Spring came early that year, bringing with it relief from the winter snows, much-needed rain and honey-sweet prairie winds which urged the first sprouts of corn and wheat above the ground and promised that 1934, like the five years before it, would be a fertile and prosperous year. Once the land of the Delaware and Potawatomi Indians, the central plains of Indiana were extremely fertile, abounding in lush produce and hogs the size of ponies, of which the Hoosiers were justifiably proud. This was the sweet land of Booth Tarkington and James Whitcomb Riley, a land settled by Scottish, Irish and German descendants who only begrudgingly acknowledged that Cole Porter, writer of “dirty” songs for blue Broadway shows, was also from the Hoosier State.
There was a small billboard on Route 36 that read: “Drew City, Indiana. Founded 1846. Home of 2,162 happy people,” under which someone had painted “and one old grouch.” A signpost a hundred feet past it had arrows pointing northwest toward Chicago, one hundred and forty miles away, to South Bend, eighty-one miles north, and Indianapolis, seventy-two miles to the south.
Drew City was a typical mid-American town, located on the southeast bank of the Wabash River, along the route of the Illinois Central Railroad, and proud of its heritage—the Battle of Tippecanoe having been fought near Lafayette, twenty or so miles away. The town was surrounded by miles of fertile, sweeping fields of yellow wheat, head-high stalks of juicy corn and the sweetest tomatoes in the country, if you listened to the farmers talk on Saturdays in front of Jason’s hardware store or in the park across the street from the courthouse where they congregated to trade lies and gossip once a week. There were four churches in town, which was about a third Catholic, the rest being Lutheran, Episcopal and Presbyterian. There were two Jewish families, no colored people and a small community of Mennonites a few miles east of town.
The main drag, called Broadway although it was barely two lanes wide, was actually Highway 36. The streets were paved for three blocks on either side of the main street, and there was a small park at the edge of town on the bank of the river with a baseball diamond maintained by the Masons, half a dozen cooking fireplaces, and several wooden tables. The Illinois Central was located on the far side of the river, crossing a bridge to the outskirts west of town. Neither isolated nor along the main traffic routes, it was a prosperous town for the times, for while it had felt the sting of the Depression, there had been five or six years of good harvest and the town’s two industries, a machine mill and switching station for the Illinois Central, and a shoe factory, had both survived the ravages of the Depression relatively intact.
There was nothing quaint or unique about Drew City. It was a plain American small town, a town of stucco, brick and wood, of galvanized iron rooftops, cornices and Victorian parapets, squatting in the flatlands of northern Indiana, distinguished only by its citizens who had the same ailments, problems and minor victories as folks in any other town of its size. The business section was actually only two blocks long. There were stores on the first floors of the two-story brick buildings and above them, professional offices. Dr. Kimberly, the family doctor, was over the Dairy Foods and Dr. Hincrafter, the dentist, was across the street over Brophy’s Dry Goods Shoppe. The town lawyer, William Horton, who drank a lot, was over Aaron Moore’s Drug Emporium, his sign reading “W. B. Horton, Atty at Law,” and on the line under it “Wills—Divorces—Complaints.” Horton’s office was perfectly placed since he started each day in Aaron’s drugstore, hunched over one of the tiny round tables in the front of the store by the soda fountain, nursing his hangover with a B-C fizz chased with black coffee.
The town had its share of ne’er-do-wells, alcoholics and eccentrics but it had escaped the collapse in morals and the increase in alcoholics and gambling brought on by the Roaring Twenties and the Depression. When the
True, teachers and the police were paid in scrip, slips of paper which were like promissory notes from civic employers, a promise to pay when things got better, but scrip was honored almost every place in town. The bank had survived the crash and the town had only one suicide, an accountant for the railroad who had been playing fast and loose with company funds until the crash cleaned him out. He had gone down to the picnic grounds by the river, finished off a pint of bathtub gin he got from Miss Belinda Allerdy’s and done himself in with a shotgun.
“Nobody jumped outa any windas here,” Ben Scoby, president of the bank, once bragged.
“That’s because the tallest building in town’s only two stories high,” his daughter Louise pointed out.
“Well, now, we got the water tower,” Ben countered. “If you were real determined you could go up there and take a leap.”
Hoboes still came to back doors looking for odd jobs to earn a sandwich or a piece of pie. But, as in most small towns in America, they were treated decently, and occasionally they even found work in the fields or at the railroad yards on the outskirts of town. The chief of police drew the line at Hoovervilles, however, and when makeshift camps began to develop he was quick to urge the peripatetic unfortunates to move on. Violence was virtually unheard of here, except for an occasional fistfight over some buxom cheerleader at a ball game, and the chief of police, Tyler Oglesby, who was also mayor, often lay in bed at night, listening to the mournful sigh of the ten o’clock freight rattling through on its way to Lafayette, secretly thanking his lucky stars that in twelve years he had never drawn his gun from its holster except to clean it.
All that was soon to change.
* * *
When Fred Dempsey moved to town from the bank in Chicago, Louise Scoby was a tall, slender, raw-boned woman, her straw- colored hair usually tied in two pigtails that framed stern, heavy features. Her splendid figure had been disguised under loose- fitting cotton frocks since she was a teenager and she wore little makeup to soften her windblown, sun-ridged features. She had the look of early pioneer stock, a hardy woman, stern-faced and formal, whose attitude some folks considered haughty.
Then Fred had come to the bank and soon afterward there had begun a subtle change in Louise. Little things through the months. She began to wear lip gloss. Then a slight dusting of face powder. She began plucking her eyebrows. She had her hair cut shorter, then shorter still, and then curled under. On occasions, such as the Saturday night dance at the YMCA, she appeared in silk dresses and sweaters that implied there was more to Louise Scoby than had once met the eye. But the biggest change had little to do with lip gloss and silk and hairstyling. Her features seemed softer and she smiled a lot. Fred Dempsey had kindled a glow in Louise Scoby and it became obvious to the folks of Drew City that she had finally found a man who measured up to her haughty standards.
Dempsey was a tall, muscular, quiet man, his balding black hair graying at the sides and widow-peaked over steel-gray eyes encircled by thin, wire-framed glasses. His thick black mustache also showed the gray of his years and while he never discussed his age, it was known around town that he was forty, almost the perfect age for Weezie Scoby, who would soon turn twenty-five. Dempsey was a pleasant man, well educated and well informed. He had moved up rapidly at the bank, from assistant teller to teller to loan manager. He made it his business to know the people of Drew City and to be a friendly banker, not the intimidating ogre that most people conjured in their minds when they had to make a loan to buy a new plow or get one of the new plug-in refrigerators or buy an
