The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady (17 page)

“Yes. Adele Hart. Artis Hart is her husband. They live next door to the laundry, but if the sheriff stops in during the day, she'll probably be at work. He should go there first.”

There. She had done her good deed for the day. Lizzy put the phone down and stood for a moment, thinking. She had promised Verna she would bring a salad for supper tonight, so she ought to go out to the garden and see what she had in the way of salad fixings—the last of the lettuce, if the heat hadn't done it in. But she knew there were some tomatoes, a cucumber or two, and a few green onions. She looked out of the window, noticing that the sky had grown darker and that there were thunderclouds piling up to the southwest. She probably ought to get the salad makings now, before it rained. And since she had the rest of the afternoon free, she should finish up the “Garden Gate” column she'd been working on, in case Charlie had room for it in the special edition of the
Dispatch.

But first, there was Nadine Fleming's letter.

Back in the kitchen, Lizzy slid into the dining nook, lifted
the oilcloth, and took out the letter. She sat down holding it for a moment, thinking about prayers and wondering whether—and how—her life might be changed by what the letter held or whether she would go on doing just what she was doing now, for the rest of her days. Then she unfolded it and read the first few lines.

And burst into
tears.

THE GARDEN GATE

BY
E
LIZABETH
L
ACY

At a recent meeting of the Darling Dahlias, Miss Rogers (Darling's devoted librarian and noted plant historian) gave a talk on old-fashioned flowering bulbs that thrive in Southern gardens. Among the plants she recommended were eleven o'clock ladies, naked ladies, chives and garlic chives, gladiolas, starflowers, and snowflakes, as well as caladium and elephant ear, which are grown for their decorative leaves. Of course, Miss Rogers gave us the correct Latin names, which she recommends that we use to avoid confusing one plant with another. We have a list of those, if you want them. Just ask.

It's been a busy summer for the Dahlias Canning Kettle Ladies (Bessie Bloodworth, team captain, with Earlynne Biddle, Aunt Hetty Little, and Beulah Trivette). They have been putting up extra produce donated by gardeners all over town, to share with our Darling needy folk in the winter. The team is using the two new big pressure cookers the Dahlias bought with the money they earned from the quilt raffle. (Big thanks to Mildred Kilgore and Alice Ann Walker for organizing the raffle!) The Canning Kettle Ladies put up dozens of jars of green beans, corn, tomatoes and tomato sauce, peaches, and pickles. The residents of the Magnolia Manor will be helping to distribute the canned goods, so if you want to put your name on the list (or the name of a needy neighbor), let Bessie Bloodworth know, or call the Magnolia Manor at 477 and leave a message. Come November and December, you'll be glad you did. It'll be like eating summer out of a jar.

Mildred Kilgore gave a demonstration on how to make an old-fashioned rose jar to the Methodist Ladies last week. Several ladies from other churches have expressed their regret that her demonstration was limited to their Methodist friends and have requested her how-to instructions. She says to take a pint of dried rose petals (red are prettiest) and pack them in a jar, sprinkling each layer with coarse salt. Put a lid on it and put it on a closet shelf for a month. Then find a big bowl and mix in 1/4 ounce of orris root, 2 teaspoons each of powdered ginger, nutmeg, and allspice, and 4 tablespoons each of dried lavender and lemon verbena. Dump in the rose petals and mix it all together very well with a big spoon. Put
everything back in the jar and put the jar back in the closet for another month. To use, put in a pretty bowl, stir every so often, and take a deep sniff when you walk past.

The Dahlias, under the direction of Verna Tidwell, have compiled a companion booklet to their very popular “Makin' Do” booklet. This one is called “The Dahlias' Household Magic: A Baker's Dozen Ways to Do It Easier, Faster, Better.” You may pick up a copy free at the
Dispatch
office. (Mrs. Albert says she's going to include it in her latest book, which Miss Rogers has promised to get for the Darling Library. She says that you should put your name on the waiting list now if you want to read it. It'll probably be a very long list.)

Aunt Hetty Little is inviting everyone to her garden to see the very strange Voodoo Lily (
Dracunculus vulgaris
, according to Miss Rogers), which is blooming now. It has impressively large (12”) deep purple flowers that last about a week. But you might want to bring a perfumed hanky to cover your nose. The Voodoo Lily (a.k.a. Stink Lily) smells like something crawled under the porch and died. Mildred, who collects exotic plants, reports that the plant produces this smell on purpose, to attract the flies that pollinate the huge blossoms. “Some plants are very clever that way,” she says.

We were cleaning up Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone's papers recently (Mrs. Blackstone was the founder of our garden club, as you probably know), and found this lovely clipping that we want to share with you. It's been around for so long that nobody knows who wrote it. We hope it will be around for a long time to come.

