The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Oh, that’s the silver dollar bush,” Bessie said. “You might not have seen it blooming, but you’re sure to remember the seed pods—those flat silver disks that look so pretty in dried bouquets. Just like silver coins.” She chuckled. “If we could spend them, we wouldn’t have to worry about what’s happening with the bank.”

  “Except that Miss Rogers would never let us get away with calling them ‘silver dollars,’” Verna reminded them. She turned to go to the kitchen with Beulah’s bag of lemons. “She’d insist on Lunaria annua.”

  Everybody laughed, and even Lizzy chuckled.

  Bessie leaned toward her. “The girls asked me to tell you that they’re thinking of you in your hour of need, my dear. They’ve all been disappointed in love and they know just how it feels. You have our deepest sympathies.”

  “Thank you,” Lizzy said gratefully. “But I hope you’ll tell them that I’m not the one who is in need of—”

  “We’re going to have our supper on the picnic table in the yard, where there’s more room,” Myra May announced from the kitchen door. “Is everybody here, Verna? Shall we start putting out the food Raylene sent?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Is everybody here?’” Lizzy asked, looking around. “Who’s everybody? What is going on?”

  Verna peered out the front door. “They’re here, Myra May,” she called over her shoulder. “You can start setting the food out now.”

  Lizzy saw that Ophelia Snow and Aunt Hetty Little were coming up the front walk. Aunt Hetty, leaning on her cane, was carrying a crocheted flower garden afghan in every color of the rainbow. Ophelia, short and round, with flyaway brown hair, was bearing a cake.

  “Come on, you two,” Verna called. “The party’s just getting started. You’re the last ones.”

  “Party?” Lizzy asked helplessly. “We’re having a party?”

  “A few of us Dahlias thought you needed a party tonight,” Aunt Hetty explained, climbing onto the front porch. “Some folks couldn’t come on short notice, but they all send their love.” As she came through the door, she fished in the pocket of her purple sweater. “Mildred Kilgore asked me to give this to you. She thought it might cheer you up.”

  Lizzy saw that it was a little book of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, called Second April. Millay—her favorite poet!

  Aunt Hetty pressed it into Lizzy’s hand, dropping her voice. “I glanced at some of the poems, dear. They didn’t look all that cheerful to me, but maybe you’re a better judge.” She held out the crocheted flower garden afghan. “This is from me. To wrap yourself up on a chilly evening.”

  “Alice Ann couldn’t be here,” Ophelia said, “but she promised to leave a dozen eggs at Mr. Moseley’s office when she comes to town tomorrow. She says her hens are laying extra good right now. And Lucy Murphy says she’s taught herself to tat and you’re going to get her first doily, as soon as she finishes. If it’s decent, that is. She’s not making any promises.”

  Liz held the book and the afghan against her breast. “You Dahlias,” she said, shaking her head in amazement. “You are . . . you are wonderful!”

  “Wonderful is us,” Ophelia replied, tossing her head. “Definitely.” She handed the cake to Verna. “Verna, this is my mama’s moonshine whiskey cake, which has been handed down in our family for years. I was lucky to get Mrs. Hancock’s last box of raisins. She said she can’t pay her bill at the grocer supply and she doesn’t know when she’ll be able to get more. So we should enjoy every last bite.” She gave Lizzy a loud kiss on the cheek, then pulled back, looking at her critically. “Sweetie, you could use a comb and maybe a dab of lipstick. Come on upstairs with Beulah and me and we’ll get you prettied up, while the rest of these girls finish setting up your party.”

  So there was nothing for Lizzy to do but allow herself to be led upstairs, where she put on the blue dress she had worn the night before and let Beulah do her makeup and Ophelia comb her hair.

  “There,” Beulah said with satisfaction, as the three of them looked at Lizzy’s reflection in the dressing table mirror. “All beautiful!” And when she saw the tears well in Lizzy’s eyes, she whipped out her handkerchief. “Don’t you dare cry over losing that fella,” she cautioned. “Your Maybelline will run!”

  “But I’m not,” Lizzy protested. “I’m crying because I have such wonderful friends.”

  “No time for crying.” Ophelia pulled her to her feet. “Time to party. Come on!”

