The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush (3 page)

“You said you were going to tell us whether Mr. George E. Pickett Johnson stole money from the bank,” Bessie replied. “That’s what.”

“No,” Earlynne said, sipping her tea. “She’s going to tell us that he’s going straight to jail for what he did. Where he belongs. And that’s the blessed truth.”

“Oh, but she didn’t say that,” Lizzy put in diffidently. “Not quite, anyway.”

Lizzy was wondering just how much Verna actually knew about the situation. Verna worked all day on the second floor of the courthouse, where she got to hear a lot of things that most of the other Dahlias knew nothing about. In the same way, Lizzy herself, working in Mr. Moseley’s office, knew more about what was going on behind the scenes in Darling than a lot of other people.

But Lizzy and Verna had different approaches to what they heard. Lizzy usually tried to tune out the worst of it, figuring that life would be a little brighter if she didn’t clutter it up with all that dark stuff. The world was full of things she didn’t need to know. When she locked the door to Moseley’s law offices, she left it all behind and went home to her pretty little house and her beautiful garden and her dear cat, Daffodil, and did her best to forget all that unhappiness until the next day.

Verna, on the other hand, had a dim view of human nature to start with. Her suspicions were usually fed by her habit of peering “under the rocks,” as she put it, on the lookout for people’s dirty doings. Since Verna’s job required her to collect the county taxes and pay the county’s bills, her habit usually paid off. It never surprised her to discover that a county employee had helped himself to a load of gravel from the pile out behind the road maintenance building, or that the contractor who built the new road out past the sawmill had double-billed the county for over a hundred hours of labor.

“That’s just people for you,” she’d say with a little shrug. “They’ll do anything they think they can get away with. If you turn a blind eye to their dirty tricks, they’ll figure they can get away with even more.”

Verna never turned a blind eye, though. And when she found out about the gravel or the double-billing, you could bet your bottom dollar that the perpetrators were going to be called to account, even if they were big shots. Big shots had never impressed Verna Tidwell.

“Well, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Mr. Johnson did steal a lot of money,” Bessie said darkly. “I heard that the bank examiners grilled him for hours and hours before they closed the bank.”

“And Hank says that the state attorney’s office has decided to throw the book at him,” Earlynne put in. She looked at Verna. “So what’s going on, Verna? Do tell.”

With a glance at Lizzy, Verna pulled on her cigarette. “What I can tell you,” she said quietly, “is that Voleen Johnson took the train to Montgomery this morning. She says she’s going to stay with her sister for a few weeks.”

The Dahlias pulled in their breaths in a unanimous gasp of surprise, and Bessie said softly, “That does take the cake. You’d think she would stand by her husband, wouldn’t you?”

“Can’t say I’m surprised,” Earlynne said, reaching for another one of Bessie’s cookies. “Voleen Johnson has the backbone of a wet noodle. When her husband is arrested, she won’t be able to hold up her head in this town and she knows it.” She munched. “Bessie, these are the
best
sour cream cookies. I have to get your recipe.”

“Oh, dear,” Lizzy murmured. She had read Verna’s glance, and thought her friend might know more than she was saying. However, Verna had never much liked Voleen Johnson, who was a Dahlia in name only. She usually came to the meetings to cause trouble, rarely offered to roll up her sleeves and help on a workday, and was never,
ever
seen with a speck of garden dirt under her prettily manicured fingernails. The Johnsons lived in the biggest and fanciest house in town, and while they didn’t have as many servants as they used to, Voleen still had two maids and paid a colored gardener to take care of her garden, which included a large greenhouse full of exotic tropical plants. She loved white flowers and—thanks to that fabled greenhouse—saw to it that there was a big bowl of fresh, pure white blossoms in the lobby of the Darling Savings and Trust every morning. Her exotic blooms always took first place at the Cypress County Flower Show, which made some of the Dahlias grumble resentfully that she was taking unfair advantage of her . . . well, her advantages.

Lizzy hadn’t heard about Mrs. Johnson leaving town, and she immediately felt uneasy. Mr. Moseley always insisted that a person was innocent until he was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and even then, his conviction could be overturned on appeal. Guilty didn’t always mean guilty, in the long run.

But Lizzy knew the citizens of Darling well enough to know that the minute Mrs. Johnson climbed on that train, it was as good as a guilty verdict—and one that couldn’t be overturned on appeal. People would decide that she was leaving town because she knew her husband was guilty and she didn’t want to stay and face the music.

Aunt Hetty nodded regretfully. “I’m sorry to be the one to say it, but Voleen should have had better sense. People’s feelings are running high enough the way it is. Her leaving will just make a bad thing worse.”

