The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls Read Free Book Online

had loved birds and kept a big Victorian birdhouse full of
different kinds of finches.
    “Where was Mom’s room?” I asked.
    “She never mentioned it?” he asked. “The whole bird wing was hers.” He pointed through the door of one room. “When she brought you back from the hospital after you
were born, she put you in that cradle in the corner there.”
    I looked over at the cradle. It was small and white and made of wicker, and I couldn’t understand quite why, but it made me feel very safe.

 
CHAPTER SIX
    The next morning, over our poached eggs, Liz and I tried to talk Uncle Tinsley into letting us help him clean up the house just a
little bit. But he insisted that nothing in the house could be thrown out or even moved. Everything, he said, was either a family treasure or part of one of his collections or necessary for his
geological research.
    We spent the morning following Uncle Tinsley around the house as he explained what all the stuff meant to him. He’d pick something up, say an ivory-handled letter opener or a tricornered
hat, and give us a long explanation of where it came from, who had owned it, and why it had extraordinary significance. I came to realize that everything was, in fact, organized in a way that only
he fully understood.
    “This place is like a museum,” I said.
    “And you’re the curator,” Liz told Uncle Tinsley.
    “Well said,” he replied. “But it’s been a good while since I gave my last tour.” We were standing in the ballroom. Uncle Tinsley looked around. “I admit the
place is a tad cluttered. That was the phrase Martha liked to use. I’ve always loved to collect things, but when she was alive, she helped me keep the impulse in check.”
    Uncle Tinsley finally agreed to let us throw out some of the old newspapers and magazines and carry up to the attic and down to the basement boxes of mineral samples, spools of thread from the
mill, and Confederate paper money. We washed windows, aired out rooms, scrubbed floors and counters, and vacuumed the rugs and curtains with this old Hoover from the 1950s that reminded me of a
little spaceship.
    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