By the end of the week, the house looked a lot better. Still, it didn’t meet most people’s definition of neat and tidy, and you had to accept the fact that you weren’t living
in a regular house but a place more like a junk shop crammed with all kinds of fascinating stuff—if you had the brains to see its value.
Venison stew and eggs were the staples of Uncle Tinsley’s diet. He didn’t shoot big bucks for trophies, he explained, but if he bagged two or three does during deer
season, had the meat processed and double-wrapped, then stored it in the basement freezer, he had enough to last the entire year. So most nights we had venison stew with things like carrots,
onions, tomatoes, and potatoes and barley mixed in. The meat was a lot tougher than the chicken in potpies, and sometimes you really had to work your jaws before you could swallow it, but it was
also spicier and tastier.
Thanks to Mr. Muncie, the eighty-seven-year-old neighbor who hayed the big pasture, Uncle Tinsley didn’t have to buy eggs and vegetables, and he made hot cereal from rolled oats he got at
the feed store. But he decided growing girls needed milk and cheese, plus we were short on staples such as salt, so at the end of our first week, Uncle Tinsley declared it was time for a grocery
run. We all climbed into the station wagon with the wood panels, which Uncle Tinsley called the Woody. We hadn’t left Mayfield since the day we arrived, and I was itching to check out the
area.
We drove past the white church and the cluster of houses, then along the winding road that led through farmland, with cornrows and grazing cattle, on the way to Byler. I was looking out the
window as we passed a big fenced-in field, and I suddenly saw these two huge birdlike creatures. “Liz!” I shouted. “Look at those crazy birds!”
They reminded me of chickens, only they were the size of ponies, with long necks and legs and dark brown feathers. Their heads bobbed as they moved along with big careful steps.
“What the heck are they?” I asked.
Uncle Tinsley gave that little chuckle of his. “Scruggs’s emus.”
“Like ostriches, right?” Liz said.
“Near enough.”
“Are they pets?” I asked.
“They weren’t supposed to be. Scruggs thought he could make some money off them but never figured out how. So they’re the world’s ugliest lawn ornaments.”
“They’re not ugly,” Liz said.
“Take a look at them up close sometime.”
Once we got to Byler, Uncle Tinsley gave us what he called the nickel tour. The main street, lined with big green trees, was Holladay Avenue. The buildings were old-fashioned,
made of brick and stone. Some had pillars and carvings, one had a big round clock with Roman numerals, and you got the feeling that Byler once was a bustling and prosperous place, though it looked
like nothing new had been built in the town for fifty years. More than a few of the storefronts were vacant and had masking tape crisscrossing the glass. A sign on one door said
BACK IN HALF AN HOUR
, as if the shopkeeper had intended to return but never did.
Maybe it was because of the humid air, but Byler struck me as very sleepy. People seemed to move slowly, and a lot of them were hardly moving at all, just sitting in chairs under store awnings,
some of the men in overalls, talking, whittling, or leaning back, chewing tobacco and reading newspapers.
“What year are we in here?” Liz joked.
“The sixties never happened in this town,” Uncle Tinsley said, “and people like it that way.”
He stopped the Woody at a red light. An older black man wearing a fedora started across the street in front of us. When he got to the middle of the intersection, he looked at us, smiled, and
touched his hat. Uncle Tinsley waved.
“Who’s he?” I asked.
“Don’t know him,” Uncle Tinsley said.
“But you waved at him.”
“You only wave at people you know? You must be from California.” He burst out laughing.
The mill stood at the end of Holladay Avenue, right on the river. It was made of dark red brick laid in patterns of arches and diamonds, and it covered an entire block. The windows were two
stories high, and smoke poured out of a pair of soaring chimneys. A sign in front said
HOLLADAY TEXTILES
.
“Charlotte tell you much of the family history?” Uncle Tinsley asked.
“It wasn’t Mom’s favorite subject,” Liz said.
Before the Civil War, Uncle Tinsley explained, the Holladay family had owned a cotton plantation.
“A plantation?” I asked. “Our family had slaves?”
“We certainly did.”
“I wish I didn’t know that,” Liz said.
“Those slaves were always treated well,” Uncle Tinsley said. “My great-great-grandfather Montgomery Holladay liked to say if he was down to one final crust of bread, he would,
by God, have shared it with them.”
