The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

by Susan Wittig Albert

  They were lucky to have Dahlia House—there was no doubt about that. But the place was forty years old and hadn’t been built all that well to start with. After the last hard rain, there had been puddles in the kitchen and the back room, and the leaks were only going to get worse. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, they would have to find the money to fix the roof

  Voleen Johnson frowned. “Personally, I think we should leave the dues right where they are. A quarter surely isn’t too much to ask. If anything, we ought to raise them. We don’t want to encourage—”

  She stopped, because everybody knew what she had been going to say. She had been arguing for years that Darling’s garden club should accept as members only people who were “serious” gardeners. Which meant people who had enough spare time to spend hours every day in the garden, or had the money to pay somebody else to spend the time, the way she did. The Johnson garden was a showplace, but Voleen Johnson never had dirt under her fingernails, like the rest of the Dahlias. And twenty-five cents a month, Lizzy was thinking, pretty much excluded the folks who lived over in Maysville, on the east side of the railroad tracks.

  She saw that people were shifting on their chairs. “If somebody’ll make a motion about the dues, we can discuss it,” she said.

  Aunt Hetty spoke up first. “I move that the 1930 dues be set at fifteen cents a month,” she said firmly. “If somebody wants to pay it all at once, let’s make it a dollar fifty.”

  “I’ll second that!” Earlynne Biddle said, very fast. Her husband, Hank, was the manager at the Coca-Cola bottling plant. The plant was laying people off, and Earlynne knew that, for a lot of families in Darling, every nickel counted.

  “I’ll third it.” That was Ophelia. Her husband, Jed—Darling’s second-term mayor—owned Snow’s Farm Supply, on the northwest corner of the courthouse square. He carried as many farmers as he could on credit, but the past several summers had been dry and most crops hadn’t brought in enough for folks to pay their seed bills. Jed hadn’t laid anybody off yet, but he’d had to cut the employees’ hours. Like everybody else, the Snows were pinching pennies.

  “Moved and seconded and thirded,” Lizzy said. “The motion’s on the floor.” She looked around. “Is there any discussion?”

  “Just one thing,” Lizzy,” Aunt Hetty said. “You’re right about the roof on this house. We can probably get some volunteers to help, but we’ll have to buy roofing material. We can’t expect to pay for something that expensive out of what we collect from our members, though. I think we ought to lower the dues and find another way to raise money for the roof.”

  “Hear, hear,” Bessie Bloodworth called from a corner of the room.

  “I’m in favor,” Mildred Kilgore added, and others were nodding. “If we lower the dues, maybe we’ll get some new members. There’s lots of work out there in the garden. They could help.”

  Silence. After a moment, Voleen Johnson said, in a sour tone, “Well, I’ve said my piece. Might as well vote, I suppose.”

  “Mrs. Johnson has called the question,” Lizzy said crisply. “All in favor, say aye. Opposed, nay.” There was a loud chorus of ayes. Mrs. Johnson didn’t say anything.

  “Motion carried,” Lizzy said. “So everybody, pay your dues. At our next meeting, we’ll discuss what we can do to raise money to fix the roof. But for now, could we have a motion to adjourn? And of course, there’s still plenty of food.”

  “I move we adjourn,” Beulah said. “I want a piece of Mildred’s ribbon cake—if there’s any left, that is.”

  Later, after the rest had taken their dishes and gone home, Lizzy, Opelia, and Verna put on aprons and tidied up the kitchen, washing the plates and silver, wiping the counter and table, and sweeping the floor.

  “I sometimes wonder why she wants to belong to the Dahlias,” Ophelia said. “Voleen Johnson, I mean.” She put the clean forks into the silverware drawer. “The rest of us are way below her on the social ladder. Voleen was a Butler before she married into the Johnsons, you know.”

  Lizzy carried the enamel dishpan to the back screen door and tossed the water onto the trumpet climber that arched across the roof. “Maybe it’s our friendly company she craves.” She chuckled. “Must be kind of lonely at the top of that social ladder. Nobody can afford to climb high enough to join her.”

