Free The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls

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.

 
CHAPTER TEN
    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