The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “You don’t s’pose you could get Raylene to fry me up a couple of waffles, do you?” Buddy asked hopefully. “Workin’ all night sure makes a man hungry.”

  “Here you go, Buddy,” Raylene said. “Here’s your waffles.” She put the plate on the shelf of the pass-through and Myra May set it in front of Buddy, with a bottle of maple syrup. “On the house.”

  “That was fast,” Buddy said admiringly. “How’d you do that?”

  “Trade secret,” Myra May replied.

  “Hey,” Mr. Dunlap protested. “How come I don’t get free waffles?”

  “You climb out of bed and go out at night when there’s trouble and you might,” Myra May said.

  Buddy unscrewed the lid and poured maple syrup liberally over his waffles. “I guess if you want to know about the boy, somebody could call over to the Monroeville hospital and ask.”

  “We don’t have to,” Violet said from the doorway, and broke the Exchange’s cardinal rule. “That was Mickey LeDoux’s mother on the phone. She was calling Mickey’s grandmother to tell her that Rider died a little while ago. The doctor said he never had a chance.”

  “Them revenuers can go to hell,” Mr. Musgrove said darkly. “Why cain’t they just leave us alone?”

  “’Cause it’s their job.” Buddy’s voice was muffled as he bent low over his waffles. “It’s their goddamn job.”

  TEN

  Charlie Dickens: The Morning After the Night Before

  The clock on the wall said ten past ten and Charlie Dickens was sitting at his desk, banging out the lead story for Friday’s Dispatch in his two-finger staccato style. His green eyeshade was pulled low, and a cigarette hung limp out of one corner of his mouth, the smoke curling in front of his face. A half-full bottle of warm Hires Root Beer, his second of the morning, stood at his elbow, and an overflowing ashtray sat on the Webster’s Dictionary. The typewriter keys clacked, the carriage slammed, and the black electric fan on the edge of the desk whirred noisily. In the back corner of the pressroom, Ophelia Snow was working at the ninety-character keyboard of the Linotype, which produced hot lead slugs with its usual arrhythmic thump. On the shelf over her head, the radio was playing the “Liberty Bell March,” loud. Charlie wrote best when there was plenty of background noise, the way there had been in the other newsrooms where he’d worked. Somehow, noise seemed to fuel the creative process. The words came quicker and they had more energy, especially on days when he was plagued with a morning-after headache that pounded in his head like a set of drums in a basement.

  But the words were coming quicker today because—instead of the usual mind-numbing club meetings and weddings and obituaries—Charlie was working on a real newspaper story, a story that everybody would read and talk about for weeks to come. Headlined Federal Agents Kill Local Youth, the story reported the death of the youngest LeDoux boy, Rider, at the hands of the revenue agents, who had crept past the lookout and up the trail to attack Mickey’s still without warning. With no provocation, they had fired on the unarmed crew, killing Rider and slightly wounding Tom-Boy. Now, Mickey and Tom-Boy were both locked up in the Darling jail on the second floor of Snow’s feed store building, awaiting arraignment when Judge McHenry convened court on Thursday. They would be tried right here in Darling and if convicted (make that “when convicted,” Charlie thought), they would no doubt get the maximum sentence: two years in the state penitentiary. The agent who shot the boy dead would likely get a commendation. Kinnard himself would probably be booted up one pay grade.

  And all Kinnard had to say, when Charlie showed up with his notebook and pen that morning and asked for a statement, was “The shooting was unavoidable.” He was sitting with his feet up on the desk in the sheriff’s office, his fedora pulled low over his forehead, picking his teeth with a wooden match whittled to a point. He’d looked straight at Charlie and added, coolly, “But it wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t been making moonshine, now, would it? Gotta teach these boys that when they break the law, they are gonna pay the price.” He’d tipped his hat back with his forefinger, hooked his hands into his belt, and growled, “I want you to quote me on that, Dickens. Word for word. Folks around here need to get the message. No shining in my district, long as I’m agent.”

  Charlie needed no encouragement to feature the quote prominently in his article. In his opinion, Kinnard’s unfeeling response showed his utter callousness to a young boy’s death, and Charlie depicted him as cold as ice, entirely unemotional, and intent only on getting the job done as expeditiously as possible, whatever the cost.

