The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

The clock on the wall said it was five minutes after five. Verna took one last look around the office and flicked off the light. She had been working on the second floor of the Cypress County courthouse for over fifteen years now—first as a mere records clerk, right out of high school, then as an assistant clerk, and now as the county probate clerk and acting county treasurer. She could find her way around in the dark, even in that windowless back room where the county map, enlarged, took up almost one wall, and where the plat files were stored in large, shallow drawers. In fact, she could probably find the right plat drawer blindfolded and pull out the exact plat she was looking for, assuming that it had been put back where it belonged.

But being able to find her way around the plat room in the dark was not going to pull Cypress County out of its current grim predicament. For that, Verna would have to be a magician, pulling fistfuls of fifties and hundreds out of a hat instead of rabbits. A year or so ago, she had discovered that the previous county treasurer had been up to some pretty ingenious monkey business with the county’s funds. After she got that mess straightened out, she had consolidated the county’s accounts (which had been scattered around in several different banks, some of them over in Monroeville) in the Darling Savings and Trust. The county would get a better interest rate on the larger single deposit and the money would be easier to manage.

Lately, however, Verna wished she hadn’t been so quick to dump all the county’s eggs into one basket, so to speak. As acting treasurer, she was responsible for every cent that went into and came out of the county’s account. So she had held her breath when the Alabama legislature, back in February, had granted Governor George Miller the power to shut down all the banks in the state. She had breathed again only when the governor, challenged by the large banks in Mobile, admitted that the closure was “advised” and not mandatory. The Darling bank stayed open and everybody’s checks were good.

But Verna had learned from that experience. When she heard that President Roosevelt was thinking of closing all the banks in the country, she had pulled enough cash out of the county’s accounts to meet the payroll. That planning had helped Cypress County weather FDR’s national four-day bank holiday, from the sixth of March, two days after his inaugural, through the tenth. The Darling bank had been closed for another couple of days after that, but it had passed muster, and she had relaxed. The situation wasn’t good, of course. People weren’t paying their taxes, the county was losing revenue, and she’d had to propose an across-the-board pay cut for all employees. But it wasn’t awful, either. She thought—or perhaps she hoped—that they had weathered the worst.

And then, abruptly and without notice, the Darling Savings and Trust had shut its doors, catching her completely by surprise. Today was Monday the tenth, the payroll was due on Friday the fourteenth, and she didn’t have any reserve funds to cover it. The county employed fifty-four people: the men who worked on the roads and in the vehicle maintenance shed; the janitor at the courthouse and the building maintenance man; and the records clerks, including Melba Jean Manners and Sherrie Brindley, who worked in Verna’s office. Everybody was paid twice monthly, on the Friday closest to the first and the fifteenth. Fifty-four families wouldn’t have a paycheck on the fourteenth of April. And those fifty-four families had already cut their spending pretty close to the bone. When the fourteenth rolled around, they wouldn’t have a cent left.