  Myra May had spread a blue-checked tablecloth on the picnic table, and Bessie had put her flowers in a crystal vase, right in the middle. Raylene Riggs had sent enough thin-sliced ham sandwiches and macaroni salad for everyone. There was a pitcher of lemonade made with Beulah’s lemons. And Ophelia’s cake turned their simple picnic into a feast. They finished eating as the soft April dusk closed around them, sweet with the scent of honeysuckle that clambered in the company of the climbing rose over Lizzy’s back porch. Myra May had lit several candles in Mason jars and the flames flickered in the darkening evening.

  As a companionable silence fell, Lizzy cleared her throat. “You were so sweet to come out tonight to cheer me up,” she said quietly. “But I want to correct . . . well, a misimpression. I didn’t mean to deceive anybody, but—”

  “Deceive us?” Aunt Hetty chided. “What in the world are you talking about, child?”

  “Well, maybe ‘mislead’ is a better word. What I mean is, it’s true that I’m feeling just terrible about this whole thing—about Grady getting married.”

  “We know that,” Verna said. “So what—”

  Lizzy held up her hand. “But I’m not feeling sorry for myself, and I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I think we should feel sorry for him.”

  “Oh, come on,” Ophelia said, with a sarcastic emphasis. “Nobody needs to feel sorry for Grady Alexander. He is a jerk, pure and simple.”

  “A cad,” Bessie said hotly.

  “A rascal,” Aunt Hetty growled. “He can burn in—” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m a Christian,” she said, between her fingers. “I won’t say it. But you all know what I mean.”

  Lizzy shook her head. “I hate to contradict everybody, but you’re wrong. I’ve known Grady Alexander ever since we were kids in second grade. He’s not a jerk or a cad or a rascal. He’s a nice guy who made a mistake. He’ll do his best to make his wife happy and he’ll love his child—his children. But he’s doing what he feels he has to do, and in the long run, that’s going to weigh on him.” She sighed. “That’s why I’ve been crying. I’m feeling sorry for him. And I hope you’ll have some sympathy, too.”

  Beulah reached across the table and took Lizzy’s hand. “You mean, you really didn’t love him after all, Liz?”

  “Oh, I loved him,” Lizzy said. “Maybe not as much as I should have—that is, if we were going to get married. But I did love him, and I still do. That’s why I can’t hold this against him. He did what . . . what people do. Of course, he shouldn’t have—at least, I’m sure that’s what his mother has told him.”

  “I’ll bet she did,” Ophelia said with a knowing giggle. “Mrs. Alexander probably bit his head off.”

  “But which of us has never done anything we shouldn’t?” Lizzy asked. She looked across the table at Beulah. “You?”

  “Are you kidding?” With a rueful smile, Beulah shook her head. “Not me, honey.”

  “Me neither,” Myra May said grimly. “I’m forever doing things I shouldn’t, and getting into hot water because of it.”

  “You said a mouthful there, Myra May,” Aunt Hetty put in. “Although at my age, people tend to overlook my shortcomings. I guess they figure I don’t have much longer to get myself in trouble.” Everybody had to chuckle at that.

  “Well, then, you understand,” Liz said. “I love it that you gave me this party and all those wonderful gifts. You are very generous and I appreciate it,
more than I can say. But you can stop feeling sorry for me. And you can tell the rest of the Dahlias that I am going to be perfectly okay. Not tomorrow, maybe,” she added staunchly. “And maybe not even next week. But I will. Later.”

  Verna leaned forward, studying Lizzy, her eyes narrowed. “Where is it?” she asked, frowning suspiciously. “I don’t see it. Did you take it off and leave it somewhere?”

  “Leave what?” Lizzy asked, puzzled.

  “What are you talking about, Verna?” Myra May demanded.

  “Her halo,” Verna replied. She looked around. “She must have dropped it.” She picked up the edge of the checked tablecloth and peered underneath the table. “Not under there. Come on, everybody, we’d better hunt for it.”

  With that, the party broke up in laughter and hugs. And when Lizzy went to bed that night, she thanked her lucky stars for all her Darling Dahlia friends, the best friends any woman could have.

  Grady was now in her past, a man she had loved once, a man she would always remember with both love and sadness. But she was ready to make a new start on the rest of her life. And the Dahlias were there to help.

