The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Through all those dark months, it was Ophelia’s earnings that had kept the family afloat and supported Jed’s parents, too, both of whom were too old and too sick to work. She didn’t mind helping them, of course. She accepted it as her obligation. Jed was their only child, so they had nowhere else to turn—except the county poor farm, and she and Jed would never let that happen, not in a million years. But where else could old folks turn if they didn’t have any children and couldn’t pay the rent or doctor or dentist bills, or buy enough fatback and beans to keep them alive? For many, it was a desperate situation.

  Just recently, though, Ophelia had read that President Roosevelt had sent a message to Congress about something he was calling “social security,” which was designed to give older people a little something to live on when they couldn’t work any longer. There seemed to be a lot of opposition to it—some were calling it socialism or even communism—but when Ophelia paid Mother Snow’s doctor bill and bought Dad Snow a pair of new dentures, she felt it would be a godsend if it passed. If it didn’t, she was hoping that Senator Huey P. Long, a Democrat from Louisiana who had a bigger mouth and even bigger ideas than Franklin Roosevelt, would win the 1936 presidential election. She often heard the senator talking on the radio about his plan to make every man a king, and she thought it was grand. If Senator Long was elected, he promised to limit rich people’s annual incomes to a million dollars. The government would take the rest and use the money to guarantee every family two thousand dollars a year and every person over sixty an old-age pension. Ophelia had declared that she was personally ready to cast her vote for Huey P. Long if President Roosevelt couldn’t get his social security program through Congress.

  She and Sarah were halfway back to Darling and the turnoff to Camp Briarwood was in sight when Ophelia said, “I want to stop at the camp for a few minutes. I left some papers on my desk, and I need to take them home and work on them.” (That was what Charlie Dickens called her “cover story,” what she would say to anybody who happened to come into the office while she was getting the files that Charlie wanted.) She turned to glance at Sarah. “And you haven’t seen the camp yet, honey, or the building where I work. Let’s take a quick detour.”

  “Do we have to?” Sarah asked, pouting. “Really, it’s too hot to be out driving around. I want to get home and show my swell new bathing suit to Connie. It’ll knock her eyes out.” She hugged the swimsuit sack. “The one her mother got her has a skirt on it. A ruffled skirt that comes halfway down to her knees. Of course Connie hates it.” Connie, who lived next door, was Sarah’s best friend.

  Sarah was right about it being hot, Ophelia thought. She glanced up at the sky, which was clouding up. It looked like the weather forecast might be right. They might have rain, in which case they might have to move the picnic onto the back porch, if it didn’t come down too hard. Or indoors, if it did.

  “We won’t be there very long,” she promised, making the turn. She shifted into second gear and headed down the bumpy graveled road that led to the camp, a mile away. She smiled over at Sarah. “Don’t pout, sweetie. Your face might get stuck that way, and then you won’t look very pretty in your red swimsuit. Which is going to turn your father a dozen shades of purple, you know. He would rather it had a skirt on it—all the way down to your ankles.”

  That brought a giggle. “Poor Daddy,” Sarah said, rolling her eyes. “He is such an old fogy. What makes him be that way?”

  “Love.” Ophelia reached out and patted Sarah’s arm. “He loves you, hon. He doesn’t want you to grow up and go away from home.”

  Sarah was silent for a moment, looking out the window. “Daddy’s an old fogy about your job out here, too, isn’t he? I guess maybe he doesn’t want you to go away from home, either.”

  Ophelia sighed. Sarah was an uncommonly perceptive young woman. She had sensed the tension that the Camp Briarwood job was creating in the family. Jed hadn’t been happy with the Dispatch job or the work in Mr. Moseley’s law office, but (as Ophelia had often pointed out), she was just a half block from the farm supply store and only a few blocks from home. Jed knew and liked Charlie and Mr. Moseley, he knew exactly where to find her, and she was always available to him and the children on a moment’s notice.

