My Uncle Daniel’s just like your uncle, if you’ve got one—only he has one weakness.
The opening line of the novella is an essential element to its charm and popularity. Immediately, the reader is welcomed into the story by a participant. A welcoming participant who tells the story as if relating it as gossip over a glass of iced tea while sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of a sleepy town in Dixie at the height of the dog days of August. Conversational is the keyword here. Edna Earle Ponder is not an objective commentator; the Ponders and the Peacocks are not exactly the Hatfields and McCoys, but it doesn’t take too long to figure out which family considers itself to be a higher station. But don’t let that stop you from enjoying Edna’s storytelling abilities which are considerable.
“I’ve got a great big house standing empty, and my father’s Studebaker. Come on—marry me.”
For the record, Uncle Daniel’s one weakness is that he loves to give away stuff. Hams, heifers, clothing and even trips to Memphis. Daniel has a big heart; a Ponder heart if you are to believe Edna Earle. Daniel gets high on life, one could say. Another way of saying it is that Daniel’s weakness is impulsiveness. And it is this one particular impulsive act which comes out of nowhere in the middle of an innocent stop at the five and dime that sets the story in motion. The person that Uncle Daniel is asking to marry him is none other than Bonnie Dee Peacock of the Polk Peacocks. This is trouble.
Well, to make a long story short, Bonnie Dee sent him word Monday after dinner and was dead as a doornail Monday before supper. Tuesday she was in her grave.
If asking a Peacock for a hand in marriage into the Ponder family—the Ponders, for crying out loud—was trouble, it was nothing compared to learning that shortly thereafter Bonnie Dee was dead. True to his reputation, Daniel offers his cemetery lot to the Peacocks for Bonnie’s burial, but true to their kind—if you know what that means—they “bury at Polk, thank you.” So, there it is: in randomly rapid succession a proposal and a death. And at the center the chasm between the Ponders and the Peacocks. Not exactly what one would describe as bad blood, necessarily, but there are just some folks don’t get along and never will. What more could possibly go wrong?
They charged Uncle Daniel with murder.
If asking Bonnie Dee Peacock to marry him was trouble, it was at least trouble in its potential form. Bonnie Dee turning up dead took it out of potential and made it a very concrete difficulty. With word that Bonnie Dee’s death was murder and, furthermore, Uncle Daniel was the prime suspect, well…things just got real. Making things even more real is that the relationship between Bonnie and Daniel as husband and wife was not quite the whirlwind romantic fantasy it promised to be. It was, in fact, rather rocky. And in that rocky valley did Peacock suspicion find purchase. Did Daniel murder his wife? His second wife, actually? No spoilers here; for that it is suggested one reads the book. Or, at the very least, read the plot summary above.
