The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush (12 page)

The Dahlias were still very loyal, of course, although several of them (Bessie Bloodworth, for one, and Mildred Kilgore and Myra May Mosswell) had cut back on their visits, coming only twice a month instead of once a week. Beulah had reduced her price for a shampoo and set from thirty-five cents to twenty-five, which was the price of a movie ticket. But if it came down to choosing between Clark Gable (
Red Dust
had played at the Palace the week before) and a shampoo and set, most Darling women would rather have Clark Gable—although with the bank closing, they might not even have
him
. How long would the Palace be able to stay open? Worse yet, how long would there be enough beauty work at the Bower for both Beulah and Bettina? Would she have to let Bettina go?

But Beulah never liked to meet trouble halfway. She turned off the rinse water, turbaned Twyla Sue, and helped her sit upright.

“Well, now,” she said brightly, “you just go sit in that chair, Miz Mann, and we’ll get you all beautiful for your niece’s wedding. And you can tell us what you are going to wear.”

“I thought my peach silk foulard with the georgette jabot, which I got from the latest Sears catalog,” Twyla said. “But I don’t know about a hat.”

“You go right on over to Fannie Champaign,” Beulah advised, drying her hands on a towel. “She’ll come up with a hat that’ll do you proud.”

“Oh, she’s back in town?” Twyla Sue asked. “I hadn’t heard. I’ll do that right after I take the wedding announcement over to the newspaper. I want to be sure it runs in Friday’s
Dispatch
.”

*   *   *

After Charlie Dickens had given the matter careful thought, he came to the conclusion that Alvin Duffy’s plan to issue scrip was about the only alternative the town had left, given the looming emergency. In his usual skeptical fashion, he doubted that anything they tried would have a great deal of effect. But he supposed it was only prudent to try
something
.

So while he still didn’t much like the idea, he took the printing order that Duffy handed him, set up the job press (which was almost old enough to have printed handbills calling for men to join the Confederate army and fight the Yankees), and spent all of Tuesday morning printing and trimming ten thousand dollars’ worth of scrip, in colorful denominations: yellow ones, red fives, purple tens, and green twenties.

Duffy wasn’t picking up the print job until the next day, so Charlie searched on the shelves in the back for something to put it in, something easy to carry. He found the brown decal-plastered satchel he’d used when he traveled in Europe after the Great War. When he looked at it, he remembered the nostalgic, half-sad words of a long-ago song, sung by the doughboys who marched off to war. “Good-bye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square! It’s a long, long way to Tipperary, but my heart’s right there.”

Whistling the tune between his teeth, he stacked the scrip on the counter, by denomination. He was bundling it into manageable packets to store in the satchel when the door opened and Archie Mann’s wife, Twyla Sue, came in. A heavyset woman with multiple chins and saggy upper arms, she worked behind the counter at Mann’s Mercantile and handled the store’s bookkeeping. When Archie hosted the weekly poker game, she always served a big batch of ham sandwiches with her own homemade whiskey mustard for the players. The mustard won Charlie’s heart, and when he told her how good it was, she gave him a jar of it.

Her eyes widened when she saw the bundles of scrip on the counter. “My goodness, Mr. Dickens,” she breathed. “What on God’s little green earth is all that?”

“Funny money, Mrs. Mann,” Charlie said, and put three more bundles of twenties into the satchel. “I’ve been printing it up for Mr. Duffy at the bank. He promises that people will be glad to spend it like the real thing.” He paused. “I suppose Archie is anxious for people to spend it over at the Mercantile.”

“Well, yes, I have to say he is. Ever since he heard about it, he’s felt a little better. The trouble is that people are holding on to whatever cash they have. Mr. Mann says he doesn’t know if this scrip money will do the trick, but we have to try everything once.” She opened her pocketbook, ducking her head in an embarrassed fashion. “I’m real sorry to have to ask this again, but I wonder if you could run this week’s Mercantile ad on credit, same as you did last week. We’ll pay you as soon as the money starts coming in again.”

Charlie frowned. Over the past few days, half of his advertisers had come to him with the same question. “As soon as people start spending their scrip, you mean,” he said with resignation. “And then I suppose you’ll pay me in scrip.”

“It’s not a dirty word, you know,” Mrs. Mann said reproachfully. “But we probably have something on the shelves you could take in trade. A new dress shirt, maybe. We’ve got some in just your size.” Without waiting for his answer, she pulled the advertising copy out of her big red pocketbook. “We’d like our usual half page. Here are next week’s sale items.” She put the handwritten sheet of paper on the counter.