It was certainly true that feelings in Darling were running high. Coming back from Lima’s Drugstore yesterday afternoon, Lizzy had overheard a conversation between two farmers who were standing out in front of the bank, glaring at the CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign. One of them had gritted his teeth and growled, “Bankers are the damnedest, rottenest liars on God’s green earth.”

And the other had nodded in agreement. “Goldurned shysters and thieves to boot. Somebody oughta take Johnson out behind the woodshed and teach him a thing or two.”

Bessie put her cup down. “Is Mr. Johnson still in jail, Liz?”

“I certainly hope so,” Earlynne said.

Lizzy hesitated. Because of Mr. Moseley’s gag rule, she didn’t feel right, talking about the matter. But what Bessie was asking was a public fact, yes or no. She could answer that, couldn’t she?

“No,” she said. “I mean, well, yes, it’s true that Sheriff Burns took him over to the jail last night, for a little while. But it’s not true that he was arrested. Mr. Moseley went over and had a talk with the sheriff and Mr. Johnson went home.”

She got up to give the rhubarb a good hard stir with the wooden spoon, feeling uncertain. Had she said too much? But Sheriff Burns wasn’t muzzled by Mr. Moseley’s gag rule. He would have told Mrs. Burns, who would have gone straight to the telephone to tell her daughter and her sister-in-law, who were both on the party line.

So all of Darling would know by now that Mr. Johnson was not only a free man, he had never been arrested for doing whatever he might (or might not) have done to get the bank closed. As Mr. Moseley had remarked, what the sheriff needed was evidence, and he didn’t have any.

“At least, not enough,” he had added. “Not yet, anyway.”

Lizzy kept on stirring. She had the feeling that Mr. Moseley’s remark about evidence fell under the gag rule and shouldn’t be repeated. There was a moment’s silence. Her back was turned to the group, but she could feel everybody’s eyes, boring into her shoulder blades like sharp, bright augers.

Finally, Bessie cleared her throat. “Well, you’ve got to hand it to your Mr. Moseley,” she said with some irony. “He does go to bat for his clients. Even the guilty ones.”

Her
Mr. Moseley? Lizzy stirred harder. Why was he
her
Mr. Moseley all of a sudden?

But Aunt Hetty was thinking of something else. “You’re sayin’ Mr. Johnson is at home, all by himself, Liz?” She whistled through the gaps in her front teeth. “That might not be just real smart, you know, dear. I was in Musgrove’s Hardware this morning and heard some folks talking about tar and feathers. If he was in jail, he’d likely be safe. Or if Voleen was at home and they tried to get at him, she could call the sheriff.”

Lizzy turned around. “Tar and feathers!” she exclaimed, horrified. “Oh, my goodness!”

“Well, what do you expect, Liz?” Earlynne demanded crossly. “Whatever that man was up to at the bank, he wasn’t playing tiddlywinks. He did something bad enough to get it
closed
, and not just on ‘holiday,’ either. Everybody in Darling is now in serious trouble. People won’t get their paychecks, so they can’t pay their rent and buy groceries. Why, I’ll bet Hank and I don’t have more than four or five dollars between the two of us.”

“Even if they could buy groceries,” Bessie said glumly, “Mrs. Hancock might not have any to sell. She stocks her shelves on credit from the bank. If she can’t get credit, her suppliers won’t sell her any beans or rice or canned goods or soap or—”

“It was the same thing at the hardware store,” Aunt Hetty said. “I went in to see the new garden tools Mr. Musgrove had ordered—I was thinking of replacing my old spade. But he couldn’t pay for the tools. So when they were delivered, he had to send them back.”

“Hank thought maybe he could borrow some money from one of the banks in Monroeville, to meet this week’s payroll,” Earlynne said. “But with the situation everywhere as bad as it is, they’re limiting credit to depositors only. So that’s out.”

Nobody had to ask what Earlynne meant by “the situation everywhere.” For almost three years, the nation had been plagued by a series of bank panics—“runs,” they were called. People would hear that their bank was in trouble and rush to withdraw their money, which naturally meant that the bank really
was
in trouble. Everybody hoped that things would get better after President Roosevelt took office, but they hadn’t—at least, not yet. The president had decided to close all the national banks in the country until the bank examiners figured out how many assets each bank really had on its books, now that so many factories had closed and businesses had gone bankrupt. Some banks were sound enough to reopen quickly without any help, while others needed a bailout from the Federal Reserve. And there were others that would never open again. Lots of people had been urging President Hoover to set up some kind of federal deposit insurance, so that people’s money wouldn’t go down the drain when their bank closed. But President Hoover hadn’t done it—and it wasn’t clear that President Roosevelt would do it, either. If your bank failed, you were just out of luck. Your money was gone. Gone forever.

