The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose

He reached the corner of Robert E. Lee and Dauphin, at the southeast corner of the square, by the Old Alabama Hotel. He stopped for a moment, glancing up at the clock on the courthouse bell tower. Nine forty-five, not that late, and still no rain. Instead of going back to his flat, he could drop in at Pete’s and play another game of pool. Or he could walk over to the Dispatch office and catch up on the work he’d set aside in favor of those Civil War books he’d got from the library. He decided on the office. Since he was a kid, he’d always been a night owl. He’d liked working after hours, when everybody else had gone home to bed and the bright lights were a barricade against the dark outside the window, which he always knew was there, even when he couldn’t see it. Working nights, a guy didn’t get interrupted. A guy could think long thoughts, put some meat on the bones of his prose. Could have a drink or two, some smokes—writing went better with booze and a cigarette. What’s more, there was an umbrella in the office. If it was raining when he finally left, he’d go home dry.

He picked up his pace, passing the courthouse. On the right, on the other side of the street, was Kilgore Motors, the local Dodge dealership. The lights were off and the place was dark, but Charlie knew what was in the showroom. He’d had a look the previous week, a long look, since looking didn’t cost a red cent. Didn’t cost anything to sit under the wheel and dream, either. And there’d been plenty to dream about. The latest DH Six four-door sedan, two-tone mint green and teal blue, with black fenders and running boards, enough shiny chrome to break your heart, an ebony-paneled dashboard, and wire wheels with adjustable spokes and nonskid balloon tires. Roger Kilgore claimed it would do ninety on a good straightaway, and Charlie didn’t doubt it. All for only $865—although there weren’t many people in Darling who had that kind of money to blow on an auto. Mr. Johnson at the Darling Savings and Trust, maybe. Or one of the bootleggers, who wanted a car that would pull away fast and hold its own in a hot chase. Charlie certainly didn’t have it—his pockets were empty. The Dispatch might turn a profit someday, but not yet.

Past Kilgore’s was Mann’s Mercantile, and kitty-cornered, Musgrove’s Hardware. There were no lights in any of the businesses—except upstairs over the diner, where Myra May and her friend Violet lived with Violet’s little girl. And while he couldn’t see the back of the diner from here, he knew there was a light in the office of the telephone exchange, where somebody was on round-the-clock duty at the switchboard.

It had just started to rain when Charlie crossed the street to the Dispatch office, unlocked the door, and went in, flicking on the light switch, inhaling (as he always did) the sharp scent of printer’s ink, paper, and cigarette smoke. He surveyed the room: the old black Babcock cylinder press, a four-pager, against the back wall; the prewar Linotype machine that only Zipper Haydon knew how to operate, with the Miles proof press on the table beside it; the old Prouty job press; the sturdy marble-topped tables where the pages were made up; the printers’ cabinets; the stacks of paper, press ready; and his battered desk with its tower of overflowing wooden in-boxes.

More overflow than Charlie liked to see, really, especially when he had just three days to get this week’s paper out and Zipper coming in tomorrow to start setting columns. He turned on the green-shaded lamp on the corner of his desk, sat down, and opened the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk, taking out a full bottle of Mickey LeDoux’s corn whiskey—white dog, some of the locals called it, or tiger spit, or chain lightning—and a glass. He poured and downed it, neat and fast. It wasn’t sipping whiskey. It was gettin’-drunk whiskey, not the kind you were inclined to savor at the back of your throat.

He wiped a hand across his mouth. Thus fortified, he was ready to pick up where he had left off on the editorial for Friday’s paper. He would a whole lot rather be working on Ruthie Brant’s story, but he hadn’t yet figured out a way to verify the auditor’s report of the missing money. So he was writing about the state of the cotton market, the drought, and the job market. He planned to end his editorial with Herbert Hoover’s pie-in-the-sky presidential promise to put two and a half million people back to work. The unemployment rate was now fifteen percent and still rising. Where were those two and a half million jobs? he would ask. Still buried under Hoover’s hopeful imagination, he’d answer. There was no way to conjure them up unless the federal government put some muscle and money behind the effort. But Hoover wanted to depend on private business to come up with the jobs, and look where that was getting them. Nowhere, that’s where. Private business would do what was good for its investors, that was the bottom line. And right now, jobs for the jobless wasn’t good for investors.

He lit another Lucky Strike, flexed his fingers, and attacked his typewriter.





EIGHTEEN

Lizzy, Verna, and Myra May



Lizzy, with a blindfolded Coretta in the front beside her and Verna in the rear seat, drove Big Bertha back to Darling, taking another circuitous route. Coretta had given Verna what she needed—the copy of the state auditor’s report and a key to the office—and Verna seemed confident that she knew what to look for. But Lizzy still wasn’t sure that Coretta could be trusted.