Decoration Day and Other Stories
ranges in locale from the piney woods of Deep East Texas, to the mean streets of Memphis, to the suburbs of Washington, DC. Highly comic and deeply serious, the collection reaches from the late 19th century to the present day. The title story centers on elderly sisters striving to save an unjustly accused man from a lynch mob, while at the same time fetch home a wagonload of flowering bushes to commemorate their dead in the family cemetery. Captive to private delusions and bound to dreams of what ought to be, each character in Duff's eleven stories struggles for escape, redemption, and the healing power of memory.