The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

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 na?ve 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.