Author's note: Final chapter, here. I never really meant to hold it back for so long, but work just kept right on happening, despite my protests that I didn't want to do it... alas. Anyway, this chapter ties up those last few loose ends.

Thanks for coming along on another ride with me. Until next time!

Twenty-seven: Union and Dissolution

November 30, 1974

They hadn't even broken up, not officially. Maybe that fit when they hadn't ever officially started dating. It had all just sort of fallen together, until it fell apart.

Anyway, no one had to say it out loud for Daisy and Enos to know it was true. The relationship was dead. Maybe they'd known since that night at the movies when they'd argued over Butch and Sundance. Maybe Enos arresting Bo and Luke on the wrong night, for the right reasons – they were guilty, after all – was just the final nail in a coffin that had already been built.

So she set about burying it.

The dizzying aftermath of that crazy summer provided plenty of distraction from her mourning, at least in the beginning.

That first week got taken up with settling Molly and Alice back into the swamp. The drive alone seemed to last a few days and was spooky enough to keep her focused on exactly where she was – riding with Alice in the ancient and creaky pink-hued pickup, getting her ear talked off about Bo and how great it was that he was okay and all, and did he like cookies? Alice wasn't half the cook that Molly was, but she could bake, and she knew Bo liked to eat – while Jesse rode shotgun in his own truck ahead of them. Twists and turns with quicksand and bogs and gators on either side of a narrow ribbon of a road, and Jesse hadn't much cared for giving the wheel over to Molly. Cared less for how both vehicles stopped somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and everybody got out. Daisy was slapping mosquitoes away from her bare arms and shoulders when the blindfolds came out.

"Now, Jess," Molly was saying in answer to grumbles and rolled eyes. "You done us a real big favor by putting us up and looking out for us for three weeks. But in them three weeks you ain't once showed me nor Alice where your still was." And no one would have expected him to, either. "Now our still, it's right there at our cabin, and since you're coming to the cabin, you're going to see our still. But we can't have you knowing how to get there on your own."

Silly concern. Jesse Duke wasn't going to show up one day with an axe to bust up Molly's still, even if she was, technically, a competitor. But a nod of a grizzled white head meant the logic was deemed sound. Jesse had just agreed to let himself be blindfolded for the rest of the trip, so Daisy did the same. It made the remainder of the ride into the swamp less distressing, anyway.

Days in the swamp were sultry, and not in a romance novel way. The air, both inside and outside of Molly's cabin, just about shimmered with heat and sweat. What had seemed like a good-neighborly idea was more like a clammier, buggier version of what it had been like to host Molly and Alice at the farm – crowded, loud, lacking privacy. And there wasn't all that much that needed doing, when it came down to it. No livestock to care for – the mysterious nephews were supposed to bring a goat and some chickens into the swamp next week sometime – a tiny house that took all of half a day to clean up, a kitchen where Molly held court and cooked up some fine crawfish bisque and other than keeping Jesse in there with her to peel the shells off the critters, she didn't let anyone else in.

Daisy was ready to leave within a day, but it took a couple extra for Jesse to talk Molly into blindfolding them taking them back out to a neutral part of the swamp. And even when she did, Molly drew out the goodbyes as long as she could, hanging onto the sill of Jesse's window and giving him directions he didn't need to get back home from where he was.

Finally, they were on their way back home and not a moment too soon – she thought that Bo and Luke had probably wrecked the house by then. Besides, she had a new mission, thought up during those pointless, sweaty hours spent in the swamp. Irma and Joey, Poison Ivy's grandchildren, needed a good home while their parents were in jail. Something better than the orphanage. She started straight in on Jesse as soon as they were alone. Got a frown and a shaken head that were hard to interpret, but she figured that if he could see their little faces, Jesse could be swayed...

And she spent the second half of that first week tracking down what had happened to the little ones, only to find that they had a perfectly wonderful home with Kevin's ex-wife over in Placid somewhere. Which meant they didn't need rescuing and left Daisy to her own devices.

She'd barely settled into the blissful peace of having her own room again, when the second week after Bo's kidnapping came whirling into their lives, full of heavy demands and light sympathy. Rosco's ijitted and wijitted objections aside, the state police had taken over investigating the case against Poison Ivy and her family, so previously-answered questions had to be answered all over again. One at a time in the sheriff's office, which had been commandeered by the state boys, over more whimpered and whined protests. Each Duke telling their own tales of what they had seen and done, while Rosco stood outside and loudly threatened anyone and everyone within earshot.