But Mr. Johnson had always said that the Darling Savings and Trust was as sound as a gold dollar. And when the president’s official bank holiday was over, back in March, Mr. Johnson was proved right. The Darling Savings and Trust had sailed through the storm like a proud ship, all flags flying. Until last week, that is, when the bank examiners showed up again, and somebody hung the CLOSED sign on the front door and—

“Tar and feathers?” Lizzy whispered to herself, thinking that maybe she should call Mr. Moseley and tell him about this new development. She glanced at Verna, wondering if she would have an opinion about this, and was surprised to see an uncharacteristically wrinkled forehead and a worried look. Verna knew something, Lizzy realized, and whatever it was, it wasn’t pleasant. She probably wouldn’t tell them, either.

But Verna did say something. “Oh, I don’t think it’ll come to that,” she remarked casually.

“Tar and feathers,” Earlynne repeated bitterly, as if Verna hadn’t spoken. “He’ll be lucky if that’s all they do to that—” She shook her head disgustedly. “I’m too much of a lady to say the word I’m thinking.”

Bessie chuckled wryly. “It’s the same word I’m thinking, Earlynne.” Her voice dropped and she sighed heavily. “I just don’t know how any of us are going to manage.”

The others sat silent over their tea and cookies, and even Verna didn’t look at all happy. Like it or not, Bessie was right.

Because the truth was that the whole, entire town of Darling, Alabama, was very nearly out of something that everybody in the world had to have in order to just get along.

They were out of money. Totally, terribly out of money.

The Root of All Evil

Charlie Dickens unlocked the front door of the Darling
Dispatch
and print shop and went inside, pulling in a deep lungful of the perfume of printers’ ink and solvents and newsprint that smacked everybody right in the face the minute they walked in. And which, if you were a newspaperman, was more seductive than any woman’s perfume, anywhere, anytime. His father, who had owned the
Dispatch
before Charlie took it over, always said that once you got that smell in your blood—and on your hair and your clothes—you were a goner. You’d be a newspaperman until your dying day.

But Charlie knew for damned sure that printers’ ink in your blood was no guarantee of happiness, for he himself was not a happy man. Never had been and never would be, especially now. He closed the door and locked it, then yanked down the blind across the front window, shutting out the light and the curious glances of anybody who might be walking past.

Of course, everybody knew that the
Dispatch
and print shop was closed on Saturdays. But the building was on the town square, right on Franklin Street, with Hancock’s Grocery and the Palace Theater to the west, Musgrove’s Hardware and the Darling Diner to the east, and the courthouse across the street. And Saturday was the biggest trading day of the week. It was the day the farmers and their wives and their half-dozen kids piled into the Tin Lizzie or hitched up the mule and put everybody and the dog in the wagon and drove to town to trade their butter and eggs for coffee and flour and sugar and maybe even a Tootsie Roll apiece for the kids, if they minded their manners and didn’t sass.

Once the trading was done, they’d usually take in the matinee at the Palace Theater, if they could afford it, or have a piece of Raylene Riggs’ pie at the diner. And then they’d join the slow-moving parade that strolled around the courthouse square, everybody walking in the same direction, taking it slow and peering into the shops’ display windows, dreaming of what they’d buy if they had money, which was a great big
if
these days, as big and absurdly hopeful as the Empire State Building—the “Empty State Building,” the
New York Times
called it, because some three-quarters of its offices were vacant.

But empty pockets never stopped a dreamer. Kids dreamed of those bright red O-Boy Yo-Yos—“the toy with a big kick for all ages”—in the window of Mr. Dunlap’s Five and Dime. Stopping in front of Mann’s Mercantile, the ladies dreamed of a Singer treadle sewing machine and a couple of yards of pretty print dress cotton, plus maybe a yard or two of lace. The men stood with their hands in their empty pockets, gazing through the window of Kilgore’s Dodge dealership at the classy maroon 1932 Dodge, with its L-head, eight-cylinder engine and downdraft carburetor, imagining themselves racing that powerful machine down the Jericho Road at seventy miles an hour, the wind in their faces, their cares and despairs left far behind.

Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. Dreaming was free, so people could dream big.