  In contrast, there was Mickey, sitting in his jail cell with his head hanging down and his face streaked with tears and grime, his brother’s blood soaking one leg of his jeans. “If’n I’d know’d this was gonna happen, I’d’ve never let Rider come on the crew,” he’d said desolately, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “He was a good boy. A real good boy. Liked to go fishing, hunting. Had him a good ol’ coon dog, too. That dog is gonna miss him.” Charlie quoted that, as well, and added that Mickey’s Model T, Sweet Bess, had been confiscated and would be broken down for scrap. It was, after all, a human interest story.

  Charlie got to the end of his article, realized that he lacked one more piece of information, and picked up the candlestick telephone that sat at the corner of his desk. When Violet (he recognized her chipper “Number, please”) came on the line, he said, “Violet, get me Noonan’s Funeral Home, would you, hon?” While he waited, he slugged a gulp of Hires. Booze always gave him a mighty thirst.

  A few minutes later, after talking to Mrs. Noonan, Charlie was able to type the last couple of sentences:

  Noonan’s Funeral Home is handling final arrangements for Rider LeDoux. Services are set for 2 p.m. Saturday at Briar’s Chapel, with interment in the family cemetery. Mrs. LeDoux says there’ll be a potluck after, at the house. Bring what you want to eat, and plates and forks.

  Charlie doubted that Judge McHenry would let Mickey and Tom-Boy out to attend the funeral.

  Charlie typed -30- at the end of his story, pulled the copy out of the typewriter, and yelled for Ophelia to come and get it. Then he looked over a two-paragraph story that Ophelia had written, about the return of the renowned Miss Tallulah LaBelle to the LaBelle plantation, over on the Alabama River west of town. The wealthy old lady—the LaBelles were one of Cypress County’s early settlers—had been on an extended visit to friends in Boston and New York. Unlike most folks, Miss Tallulah had been fortunate enough to keep the family money from disappearing into the chaos of the stock market crash and was able to breeze around the country and even abroad, visiting here and there. She didn’t often appear in Darling, but she was always good for copy in the “Out and About” column, where the comings and goings of notable citizens of Cypress County were reported. He would put it at the top of that column, above Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson’s ill-timed visit to her sister in Montgomery and Miss Ruthie Brandt’s weekend trip to Mobile, where she had gone to the movies to see King Kong (just released after its March premier in New York City) and taken an afternoon cruise on Mobile Bay.

  Finished with that column, he wrote up the announcement of Grady Alexander’s marriage to Archie Mann’s niece, noticing that the wedding, like Rider LeDoux’s funeral, was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. Out of deference to Liz Lacy and Mrs. Alexander, he kept the piece short, nothing but the bare facts of the matter—who, what, when, where. People’s imaginations would take care of the why. He would bury the story in the middle of page seven, between the legal notices and the Kilgore Motors advertisement for the 1933 Dodge six-cylinder roadster, which sold for $640. Women didn’t read that page, and every man’s gaze would be fixed hungrily on that roadster. Nobody would notice the wedding announcement.

  Ophelia came and picked up both stories, and Charlie put his feet up on the desk, tilted his chair back, and pulled his eyeshade down. He’d rest his eyes for a moment, get rid of that
headache, courtesy of the bottle he had polished off the night before, maybe the last bottle of LeDoux’s fine whiskey that he would ever have the privilege of drinking. He folded his hands over his belt buckle, closed his eyes, and lay back in his chair, musing over his lead story, what he had written—and what he hadn’t.

  It was too bad that the boy had died, yes, he wasn’t belittling that. And too bad that Mickey and Tom-Boy would likely be sent up for the full two-year stretch. But it was just too damn bad that Kinnard had smashed up that still, which was now out of production forever. Even if Mickey went back to making moonshine after he got out (most shiners did), it wouldn’t be the same. The oak kegs would be gone, different creek water would have a different taste, the boys tending the fire and the mash would be new boys and wouldn’t have the same touch as Tom-Boy and Baby—

  Somebody was shaking his foot. “Hey, Dickens,” a man’s voice said. “Wake up.”

