The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush (2 page)

C
LUB
O
FFICERS

Elizabeth Lacy
, president. Secretary to Mr. Benton Moseley, attorney-at-law, and garden columnist for the Darling
Dispatch
.

Ophelia Snow
, vice president and secretary. Linotype operator and sometime reporter at the Darling
Dispatch
. Wife of Darling’s mayor, Jed Snow.

Verna Tidwell
, treasurer. Cypress County probate clerk and acting treasurer. A widow, Verna lives with her beloved Scottie, Clyde.

Myra May Mosswell
, communications secretary. Co-owner of the Darling Telephone Exchange and the Darling Diner. Lives with Violet Sims and Violet’s little girl, Cupcake, in the flat over the diner.

C
LUB
M
EMBERS

Earlynne Biddle
, a rose fancier. Married to Henry Biddle, the manager at the Coca-Cola bottling plant.

Bessie Bloodworth
, proprietor of Magnolia Manor, a boardinghouse for genteel elderly ladies next door to the Dahlias’ clubhouse. Grows vegetables and herbs in the Manor’s backyard.

Fannie Champaign
, proprietor of Champaign’s Darling Chapeaux and a bit of a mystery to everyone. Recently returned from Atlanta, after an unfortunate break with Charlie Dickens, the editor of the Darling
Dispatch
.

Mrs. George E. Pickett (Voleen) Johnson
, president of the Darling Ladies Guild and notable town matron, specializes in pure white flowers. Married to the now former president of the Darling Savings and Trust Bank.

Mildred Kilgore
, owner and manager, Kilgore Motors. Married to Roger Kilgore. They have a big house near the ninth green of the Cypress Country Club, where Mildred grows camellias.

Aunt Hetty Little
, gladiola lover, town matriarch, and senior member of the club. A “regular Miss Marple” who knows all the Darling secrets.

Lucy Murphy
, grows vegetables and fruit on a small market farm on the Jericho Road. Married to Ralph Murphy, who works on the railroad.

Raylene Riggs
, Myra May Mosswell’s mother and the newest Dahlia. Cooks at the Darling Diner and lives at the Marigold Motor Court with Pauline DuBerry.

Miss Dorothy Rogers
, Darling’s librarian. Knows the Latin name of every plant and insists that everyone else does, too. Resident of Magnolia Manor, where she plants her small flower-and-vegetable garden in very straight rows.

Beulah Trivette
, owns Beulah’s Beauty Bower, where all the Dahlias go to get beautiful. Artistically talented, Beulah loves cabbage roses and other exuberant flowers.

Alice Ann Walker
, grows iris and daylilies, which don’t take a lot of time or attention—important for Alice Ann, who works full-time as a cashier at the Darling Savings and Trust Bank. Her disabled husband, Arnold, tends the family vegetable garden.

Out of Money!

Saturday, April 8, 1933

Earlynne Biddle sighed heavily. “Well, I for one don’t know how
any
of us are going to manage, now that the bank is closed.” She paused. “Liz, reach me that knife right there beside you. It’s sharper than mine.”

“As long as you’re not going to use it to do something desperate,” Elizabeth Lacy said with a little laugh, handing the knife across the table.

“Something desperate, like slit my wrists?” Earlynne turned down her mouth and went back to chopping rhubarb. “That wouldn’t solve anything, now, would it?”

“No, of course not,” Lizzy replied hurriedly. “I didn’t mean—”

“We know you didn’t, Liz,” Aunt Hetty Little said in a soothing tone. “You were just making a little joke.”

“A
very
little joke,” Verna Tidwell remarked with a sardonic laugh.

Earlynne sniffed. “It’s no laughing matter. Who knows how long the bank will be closed. And until it opens, what are we going to do for money?”

Of course it wasn’t a laughing matter, Lizzy thought, looking at the sober faces of her four friends. They had gathered in the Dahlias’ clubhouse kitchen for a Saturday morning rhubarb canning party. It was a pretty day and all the doors and windows were open to the sweet April breeze—which was a good thing, because canning could be hot work. Mildred Kilgore had just come back from Tennessee, where somebody had given her two big washtubs heaped full of fresh rhubarb stalks.

“All I wanted was enough for one pie,” she’d told Aunt Hetty, “and I ended up with enough to feed an army! I’d can it, but I just don’t have time.” Roger Kilgore, her husband, had proven himself to be a less-than-trustworthy manager, so Mildred was now running Kilgore Motors and had her hands full, trying to keep the business afloat.

“You give that rhubarb to me, Mildred,” Aunt Hetty had said. “I know just what to do with it.”

So today, five of the Dahlias had gotten together, under Aunt Hetty’s direction, to can rhubarb. They were using the two new 23-quart pressure canners they had bought with the proceeds from their vegetable sales the previous year, and canning jars donated by fellow club members. They would give the canned rhubarb, rhubarb sauce, and rhubarb butter to the Darling Ladies Guild, which would distribute it to people in need. (Unfortunately, there were a
lot
of people in need this spring. A jar of rhubarb would be just the thing to cheer them up.)