I glanced at Liz, who rolled her eyes.
If you went back far enough, Uncle Tinsley went on, just about all American families who could afford them owned slaves, not only Southerners. Ben Franklin owned slaves. Anyway, he continued,
the Yankees burned down the whole plantation during the war, but the family still knew the cotton business. Once the war was over, Montgomery Holladay decided there was no point in shipping cotton
to the factories up north to make the Yankees rich, so he sold the land and moved to Byler, where he used the money to build the mill.
The Holladay family, Uncle Tinsley explained, had owned the cotton mill—and pretty much the town itself—for generations. The mill was good to the Holladays, and in turn, the
Holladays were good to the workers. The family built them houses with indoor plumbing and gave out free toilet paper to go with the toilets. The Holladays also gave out hams on Christmas and
sponsored a baseball team called the Holladay Hitters. The millworkers never made much in terms of wages, but most of them had been dirt farmers before the mill opened, and factory work was a step
up. The main thing, he went on, was that everyone in Byler, rich and poor, considered themselves part of one big family.
Things started to go downhill fast about ten years ago, Uncle Tinsley continued. Foreign mills began undercutting everybody’s prices at the same time those Northern agitators started going
around stirring up the workers to strike for higher wages. Southern mills started losing money, and as the years went by, more and more of them shut down.
By then, Uncle Tinsley said, his father had passed, and he was running Holladay Textiles himself. It, too, was in the red. Some Chicago investors agreed to buy the mill, but it didn’t
bring much, only enough for him and Charlotte to get by if they watched their pennies. Meanwhile, the new owners laid off workers and did whatever they could to squeeze every last ounce of profit
out of the place, not just doing away with the Christmas hams and the Holladay Hitters but cutting back bathroom breaks, turning off the air-conditioning, and using dirty cotton.
“Back in the day, Holladay Textiles made a quality product,” Uncle Tinsley said. “Now they turn out towels so thin you can read a newspaper through them.”
“It all sounds too depressing,” Liz said.
Uncle Tinsley shrugged. “Things change, even in this town.”
“Did you ever think of leaving Byler?” I asked. “Like Mom?”
“Leave Byler?” Uncle Tinsley asked. “Why would I leave Byler? I’m a Holladay. This is where I belong.”
At Mayfield we
slept with the windows open, and you could hear the frogs croaking at night. I conked out as soon as my head hit the
pillow, but those noisy birds woke me early every day. One morning in late June, after we’d been at Mayfield for almost two weeks, I woke up and reached out for Liz and then remembered that
she was in the next room. Much as I had loved sharing a bed with Liz, I’d always thought it would be neat to have a room of my very own. The truth was, it felt lonely.
I went into Liz’s room to see if she was awake. She was sitting up in bed, reading a book called
Stranger in a Strange Land,
which she’d come across while we were cleaning
the house. I lay down beside her.
“I wish Mom would hurry up and call,” I said. I’d been expecting to hear from her any day. I constantly checked the phone to make sure it was connected, because Uncle Tinsley
didn’t particularly appreciate getting calls and sometimes unplugged it. “Uncle Tinsley’s going to think we’re a couple of moochers.”
“I think he actually likes having us here,” Liz said. She held up the book. “We’re like friendly aliens visiting from another planet.”
Truth be told, in the time we’d been there, Uncle Tinsley hadn’t had a single other visitor. He had one of those big old-fashioned radios, but he didn’t seem that interested in
what was going on in the world, and he never turned it on. What fascinated him were genealogy and geology. He spent most of his time in his library, writing to county historical societies,
requesting information on, say, the Middleburg Holladays, and going through what he called his archives, boxes of crumbling old letters, faded journals, and yellowed newspaper clippings that
referred to the Holladay family in any way. And there was nothing he didn’t know about the earth, its layers of rocks and soil and underground water. He studied geological charts, conducted
tests on little glass jars of soil and trays of rocks, and read scientific reports to cite in the articles he wrote and occasionally published.
While Liz liked to lie in bed and read after she woke up, I always wanted to get up and get cracking and I went downstairs for breakfast. Uncle Tinsley was in the ballroom, nursing a cup of
coffee and staring out the French doors. “I hadn’t realized how tall the grass has gotten,” he said. “I do believe it’s time to mow.”