  Charlie caught himself in midsnore, swimming up from the bottom of a sodden doze, saturated with sleep as sticky as molasses on a summer day. He opened one eye and sent his tongue out to explore his dry lips. Alvin Duffy, dressed in a cool blue seersucker suit, was standing in front of his desk. The clock on the wall said eleven thirty. Ophelia’s Linotype was silent and the radio was off. She must have finished her work and gone out while he was asleep.

  “Hey, Duffy,” Charlie said. His mouth felt like it was full of feathers. He reached for the Hires bottle and swallowed a swig of warm, flat root beer. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I need you to run a story in Friday’s paper,” Duffy said crisply. “And I want to pick up the scrip you printed.”

  “A story?” Charlie asked warily. “What kind of story? What’s it about?”

  “We’ll call it The Silver Dollar Bush. We’ll say, of course, that dollars don’t grow on bushes and you can’t pick ’em off like picking peaches off the trees. But the new Darling Dollar pays big dividends when you spend it at home, right here in Darling, your favorite town.” Duffy’s voice rose energetically. “We’ll say something like ‘You earn your money here at home because our local merchants support home industries—the sawmill, the Academy, the prison farm.’”

  “The prison farm?” Charlie asked, half amused.

  “Sure. It’s a big employer, and most of the staff live right here in Darling. A lot of folks wouldn’t have jobs if it weren’t for the prison farm.”

  And if it weren’t for the prison farm, Bodeen Pyle wouldn’t have any customers, Charlie thought to himself. He didn’t much like Bodeen’s whiskey but it might be the only brand available, now that Mickey’s was defunct—at least until whiskey was legal again.

  Enthusiastically, Duffy went on with the article he was sketching out. “Tell people that we are now using Darling Dollars, printed right here on good old Ben Franklin Boulevard. Hometown money for hometown folks. They may not be silver, but they’re dollars.”

  “Street,” Charlie said. “Franklin Street. Not boulevard. We don’t have any boulevards in Darling.” He began ticking the streets off on his fingers. “Robert E. Lee Street, Jeff Davis Street, Camellia, Mimosa, Larkspur—”

  “Okay, street, then.” Duffy looked annoyed. “Say something like, ‘If these Darling Dollars help you, turn around and help your Darling businessmen by buying from them.’ And run that slogan at the top of the article. ‘Hometown money for hometown folks.’” He tilted his head. “Pretty jazzy, huh?”

  “Businesspeople,” Charlie said. “Not businessmen. Mrs. Hancock at the grocery is a woman. Two women own the Darling Diner and half the Telephone Exchange. Mrs. Hart owns the laundry with her husband. Fannie Champaign—” He stopped. This wasn’t the first time today he had thought about her, but saying her name out loud gave him a wrench.

  “Make it ‘Darling merchants,’ then, and stop quibbling.” Duffy smacked his fist against his palm. “We’ve got to pump some cash back into this town. Get people to stop hoarding, start spending. Get them to realize that the dollars they spend for things they want go right back into their neighbors’ pockets.”

  Charlie regarded him thoughtfully. “What’s the difference between saving and hoarding? And what if they don’t actually need something? Are you telling them they should buy it anyway? What if it wrecks their budget?”

  “Just whose side are you on?” Duffy returned the look, steely-eyed. After a moment, he pursed his lips and said, “This train is leaving the station, Dickens, and it’s leaving now. Do you want to get on board, or stand in the middle of the track where you can get run over and smashed flat?”

  Charlie sighed. Duffy might be just the cheerleader Darling needed, especially since he was the new top man at the bank and—once the bank was open again—was presumably willing to put his money where his mouth was. But the man was a pain in the you-know-what.

  “Okay, Duffy,” he said sourly. “Have it your way. I’ll write your story, under your byline. It’ll be on the editorial page. At the bottom, under ‘Letters to the Editor.’”

  “It’s news,” Duffy said. “Put it on the front page. No byline.”

  “No room,” Charlie said. It wasn’t just Kinnard’s raid and the death of Rider LeDoux. The story about the white-sheeted men who had vandalized the Johnson house had to go on the front page, along with the article about the crash of the U.S. airship Akron, which was torn apart in a thunderstorm and crashed into the ocean off New Jersey, killing seventy-three of the seventy-six people on board.

