The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush (9 page)

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Mr. Tombull looked at Charlie. “I reckon it won’t take you more’n a few hours to print us up some of this here scrip,” he said with a false heartiness.

“Reckon it won’t.” Charlie came back to the desk, reached for the bottle, and gulped a couple of swallows.

Jed gave a laugh, an echo of Charlie’s. “Reckon you’d better lock it up in a safe place somewhere until it gets where it’s s’posed to go.”

Charlie snorted and put the bottle down. “You think anybody’s going to break in here and steal a whole lot of worthless paper? Hell, it’s not money. Not even close.”

“I fail to understand,” Mr. Duffy said testily, “what your objections are to this project. It seems to me that we all need to—”

“Yeah. Hang together,” Jed said, resigned.

“Our objections,” Charlie replied dourly, “are to this whole damn mess we’re in, that nobody can see their way out of and nobody wants to get sucked down any deeper into. And we don’t think your Darling Dollars are going to pull us out of it. That’s what our objections are.” He looked at Jed. “Did I get that right, Snow?”

“More or less,” Jed said. “We’re used to every man for himself, I guess. That’s the American way. We don’t want charity.”

“This ain’t charity,” Mr. Tombull objected, past his cigar. “Hell’s bells, no! This is every man gettin’ what he’s earned, so he can turn around and spend it right here in our little town.”

“Yeah, but
that’s
the un-American part,” Jed said energetically. “If I earn a dollar and want to spend it over in Monroeville, by damn it’s my American right to do that. If I want to buy a new pair of boots from Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck, I got a right to do that, too. But this scrip you’re handin’ out means that you’re telling me where I gotta spend it and who I gotta buy from.
That’s
un-American, Mr. Tombull. That’s socialism. Hell, that’s
communism.
And there’s gonna be a whole lot of folks in this town that’s gonna stand up on their hind legs and say so.”

“I say you’re wrong, Jed,” Mr. Tombull said in his bluff, burly way. “Yes, sir, you are wrong. Folks’ll see the wisdom of gettin’ something instead of getting’ nothin’, and they’ll be glad to trade that something for sugar and flour and shoes for the kids, bought right here in Darlin’.” He chuckled. “Even an old hog’s got ’nuff sense of direction to take the shortest way through the thicket.” He leaned forward, raising one pudgy finger. “Compromise, Mr. Mayor, compromise. It’s the first political lesson every one of us has got to learn.”

Verna could see that the men were going to be at it hammer and tongs the whole night long. So she picked up her pocketbook and stood up.

“If the meeting is adjourned, gentlemen,” she said, “I have other things to do.” To Mr. Tombull, she added, “I trust that the county commissioners will do what has to be done to formally authorize the use of scrip for the payroll.”

“Oh, you bet,” Mr. Tombull said with enthusiasm. “We got a meeting tonight, to do just that. You don’t have to come,” he added hastily. “I’ll tell ’em that you’re on board with this.”

Verna nodded. To Mr. Duffy, she said, “And I assume that someone will deliver sufficient scrip to my office in time for Friday’s payroll.”

Mr. Duffy had risen, too. “I’ll bring it myself,” he said gallantly, and smiled at Verna. She noticed that his eyes were gray, and that when he smiled, there were dimples in either cheek. He did not look like a stuffed shirt when he smiled.

Verna’s rising seemed to signal the end of the meeting, and all the men stood up. Charlie took another swig from his bottle, Mr. Tombull and Jed continued their disagreement, and Mr. Moseley began to empty out his pipe. Mr. Duffy put his hand on Verna’s elbow and escorted her to the door.

“I want to thank you for being so cooperative,” he said, opening the door for her. “You’re showing the others how this can be done. Your example will get the program off to a good start.” His glance and the almost intimate tone of his voice made them colleagues, as if they were somehow united against an opposing force. “A great many people are going to find this hard to accept. Your part in it may actually make the difference between the success and failure of the program.”

“I’m glad to help,” Verna said, and was absurdly glad that she had thought to put on that red lipstick.

They were outside now, on the sidewalk, and the courthouse clock was striking six, startling the flock of gray pigeons roosting in the tower. Verna glanced up at the sky. It had clouded over completely, a thick, threatening blue-gray. The breeze from the south was stronger now, and old Hezekiah came hurrying out the courthouse’s basement door to take down the flag.

“It’s looking like rain,” Mr. Duffy said. “My car is parked in front of the bank. May I drop you somewhere?”