Recipe for Preserving Children

Take one grassy field, 1/2 dozen children, 3 small dogs, a pinch of a brook, and some pebbles. Mix the children and dogs well together and put them in the field, stirring constantly. Pour the brook over the pebbles. Sprinkle the field with flowers, spread over all a deep blue sky, and bake in a hot sun. When brown, remove the children and set away to cool in a bathtub.

Ophelia Goes Undercover

Ophelia took one look at her daughter's choice of a birthday present and knew that Jed would
not
approve. Sarah, a long-legged, gray-eyed blonde with developing curves and a liberal peppering of freckles, had found the swimsuit she wanted on the second floor of Katz Department Store on the south side of the square in Monroeville. The suit was a bright red clingy wool knit, cut high in the legs and low in the bust. When he saw it, Jed would have a conniption fit.

But even though she felt a little disloyal to her husband, Ophelia went ahead and bought the swimsuit anyway. Times had changed—jeepers, had they ever!—and the swimsuits she had worn when
she
was a teenager (and which Jed would certainly approve) would be laughed at today. She remembered one fetching number her mother had bought her when she was twelve, before the Great War. It had a blousy, button-to-the-chin black top with elbow-length sleeves and a calf-length
black-and-white striped skirt, and she wore it with black stockings, lace-up rubber shoes, and a frilly turban. Sarah was a sensitive young girl, and she ought to have what her friends had. In Ophelia's opinion, the worst thing that could happen to a young girl was to feel
different
from all the other girls.

With the idea of somehow making it up to Jed, Ophelia went down to the men's department and picked out a shirt for him—another boring blue plaid cotton, but it was the kind he liked and it was on sale for ninety-nine cents. She also bought a tee shirt for Sam (thirty-nine cents) and splurged on a white blouse for herself, tailored, with pearl buttons and short sleeves. It was $1.09, but well made and worth the money, she thought, and anyway she needed it, now that she was working five days a week, three of them out at Camp Briarwood, where she met a great many strangers and liked to look nice.

Then, with Sam's baseball team picnic in mind, she shopped for hamburger (fifteen cents a pound) and hot dogs (eight cents a pound) at Haynes' Meat Market, and got a frying chicken for twenty cents a pound for Sunday dinner. Kitty-corner across the street at the Value Rite grocery, she bought cabbage for slaw (ten cents a pound), yellow cheese to top the hamburgers (nineteen cents a pound), buns for the hamburgers and hot dogs (eight cents a package), and a dozen and a half lemons (fifteen cents a dozen) for lemonade. She had already made two apple pies for dessert, with apples that the Dahlias had canned last fall. And she had saved back a dozen eggs for an angel food cake—Sarah's favorite—for her birthday dinner tomorrow. She didn't have any cake flour, but she had a box of cornstarch and a bag of all-purpose flour and she knew how to make a very decent substitute for the more expensive cake flour.

As she and Sarah got in the family Ford and drove back toward Darling, Ophelia was still worrying about what Jed was going to say when he saw Sarah's bathing suit. Maybe she
would just casually mention it to him at the same time she gave him his new plaid shirt, and bank on his usual lack of curiosity about things she bought for the kids. At least she hadn't had to ask him for the money to buy it. She had her own money to spend, which she counted as a hundred blessings, one for every penny in the dollar.

Ophelia was able to buy clothes and groceries—as well as put tires on the family's old blue Ford and finish paying for the living room suite she had foolishly bought on time out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog—because she had gotten a really lucky break. During the months that her friend Liz was working in Montgomery, Mr. Moseley had hired her to take Liz's place three days a week in his office. She'd still been able to work for Charlie at the
Dispatch
on the other two days, so between them she was working five days a week
.
Then, when Liz came back and reclaimed her desk in Mr. Moseley's office, Ophelia had gotten a three-day-a-week job at Camp Briarwood: another lucky break. A
very
lucky break, especially given how slow the feed business was.

Unfortunately, Jed didn't quite see it that way. His masculine pride had been stung by Ophelia's success, and he kept muttering that it was
his
responsibility to support the family and his wife should stay home where God had put her. Ophelia didn't know about God, but she understood Jed's feelings about her working. He came from a conservative family, and none of his womenfolk—his mother and aunts and cousins—had ever held a paying job outside the home. Women just
didn't
; that was all. It was no wonder he hated to see her go out the door every morning, all dressed up and with lipstick on and heels, like she was going to the picture show.

But while Jed would never admit it, Ophelia knew that the money she brought home every week had been a lifesaver. Snow's Farm Supply, the family business Jed had inherited
from his father, had been in deep trouble for the last few years. Farmers were scrambling to find the money for seed and equipment, and Jed (who had a hard head but a soft heart) had extended too much credit to his customers. The Snows had been scraping the bottom of the barrel, and Ophelia—who never felt very secure, even in the best of times—lived in constant dread that he would come home one day and tell her that the business was finished and that they were going to lose their house. And their car. And everything they had worked for since they got married.

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.