A detective called Schenk was the unfortunate investigator who got yanked out of his element and plopped down into Hazzard, where he growled at things he didn't understand. Which was anything to do with why anyone would ever go out in the wilderness for any reason at all, let alone to trying to trap some crooks that were likely to follow them there. And why Luke would have concocted a plan instead of just telling Rosco his suspicions. Poor man, with his regulation haircut and starched uniform, was probably used to investigating robberies or homicides or something – the kind of thing that didn't happen in Hazzard, and he probably didn't understand that, either – but he liked Daisy well enough. Spoke to her kindly, listened to her answers with a smile and a nod. Meanwhile outside the office, Rosco was screaming, All right Bo Duke, you can't chew gum in this office with Bo sassing back, Since when? and Jesse most likely getting ready to threaten them both with a whipping if they didn't hush up. Detective Schenk didn't have the first idea what to make of any of it, but it was easier to try to talk to him than it would have been to go through this same line of questioning with Enos.

Enos… who was notably missing from the sheriff's station each day of that week, when the Duke family dutifully showed up for questioning. At first she was worried that he'd somehow gotten fired over the whole mess, but it turned out that he was just out on patrol a lot. According to Bo and Luke, who sometimes slipped away from the confines of the courthouse to drive around, Enos was mostly to be found in the junk yard. Lord knew what he did there.

Ultimately, Detective Schenk's favorable disposition toward her was useful, if a touch strange.

"Not sure how important it is what you say," he confessed the second time he interviewed her, with an awkward wink and a tug at his tight uniform collar. "Since Bob Donnelly," right, Velma's husband, "is likely to turn state's witness and do all your testifying for you. But let's get back to what you were saying about Clem Clemmons holding Mr. Hogg at gunpoint…"

So she told him what he wanted to know, more or less, leaving out anything that had to do with moonshine. Daisy's smart enough to know what not to say to him – that was what Jesse had said, way back in those sepia days (that were really only a month earlier and yet they had that distant feeling to them, almost as if they had happened to someone else) when she was so gleefully dating Enos. It was true then and it was true now. She talked to the detective about everything and nothing all at once, and none of what she said turned out to matter. But that part came later.

The third week after Bo had been kidnapped, the Dukes' new barn finally got built. Much as Enos had long-ago predicted, Uncle Jesse announced the barn-raising plans in church on a Sunday, with the festivities to take place on Wednesday. Which meant a whole lot of cooking (for both her and Jesse, because folks both ate and drank far too much at these kinds of things) for the first half of the week. And then, like he'd once promised, Enos showed up with the rest of the town's able-bodied folks to complete the task. Which meant a whole lot of smiling and flirting with any guy young enough to flirt back, even if she would rather have locked herself away in her room.

But that was the other thing she had learned those days spent talking to Detective Schenk. One morning, when she'd arrived a few minutes earlier than her ten o'clock interview appointment, she'd overheard the detective and Rosco talking in his office.

"She's a looker, that Daisy is," Schenk had said.

"Don't you let old Jesse hear you say that or he'll give you a tongue lashing, lawman or no," Rosco had counseled. And then he'd giggled. "She does have legs that could stop a man's heart, though."

"And what a way to go," the detective had added.

It had been, she'd decided after the perfectly professional interview had been completed and she'd sat out in the hot summer sun, tanning and waiting for Bo and Luke to pick her up, a compliment. A strange and slightly unsettling compliment, but a compliment all the same that two older man had found her attractive. It gave her confidence, anyway.

So she flirted with other boys in front of Enos, for no reason she could properly explain to anyone at all, but it didn't matter, because no one asked. The men just flirted right back, while Luke stood a careful distance away and flexed his muscles a bit. It was a win-win situation: no man touched her with her proective cousin standing around, but the women enjoyed the little show that Luke was putting on.

In the fourth week, not a whole lot happened, but come the fifth week, J.D. Hogg made a real nuisance of himself. The local elections were bearing down on Hazzard like a runaway train, and J.D.'s mouth was doing everything it could to keep up with the momentum. When facts eluded him, he settled for spewing nonsense. And some of that nonsense had him coming to the rescue of the Dukes on that early August morning, single-handedly fighting off the Poison Ivy gang and rescuing a barely conscious Bo Duke, while Bo's dumbfounded family stood around and watched is grateful awe.