Verna was unexpectedly tempted. She remembered what Myra May had said about Mr. Duffy being “slick,” whatever that meant, but she had seen nothing during the meeting that gave her any special apprehension. She lived only a few blocks away, down Robert E. Lee, and she always looked forward to walking home from work, passing in front of the familiar houses and yards, enjoying the flowers and the neighborhood children who played in the street. But that dark sky was certainly ominous. And she hadn’t failed to notice that Mr. Duffy’s hand on her elbow felt surprisingly natural and pleasantly protective, although of course there was nobody on Darling’s courthouse square or the surrounding streets that she needed protection
from
. Still, with Myra May’s caution in mind, she resisted the temptation.

“It’s not far,” she said. “If I hurry, I can beat the rain.”

But just at that moment, like a signal from the heavens above, there was a blinding flash of lightning and a sharp crack of thunder, and without thinking, she flinched and turned her head toward Mr. Duffy’s shoulder.

He tightened his grip on her elbow. “That settles it,” he said authoritatively. “I am driving you home. And if Mr. Tidwell objects, I’ll be glad to explain to him that I refused to allow his wife to get drenched—or struck by lightning. So come along, please. I’m not in the habit of taking no for an answer.”

Verna opened her mouth to object and found that she had no objection, especially since it really was beginning to rain. Moving swiftly, with long, emphatic strides, Mr. Duffy steered her along the sidewalk in the direction of the bank, and Verna had to run to keep up with him.

“There is no Mr. Tidwell,” she half gasped as they crossed the street at the corner. She wasn’t certain whether her breathlessness was caused by their fast pace or by . . . something else. Something entirely new and utterly astonishing.

“I’m sorry,” he said contritely. “That was thoughtless of me. I should have asked. I didn’t think—” He stopped beside a 1932 four-door Oldsmobile, painted an elegant maroon with shiny black fenders and polished chrome bumpers and trim. “Here we are,” he said, and opened the passenger door.

Another lightning flash and almost simultaneous thunderclap startled them both and Verna quickly slipped inside. The rain was coming down quite hard now, and he slammed the door and ran around the car to the driver’s side.

“I am truly sorry,” he said again, sliding under the wheel. He brushed the raindrops out of his hair and put the key in the ignition, giving her a sidelong glance. “You’re widowed?” He hesitated imperceptibly. “Divorced?”

“I’m a widow,” Verna said, meeting his eyes. “And there’s no need to apologize, really. It was a long time ago. I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it.”

Mr. Duffy looked at her for a long moment. “I don’t understand why.” Sounding half amused, he added, as if to himself, “These local fellows—what’s wrong with them? They haven’t got eyes?”

Verna felt herself coloring. And for once in her life, she couldn’t think of a single word to say.

Lizzy’s Life Changes—Forever

The old-fashioned grandfather clock struck six and Elizabeth Lacy looked up from her Underwood typewriter, startled. She had been concentrating so hard on her typing that she had lost all track of time. It really was
not
six, though. She always set the clock exactly seven minutes fast so Mr. Moseley (who was inclined to be late for almost every appointment) wouldn’t be late for hearings in the courthouse across the street.

She finished the last page of the brief she was working on and pulled it out of the typewriter. Mr. Moseley would need it for tomorrow morning’s hearing before Judge McHenry, where he was representing Silas Ford. Poor Mr. Ford had lost his right hand in a sawmill accident and was trying to get Ozzie Sherman—the owner of the Pine Mill Creek Sawmill—to pay his medical expenses. Mr. Moseley was arguing that the accident was really Mr. Sherman’s fault, since he had known for weeks that the saw’s cutoff switch was faulty and hadn’t bothered to get it fixed.

Mr. Sherman, on the other hand (represented by that old windbag George Lukens), was arguing that Silas Ford hadn’t paid attention to the CAUTION sign posted over the switch, which announced in big red letters that there was a problem with it and anybody who used it should be careful. The best thing, of course, would have been workmen’s compensation, but Mr. Ford (according to Mr. Sherman) was a self-employed contractor. That was true for most of the men who worked at the sawmill, which Mr. Moseley said was cheating—a dishonest way for Ozzie Sherman to use a loophole in the law to avoid paying money into the workmen’s compensation system. Mr. Moseley said it was wrong of Ozzie Sherman to get around the law that way. “Trying to figure some folks out is like guessing at the direction of a rat hole underground,” he said, and shook his head in disgust.

Lizzy fervently hoped Mr. Moseley would win the case, so Silas Ford wouldn’t lose his house as well as his hand, which was probably what would happen if Mr. Sherman wasn’t forced to pay the medical bills and chip in something for the missing hand. Mr. Ford didn’t have a job now, since nobody wanted a one-handed ex–sawmill operator and there wasn’t much else he knew how to do.