  Lizzy knew she was exaggerating, but what she said was mostly true. Darling had once had an aristocracy of sorts—the Blakes, for instance, and the Robbs and the Butlers and the Cartwrights, of course, Mrs. Blackstone’s mother’s family. They were the cotton kings and queens, with fine plantations on the richest bottoms and landings along the river, where the stern-wheel steamboats plied their weekly runs up from Mobile and down from Montgomery. The boats stopped at every landing to leave farm equipment and blocks of ice and barrels of flour and bags of sugar, and pick up bales of cotton and wool and bushels of corn and sweet potatoes and barrels of turpentine—a strong commerce built on agriculture.

  But that was in the old days, before the War Between the States, before Emancipation, before the Depression of the 1890s, before the Great War. Everything was different now. The Louisville and Nashville railroad had taken over the river traffic. The boll weevils that munched through the cotton fields in the early 1900s had finished off what was left of the cotton fortunes. The aristocratic families had sent their young men off to fight, first Mr. Lincoln and then the Kaiser, and those who had managed to come back more or less unscathed had gone elsewhere to seek their fortunes: to Mobile, Atlanta, Richmond, Chicago, even New York. There were no more Cartwrights now: Mrs. Blackstone was the last of that clan, just as Mrs. Johnson was the last of the Butlers. And now, the Darling Savings and Trust owned many of the old plantations and George E. Pickett Johnson (named for a Confederate general famous for his disastrous charge at Gettysburg) was the richest man in town. Voleen and George Johnson had friends among the professional people—the town’s three lawyers, the circuit court judge, the probate court judge, the doctor, the president of the Darling Academy. But times had changed and there wasn’t much in the way of a local aristocracy.

  Verna put the broom back in the corner and replied to Lizzy’s remark with an ironic chuckle. “Nobody can afford to do anything right now. Working in the probate office, I get to see how far behind on their taxes people are.” She gave the others a sideways look. “Even some of the ones who act like they own the top of the ladder. And there are rules, you know.” She picked the tablecloth up and took it to the back door to shake it. “Everybody has to play by them, like it or not. Eventually, they’ll have to pay up.” She folded the tablecloth and put it into the drawer.

  Lizzy hung the dishpan on its hook under the sink, think ing that it sounded like Verna was talking about the Johnsons. But surely not. Mr. Johnson had the reputation of being a careful businessman and a person of solid strength in the community. He’d be the very last person to get behind on his taxes, if only because he didn’t want his neighbors to think he was in trouble. And these days, people in the banking business couldn’t afford to look like they were in trouble, or there would be a run on the bank.

  Ophelia shut the silverware drawer and gave the others a quick smile. As the mayor’s wife, she was right in the middle of all of Darling’s current woes, but she tried as hard as she could to keep a steady outlook. And of course, she was an optimist.

  “Folks do get behind, poor souls,” she said sympathetically, “but I’m sure everybody will catch up. Times are hard now, but things’ll get better soon. And in the meantime, we’ve got each other, and that’s what counts. Friendship goes a long way.”

  “It does,” Verna agreed in her usual blunt, practical way. “But friends don’t pay your back taxes, Ophelia. At least, not that I’ve ever noticed. And they may line up to buy your house for pennies on the dollar at the tax sale, but I doubt they’ll hand back the property deed just because they’re your friends. Everybody’s got a bottom line. Some are closer to it than others.”

 
Ophelia shook her head, frowning, but Lizzy had to agree with Verna. She saw that kind of thing in the lawyer’s office all the time: people trying to get as much as they could, even at the expense of someone else. Ophelia always liked to say that bad times brought out the good in folks. In Lizzy’s experience, it was just as likely to go the other way.

  When her friends had left, Lizzy took one last tour of the house, making sure that everything was in order. She locked the front door from the inside and let herself out the back, locking it behind her.