Even Uncle Jesse, who had defended his one-time friend throughout the entire summer, wouldn't sit still for that. One rainy afternoon when it seemed like half the county was squeezed into the Boar's Nest all at once, sweating and drinking in equal measure, J.D. Hogg climbed up on the roadhouse stage and told his glorious tale. The Dukes sat together at a small, side table with their bland drinks leaving wet rings of condensation on the checked tablecloth, Bo shoving handfuls of dry popcorn into his mouth at odd intervals, listening to the man stump for votes. Long about the time those frizzy strings of dull gray hair were dripping sweat and his pudgy cheeks glowed pink with exertion, J.D. got around to saying he could save Hazzard from fiscal crisis, just like he'd saved Bo Duke from dastardly kidnappers.

Their uncle gripped Bo's forearm to keep him from shouting out how it had really gone. Luke sat back with his hands behind his head, and Daisy bit her tongue until it was just about shredded.

"Mr. Hogg," Jesse interjected when the story seemed to have wound itself around into something approximating a lovely white bow, fit for the top of a Christmas present. "Reckon I've got a few questions about that yarn you've been spinning."

The blustering started up then and built into a blizzard of excuses about how little time the prospective county commissioner had to spare to the cause of historical accuracy when, really, he had a whole platform to present. But Jesse was stubborn in his insistence that his own recollection of events didn't exactly tally with Hogg's. Faster than a rattlesnake strike, her uncle was on his feet and the two men were belly-to-belly, hollering a few things out about who had rescued whom. J.D. was still on wood of the platform, and Jesse stood on the concrete floor, which made them about even height, red face matching red face until Daisy figured it'd take half the men in town and an oversized pry bar to separate them. By the time it was done, everyone in the Boar's Nest had learned quite a bit more than they had bargained for about one Jefferson Davis Hogg's role in the whole Poison Ivy incident.

Not that it mattered. During the sixth week after the whole mess happened, the county of Hazzard had elected themselves a new commissioner. It wasn't much of a choice, really. The candidates were Chadwick, a beloved oldster who could no longer talk sense, much less govern, and Hogg, a gluttonous liar who was sharp as a tack, especially when it came to lining his own bottomless pockets. The first election in which Daisy and Bo were old enough to vote, and she almost didn't feel like bothering. But oh, her ear just about fell right off her head for all the words Jesse shouted into it when she confessed her lack of interest. A whole twelve years of schooling condensed down into a powerful lecture about civic duty and the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen, with a side order of guilt and a reminder how her own grandmother had been a suffragette for dessert. It was a full meal.

So she voted, not for Commissioner Chadwick, and not for J.D. Hogg. She wrote in Uncle Jesse's name, even though she knew he didn't want the job. He'd be better at it than either of the two men that were running.

And if he was a little more grown up, if he'd shown good judgement when it came to the events of the past summer, she would have written in Enos' name instead. She would have told all her friends and family to do the same, and she would have proudly hosted a fine celebration for him when he won. But that was only in her dreams, where she could trust Enos, where she would still be his girlfriend and it would be her hand that he held in his when he gave his acceptance speech.

Instead, it was J.D. Hogg who won and she didn't think there was much of anyone who'd want to hold his hand, sticky as it was with leftover candy, coated in the stench of old cigars. He gave his acceptance speech all the same, and managed to sound more pompous than grateful, dubbing himself "Boss Hogg" before the inaugural address was even halfway over.

Somewhere around the seventh week, the state of Georgia decided there was enough evidence to try the Poison Ivy gang.

The state's star witness, Bob Donnelly, was promised minimal punishment for his cooperation. He was almost sent to prison anyway, when Ivy, Velma, Kevin and Jeremy decided to plead guilty and avoid a jury trial. But there was still Clem Clemmons, too tough or too stubborn to cop a plea, so Bob Donnelly got to tell the tale after all. How Ivy had her nephews and daughter get temporary jobs in Hazzard, how Ivy herself had gotten mail-order, forged credentials that said she was qualified to be a librarian. How they'd infiltrated town to keep an eye on the Dukes, how they'd figured that Jeremy and Kevin's jobs in the garage would probably provide the best vantage point for observation, though it was Daisy and Enos' romance in the library had taken center stage.

