But after that, things quieted down. The bell tower was rebuilt, the town grew a little bigger, and when the Great War came, the price of cotton went through the roof. Still, nothing much of note had happened since the boys of the 167th came home from France in 1919—or didn’t, as in the case of Lizzy’s fiancé, Reggie Morris. The Roaring Twenties had roared through Darling very quietly, since the local ladies weren’t crazy about bobbed hair and skirts so short they couldn’t sit down in them, and most of the people in town belonged to a church that turned thumbs-down on dancing. There wasn’t supposed to be any drinking of alcoholic beverages after the Alabama legislature passed the Bone-Dry Act of 1915, five years before the rest of the country followed suit, but that didn’t mean a whole lot, since Alabamans always talked dry and drank wet. Voters thought that prohibiting alcohol was the Christian thing to do, since it might help people whose spirits were willing but whose flesh was weak. But there were plenty of folks who were Christians on Sunday morning and dancers and drinkers on Saturday night, and if somebody wanted hooch, he (or she) knew right where to go to get it.

They knew where to get a good meal, too, although most people in Darling ate breakfast, dinner (the main meal of the day, at noon), and supper at home with their families. If you had a reason for eating away from home, you had several choices, depending on who you were. If you were a traveling gentleman staying at the Old Alabama Hotel or a husband who wanted to give his wife a treat by taking her out for an expensive meal, you could go to the hotel dining room and sit down at a table with a bowl of flowers in the middle of a white damask tablecloth, and a waiter would pour water into a crystal goblet and offer you a menu that featured (depending on the time of year) tomato frappe, asparagus vinaigrette, green peas and carrots, your choice of a thick filet mignon wrapped in bacon or a cold plate with chicken, and a maple nut sundae for dessert—for which you would pay seventy-five cents. While you dined, you could listen to Mrs. LeVaughn playing soft, elegant dinner music—Chopin and Debussy and Liszt—on the beautiful rosewood square grand piano, which was surrounded by potted palms in the Old Alabama lobby.

If you were a single man and wanted a hearty meal that would stick to your ribs (beef stew and dumplings, say, or baked ham and mashed potatoes), you could walk over to the Meeks’ boardinghouse two blocks west of the rail yard where the railroad workers and some of the men from the sawmill boarded and see if Mrs. Meeks could make room at the table for one more, which she usually could, especially if you didn’t mind waiting until the second shift sat down. For the main dish, plus corn bread and green apple pie and all the coffee you could drink, you would expect to pay thirty-five cents, but you had to eat fast, because there was usually a third shift waiting to sit down. There was no time to talk, or anybody to talk to, either, since all the diners had their heads down, shoveling in their food. Definitely no dinner music.