Lizzy stacked the pages of the brief, clipped them into the usual green folder, and carried the folder into Mr. Moseley’s office to put it on his desk. For the past hour, he’d been downstairs in the
Dispatch
office, meeting with Mr. Tombull and Mr. Duffy and Mayor Jed Snow about the scrip Mr. Duffy wanted to substitute for money: Darling Dollars, it would be called. Jed was opposed to the plan, which was supposed to be temporary—at least, that’s what people would be told. But Lizzy had overheard Mr. Duffy telling Mr. Moseley that once the scrip got into circulation, it was likely to be around for quite some time.

Mr. Moseley planned to go home after the meeting, so Lizzy went into his office to close his wooden blind. She stood for a moment gazing at the imposing Cypress County courthouse across the street. Built of brick more than a quarter century before, it sat in the middle of the town square, under a white-painted dome and a stately clock tower. It was surrounded by several large tulip trees (
Liriodendron tulipifera,
Miss Rogers would insist), an apron of bright green spring grass, and the staked-out spot on the lawn where the Dahlias planned to plant a quilt garden—flowers planted in a familiar quilt pattern, in red, yellow, blue, and white. The club maintained several flower beds around their little town, believing that when times were tough, a few pretty blossoms went a long way toward brightening the dark days. And since most of the seeds were saved from the previous year’s flowers, all it cost was a few hours and a little bit of digging.

A storm was blowing up from the south and Lizzy was glad that she had brought her umbrella to work that morning. As she stood at the window, the courthouse clock struck six, startling a flock of gray pigeons out of the shelter of the tower. The basement door opened and old Hezekiah, the courthouse’s colored custodian, hurried out to pull down the American flag before the rain arrived. Lizzy appreciated Hezzy’s efforts, for she hated to see the splendid Star Spangled Banner hanging out in the rain. The flag always seemed to her to represent what was true and good about this country. Like the courthouse itself, but maybe even more so, it stood for the law and justice that held America together like a special kind of glue.

When she had first come to work in Mr. Moseley’s law office, right after high school, Lizzy had been naïve enough to think that the law was black and white and right in every respect, and if you were a good citizen you always obeyed it, not just because you didn’t want to get in trouble but because doing what was wrong was . . . well, it was
wrong.
The law said so.

But the longer she worked here and the more she saw of the law in action, the more she understood that this just wasn’t true. The law was hundreds of shades of gray, not black and white, and sometimes it was outright wrong instead of right—like that legal loophole that Ozzie Sherman was using to avoid paying workmen’s compensation for the men at the sawmill. Or as Mr. Moseley liked to say, “All the justice in the world isn’t fastened up in that old courthouse over there, Lizzy my girl. Sometimes the law works better when it’s bent just a little.”

Lizzy wasn’t going to think about that right now, however. She had a date with Grady Alexander at seven and it was time to go home. She closed Mr. Moseley’s blind and went back to the outer office, where she covered her Underwood, checked that the hot plate was unplugged, and took one last look around, making sure that everything was ready for the next morning’s work.

She loved the special character of this old room, with its creaky wooden floor, glass-fronted bookcases, and wood-paneled walls hung with certificates and diplomas and the somber, gilt-framed portraits of the three deceased senior Moseleys—Mr. Moseley’s great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father. The junior Mr. Moseley, however, stubbornly refused to have his portrait—or even a photograph—taken.

“All traditions have to come to an end sometime,” he said firmly. “And I am putting a stake through the heart of this one right now. Anybody wants to know what I look like, they can by God take a gander at my
face,
not at my portrait.”

But he left the portraits hanging, he said, as a reminder that “the sins of the fathers are forever with us, especially in the goldurned South.” Then he’d shaken his head dejectedly and muttered something that Lizzy didn’t quite understand: “Forever and forever. We’ll never be free of them.” But then, Mr. Moseley often said things that Lizzy didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

By the time she closed the door and went down the outer stairs to the street, the rain had stopped, and Lizzy was glad. She and Grady were driving over to Monroeville to see
Grand Hotel,
with Greta Garbo and John Barrymore, and she didn’t want to get her hair all wet and straggly. Just in case, she put up her pink umbrella against any stray drops and turned left and hurried east on Franklin past the
Dispatch
. She noticed that the newspaper office was closed and dark, and she wondered how the meeting had gone and whether Jed Snow had gotten over his objections to the Darling Dollars. Passing Musgrove’s Hardware, she saw that Mr. Musgrove still hadn’t changed his window display, maybe because he didn’t have any new merchandise, as Aunt Hetty had said, since he couldn’t pay for it. And then the diner, with Myra May behind the counter, where only two people were seated—not a very good crowd for this time of evening. In the old days, before all this trouble, every seat at the counter was filled and most of the tables. Lizzy would have gone in to say hi and maybe buy a piece of Raylene’s pie for supper, but she was already late. So when Myra May looked up, she just waved and went on across Robert E. Lee and east toward home.

