looks on it kindly.”
From time to time, he said, farmers who spotted him in their orchards or cornfields took potshots at him. On one occasion, he was up in an apple tree in the backyard of this dentist’s
fancy house in Byler, and when the family came out to have lunch on the patio, he had to sit in the tree without moving a muscle for an hour until they left, still as a squirrel hoping the hunter
wouldn’t notice him. The worst that had ever happened was when someone’s yard dog came after him and he lost part of a finger before making it over the fence. Joe grinned at the memory
and held up his hand. “Wasn’t a picking finger.”
When our bags were full, we headed back down the hedgerow to Mayfield. The woods beyond the fence were quiet in the midday heat. At the barn we stopped to get a drink from the faucet above the
watering trough, sticking our heads under the spigot, the water splashing on our faces.
“Maybe we can do some more scavenging, cuz,” Joe said, wiping his chin.
“Sure, cuz,” I said, wiping mine.
He walked down the drive, and I turned to the house. As I reached the front porch, Liz came out of the door.
“Mom called,” she said. “She’ll be here in a couple of days.”
That afternoon Liz
and I sat out by the koi pond, talking about Mom’s arrival and feasting on blackberries until our fingers
were stained. It was about time Mom called. It had been five weeks and two days since she had the Mark Parker meltdown and took off. As much as I liked Byler and as thrilled as I was to know Uncle
Tinsley and to have met my dad’s family—even that grump Uncle Clarence—I really missed Mom. We were, as she always said, a tribe of three. All we needed was each other. I had tons
of things I wanted to discuss with Mom, mostly about my dad, and Liz and I also wanted to know what the plan was. Would we be going back to Lost Lake? Or somewhere else?
“Maybe we could stay here for a while,” I told Liz.
“Maybe,” she said. “It’s sort of Mom’s house, too.”
Ever since we’d arrived, we’d been straightening up Uncle Tinsley’s stuff, but with a place like Mayfield, there was always more to do. Two days after Mom
called, we were putting away jars and boxes when we heard the sound of the Dart coming up the driveway.
Liz and I rushed through the door, across the big porch, and down the steps just as Mom got out of the car, which was pulling a little white-and-orange trailer. She had on her red velvet jacket
even though it was summer, and her hair was teased up the way she did it when she was going to an audition. We had a three-way hug in the middle of the driveway, laughing and whooping, with Mom
going on about “my darlings,” “my babies,” and “my precious girls.”
Uncle Tinsley came out of the house and leaned against one of the porch columns, watching us with his arms crossed. “Nice of you to finally drop in, Char,” he said.
“Nice to see you, too, Tin,” Mom said.
Mom and Uncle Tinsley stood there looking at each other, so I started jabbering on about all the fun things we’d been doing, staying in her old rooms in the bird wing, clearing the koi
pond, riding the Farmall, eating peaches, and gathering blackberries.
Uncle Tinsley cut me off. “Where have you been, Char?” he asked. “How could you go off and leave these kids alone?”
“Don’t pass judgment on me,” Mom told him.
“Now, please, no fighting,” Liz said.
“Yes, let’s be civil,” Mom said.
We all went into the house, and Mom looked around at the clutter. “Jesus, Tin. What would Mother say?”
“What would she say about someone abandoning her children? But as you said, let’s be civil.”
Uncle Tinsley went into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. Mom started walking around the living room, picking up her mother’s crystal vases and porcelain figurines, her father’s old
leather-covered binoculars, the family photographs in their sterling frames. She’d tried so hard to put this place and her past out of her life, she said, and now she was back in the middle
of it again. She laughed and shook her head.
Uncle Tinsley came in with the tea service on the silver tray.
“Being back here is all too dark and strange,” Mom said. “I feel the old chill. Mother was always so cold and distant. She never truly loved me. All she cared about were
appearances and being proper. And Father loved me for the wrong reasons. It was all very inappropriate.”
“Charlotte, that’s nonsense,” Uncle Tinsley said. “This was always a warm house. You were Daddy’s little girl—at least until your divorce—and you loved
it. Nothing inappropriate ever happened under this roof.”
“That’s what we had to pretend. We had to pretend it was perfect. We were all experts at pretending.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Uncle Tinsley said. “You’ve always exaggerated everything. You’ve always had to create your little dramas.”
Mom turned to us. “See what I mean, girls? See what happens around here when you try to speak the truth? You get attacked.”
“Let’s just have tea,” Uncle Tinsley said.
We all sat down. Liz poured and passed the cups around.
Mom stared into her tea. “Byler,” she said. “Everyone in this town lives in the past. All they ever talk about is the weather and the Bulldogs. It’s like they don’t
know or care about what’s happening in the outside world. Are they even aware that their president is a war criminal?”
“The weather’s important if you live off what you grow,” Uncle Tinsley said. “And some people think President Nixon’s doing a pretty good job trying to wind up a
war he didn’t start. First Republican I ever voted for.” He stirred sugar into his tea and cleared his throat. “What is the plan for you and the girls?”
“I don’t like plans,” Mom said. “I like options. We have several options, and we’re going to consider them all.”
“What are the options?” Liz asked.
“You could stay here,” Uncle Tinsley said. He took a sip of tea. “For a while.”
“I don’t consider that an option,” Mom said.
Uncle Tinsley set down his teacup. “Char, you need to give these girls some stability.”
“What do you know about looking after children?” Mom asked with a tight smile.
“That’s not fair,” Uncle Tinsley said. “I do know if Martha and I had been blessed enough to have children, we never would have gone off and left them.”
Mom slammed her teacup down so hard I thought she’d break it, then she stood up and leaned over Uncle Tinsley. When anyone criticized Mom, she went on the attack, and that was what she did
now. She was raising two daughters completely on her own, she said, and they were turning out darned well. He had no idea of the sacrifices she’d made. In any event, she was an independent
woman. She had her own music career. She made her own decisions. She wasn’t going to stand here and be judged by her brother, a broken-down old hermit still living in the house where he was
born in a dead-end mill town. He’d never even had the wherewithal to get the hell out of Byler, and she had not come back to this godforsaken place to answer to him.