“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Earlynne!” Bessie Bloodworth said from the sink, where she was washing pint jars and lids in hot, soapy water. “I believed Mr. Johnson when he said that our bank was as sound as a bell. What we’ll do now that it’s closed, I can’t for the life of me guess. Everybody’s out of money!”

“Oh, surely it won’t be closed long,” Aunt Hetty Little said reassuringly. She picked up another rhubarb stalk and began to chop it. The oldest of the garden club’s fifteen members, she always looked for the silver lining in every dark cloud—and most of the time she found it. “I heard it might be open again in a couple of weeks.”

Earlynne groaned. “A couple of weeks!” She pushed a straggly wisp of brown hair out of her eyes. “People could starve to death in a couple of weeks. They could lose their homes. Their businesses, too. And think of poor Alice Ann. She could be out of a job!”

Earlynne usually overstated the problem, but this time, Lizzy knew that she was right, especially about their friend and fellow Dahlia, Alice Ann Walker, who was a teller at the bank. Things were difficult enough for the Walkers, with Alice Ann’s Arnold not able to work because of his leg. And now this!

“It’ll be hard,” Lizzy agreed sympathetically, scraping her chopped rhubarb into a little heap. “Most folks don’t have much to start with. And now that the bank’s closed, they won’t be able to get their paychecks. Not from Ozzie Sherman’s sawmill, not from the Academy—”

“Not from the bottling plant,” Earlynne put in, pulling the fibers off a tough stalk. Her husband, Henry, managed the Coca-Cola bottling plant, a couple of miles south of town on the Jericho Road. “Hank had to lay off a couple more of the guys last month, but he’s still got five on the payroll, plus me. I’ve been working out there in the office to earn a little extra money. But there’s not a penny to pay any one of us. The plant has money in the bank, but it’s frozen solid, like all the other deposits.”

On the stove, the regulator on the club’s shiny new pressure canner was hissing and dancing merrily, and Verna got up and turned down the burner. “They won’t get their paychecks from the county, either,” she said grimly.

Verna was the acting county treasurer and knew what she was talking about. What’s more, Cypress County was a bigger employer than the sawmill, the Academy, and the bottling plant combined, so the loss of a paycheck or two would cause hardship among families all across the county.

Lizzy would be all right, though—at least, she hoped so. A few days before, Mr. Moseley, her employer, had warned her that there might be some difficulty at the bank and suggested that she might want to withdraw her money until the worst of it blew over. She had followed his advice, and now the cash was securely hidden in a coffee can beneath a loose board in the back of her closet, under her shoe rack. It sounded as if the others hadn’t taken their money out before the bank closed, and Lizzy’s thought of her secret cache was shadowed with a little guilt. Maybe she should have passed Mr. Moseley’s warning along to her friends.

“Well, you know the old saying,” Aunt Hetty replied. “If you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.” In a practical tone, she added, “We’ll all just have to pitch in and help those who can’t help themselves.”

Verna chuckled. “My daddy always said, ‘If you buy a rainbow, don’t pay cash for it.’”

“Well, I don’t know how we
can
help,” Earlynne protested. “Short of standing on the street corner with an umbrella, handing out dollars while the rain pours down.”

“Even if we had dollars to spare, that wouldn’t work,” Bessie said, ignoring Verna. “Folks are proud. They don’t like to admit they need help.”

Bessie looked troubled, and Lizzy knew why. Two of the genteel elderly ladies who rented rooms at Bessie’s Magnolia Manor were behind on their rent. Bessie would never turn them out on the street, of course—that meant they’d have to go to the county poor farm, which would be a tragedy. But she was always strapped for cash to keep Magnolia Manor afloat. And this bank “holiday” would only make matters worse.

“I’m sure we’ll think of something,” Aunt Hetty said. She glanced at the clock over the icebox. “Eight minutes. Time’s up, Verna.”

Verna shut off the burner under the canner. “Want me to take it off the stove?”

“Yes, please,” Aunt Hetty replied. “We’ll let the pressure go down by itself before we open it and take the jars out.”

When it came to canning and preserving, Aunt Hetty, at eighty, was the most experienced of all the Dahlias. For years, she had canned fruits and vegetables using Ball jars with zinc lids and rubber gaskets or the Atlas E-Z Seal jars, which had a wire bail that clamped tight on the domed glass lid and flipped off for easy opening. And until a few years ago, she had always used the tried-and-true boiling-water-bath method, where you put a rack of jars—pints or quarts or even half gallons, if that’s what you had—into a big canning kettle. Then you poured a couple of teakettles of hot water over them and let the whole thing boil on the stove, ten to twenty minutes for fruits and up to an hour and fifteen minutes for tomatoes. But that was safe only if the food had plenty of acid in it. If you had extra green beans, for instance (which had no acid at all), it was better to pickle them than risk killing everybody in your family with botulism.

But Aunt Hetty always prided herself on keeping up to date, so she was the first in town to buy a canner and adopt the newfangled Mason jar lids. They came in two parts, the metal lid with a permanent rubber gasket and the shiny metal ring that fastened the lid down tight until it was sealed and you could take the ring off. But she never did. She always said it seemed safer to leave the ring on. Anyway, the rings and lids were cheap, just twenty-four cents a dozen, which was cheaper and a lot more reliable than the old zinc lids and rubber gaskets.

