The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

Hoping to keep her job, he thought then, and his condescension disappeared with a jolt. Miss Rogers struck him as the kind of woman who lived for her part-time job at the little library. But he knew from his attendance at the town council meetings that there wasn’t likely to be a library much longer. City revenues were down all over Alabama, and the libraries were among the first victims to fall to the budget-cutting ax. It was a damned shame, but that’s how things were these days. Unless some sugar daddy came along and bailed them out, Miss Rogers and the library were about to come to the end of the road, at least until the economy turned around. And Charlie hadn’t seen any sugar daddies loitering around outside.

“Thanks,” Charlie said in reply to her question. “I’m not looking for anything special.” He didn’t want to be bothered by a fidgety old lady fussing around, trying to show him this or that just to prove that she was earning her pittance of a salary. “I’ll just browse through the books, if that’s okay.”

She nodded, trying not to look disappointed, and Charlie went into the other, larger room, where floor-to-ceiling bookshelves covered all four walls, with two rows of back-to-back waist-high shelves down the middle. Until last year, the council had always set aside a few dollars for new book purchases. That wasn’t happening this year, but the Ladies Club and the Dahlias’ garden club had got together and raised some money with an auction and variety show. (Charlie didn’t have much use for ladies’ clubs, but occasionally they did something he approved of. Raising money for library books was one of them.)

Miss Rogers had put the money to good use. She had bought The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (which Charlie had tried to read but got exasperated after the first dozen pages and gave it up); A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (an easier novel that Charlie had checked out more than once); and Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, who wrote in something called a stream-of-consciousness style that made Charlie dizzy. If you had a story to tell, just by golly tell the damn thing, he thought, with the impatience of the born newspaperman, and stop meandering around. The other books Miss Rogers had bought were more to Charlie’s liking—a mystery by a novice writer named Ellery Queen, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, and a new S. S. Van Dine. It appeared that Miss Rogers was as fond of a good mystery as any of the Darlingians who frequented the little library.

But it wasn’t the newer titles that interested Charlie, not today, anyway. Several years before, Miss Rogers had reshelved all the books according to the Dewey Decimal System. The history books were all in the nine hundreds, so that’s where he started browsing. There were titles on Roman history, British history, and American history. And, yes, as he had expected, there was nearly a full shelf of Civil War history, including a leather-bound copy of a book called My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington by R. O’Neale Greenhow, published in London in 1863; a collection of newspaper clippings pasted into a flimsy scrapbook; and a history of Civil War battles written by an obscure Confederate officer. He carried all three books to the desk, expecting that Miss Rogers would object to his taking the scrapbook, which looked as if it might disintegrate when the pages were turned.

But she only gave his gatherings a puzzled look, cautioned him to be very careful not to lose any pages of the scrapbook, and wrote his name and the due date on the white cards in the front of the books, then filed them in the tin box on the corner of her desk.

“Two weeks,” she said, handing them back to him and adding, with an enigmatic significance, “I hope you’ll find what you’re looking for, Mr. Dickens.”

Charlie was still trying to figure out what that was supposed to mean as he walked around the building and nearly stumbled over Miss Fannie Champaign, who was kneeling in the path, tending a flower bed. She was wearing a pale green straw garden hat decorated with green silk roses. Beside her was a basket half filled with weeds.

She straightened up and looked at him, and he was struck once again by how pretty she was. Not beautiful, no, not that, but pretty in a comfortable sort of way, with the look of a woman who was at home with who she was and how she had got there. Miss Champaign had come to Darling some two or three years before. Many Darlingians had been deeply curious about her, especially since she was a single woman with no visible means of support and no friends and relations to welcome her to town. People were too polite to ask, but the questions were on everyone’s mind, for she was something of a mystery. Where did she get her money? Why had she come to Darling? Charlie had heard that she had been engaged once, when she was much younger, and that her work as a milliner often took her to Mobile and beyond, where she sold her hats to wealthy customers in fancy shops. More than that, he didn’t know, although of course he was as curious as anybody else.