  Until recently, most people in Darling hadn’t bothered to lock their doors. But in the past few months, that had changed. Hobos, down on their luck and hungry, had begun jumping off the freight trains and going door to door, asking if there was any work they could do in exchange for food. Two or three had come to Lizzy’s house, and she’d done what she could—asked them to chop kindling or clean up a tree that had come down in a storm, in return for a good meal and a couple of extra sandwiches. They were polite and nice enough and she hadn’t been afraid. But if they found a house unoccupied and unlocked, it might be a different story. There wouldn’t likely be any vandalism—they were just ordinary men and boys (and some of the boys no more than children), down on their luck and looking for a dry place to sleep. But she didn’t want to take a chance. She wasn’t as optimistic as Ophelia about people’s good intentions.

  Lizzy was going down the walk, thinking about this, when a low, cracked voice said, at her elbow. “Afternoon, Miz Lacy.”

  Lizzy jumped and put her hand to her throat. “Oh, Zeke!” she exclaimed. “You startled me!”

  “Sorry,” Zeke muttered. The old colored man was grizzled and thin, with a leathery face and a nose that was smashed to one side—he’d been a boxer in the old days, Lizzy had heard. He wore a shapeless felt hat mashed down on his head and bib overalls over a white shirt, clean, because this was Sunday. “Wonderin’ if there was somethin’ I could do to he’p out here.” He gestured toward the garden. “Reckon the grass might oughta be mowed purty soon. An’ there’s plenty of snippin’ an’ clippin’ and cleanin’ in them flower beds.” He shook his head. “Sho’ looks a mess. Po’ Miz Dahlia must be turnin’ over in her grave.”

  Lizzy looked around. Zeke was right, she thought. The grass was ankle-high, and if it wasn’t clipped soon, the job would be a lot harder—maybe too hard for Zeke, who must be in his seventies. But he was strong still, strong enough to make a living delivering groceries for Mr. Hancock and doing odd jobs around the neighborhood—when he wasn’t drunk or recovering from an extended bout with the bottle.

  “Thanks for pointing that out, Zeke,” Lizzy replied. “Our club members will handle the cleanup on the flower beds, but maybe you could cut the grass for us.” She looked again at the long stretch down toward the woods. “How much did Mrs. Blackstone pay you for the work?”

  Zeke brightened. “A quarter’s whut she paid, Miz Lizzy.”

  “Good.” Lizzy opened her purse and took out a quarter. “Oh, and there’s something else you might could do for us, Zeke. It doesn’t have to be this week, but please dig a hole for the sign and plant it, out there in front of the house, under the cucumber tree. We want people to see it as they go past.” Considering his habits, it would probably be better if she didn’t give him all the money at once. “If you’ll come by my house when you’re finished, I’ll pay you for it”

  Zeke nodded, grinning a snaggletoothed grin. “Yes’m, I’ll do that” He pocketed the money, giving her a questioning look. “What folks’re sayin’ is true, then? Mr. Beatty Black stone ain’t never gonna live here? This place don’t belong to him or his’n?”

  There was something in the tone that arrested her, but she only said, “No, Zeke. Mrs. Blackstone left the house and the lot next door to the garden club. The Dahlias will be keeping the garden up—as best we can, anyway—and using the house for our meetings. It’s what Mrs. Blackstone wanted.”

  “Yes’m,” Zeke said, and looked away. “Reckon you know about the Cartwright ghost”

  Many Alabama houses have their resident ghosts, of course, especially if the house has had a history of tragedy. The Cartwright house was burned during the War (always spoken of in Darling with a capital W) and the Cartwright ghost, dispossessed, was said to wander through the old gardens looking for something she had lost, variously reported to be a baby, a family treasure, or even her shoes.

  “I’ve heard about it, of course,” Lizzy said. “I haven’t seen her myself, though,” she added.

  “Lots of folks has seen it.” Zeke was serious. “Never bothered Miz Blackstone much, ’cuz it’s her fam’ly ghost. She wuz familiar. But other folks might be afeerd, if they ain’t never seen her.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  Zeke looked wise. “Oh, reckon I have. More’n once, too, since I was a chile. Wears a long black cape, she does. Carries a spade and digs in dem bushes at the back end of the garden. You’ll see her, too, if’n you come round here one night when the moon’s full.”