  None of that was true with her new three-day-a-week job at the CCC camp, which was five miles out of town. She left early in the morning and barely got home in time to put supper on the table. (Jed was always complaining that they never had dessert on weeknights, and when they did, it was Jell-O, which he wasn’t crazy about.) She couldn’t be reached very easily, which was bad enough. But probably more important, Jed didn’t know the people she worked for. It wouldn’t be right to say that her husband was jealous, exactly, because she never gave him any reason for jealousy. But it would certainly be fair to say that he was uneasy at the idea of her working among so many strange men—strange men in uniform, and Yankees, to boot. She suspected that it was the Yankee part that bothered him the most. Jed’s grandfather had been a captain in a Confederate regiment. To Jed, Yankees wearing uniforms—even if they were CCC uniforms and didn’t look much like the regular military—were soldiers in an invading army.

  But while Ophelia kept a wary eye on the Yankees, she loved working at the camp. She was on the job at the Dispatch on Wednesday and Thursday, helping Charlie put the paper together for Thursday night printing and Friday mailing. But on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, she got up early, put the family’s breakfast on the table, then rushed to catch the bus to Camp Briarwood, where she worked as a liaison between the camp and the local people who supplied it with goods, equipment, and services—an important job, and she was the right one to do it.

  Jed’s mood had improved somewhat when she handed him her first pay envelope, but he was still acting surly about it. “You watch out for those damn Yankees,” he’d muttered. “You can’t trust a one of ’em any farther than you can throw him.”

  Charlie’s reaction, on the other hand, was entirely different. When Ophelia told him about her new job, he had thought it was a grand idea. He even improved on it, coming up with the suggestion that she should start writing a weekly newspaper column about the camp. He would pay her a dollar fifty for each column, which was the same amount he paid Liz for the “Garden Gate” column she wrote for him.

  “We’ll call it ‘Camp Briarwood News,’” he said. “Folks are curious about what’s going on out there. You can tell them what’s happening. And if you’ve got enough material for a feature story, we can run that, too.” And then just yesterday, he had come up with the more interesting undercover investigative assignment, but that was a different matter. A different matter entirely.

  Ophelia was delighted to be writing the column, and not just because of the money. It gave her a chance to satisfy her curiosity and find out much more about the camp than she could have learned just by working there. For her first column, she had interviewed Captain Gordon Campbell, the camp commander, who heartily approved of Charlie’s idea for a newspaper column. He was eager, he said, for the local folk to learn about the camp’s activities and its plans.

  “Our work will go a lot more smoothly if we can count on local cooperation,” he had said. “And people will be better able to cooperate if they know what’s going on out here, especially now that we’re employing a few townspeople.” Ophelia got the feeling that Captain Campbell really cared about making his camp successful and that the camp’s success could depend on the support it got from Darling. The captain was pleased by the letters that people wrote to the editor about that first column, and told Ophelia that if he could help in any way, all she had to do was let him know.

  “Well, here we are,” Ophelia said, slowing the car at the top of the small hill that overlooked the camp, beside a large wooden sign.

  Welcome to Camp Briarwood

  Civilian Conservation Corps

  Company 432, Camp SCS-8

  “Golly,�
�� Sarah said, her eyes widening. She sat up and looked through the windshield at the camp below them. “It’s huge, Mom! It’s a lot bigger than I thought.”

  “One of the biggest camps in the state,” Ophelia replied proudly. “It’s really something, isn’t it?”

  Camp Briarwood sprawled like a small city across about twenty acres of open meadow, a mile or so from the eastern edge of Briar’s Swamp. On the flat plain below them lay an orderly arrangement of two dozen wooden buildings of similar construction, all single story, each painted a dark forest green with a brown shingled roof. They were laid out around a large rectangular parade ground, its grass neatly clipped, with a graveled road that traced another rectangle around the perimeter of the buildings. The place looked like a military compound, which it was, partly. That is, it was run by Army officers, and there was enough military discipline to keep the young men organized and working in an orderly way, although not as much as they would have encountered in a real Army camp.

