The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls Page A

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.”

 
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    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