After breakfast, I went with Uncle Tinsley up to the equipment shed. Inside was an old-timey red tractor with
FARMALL
on the side, a little side step up to the seat, and
an empty paint can over the exhaust pipe that, Uncle Tinsley explained, kept out the critters. The tractor coughed when he turned the engine over, but then it fired right up, a big belch of black
smoke coming out from under the paint can. Uncle Tinsley backed it up to his pull-behind mower, a big green contraption, and I helped him attach the mower to the rear of the tractor, getting grease
all over my hands and under my fingernails.
While Uncle Tinsley mowed, I used a shovel and rake to clear the leaves from the koi pond. I discovered overgrown brick paths running between the old flower beds, and I started pulling the weeds
off them. It was hard work—the wet leaves were heavier than you’d think, and the weeds were itchy—but by the end of the morning, I had cleared out the pond and most of the brick
around it. The flower beds, however, still had a ways to go before they won any new prizes. Uncle Tinsley motioned me over. “Let’s see if we can get us some peaches for lunch,” he
said.
He hoisted me up onto the tractor’s little side step, explaining that you really weren’t supposed to do this but every farm kid did it anyway, and with me standing on the step and
hanging on for dear life, we drove past the barn, up the hill to the orchard, the old Farmall shaking so much it made my teeth rattle and my eyeballs jiggle.
The apples and pears were too green, Uncle Tinsley said, they’d be ripe in August and September. But he had some early peaches that were ready to eat. They were old varieties, bred
centuries ago for the climate in this particular county, and they tasted nothing like the mealy Styrofoam that passed for fruit in your modern supermarkets.
There was fruit on the ground under the peach trees, and bees, wasps, and butterflies were swarming around, feasting on it. Uncle Tinsley pulled a peach down and passed it to me. It was small
and red, covered with fuzz, and warm from the sun. That peach was so juicy that when I bit into it, I felt like it almost burst in my mouth. I wolfed it down, all that juice leaving my chin and
fingers sticky.
“Dang,” I said.
“Now, that’s a peach,” Uncle Tinsley said. “A Holladay peach.”
We brought back a paper bag full of peaches. They were so irresistible that Liz and I ate them all that afternoon, and the next morning, I went back up to the orchard for
more.
The peach trees were behind the apples, and as I approached, I saw the branches of one swaying back and forth. When I got closer, I realized that someone was behind the tree, a guy, and he was
filling a bag with peaches just as fast as he could.
“Hey!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”
The guy, who was about my age, looked at me. We stared at each other for a moment. He had longish brown hair that flopped in his face and eyes as dark as coffee. He was shirtless, and his
sunbaked skin was streaked with sweat and grime, like he ran around half-wild. He held a peach in one hand, and I saw that part of a finger was missing.
“What are you doing?” I shouted again. “Those are our peaches.”
The boy suddenly turned and ran, the bag in one hand, arms and legs pumping like a sprinter’s.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Thief!”
I ran after him for a few steps, but he was fast and had a good head start, and I knew I couldn’t catch him. I was so mad at that dirty kid for stealing our delicious peaches that I picked
one up and threw it after him. “Peach thief!”
I headed back to the house. Uncle Tinsley was in the library, working on his geology papers. I fully expected him to share my outrage over the low-down scoundrel stealing our
peaches. Instead, he smiled and started asking me questions. What did he look like? How tall was he? Did I happen to notice if he was missing part of a finger?
“He sure was,” I said. “Probably got it chopped off for stealing.”
“That’s Joe Wyatt,” Uncle Tinsley said. “He’s your father’s family. His father was your father’s brother. He’s your cousin.”
I was so stunned, I sat down on the floor.
“And I don’t mind him taking a few peaches,” he added.
Mom didn’t talk much about either Liz’s dad or my dad. All she’d told us was that she had met Liz’s dad, Shelton Stewart, while in college in Richmond, and after a
whirlwind romance, they got married in the most lavish wedding Byler had seen in a generation. Mom became pregnant almost immediately, and it didn’t take long for her to discover that Shelton
Stewart was a dishonest parasite. He’d come from an old South Carolina family, but their money was gone, and he expected Mom’s family to support them while he spent his days playing
golf and shooting grouse. Her father made it clear that wasn’t going to happen, and so, shortly after Liz was born, Shelton Stewart walked out on Mom, and she and Liz never saw him again.