Charlie raised an eyebrow. Trade, by golly. But it wasn’t a dress shirt he had in mind. It was a bottle or two of Mickey’s finest. Good as gold, it was—and just about as legal, since keeping gold was now against the law. He was tickled by the idea that booze and gold were on equal footing as far as the government was concerned, and he suppressed a smile as he picked up the ad copy and scanned it. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll bill you for a half page and we can dicker. I’d rather take trade than scrip, as long as I can choose what I want.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Mann said gratefully. She closed her pocketbook and half turned, then turned back. “Oh, I almost forgot!” She opened her pocketbook again and took out another handwritten sheet. “It’s a wedding announcement,” she added with a diffident smile. “Kind of interesting, actually.”

With a sigh, Charlie reached for the paper. Once upon a time, far back in the dim, distant past, he had been a newspaperman, a
real
newspaperman. He had written feature stories for the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
and the
Baltimore Sun
—undercover stories, investigative stories, in-depth stories that challenged the status quo and made people think. He had dug up dirt on local politicians, blown the whistle on some serious police corruption, and triggered a federal investigation that ended with a big-time crime boss going to jail. Unfortunately, that last adventure hadn’t set too well with some of the powers that be, and Charlie had found himself out of a job.

And then his father—the longtime owner and editor of the Darling
Dispatch
—had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and Charlie had come home to see him through his last days. The old man died a couple of months after the stock market took its final, fatal dive, and after a futile year of trying, Charlie decided that finding another newspaper job was impossible. He might as well stay where he was for the duration. He had no illusions about living happily ever after in Darling, which (he said) was nothing more than a two-bit Southern town that figured it was worth twenty-five dollars. Taking over the
Dispatch
and print shop wasn’t a very alluring prospect, either, since he had no experience in running an antique newspaper press or managing a rural newspaper with a shrinking subscription list, weak advertising, and a faltering job printing business on the side. But as his father used to say, a blind mule isn’t afraid of the dark, so here he was, groping his way from one day to the next, reduced to printing phony money for the town banker and running wedding announcements that were “kind of interesting.”

But when he looked at the paper Mrs. Mann had handed him, he found it interesting, indeed. “Grady Alexander is marrying
who
?”

“Mr. Mann’s brother’s daughter Sandra,” Mrs. Mann replied. “From the other side of Monroeville, out by Rocky Bottom.” Smiling, she patted her wiry gray curls, which looked as if they’d been stiffened with lacquer. “The wedding is on Saturday, two in the afternoon. It’s just the family, but since Grady is from here, Mr. Mann and I thought his friends ought to know, and I wasn’t sure that Mrs. Alexander would think to put it in the paper.”

Charlie heard the smugness in her voice and could guess why. Hooking Grady Alexander into the extended Mann family was something to brag about, since Grady had been to college and had a paying job as the county ag agent—steady, too, as long as government money held out. The Manns might own the Mercantile, but the family had something of a questionable reputation, darkened by their association with Mickey Ledoux’s moonshine business and the fact that their oldest boy, Leroy, belonged to Tiny French’s notorious gang of bank robbers. No wonder Mrs. Mann wanted to make sure that the wedding announcement ran in the
Dispatch
. It was an advertisement that the Manns had come up in the world. They were becoming respectable, if only by marriage.

But Charlie was also thinking of Liz Lacy, who worked upstairs in Bent Moseley’s law office. She and Grady had been going together ever since Charlie returned to Darling. What had happened to break them up? What had sent Grady rushing into marriage with somebody else? But the minute he asked himself that question, he thought he had the answer.

“Saturday,” he mused speculatively. “That’s pretty quick, now, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Mann’s averted gaze confirmed his suspicion. “Well, they’re both of ’em grown-ups,” she replied defensively. “I reckon if they wanted to get married this afternoon, they could do it.”

“Reckon they could,” Charlie said. He thought again, regretfully, of Liz, whom he knew quite well. She wrote the “Garden Gate” column for the paper—a good writer with a talent worth developing. And a sweet girl.

Well, not a girl, exactly. Liz was in her thirties, what some unkindly people in this town would call an old maid. She was the one who was going to suffer over this, and Charlie felt unexpectedly sorry for her.