This section of Darling had always been pretty, and even though the houses were small, their owners had kept them neatly painted, with flowers along the walks and the lawns mowed and trimmed. In the dusky evenings, folks sat in their porch swings or their rocking chairs, reading the newspaper or crocheting an afghan and watching the neighborhood girls playing jacks and jumping rope and the boys swatting baseballs in the dusty street. In the spring, the windows would always be open and you could hear radios playing through the evening air. People liked
The Fred Allen Show
and Jack Benny for comedy and
The Carnation Contented Hour
for music, and when you walked down the street, you could sometimes hear a little of both.

Lately, though, Lizzy had noticed a change. The houses needed painting, the yards weren’t as tidy, and people didn’t sit on their porches so much. You could still hear the radios and the scene looked serene—until you noticed that the porch roof on Mrs. Friedman’s house had blown off in a January windstorm and hadn’t been replaced. That was because the bank had foreclosed on the house and Mrs. Friedman was living in Selma with her sister. And on the other side of the street, Mr. Harrison’s house had been vacant so long that the honeysuckle completely covered the front window and the FOR SALE sign had fallen facedown. Old Mr. Harrison had died and the little house looked lonely and deserted and desperately in need of rescue. Lizzy, who loved little houses, wished somebody
would buy it and give it the tender, loving care it deserved.

Usually, Lizzy sauntered along the street. But Grady would soon be there and she was in a hurry to get home. So she walked fast, thinking about what she was going to wear to the movies and looking forward to the ride to Monroeville on such a nice spring evening. She hadn’t seen Grady in a week or so, and she wanted to catch up on all his news.

A few moments later, she was climbing the front porch steps of her house and greeting her sweet orange cat, Daffodil, who always sat on the porch swing, waiting for her. Daffy jumped down and followed her as she unlocked the green-painted front door and stepped inside, feeling the special pleasure that always settled over her like a comfortable shawl when she stepped into the tiny front hall. She had wallpapered it with tiny pink roses on a white background and hung a gold-framed oval mirror she’d rescued from a pile of discards when Mr. Harrison’s son had cleaned out his house. The mirror was hung beside a row of brass-plated coat hooks, where she kept her ragged green sweater and her straw garden hat.

Her house had been a “rescue,” too. It had belonged to old Mr. Flagg, who had lived across the street from Lizzy and her mother for as long as she could remember. After he died, the dilapidated frame bungalow was put up for sale. Through Mr. Moseley, Lizzy had arranged to buy it—without saying a word to her mother about what she was doing. She was afraid her mother would interfere. And she was half afraid that her mother would try to stop her. It was better to hire workmen and get the place entirely finished and ready to move in, and
then
tell her. So all Mrs. Lacy could do was watch the renovations and wonder out loud who in the world was putting all that work and money into that little old house.

And it
was
little. In fact, it was a miniature, like a little dollhouse. It had a postage-stamp parlor, a minute kitchen, two small upstairs bedrooms with slanted ceilings, a narrow front porch just wide enough for a white-painted porch swing, and a little screened-in back porch. But the backyard was ten times bigger than the house, with sunflowers and a fig tree and pink roses on the trellis, and a kitchen garden just a step away from the back porch. As far as Lizzy was concerned, her dollhouse was perfect, and it was perfect because it was
hers
.

Mrs. Lacy had always been a domineering mother, and when she found out that it was her daughter
who had bought the old house and renovated it—without so much as a by-your-leave—she pitched a fit. A widow, Mrs. Lacy had planned that Elizabeth, her only child, would live with her until she got married, and then she would have a home to go to when she couldn’t (or didn’t want to) manage for herself—not a plan that Lizzy could endorse with any enthusiasm. And even though her new house wasn’t quite far enough away to serve as an escape from her mother’s daily interference—it was, after all, just across the street—it gave Lizzy at least some of the privacy she craved.

And that privacy was her deepest joy. For the first time in her thirty-plus years, Lizzy held the key to her own life. She could step into her own sweet little house, close the door behind her, and be perfectly at home. Lizzy didn’t need company: she loved books and dreamed of one day writing one herself. And if she wanted to hear a human voice, she could talk to Daffy, who never ever talked back.

But while the house was plenty big enough for Lizzy and her cat, it wasn’t big enough for two people, and therein lay the rub, at least as far as Grady Alexander saw it. He and Lizzy had been dating for several years, and if he’d had his way, they would have been married by now—if only she hadn’t gone and installed herself in a miniature house that would be a very tight fit for a man and his wife, not to mention a man and his wife and his sons (and maybe a daughter or two or three, if the sons were slow in coming).