Ivy had a thing for Uncle Jesse. She'd had hopes, Bob reported, of mending whatever fences needed to be mended, and joining him in the trade. (And maybe, if all went well, joining him in holy matrimony. Seemed like Clem Clemmons hadn't known that part; he'd gone tense across the shoulders when it came out in court.) She'd sent her nephews and Velma and Bob out to chase the Dukes on moonshine runs, so Jesse would be more likely to want a partner.

Unlike the Dukes (and unlike Detective Schenk, who'd barked at Rosco about his inability to track down two particular witnesses to the crime), Ivy apparently knew exactly where Molly's cabin was, and had ever since a dispute she'd gotten into with Molly's mother back in the 1930s. So when she'd set to harassing the Dukes, she'd known exactly where to send her nephews to scare Molly, with intent to keep her in the swamp and away from Jesse.

Kevin and Jeremy had only half listened to Ivy's instructions (which didn't surprise Daisy one bit – men were terrible at listening comprehension and following directions) so they'd burned the Dukes' barn and chased Molly right out of the swamp and into Jesse Duke's arms.

After that, the gloves had come off. Ivy had taken a strong disliking to Daisy and Enos' relationship, on the premise that no self-respecting moonshiner should get romantically involved with the law. Furthermore, she was affronted by what she thought was Jesse and Molly's budding relationship, so Jeremy, Kevin, Velma and Bob had been turned loose to wreak whatever manner of havoc they wanted upon the Dukes.

Meanwhile, J.D. Hogg had figured out exactly who Ivy was the first time he made his campaigning rounds into the library. He'd offered to help her in her quest to snare Uncle Jesse. At the trial, he made promises as large as his round belly that he'd only meant to help her achieve her romantic goals, not her destructive ones. He'd never known a single thing about what she'd had her nephews do, and he was sure that the Dukes' barn had burned of "natural causes." Whatever that was supposed to mean.

A jury of his peers found Clem Clemmons guilty of a few different crimes, none of which included kidnapping one Bo Duke. There just wasn't any proof linking him to that part of what had happened. But holding the man who was now commissioner of Hazzard County at gunpoint, well, he got ten years for that alone. When the sentencing was done for every crime of which he was convicted, Daisy calculated that he's be in jail until she was a grandmother.

Then, in the ninth week after Bo's kidnapping, just when she reckoned her life would settle back into something like normal, everything changed all over again. One bright and crisp midday when the air smelled of wood smoke and ripe apples, Rosco Coltrane showed up on the Dukes' doorstep. Hat in his hands, he crossed the threshold and set to hiccuping, stammering and sputtering about how he needed Jesse Duke's help right now. He hadn't always been friends with the Dukes, maybe he'd arrested them a time or two, but he'd never known Jesse to abandon a man in need—

"Rosco, what on God's green earth are you going on about?" Jesse had snapped. Rosco shuffled on his feet, making the kitchen floorboards creak, while Daisy had studiously stirred the baked beans and Luke set the table.

"Lulu," could as easily as anything have been more babbling. Except there was a follow-up: "And J.D. Hogg."

Bo snickered from over by the sink, scrubbing his hands for the upcoming meal. To which sympathy dictated that Rosco would soon receive an invitation.

Jesse offered up a dark glare to Bo's turned back, and Luke kept his face carefully neutral, like he always did when dealing with the law. Or when he didn't want to get dragged into Bo's messes. "What about Lulu and J.D. Hogg, Rosco?" her uncle asked with the same patience he'd use on a scared child or a cantankerous mule.

"They're getting married!" Rosco blurted.

Funny how Luke dropped the ceramic plate he'd been setting at Bo's place with a resounding thump. Bo turned around, slack-jawed, wet hands dripping everywhere but down into the sink. Those two always thought they knew everything, but they didn't.

"When?" Daisy asked. No time to worry about her stunned cousins when there were breathless images of toile and taffeta and tall, white wedding cakes flashing behind her eyes. Baked beans were still bubbling in front of her, smelling vinegary with an edge of burnt sugar. But her thoughts were a million miles away, wrapped in crepe paper and dried rice and hand-lettered Just Married signs followed by the clanking of tin cans tied to a bumper.