But the Darling Savings and Trust had closed the day before and the whole town was out of money, so nobody was buying anything they absolutely did not need, which meant that nobody was selling very much of anything, either. Trading seemed to be the only commerce, but even that was going to come to an end pretty quick, since Mrs. Hancock had put a sign in her window saying that she was completely out of flour and the coffee and sugar were just about gone, too. The matinee seats at the Palace Theater were empty, there was a row of empty stools at the diner, and the parade was taking it slow around the square, everybody peering into the display windows, everybody dreaming and no doubt wondering if they’d have any money in their pockets ever again.

Not bothering to turn on the lights, Charlie Dickens walked around the long wooden counter to his desk. He was temperamentally opposed to being on display, Saturday or any day, but especially today. Today, he was afflicted by the mother of all hangovers, since he had observed the closing of the bank by getting tight as a tick the night before, all by his lonesome. What he needed was a goodly dose of the hair of the dog that bit him, and since he had polished off the bottle he kept in the two upstairs rooms he rented from Mrs. Beedle, he had come to the
Dispatch
to get himself a drink or two or maybe three out of the bottle in his desk, and he intended to do it all by himself and in private, just like last night.

So he went to his desk in the darkened room, sat down in his old tilt-back wooden chair, and took the bottle of Mickey LeDoux’s bootleg white lightning out of his bottom drawer. He pulled out the cork and, with a sigh of pure and affectionate appreciation, took a healthy swig.

Mickey LeDoux ran the sweetest moonshine operation in all of South Alabama, tucked away in a deeply wooded hollow in the hills west of Darling, on Dead Cow Creek. Mickey’s vats and stills were tended by five or six young men, including Mickey’s cousin Tom-Boy LeDoux and another cousin, Baby Mann. Baby (whose real name was Purley Mann) was the youngest son of Archibald and Twyla Sue Mann. He’d been called Baby from the time he was a kid because his hair was baby fine and silvery blond, his face was cherubic, and he was extraordinarily polite and gentle. Folks said that he might not have been at the front of the line when the good Lord was handing out brains, but everybody agreed that he more than made up for it in other ways. Baby had an enormous sympathy for people in need and made no distinctions between the friends who lived in Darling proper or those who lived over in Maysville, on the colored side of the tracks. He’d been known to give away his last dollar to help somebody.

Mickey, who was
not
a man to help those in need, handled the distribution end of the moonshine business. For this, he drove his workhorse Model T Ford, nicknamed Sweet Bess, after his girlfriend, Bessie Dumonde. Sweet Bess was equipped with heavy-duty rear springs that enabled her to carry a hundred gallons at a time without a noticeable belly sag. Her rear seat had been pulled out for extra cargo space, and Mickey and the boys filled it with gallon-size tin cans, each of which, when full of tiger spit, weighed seven pounds. He could pack twenty six-can cases into Sweet Bess’ trunk and backseat, which meant that he was routinely hauling a half ton of highly flammable booze. He preferred the tin cans to the glass jugs that the other shiners used, because he was a daredevil driver and he didn’t want to risk any broken glass bottles when Bess barreled down a rutted road ahead of Chester P. Kinnard, that pesky revenue agent who was making it his life’s mission to put Mickey out of business.

But Mickey wasn’t just a daredevil behind the wheel of his Model T. He was also a master moonshiner. He had taught his crew how to turn the malt into sweet and then sour mash, how to keep the wood fires burning under the pot stills at just the right intensity, and how to pour out the toxic heads and tails of the doublings and bottle up only the middlings, a potent 150 proof liquor fit for the gods, purely wonderful, a fierce and fiery bolt of white lightning that blazed all the way down Charlie’s throat to the pit of his stomach.

And then Mickey hauled this amazing stuff to the nearest secret retail outlet, which was no secret at all. Everybody in Darling—including Sheriff Roy Burns—knew where to go to obtain a bottle of LeDoux’s finest, known by its fans as LeDoux’s Lightning. Mickey’s second cousin, Archie Mann (Baby Mann’s father), kept a stash behind the saddle blankets in the tack room at the rear of Mann’s Mercantile, on the east side of the courthouse square. That’s where you could find it whenever you needed it.

But of course, this was Darling’s very own, well-kept secret. Nobody told Agent Kinnard or his fellow revenue agents, because many people in Darling benefitted from the enterprise, one way or another. Archie and Mickey shared their profits generously with their extended family. They shared with Sheriff Roy Burns, too, who promised to tip them off if Agent Kinnard was planning a raid. Charlie himself had heard the sheriff say that he wasn’t aiming to hit the local shiners. His exact words were, “They can cook up what they want so long as they live decent and don’t bother me none. Some of ’em couldn’t feed their kids if they couldn’t make moon.”