  As they would in the Army, though, the “enrollees” (that’s what the boys were called) were given free dental and medical care, free inoculations, and free meals and lodging and clothing. They received a wage of $30 a month, $25 of which was automatically sent home to their families, all of whom were on relief. For that, each boy traded eight hours of labor, five days a week. Everybody was there, as Captain Campbell said firmly, to do a job. An important job.

  “Those are the administration buildings,” Ophelia said, pointing to two identical structures on the right. “And those are the barracks where the enrollees sleep.” She pointed to the left, to a row of four long green-painted frame buildings with doors at either end, each capable of housing fifty young men. “Beyond them are the officers’ quarters and the camp guesthouse. When I began working here, there were already 192 enrollees with more on the way, along with a half-dozen officers. Before the barracks were built, the boys lived in tents.” She chuckled. “I’m told that they were glad to move out of those tents. The barracks don’t leak. And they’re heated.” Which mattered in January, when the temperature could go as low as ten or fifteen degrees above zero.

  “What do the guys do all day?” Sarah asked wonderingly. “Do they go to school, maybe?”

  “They work,” Ophelia said, remembering what the captain had told her. “That’s what they’re here for.”

  Ophelia knew that when the boys arrived, most of them had never held a steady job—and their dads weren’t holding steady jobs, either, thanks (or no thanks) to the Depression. Many of them had roamed around the country, catching rides on freight trains, which meant avoiding the railroad cops, sleeping in cardboard boxes in hobo jungles beside the tracks, picking up whatever work they could find in return for something to eat. Ophelia found it frightening that a whole generation of young American men had grown up with no experience of making or building or creating something lasting, or trading their labor for a regular paycheck.

  So for the enrollees, the camp’s regular daily and weekly work schedule was a crucial part of their learning. Monday through Friday, they were awakened before dawn by the camp bugler blowing reveille. Dressed, beds made, they went for calisthenics, then breakfast in the mess hall. Then they picked up their equipment and climbed into trucks that drove them wherever they were scheduled to work that day. At noon, the mess wagon took lunch to the job site. The trucks brought them back in time to wash up and get ready for supper, announced with another bugle call.

  The camp had been built just a short distance from Briar’s Swamp for an important reason, Ophelia had learned. According to the “Mission Statement” posted on the wall in the quartermaster’s office, the first big work project was to drain the swamp to control the mosquitos and “to put the land into condition for continuous production of timber.” One or two people in Darling—including Bessie Bloodworth—were strongly opposed, since the swamp was a natural feature of the land and draining it would mean denying a home to many different species of wildlife. But that was definitely a minority opinion, and the mission was going forward. To get that job done, the boys spent their workdays digging drainage ditches, building roads, and clearing firebreaks. Once finished with that, there were other projects on the camp’s agenda.

  “But they don’t work all the time,” Ophelia added. “The boys eat supper in the mess hall, over there.” She pointed. “After supper, they can go to the rec hall—that’s the building next to the mess hall. Or they can take classes in the education building. That’s the shop building, behind it. Or they can catch a ride into town for a movie, as long as they’re back by lights-out.”

  On weekdays, the bugle call for lights-out came at ten p.m. Saturday mornings were reserved for camp cleanup and personal chores. On Saturday afternoons, there were organized sports, or trucks took the boys into town for a matinee movie and a stroll around the square, or dropped them off at the Roller Palace. On Saturday nights there was a dance, to which the townspeople were invited. Some of the enrollees had brought their clarinets and saxophones and trumpets and trombones, and formed a dance band, calling themselves the Briarwood Boogie Boys. Ophelia hadn’t been to any of the dances yet—Jed wasn’t much for dancing—so she hadn’t heard them. But everybody said that while the Boogie Boys weren’t quite Benny Goodman, they were really quite good. Ophelia wished she could get Jed to at least come and listen. It sounded like fun.

