The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Charlie doubted that Judge McHenry would let Mickey and Tom-Boy out to attend the funeral.

Charlie typed -30-at the end of his story, pulled the copy out of the typewriter, and yelled for Ophelia to come and get it. Then he looked over a two-paragraph story that Ophelia had written, about the return of the renowned Miss Tallulah LaBelle to the LaBelle plantation, over on the Alabama River west of town. The wealthy old lady—the LaBelles were one of Cypress County’s early settlers—had been on an extended visit to friends in Boston and New York. Unlike most folks, Miss Tallulah had been fortunate enough to keep the family money from disappearing into the chaos of the stock market crash and was able to breeze around the country and even abroad, visiting here and there. She didn’t often appear in Darling, but she was always good for copy in the “Out and About” column, where the comings and goings of notable citizens of Cypress County were reported. He would put it at the top of that column, above Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson’s ill-timed visit to her sister in Montgomery and Miss Ruthie Brandt’s weekend trip to Mobile, where she had gone to the movies to see King Kong (just released after its March premier in New York City) and taken an afternoon cruise on Mobile Bay.

Finished with that column, he wrote up the announcement of Grady Alexander’s marriage to Archie Mann’s niece, noticing that the wedding, like Rider LeDoux’s funeral, was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. Out of deference to Liz Lacy and Mrs. Alexander, he kept the piece short, nothing but the bare facts of the matter—who, what, when, where. People’s imaginations would take care of the why. He would bury the story in the middle of page seven, between the legal notices and the Kilgore Motors advertisement for the 1933 Dodge six-cylinder roadster, which sold for $640. Women didn’t read that page, and every man’s gaze would be fixed hungrily on that roadster. Nobody would notice the wedding announcement.

Ophelia came and picked up both stories, and Charlie put his feet up on the desk, tilted his chair back, and pulled his eyeshade down. He’d rest his eyes for a moment, get rid of that headache, courtesy of the bottle he had polished off the night before, maybe the last bottle of LeDoux’s fine whiskey that he would ever have the privilege of drinking. He folded his hands over his belt buckle, closed his eyes, and lay back in his chair, musing over his lead story, what he had written—and what he hadn’t.

It was too bad that the boy had died, yes, he wasn’t belittling that. And too bad that Mickey and Tom-Boy would likely be sent up for the full two-year stretch. But it was just too damn bad that Kinnard had smashed up that still, which was now out of production forever. Even if Mickey went back to making moonshine after he got out (most shiners did), it wouldn’t be the same. The oak kegs would be gone, different creek water would have a different taste, the boys tending the fire and the mash would be new boys and wouldn’t have the same touch as Tom-Boy and Baby—

Somebody was shaking his foot. “Hey, Dickens,” a man’s voice said. “Wake up.”

Charlie caught himself in midsnore, swimming up from the bottom of a sodden doze, saturated with sleep as sticky as molasses on a summer day. He opened one eye and sent his tongue out to explore his dry lips. Alvin Duffy, dressed in a cool blue seersucker suit, was standing in front of his desk. The clock on the wall said eleven thirty. Ophelia’s Linotype was silent and the radio was off. She must have finished her work and gone out while he was asleep.

“Hey, Duffy,” Charlie said. His mouth felt like it was full of feathers. He reached for the Hires bottle and swallowed a swig of warm, flat root beer. “What’s on your mind?”

“I need you to run a story in Friday’s paper,” Duffy said crisply. “And I want to pick up the scrip you printed.”