“I blame Mr. Johnson for this mess,” Earlynne remarked, as Verna picked up a pair of hot pads and took the canner off the stove, setting it on a trivet on the linoleum-topped counter. “If he hadn’t stolen that money—”

“Now, hold your horses, Earlynne,” Aunt Hetty said briskly. “We don’t know for a fact that Mr. Johnson
stole
anything. For all we know, it might be just somebody’s silly little mistake. At the bank, I mean. The money might be there, but they just can’t find it. Shouldn’t blame the cow when the milk goes sour, you know.”

Bessie’s gray curls bobbed over her ears. “I swear, Aunt Hetty,” she harrumphed, “you never could hold a mean thought in your head for longer than a second. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Those bank examiners wouldn’t have closed the bank unless they saw a few sparks.” She wrung out the dishrag and hung it over the edge of the sink. “Liz, I heard that Mr. Johnson hired Mr. Moseley as his lawyer. Is he going to stay out of jail?”

“You know I can’t say anything one way or the other, Bessie,” Lizzy replied cautiously. She had worked in Benton Moseley’s law office for over ten years now, and always abided by what he jokingly called his gag rule—no talking about what went on in the office, before, after, or during a case.

“Well, I can,” Verna said. “Say something, I mean.” There was a pot of rhubarb sauce cooking on the stove. She picked up a large spoon and gave the sauce a vigorous stir.

Earlynne’s head snapped up. “I hope you can tell us that Mr. George E. Pickett Johnson is going straight to the state penitentiary and will be there for a good long time. It’s no better than he deserves, causing all this trouble.”

“Hang on until we get this done, Earlynne,” Verna replied. “Bessie, I think this sauce is thick enough. Are those jars ready?”

“They will be once they’re scalded,” Bessie said. She took the teakettle off the stove and poured boiling water over the jars and lids. Verna picked up a ladle and began to fill the hot, clean jars while Bessie wiped the jar rims and screwed the lids on tight. The filled jars went into the club’s second canner and the canner went on the stove. Meanwhile, Aunt Hetty took the lid off the first canner and took the hot quart jars out, setting them on a towel on the counter.

Lizzy collected the rhubarb that she, Aunt Hetty, and Earlynne had chopped and measured it into the empty pot—seven quarts.

“That’s the end of the rhubarb,” she announced, “so this will be the last batch.” She added a half cup of sugar for each quart and stirred it in. “We’ll let that stand until it juices. Twenty minutes, maybe. Then we can bring it up to a boil, fill the jars, pressure them for eight minutes, and we’re done.” Chopped rhubarb was perfect for pies, and Myra May, at the Darling Diner, had already said she would buy any extra the Dahlias had available. Raylene Riggs, the new cook, wanted to make some strawberry-rhubarb pies, and Mrs. Meeks had spoken up for a few jars, to make the rhubarb-and-sour-cream cake she liked to serve to her boarders.

“Good job, ladies,” Verna said. She took off her apron and fished her Pall Malls out of her pocketbook, which was hanging on the kitchen doorknob. “I am taking a break.”

“There’s hot water in the kettle,” Aunt Hetty remarked. “Who’s ready for tea?”

“I brought some sour cream cookies,” Bessie chimed in. She went to the cupboard and came back with a plate of cookies, putting it in the middle of the table. “Baked them this morning.”

“My favorite,” Lizzy said, and got up to get five teacups. Several minutes later, the Dahlias were sitting around the table with their tea and cookies.

“Have you heard,” Aunt Hetty began, “that Miss Tallulah is back from her visit to New York? I saw her just yesterday, at the drugstore. She’s looking spry for her age.”

Lizzy smiled. Everybody knew that Aunt Hetty and the legendary Miss Tallulah LaBelle were exactly the same age, which was just over eighty. The two had been girlhood friends. The LaBelle plantation, on the Alabama River west of town, had been home to the county’s wealthiest family for generations, but Miss Tallulah was now the sole surviving member. Lizzy knew that the old lady, one of Mr. Moseley’s clients, had taken the family money out of the stock market just before the Crash and put it into Treasury bills. (Not that Lizzy understood this, but Mr. Moseley said it was a very good idea.) Having made this astute—or lucky—decision, she was in better shape, financially, than almost anyone else in Cypress County. But she was seldom seen in Darling, except when she came to catch the train to take her on one of her frequent trips to New York and Boston. For a woman of her age, she seemed to travel a great deal.

“Let’s not talk about Miss Tallulah,” Earlynne said impatiently. She leaned forward. “
Now,
Verna.”

“Now,
what
?” Verna asked. She blew a perfect smoke ring, which drifted toward the ceiling. Lizzy smoked sometimes, but not as often—or as expertly—as Verna. Her mother always said that smoking made women look “tough,” as if that were synonymous with “immoral” or “wicked.” Lizzy thought it made Verna look confident, as if she could do anything she darned well felt like doing, and be good at it, too. Lizzy admired confidence in other women, because she didn’t always feel it in herself.