  Lizzy nodded, although she had the feeling that Zeke’s adult encounters with the ghost might be the product of his notorious adventures with the local moonshine whiskey—and his childhood sightings the product of an active imagination.

  “Well, thanks,” she said. “Let me know when you’ve put up the sign, and I’ll pay you.”

  She walked away, wondering if there was a way the Dahlias could exploit the legend of the Cartwright ghost to help them raise money to fix the leaky roof Maybe a moonlight garden tour, with one of their members dressed in a long black cape, playing the part of the ghost? She did a quick calculation. If the roof cost twenty dollars to fix and they charged a nickel apiece for the moonlight garden tour (half the price of a movie ticket), they would need four hundred people.

  She laughed at herself. Obviously a silly idea.

  They’d have to think of some other way to raise that money. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Nobody in town had much of anything to spare.

  TWO

  Ophelia

  Ophelia Snow didn’t have far to walk home, for her house was around the corner on Rosemont Street, down Rosemont across Mimosa to Larkspur Lane, in a block that Ophelia had always thought was the prettiest in the entire town of Darling. (And since she believed that Darling must be the prettiest town in Alabama, that was saying something.) The well-kept houses, most painted white with blue or red or even yellow shutters, had wide front porches and green lawns under arching water oaks and magnolias and there were pretty flowers along the street all summer long. It was a place where kids could ride bikes and play wherever they wanted to, and where people cared about their houses and wanted them to look nice. It was the pride of Darling.

  Ophelia had been glad when her husband, Jed, announced that he intended to run for mayor. The two of them had been born right here in Darling, had lived here all their lives, and felt a sense of responsibility for what happened here, good and bad. Ophelia’s father, dead now, had been a lawyer and part-time pastor of the Methodist Church. Jed’s family had been river-bottom farmers but his dad had sold out back in 1912 and opened Snow’s Farm Supply, a few blocks north on Rosemont. Jed began working there when he came back from France in ’18—all in one piece, thankfully. When his father retired a few years later, he took over.

  Like Ophelia and Jed, most of the people who lived in Darling had been born there, or nearby. The town was located seventy crow-flying miles north of Mobile, in the modestly hilly region east of the Alabama River. It was named for Joseph P. Darling, who felt that a country rich in timber and fertile soils, with fast-flowing Pine Mill Creek close by and the Alabama River not far away, could benefit from a market town. He had planted his foot down right there, as Bessie Bloodworth (whose hobby was local history) liked to say. And where he had planted his foot the town had grown up, surrounded by farm fields and stands of loblolly and longleaf pines, with sweet gum and tulip trees in the creek and river bottoms, and magnolia and sassafras and sycamore
and pecan.

  Darling had grown apace without experiencing much in the way of noteworthy historical events, except for some brief but serious unpleasantness when Union soldiers occupied the town during the War Between the States and some considerable celebrating when the Louisville & Nashville Railroad came close enough to make building a rail-line spur and a rail yard a realistic scheme.

  When the spur—the Manitee & Repton line—was completed, the town had blossomed. Now the seat of Cypress County, Darling was centered around a brick courthouse with a bell tower and a white-painted dome with a clock, the whole thing surrounded by a grassy lawn. The town’s businesses were arranged around the courthouse square, and the oak-canopied residential streets were organized in a similar four-square grid, as logical and orderly as old Joseph P. himself Around the town there were mostly corn and cotton fields and lots of timber. The past few years had been drier than normal—people were already talking about a drought—but Jed said the town’s water supply was in no danger, and Ophelia believed him. She always believed Jed. Always.

  “I’m home,” Ophelia called, coming into the house through the kitchen door. She put her empty dish—the Dahlias had eaten every one of her stuffed tomatoes—on the kitchen table and went down the hall into the living room. Jed was just turning around from the telephone on the wall. He stepped to her quickly and gave her a hug. At six feet to her five-foot-four, he nearly dwarfed her.

  “Have a good meeting?” He was one of those men who go on looking forty-five until they’re seventy, brown-haired and brown-eyed, with square, capable hands and—usually—an open, pleasant look on his face. Just now, his brows were pulled together. He looked troubled.