"When?" Rosco snapped right back at her, like it was a fool's question, but it wasn't. There was one heck of a lot of planning to be done before a girl could get married. Even if the girl was well past the age of forty. "Too soon!"

Jesse draped a comforting arm around Rosco, patting his uniform-clad shoulder and saying something about fools and love, and how there was no reasoning with them when they thought getting married was a good idea.

Rosco settled down eventually, ate himself some beans. Pouted over how he was being advised to reconcile himself to having J.D. Hogg as a brother-in-law when he'd sought co-conspirators in making sure that nothing of the sort ever happened.

Fools and love… Daisy couldn't swear how she felt about those words, but it didn't matter, because sweet Lulu Coltrane married conniving old Boss Hogg all the same on the Saturday afternoon that fell exactly eleven weeks after Bo had been kidnapped.

The weather was chilly with a hair-frizzing mist, but the dual whites of Lulu's dress and J.D. Hogg's suit stood out in dashing contrast to the gloom of the skies. Lulu's hands were clamped tightly together, holding her bouquet of white roses and baby's breath down low by her round belly as she slow stepped her way across the green of Hazzard Square with the train of her dress being carried by the girlish Tillingham twins, Maybelle's younger sisters, who seemed too slender and small to handle all that material. By the time Lulu made it halfway to the gazebo, her satin shoes were stained with grass and dirt, and Boss Hogg was getting snappish and impatient. Maybe because he wasn't allowed to have a cigar in his hands during the ceremony, and all the sweets were over in the Boar's Nest waiting for the reception, leaving the poor man with nothing but his own fingernails to put into his mouth. Lulu quit her slow-stepping and walked right up into the gazebo after J.D. barked at her to hurry it along.

Most of Hazzard was there to watch, standing in their best clothes and fine leather shoes in the damp grass. Bo and Luke were twitching like it was so hard to stand still and behave, but they were just silly boys.

Daisy couldn't say whether Lulu and J.D. were fools, but they were obviously in love. The wedding was beautiful. Lulu swooned unsteadily when Boss promised to cherish her until death, and J.D. even smiled, once or twice. A few people looked like they might object when the preacher offered them the opportunity, and the only one who cried was Rosco.

The reception was at The Boar's Nest; of course it was. Free rent for the groom, two-dollar beer that was suspiciously foamy for the guests, a stage at one end for the new Commissioner to hold court. The pile of gifts mounting on the bar as the afternoon wore on was a toppling heap of bribes, or at least pleas for mercy. Hogg was in his own heaven.

So was Lulu, though her heaven might have looked a little different from her new husband's. The dreams in her head were full of romance and love. Daisy figured they'd have to be, to marry someone like J.D. Hogg. She must see something in him that no one else could. (Gold – that's what cynical Luke would have said her dreams were full of – spending Boss Hogg's money, while he tried with all ten fingers and most of his toes not to let any of it get spent.)

The reception wasn't formal, no one had a champagne glass or a fork to clink against it, no one toasted the bride and groom. There was just J.D. Hogg on his own stage, mentioning that donations to the wedding fund would be gladly accepted by his new brother-in-law, Rosco, who was compelled to stand by the door holding a plastic bucket which would have been better used to mop the floor. (And if J.D. wanted to start a collection to send himself on a distant honeymoon, that bucket might actually fill up with more than a few loose pennies.) Someone must have decided that a quarter would be better donated to the jukebox than to Boss Hogg's fortune, because after a while the music started up.

The Dukes had been standing together, waiting in what would have been the receiving line, if only the Commissioner would stop jabbering and start letting himself be congratulated. When the music began to blare there was no point in pretending they were going to talk to Boss and Lulu – or that they'd be heard if they did. Bo was the first to wander off, hollering something about pretty fillies in their Sunday best, and someone had to make the grand sacrifice and dance with them. Luke followed after because he couldn't let Bo suffer such an arduous task all on his own.

That left her standing there next to Jesse, feeling like a little girl clinging close to her father a big crowd. She was thinking that she'd better find someone to dance with, quick, when a tapping came on her shoulder.

"Miss Daisy," was the most formal Enos had sounded since that day when she'd still been a pony-tailed girl, dripping hose-water out of the strings of an old pair of cut-off jeans in the high school parking lot. Felt like years ago. "Might I have the pleasure of a dance?"