Then, just as unexpectedly (for Charlie had never thought of himself as even remotely sensitive to the feelings of others), he made the connection. Fannie Champaign had suffered when he had so brutally rejected her. He remembered Fannie’s hurt with great remorse and was deeply sorry that Liz had to feel that same pain—and perhaps even a worse pain, if Grady and his wife-to-be were expecting, as they likely were. If not, why the rush? Grady’s betrayal would be a terrible humiliation for Liz. He wondered if the fellow understood this, and doubted it. Grady Alexander was amiable enough and smart in his way, but he wasn’t (in Charlie’s opinion) a very deep thinker.

On the other side of the counter, Mrs. Mann shifted from one foot to the other, began to speak, then thought better of it and stopped. Then, finally deciding, came out with a change of subject.

“I was wondering,” she said tentatively, “if you’d have any work for Purley, or know where he might could find some.”

For a moment, Charlie was stumped. “Purley?”

Reddening, Mrs. Mann clutched her pocketbook. “Baby. Maybe you call him . . . Baby.”

“Oh, yes, Purley,” Charlie said. Baby was six feet tall and two-hundred-plus pounds, but he was more like a little kid than a grown man. “Sorry. Of course I know Ba—er, Purley.”

Everybody in Darling knew Baby, and liked him, too, for his easygoing, affable ways and big heart. Charlie had once seen him go into the Five and Dime, buy a painted wooden whirligig, and give it to the little boy who’d been staring longingly at the very same toy in the window.

But Baby’s guileless, trusting nature also made him the butt of jokes. Charlie had watched him playing pool with Len Wheeler and Baby’s cousin Freddie Mann at Pete’s Pool Parlor not long ago, and had seen Len and Freddie making fun of the way he was mooning over Jessellyn, Pete’s eighteen-year-old daughter. Afterward, Charlie felt that he should have stepped in and stopped them. It was rotten to take advantage of that young man’s naïve good nature. Of course, if Baby had wanted to retaliate, he could have mopped up the floor with both of them, since he was twice their size and strong as an ox. But if it bothered him, he didn’t show it.

Mrs. Mann had more to say, and the rest of it came out in a tumble of words. “I know Purley’s a little slow, Mr. Dickens, but once he gets the hang of a job, he’s a real steady worker. I thought since Zipper Haydon quit, you might need somebody to . . . well, sweep up around here.” Her eyes went to the untidy stack of papers on the shelf behind the counter. “Neaten things up a bit. He might help out with the press, too. He’s good with . . . things like that.”

Things like that.
Mrs. Mann must be talking about Baby’s proficiency as a moonshiner. Charlie failed to see how a newspaper press was like a whiskey still, but he had to admit that the place was a mess. Zipper had left the previous summer and it hadn’t been cleaned since then. Charlie always said he didn’t have time to do it, and he hated to ask Ophelia Snow to sweep and dust and wipe off the counter. She already did triple duty as reporter and ad saleswoman and Linotype operator.

But there was a good reason to stay clear of Baby. “Purley’s working for Mickey LeDoux, isn’t he?” Charlie asked. He didn’t want to get crosswise of Mickey, who wielded a lot of clout in Cypress County and beyond. And anyway, a person who already had a job would have to be crazy to leave it just now, with things the way they were. Mickey probably paid pretty good money, since managing a still was a perilous business. The fire had to be watched constantly, for if it got too hot, the steam could build up and the still could explode. More than one shiner had been dispatched to meet his Maker by a carelessly caused and unexpected fiery blast. And of course there was Chester P. Kinnard and his boys, who were always on the lookout for shiners. The Feds had a habit of shooting first and taking names later, especially if they suspected that the shiner was carrying a derringer in the pocket of his overalls.

“Well, he
was
working for Mickey,” Mrs. Mann said. “Up until day before yesterday.”

“Oh?” Charlie asked, more than a little interested.

Mrs. Mann nodded. “Mickey’s youngest brother, Rider, is of an age to work now, and Mrs. LeDoux said it seemed right to bring him into the business—keep it closer in the family, you know. Anyway, it came down to a choice between Purley and Tom-Boy, and Mickey kept Tom-Boy and let Purley go. Not that I objected in the slightest,” she added hurriedly. “I never let on that I worried, but it didn’t seem right that a young man as gentle as Purley ought to be out there working with . . . well, that rowdy bunch.”