  NINE

  Violent Events, as Told to the Citizens of Darling

  Wednesday, April 12

  The Dahlias’ get-together in Liz Lacy’s backyard wasn’t the only event that transpired on Tuesday night, but on all counts, it was the friendliest and most pleasant.

  Unfortunately, the little town of Darling was in for a violent night, although most of its citizens slept right through the excitement and didn’t learn about the frightening events until sometime on Wednesday. People heard about them in the usual way, when they eavesdropped on their neighbors talking on the party line, or attended the regular Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Darling Embroidery Club, or joined their cronies for the noontime domino match in the back room at Snow’s feed store. By evening, the reports were all over town, although not all of them were 100 percent accurate, of course. That’s what happens when people start piecing together bits of this and that from what they’ve heard, like a crazy quilt. What they come up with sometimes makes a pattern, but mostly not. Accurate or not, though, it’s always colorful.

  Verna heard about it from Melba Jean Manners, one of the ladies who worked in her office. Melba Jean had heard it from Artis Hart when she stopped on her way to work to drop off five of Mr. Manners’ dress shirts to be washed and ironed at Hart’s Peerless Laundry, across from the diner at the corner of Robert E. Lee and Franklin. Melba’s husband worked at Katz Department Store on the south side of the square in Monroeville, and Mr. Katz expected him to wear a fresh white shirt every day. This made a dent in the Manners’ budget (the laundry charged twelve cents a shirt) but it couldn’t be helped. Melba Jean said she worked all week at a paying job and she wasn’t aiming to spend her Saturdays washing and starching and ironing Mr. Manners’ shirts. And Sunday was the Sabbath.

  Melba Jean was a stoutish, double-chinned woman in her fifties, and by the time she climbed the stairs to the second floor of the courthouse on Wednesday morning, she was red-faced and so out of breath with excitement and exertion that she flopped right down in her chair and panted like a puppy. Verna sent Sherrie rushing off for a glass of water and stood by, patting Melba Jean on the shoulder and urging her to take deep breaths.

  Finally Melba Jean had recovered enough to speak. “It was just plain awful, Mr. Hart said!” She fanned herself rapidly with an envelope. “There was at least a dozen, all got up in Klan regalia. They had a big bucket of hot tar and brushes and three or four pillowcases full of chicken feathers. And if Buddy Norris hadn’t’ve got there as quick as he did, there would have been big trouble for sure. They scattered like pigeons when they heard that big old Indian Ace.”

  Deputy Buddy Norris rode a motorcycle, which was both good and bad: good because it got him to the scene of the crime fast, bad because the criminals knew he was coming.

  She paused for breath and hurried on. “Leastwise, that’s what Mrs. Barbee told Mr. Hart when she brought her big white tablecloth and sixteen napkins in to be washed after the family reunion. The Barbees live right across the street from the George E. Pickett Johnsons and when Mrs. Barbee heard the neighborhood dogs carrying on, she made Mr. Barbee get up out of bed and put on the porch light to see what they was up to.”

  “Klan regalia?” Verna asked, puzzled. “But why in the world would the Klan want to tar and feather Mr. Johnson, of all people?”

  Melba Jean shook her head so hard that her chins wobbled like a big turkey gobbler’s. “Mr. Hart said Mrs. Barbee said they wasn’t really Klan.” She accepted the glass of water Sherrie handed her and gulped it down. “Thanks, dearie. They didn’t want to show their faces, was all.”

  “That figures,” Sherrie muttered. “Could be anybody underneath one of those white sheets. Could be Jesus himself, and nobody would ever know.”

  “Sounds like it was a good thing Buddy Norris got there so fast,” Verna said. She frowned as Sherrie adjusted Melba Jean’s collar, which had got all crooked. “Did Mrs. Barbee happen to notice whether they came in a car?” That would be the first thing Ellery Queen would want to know. “If they did, what kind of car was it?”

  “No idea,” Melba Jean replied. “But Mr. Hart says he bets he can come up with a list of names today or tomorrow, when them dirty sheets start showing up at the laundry.”

  * * *

  Bessie Bloodworth heard about it right after breakfast, when she walked from the Magnolia Manor to the town square to do the shopping for the rest of the week. It was a cool, sweet, peaceful April morning in Darling, and Bessie thought the wisteria and peonies and azaleas were all at their prettiest.