What could she do? Look to her uncle or cousins to get her out of it? No. The one thing she'd been trying to do all summer long, in every way she could think of, it was grow up. To be mature enough to take care of herself.

"Thank you," she said, running her hands down the skirt of her dress. Probably looked like a graceless country girl, wiping sweat off her palms. She tried not to care what he thought of her as he took her hand to lead her to the dance floor.

Enos had big feet. Seemed strange to get around to noticing it this late in the game, but there they were in those shiny brown shoes. She shouldn't be looking down at them, should be meeting his eyes, but if she didn't watch, her toes might get stepped on. That was her excuse, if anyone ever asked.

"You're looking well, Daisy."

Almost made her want to cry – those words were so courteous, perfectly polite and crushingly civil. Like she was just another girl from town that Enos knew only well enough to offer toekn kindness.

"Thank you," she whispered. Because when all else failed, she at least had manners. And if the music covered up the broken sound of her voice, it was all the better. He could see her lips move, anyway.

Things were a mite crowded, not much space to move. If she shuffled closer to Enos there'd be a bunch fewer shoulders knocking into the both of them—

No. She wasn't going to do a dang foolish thing like getting close to Enos all over again.

"I like your hair," he piped up over the music. She'd spent some time with her friend Sally Jo that morning, pulling it straight with a borrowed blow dryer, then using a flowery spray to try to hold it that way against the moisture of the day. It felt like a helmet on her head, but she thought it made her look more like herself than she had all summer long. "It was nice how you wore it different this summer, but I reckon I like it best when it's long."

It was right about then that Luke cut in on them. Maybe he was being overprotective, maybe he was trying to keep her from getting involved with a lawman again. Maybe he was being a jerk, but she didn't know and didn't care when his arms were warm around her, and his shoulder was giving under the weight of her head when she buried it there. Luke wasn't as smart as he thought he was and he wasn't always nice, but he was family, he was safe, and he would hold onto her as long as she needed him to, until her silly tears were dry.

Until she was ready to lift her head and face the world again.

And that was what she had been doing ever since. Facing each day with forced cheer and a near-vicious energy that made her kinfolk scatter to the four corners of the house just to get away from her broom or mop or dusting wand. Being industrious helped. It gave her something to do other than think her sad thoughts, it gave her heart time to heal so that, like Bo's burned hands, it would be healthy again someday. Whole, with just a few scars and rough edges.

Come October, when Bo informed her that if she scrubbed the walls one more time, she might scrub right through the thin plaster to the outside world, she'd gone out and gotten herself a job. Took her own advice, what she'd told Enos to do back in July. She went to the Hazzard Library and said she wanted to work there, and funny thing if she wasn't hired within the week. Evenings only, replacing Maybelle Tillingham, who'd moved over to being the switchboard operator. Emma Tisdale was haunting the stacks during the day, hushing the high school students who had returned with questions about resources for term papers. She handed over the keys and the reins to Daisy each night at five. It was most active then, parents bringing in younger children to look at picture books, the older students studying near the back. All in all, it was a pretty nice place to work.

But it wasn't what she'd imagined when she'd been searching for a job over the summer. It was boring and repetitive, and it wasn't any fun to work right in the middle of town now that she didn't have a boyfriend to meet for picnic dinners. Besides, her heart gave a little pang every time she walked up the concrete steps, over that hail-pocked porch, under the rusty candle holder, past the nook and into the door.

When she got inside, she'd straighten her back and swear to herself that she wasn't going to feel bad anymore.

"Plenty of fish in the sea," Edna Tisdale sometimes said. (Of course, she usually followed that up with some kind of declaration about how Jesse Duke was the only one around worth baiting a hook for.) Daisy figured that was true, and even if Hazzard was more of a pond, or maybe just a big puddle in the grand scheme of things, she resolved herself to stop thinking of Enos.

Which was why she'd come out here this afternoon, to the dead cornfields of her uncle's farm. To bury what was gone. To grow up, to forgive, to let go. To unhook Enos from her line and turn him loose, and hope that he thrived out there in the sea (or pond or puddle) of life.

And wonder if he would feel a small tug at the corner of his mouth every now and then when he thought of her.