It was a tidy little business and as Archie often said, it didn’t hurt a single soul—except maybe those few who imbibed a mite too much of Mickey’s whiskey. But that was human nature and wasn’t going to change no matter how many revival preachers came through town calling down fire and brimstone on drunkards or how many laws the government tried to impose.

What was changing, however, was the situation. Roosevelt and the Democrats had won on a repeal platform, and Prohibition was on its way out. The Twenty-first Amendment had been proposed only two months before but Michigan had already ratified and Wisconsin was scheduled to ratify the next week. Even Alabama, whose legislature had passed the “bone dry law” way back in 1915, had seen the light and would probably ratify in the summer. FDR had already authorized the sale of near beer and wine, which was the cause of much rejoicing all across the country, and the federal and state governments were already reckoning just how much they were going to collect in the way of liquor taxes.

But repeal wasn’t likely to change Mickey’s recipe for success (Charlie fervently hoped so, anyway), or his and Archie’s business model. Mickey wouldn’t want to comply with whatever licensing requirements the state of Alabama intended to cook up, and Archie wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea of collecting taxes from his friends and turning them over to the state. So the operation would stay dark, hidden away out there in that hollow, with Tom-Boy and Baby Mann cooking up the best mash for miles around and Mickey delivering it to his enthusiastic friends and fans in Darling, Monroeville, and neighboring villages. As far as they were concerned, Mickey and company were God’s own cousins, and deserved to be protected from Agent Kinnard and his deputy agents at all costs.

And protection was necessary. Moonshining was a contest between the canny hunted and the clever hunter, and while moonshiners were wary, watchful, and armed for defense, Kinnard and his kind were determined and resourceful and armed with the law. Kinnard was famous for his smash-and-nab raids, leaving stills in smoking ruins and shiners in handcuffs. He and his men had pillaged three stills over in Monroe County just the previous week, once again putting Alabama at the top of the list of moonshine operations put out of business. Shining could earn the shiner a year, even two, in prison, and stories about their convictions showed up every so often in the local Alabama papers.

But Mickey LeDoux hadn’t been nabbed, thank God, and by God he wouldn’t be, if Charlie had anything to do with it, which he wouldn’t have, since he was just a newspaperman. He leaned back in his chair, propped his feet on his desk, and surveyed the room, which held all the equipment needed to put out the
Dispatch
every Friday—equipment he had inherited from his father, along with the newspaper. Over there against the back wall was the old black Babcock cylinder press, a hulking four-pager that shook the floors and rattled the windows when it was running at top speed. Next to the Babcock was the prewar Linotype machine that Ophelia Snow had learned to operate, even though women were not supposed to be strong enough to pull the big lever. And there was the Miles proof press on the table beside the Linotype; and the marble-topped tables where the pages were made up; and the printers’ cabinets with their drawers full of type fonts; and the stacks of paper, press-ready. And the smaller job press on which he printed the flyers and invoices and business forms that had always filled in the income gaps as newspaper ad revenue waxed and waned. Trouble was, the job printing business was waning, too. Times were bad all over.

Charlie took another swig and belched. The
Dispatch
and print shop was home to him, the only home he had these days, other than Mrs. Beedle’s rooming house, where he was required to take off his shoes and tiptoe up the stairs if he came in after nine o’clock, like a burglar or a guilty husband. If he got tired of playing by Mrs. Beedle’s rules, he could always tell her where she could stuff them and borrow a cot and put it over there in the back corner beside the press—which wasn’t a bad idea, anyway. It would save the five dollars a week he paid Mrs. Beedle for that broom closet she called a bedroom. And the office was just a half block from the tack room at the rear of Mann’s Mercantile, a block from Pete’s Pool Parlor, and two doors west of the Darling Diner, where he ate most of his meals.

Of course, if the bank was closed for much longer, or if (inconceivably) it failed, he wouldn’t have any money to play pool or buy meals or Mickey’s white lightning. But he could probably find a few things that Archie would take in trade, especially since nobody else in town was going to have any money, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Except maybe they would have something they could fill their empty pockets with in the meantime, if Mr. Alvin Duffy was able to pull off his scheme. Thinking of this, Charlie snorted. What Duffy was talking about sounded as illegal as a three-dollar bill. Maybe they’d all end up in the hoosegow, right along with Mr. George E. Pickett Johnson. But Duffy was certainly right when he said that what this town needed was money. Not tomorrow, not next week or next month, but right now. And somebody ought to do something about it.