  “Looks like they’re playing baseball,” Sarah said, pointing to a game that was underway on a diamond just behind the rec hall.

  “It’s a tournament,” Ophelia replied. “It’s been going on all month, among six or seven of the camps in this part of the state.” One of the camp officers was in charge of organized sports—baseball, basketball, boxing, horseshoes, footraces, and even table tennis and pool, played in the rec hall. There was a drill team, too, and a flag team and regular calisthenics. When Ophelia interviewed Captain Campbell, he had mentioned that the sports and games weren’t just designed to keep the enrollees occupied and out of trouble. They were an important part of the plan to put more meat and muscle on the young men, many of whom had been underweight and malnourished when they arrived at the camp. For many, food hadn’t been easy to come by when they were living at home or hopping freight trains to get from here to there, in hopes of more opportunities.

  Ophelia reached over and ruffled her daughter’s hair. “I wrote about the baseball tournament in my newspaper column last week. Bet you didn’t read it, did you?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Sarah said, laughing ruefully. “But now that I know what it’s like out here, I’ll try to do better.” A deeply tanned young man in a khaki uniform with the sleeves rolled up walked past the car and turned to wave at Sarah with a wink and a broad grin. Sarah, blushing, waved back. “Golly,” she breathed. “He’s cute!”

  Ophelia couldn’t help smiling. Last year, boys had been the object of Sarah’s scorn. Now, it was different. Sarah was definitely growing up. Ophelia put the car in gear, and they started down the hill, bearing right, toward the administration buildings. Through the open car windows, they heard the whack of a ball being solidly hit and a chorus of wild yells—the rebel yell—as the hitter rounded the bases. It sounded as if somebody had just scored a home run.

  “Hey.” Sarah sat up straight. “Can I go watch the baseball game while you get your stuff?”

  Ophelia shook her head firmly. “Not a good idea, dear. Some of these boys haven’t seen a girl in a while. You’d be mobbed.”

  Sarah gave her a long-suffering look. “That’s the idea, Mom. Being mobbed by a few boys wouldn’t hurt a bit. I’ll bet it would be fun. Pretty please?”

  “Not on your life,” Ophelia said. “You know what your father would say to that idea.” She turned right at the main camp signpost, followed the gravel road a quarter of the way around the parade ground, and parked behind the farthest administration building. “If you don’t want to come in with me, you can stay out here
and read.” She turned off the ignition. “You did bring a book, didn’t you?” She really didn’t have to ask. Sarah was a bookworm. She always had a book with her.

  “Yeah,” Sarah said and pulled a book out of the satchel on the floor. “Nancy Drew. Miss Rogers got it for me at the library.” She held it up. “The Secret of Red Gate Farm.”

  “Oh, good,” Ophelia said. Grown-up that she was, she enjoyed reading the Nancy Drew books, and she always reached for them when Sarah was finished. “What’s it about?”

  “Nancy, Bess, and George are conducting an undercover investigation to get the scoop on a counterfeit money ring and turn the information over to federal agents. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next—looks like Nancy is about to be captured by the counterfeiters.” Sarah grinned mischievously. “Maybe they’ll torture her to get her to give up the secret code she stole.”

  An undercover investigation? Ophelia was startled, since those were the same words—the very same!—that Charlie had used to describe the assignment he had given her. It was unsettling to hear that Nancy Drew, who was usually so astute and careful, had gone undercover and was about to be captured. And tortured? Surely not. She frowned. Anyway, that was a story, just fiction. It had nothing at all to do with real life. Still, maybe there was more to this undercover stuff than she had thought. Maybe—

  Ophelia pushed the thought away, opened the door, and got out of the car, taking her large handbag with her. “I won’t be too long, Sarah. Please wait for me here. And don’t leave the car,” she added through the open window. She trusted her daughter, but she knew that the baseball game might be tempting.