  Oh, and Libbie Custer, the widow of George Armstrong Custer—she had died at the age of ninety last week, after spending a full half-century burnishing the image of her fallen Yankee knight. He ought to put that on the front page, too. Custer was not remembered fondly for his role in the Appomattox campaign, capturing twenty-five guns and burning three Confederate trains loaded with provisions for Lee’s army and witnessing his surrender, the very next day, at Appomattox Court House. It rankled, rankled still, and there were quite a few folks in town who recalled Custer’s last stand at the Little Big Horn with something akin to pleasure and thought, one way or another, the damn fool had got what was coming to him. They would want to know that Mrs. Custer was gone, too.

  “It’s the editorial page, with your name on it,” Charlie said firmly, “or not at all.” Duffy might swing some weight with the city council and the county bosses, but at the Dispatch, Charlie was top dog. He stood up and stretched. That little nap had been just what he needed. “What else did you have in mind?”

  “I came to pick up the scrip you printed. I told Mrs. Tidwell I would help her set up her county payroll disbursements.” He grinned expansively. “You just watch, Dickens. We are going to pump some money back into this town.”

  “Yeah, sure. Whatever you say.” Feeling the need for nicotine, Charlie fished for a Camel, lit it, and dropped the match into the overflowing ashtray. “Got any news on the bank opening?” He filled his lungs with smoke and blew it out. “If you have, I could make room for that. Front page. Above the fold.” He’d bump Libbie Custer to page two.

  Duffy grunted. “Not yet. Working on it.”

  A no-answer answer, Charlie thought. “Well, is the holdup here, or in New Orleans?” He eyed Duffy through the curling smoke, and a new thought came to him. “Is there a chance that your bank will pull out of the deal?”

  Duffy pushed his hands into his trouser pockets. “Off the record?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How the hell should I know? Nobody tells me a damn thing.”

  Charlie considered that. Duffy hadn’t said, “No, there’s not a chance we’ll pull out.” And his “Not yet” had sounded down, dejected. Charlie felt his newsman’s nose begin to twitch. Something was going on here.

  “Seriously,” he said. “And still off the record. Just when do you think you’ll be able to announce that the bank is definitely going to open again?”

  Duffy
made a disgusted noise. “Lay off, will you, Dickens? I don’t have all morning. Just get me that scrip and I’ll get out of your hair.”

  Charlie considered that a no-answer answer as well, added it to the first and second, and knew that his newsman’s nose was right. It sounded like the New Orleans bank might be getting cold feet on the deal. If that happened, what would become of the Darling Savings and Trust? Would it be bought out by some other bank? Would it stay closed forever? He shivered. If that happened, they could kiss the town good-bye.

  “Come on, stop stalling,” Duffy said brusquely. “You may have time to sleep off last night’s bender, pal, but I’ve got work to do.”

  Charlie frowned. Was it that obvious? He had shaved and changed his shirt, but there wasn’t much he could do about the bags under his eyes. Stung, he pushed himself out of his chair and went to the wooden counter, where he had stowed the leather satchel full of scrip. He reached down for it, didn’t feel it, and bent over to pull it out. It wasn’t there.

  He straightened up, frowning uneasily. He distinctly remembered putting the satchel under the counter after he had talked to Twyla Sue Mann. But he had to admit to having a little too much of Mickey’s joy juice last night, here at the office, because sometimes Mrs. Beedle knocked on his door and demanded to know if he was smoking, which she didn’t allow for fear that her boarders would fall asleep with a cigarette and set the mattress on fire.

  And to tell the truth, he’d been so blotto that he didn’t even remember going home—although he knew he must have, because that’s where he woke up this morning, sprawled across his bed with his clothes and shoes on, stinking like a barroom. He had probably stashed the satchel somewhere else for safekeeping and forgotten about it.

  In fact, he thought he dimly remembered doing just that while he was under the influence. But where? He turned, looking around the office, which was considerably cleaner today than it had been for some time. Where would he have put it? In the corner, under those boxes?