  She went first to Lima’s Drugs to pick up some things the girls had asked for. Leticia Wiggens had given her a dime for a jar of Dew Deodorant (“When nervousness makes you perspire, DEW will keep your secret”). Miss Rogers wanted a six-cent bar of Camay (“The soap of beautiful women”). Mrs. Sedalius, who was always worried about offending, had given her twelve cents for a bottle of Listerine (“The mouth rinse that ends halitosis!”). And when Bessie happened to pass the rack of hair care items, she picked up two ten-cent Fashionette hairnets (“Made of human hair, sanitary & dependable”) for herself. Money might be hard to come by, but a person had to have her hairnets.

  Mr. Lima rang up her purchases and gave her change back from a dollar. He was dressed in his white pharmacist’s coat, with his gold-topped pen tucked in his left breast pocket and his gold-rimmed glasses perched at the end of his long nose. Putting Bessie’s items into a paper sack, he said, in his usual dry way, “I reckon you heard what happened last night, Miz Bloodworth.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Bessie stared down at the change in her hand. “Excuse me, but I think you owe me a dime.” She put the coins on the counter. “Count it for yourself, Mr. Lima.”

  It took a moment to straighten that out. Yes, he really did owe her a dime and she intended to insist on it, since this was the second time he had shortchanged her in the past month. If he was that desperate, he ought to be honest and raise his prices.

  When she was satisfied that she had the correct change, she put it into her coin purse and asked, “What happened last night?”

  “Mr. Johnson’s house was vandalized. Purple paint thrown all over his porch.” Mr. Lima raised his voice to greet Leona Ruth Adcock, who had just come in. “G’mornin’, Miz Adcock. Haven’t seen you for a while.” To Bessie, he added, “And this was after some of the Klan got run off by Deputy Norris.”

  “Oh, my!” Bessie exclaimed. “Purple paint!”

  “Blue paint was what I heard,” Leona Ruth said crisply. “And they ripped up all of Mrs. Johnson’s flowers out in back. G’mornin’, Bessie.”

  “Ripped up the flower bed! Now, that’s going too far,” Bessie exclaimed indignantly. Voleen Johnson, a Dahlia, was very proud of her all-whi
te flower bed, which she paid a yardman to tend because she didn’t like to get dirt under her fingernails. “G’mornin’, Leona Ruth.”

  “Lucky he wasn’t tarred and feathered,” Mr. Lima growled. “That’s what they was fixin’ to do when the deputy showed up.”

  “But why would anybody want to do all that?” Bessie asked, and then remembered what Earlynne Biddle had said, the day they were canning rhubarb. “Oh, I guess people are upset because of the bank closing.”

  “Upset!” Mr. Lima snorted. “Mad as hell is more like it, if you ladies’ll excuse my French.”

  “I heard the sheriff was going to arrest Mr. Johnson but Mr. Moseley talked him out of it,” Leona Ruth said sourly. “Wouldn’t bother me none if he did get tarred.”

  Mr. Lima shut his cash register drawer, hard. “I hate to say it because I’m a good Baptist, but I could be tempted to pick up a brush myself. I’ll be lucky if this goldurned bank closing don’t put me out of business.” He looked at Leona Ruth. “What’ll you have this morning, Miz Adcock?”

  * * *

  Bessie’s next stop was Hancock’s, the only grocery store in town. Before the Crash, it was rumored that the A&P had bought the empty lot next to the Five and Dime where Sevier’s Stationery burned down, and was planning to build one of those new self-serve markets, where customers went around with wire baskets on their arms and took their own goods right off the shelf and carried them up front where they paid a girl who did nothing all day but punch the keys on a cash register.

  But Sevier’s was still an empty lot and looked to stay empty until the economy improved, which was just fine with Bessie. If the A&P opened a self-serve store, that would likely be the end of Hancock’s. And that would be a pity. Not only would they make you wait on yourself, but they wouldn’t give credit—you’d have to pay every time you went shopping. And you’d have to carry your own groceries home in a shopping bag or pay Old Zeke or one of the boys to do it for you, instead of getting it delivered at no charge, the way Mrs. Hancock did it.