Everybody loved Smash Dykes. The urban theorists said that he gave authenticity to the town, and the real estate developers called him Smash and winked and said that he was a real gentleman of the old school. They wrote up Smash Dykes and his family feedstore in their promotional literature and asked him to pose for photographs for their brochures. They shook their heads when Smash Dykes showed up for the photograph session dressed in a suit and tie, with his shoes shined and his hair parted and combed down with water. They gave him a gingham shirt and faded blue jeans and a pair of worn work boots and tried to get him to slouch. They loved the questions he asked at the charettes: “Now how are them cows gon’ get to water, you got the creek fenced off.” Joggers began to drop in at Dykes’s Feed and Seed to shoot the breeze with Smash Dykes, leaning up against the grain bins in their nylon pants with zippers at the ankles. “Smash,” they asked, “what do you think of this, and what do you think of that,” just to hear him talk, and just for the satisfaction of being able to say, “Well, I had a nice visit with old Smash this morning.”

Smash Dykes came to be the symbol of everything the ad brochures claimed about the New Florinna—authenticity, old-fashioned charm, the simple life, traditional rural values. Ladies living in the fixed-up old houses along the river had fancy chicken pens built in their backyards and were thrilled to gather their own eggs, and to consult with Smash Dykes about their flocks. They brought little ailing chicks in to him, cuddled in the palms of their hands.

“Ma’am, that biddy’s got the gummy tail, ain’t nothing you can do about it but snatch its head off,” said Smash Dykes.

Then they would go home and talk about Smash Dykes among themselves and laugh about his “tough love.”

Even Mrs. Horne’s white cat, Precious, loved Smash Dykes, and instead of lolling on a satin pillow in the store window under the curlicue sign WHITE CAT BOOKS as Mrs. Horne had planned, he took to pacing back and forth in front of the door, meowing plaintively with his longing to get out of White Cat Books and dash over to Dykes’s Feed and Seed.

One day when Smash Dykes brought Precious back to the bookstore, Mrs. Horne took him into the bathroom to see Lucy’s mural. Lucy had the wall primed, and the beginnings of the background shaded in. Lucy showed Smash Dykes her preliminary sketches of the seven Arabian horses racing across the desert.

“Look like they got a little bit of quarter horse in them,” said Smash Dykes. “You got that just right, how he’s got them hind legs gathered up underneath him. You draw a mighty fine horse, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Mr. Dykes,” said Lucy.