The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose Read online

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  Bessie had been born and raised in Darling and couldn’t imagine a different life for herself, although she sometimes envied people like Charlie Dickens, who had been to New York and Paris and Cleveland and Baltimore and who knows where else. But if you had lived in a big city for a while, you would surely have seen how dirty and ugly and unfeeling it was, with nobody but strangers wherever you looked. When you got to Darling, you’d notice the difference. You’d be grateful.

  And there was plenty to be grateful for, in Bessie’s opinion. For one thing, the town looked pretty much as it always had, and if you weren’t aware of the current sorry state of national affairs, you couldn’t tell it by looking around Darling. It was a lovely place, with huge magnolia trees along the streets and flowers in the yards and friendly people and a fascinating history. Mobile was seventy miles to the south, a half-day drive, more if the roads were bad and you had to get a farmer and his horse to pull you out of a mud hole. Montgomery, the state capital, was a hundred miles north, too far to drive unless you absolutely had to and were a glutton for punishment. If you didn’t want to drive, of course, you could take the train both ways. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad went north and south out of Monroeville, twenty miles to the east, and there was a local spur that went to Monroeville. Get on the train in Darling first thing in the morning, get off in Mobile before lunch or in Montgomery by early afternoon.

  The site for the town was picked out in 1823 by Joseph P. Darling. He had come all the way from Virginia in a wagon pulled by a team of oxen, with his wife, five children, two slaves, a pair of milk cows, and a horse. He intended to keep on going as far as the great Mississippi River, where he planned to start a cotton plantation and make a lot of money, now that Mr. Jefferson had bought and paid for the Louisiana Purchase.

  But Mrs. Darling had other ideas, as the story had been told to Bessie by one of their descendants. The Darling party camped for the night beside Pine Mill Creek. When Mrs. Darling got up the next morning, the rain had put the campfire out, the wood was soaked, and breakfast was cold corn pone and last night’s cold coffee. For Mrs. Darling, who was tired to death of traveling, that was the last straw.

  “Mr. Darling, I am not ridin’ another mile in that blessed wagon,” she said. “If you want your meals an’ your washin’ done reg’lar, this is where you’ll find it—soon as you put a roof over my head. Until then, I ain’t gettin’ back in that wagon for love nor money. You kin put that in your pipe an’ smoke it.”

  Confronted with this ultimatum (and without his coffee), Mr. Darling took a long look around. He noticed the rich soil, the Alabama River flowing quietly not far away, the fast-moving creek where they were camped, and the fish in the creek and the wild game in the woods. He took into account the abundant timber—loblolly and longleaf pines on the gently rolling hills, with tulip trees and sweet gum in the bottoms, as well as pecan and sycamore and magnolia and sassafras. He also took into account the fact that he liked clean britches and his three squares a day. Altogether, he felt compelled to reply, “Well, if you insist, Mrs. Darling. You can take your bonnet off and get out your washboard. We’re stayin’.”

  And stay they did. Mr. Darling cut enough loblollies to build a cabin for the family, another for the slaves, and a barn for the animals. More Darlings trickled out from Virginia, and before long, the Darling clan had built a general store, a sawmill, a gristmill, a school, and a church. More folks came, of different religious persuasions, so they needed more churches. And the more people came, the more money they brought with them and earned when they got there, so they definitely needed more stores where they could spend it. It wasn’t long before Darling became a county seat and got dirt sidewalks and a brick courthouse with a bell tower and a county government and a county sheriff. It was on its way to being a real town.

  Darling wasn’t an isolated, out-of-the-way town, either, the way some little towns were, stuck way out in the elbow-bend back of nowhere. Steamboats chugged up and down the Alabama River, picking up cotton and delivering supplies at plantation landings, which made it easy to go south to Mobile or north to Montgomery, if somebody wanted to. And not long after the War, the owners of the sawmill, the hotel, and the bank scraped the money together to build a railroad spur that connected Darling to the Louisville & Nashville Railroad just outside Monroeville, which meant that everybody could go pretty much anywhere they wanted, even when the roads were bad (which they were, most of the time) or the river was flooded (which it was, every spring).

  But mostly, people who were born in Darling were content to stay right there, since it was a very nice town. Some, of course, went off for the sake of adventure or because they had to, like the boys in gray who marched off to the tune of “Dixie” and the boys in khaki who marched off to “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Some of them didn’t come home again because they couldn’t, and a few decided to go and live where they could get a better job and make more money. But in general, the men who left came back as soon as they could and married their hometown sweethearts and lived happily ever after, right there in Darling.

  But not Charlie Dickens, who (as Bessie knew) had gone off to Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn after high school and then to New York to the journalism school at Columbia University and after that to a reporting job on the Cleveland Plain Dealer. And after the army and France, it was back to the States, moving from place to place. Finally, he got to Baltimore, where he landed a good job as a reporter on the city desk at the Sun, until a new editor took over and the two of them discovered that they didn’t see eye to eye about a great many important things, mainly having to do with Charlie’s passion for investigative journalism. He had written a couple of in-depth features about police corruption in the city and raised some hackles in the police department and the mayor’s office. And that was the end of his reporting career at the Sun.

  About that same time, Doc Roberts diagnosed Charlie’s father—the owner and editor of the Darling Dispatch—with lung cancer, and Charlie came home to help out. Then Mr. Dickens died, and there was the newspaper with no editor and there was Charlie, a newsman with nowhere in particular to go. It seemed like the natural thing for him to settle down to his father’s job. Or try to, since he didn’t have any experience in managing a rural newspaper with a small subscription list, not much advertising, and a faltering job printing business on the side.

  He didn’t have a sweetheart to come home to, either, since Angelina Dupree had married Artis Biggs just five months after Charlie went away to college, which was probably what turned him sour on love. (The fact that Angelina and Artis’ first boy arrived on the scene seven months to the day after the wedding might have had something to do with it, too. Or maybe it was because Charlie suspected that Angelina fell for Artis because he drove the first Buick in town, while Charlie was saving his money for college.) But that had been a long time ago, and Edna Fay said Charlie didn’t harbor hard feelings.

  Charlie himself had never married. He often said he’d seen too many bad marriages to be anything but skeptical about the possibility of marital happiness. And that he had seen too much of the world out there to be anything but skeptical about the possibility of anybody living happily ever after in Darling, which (he said) was nothing more than a two-bit Southern town that figured it was worth twenty-five dollars. And even when he became the editor of the Dispatch, which you would think would be a kind of rah-rah cheerleading job, he didn’t try to hide that opinion.

  Bessie knew all this because of being best friends with Charlie’s kid sister. Edna Fay was married to Doc Roberts and kept busy managing his office, but she and Bessie still got together as often as they could. When they did, Bessie always asked about her brother and Edna Fay was always glad to give her an earful of the inside story, which is how Bessie had managed to keep track of Charlie’s whereabouts and what fors through the years.

  But not because she especially cared, of co
urse. Like Charlie, Bessie had been sour on love, too, for her heart had been broken forever when her fiancé, Harold Hamer, skipped town on the very day they were planning to buy their wedding rings. At least, that’s what Bessie thought, until just six months ago, when she was going through a box of old papers from her father’s funeral parlor business, which she had sold to Lionel Noonan. That’s when she figured out what had happened to Harold, and why. It took her a while to get over the shock, but knowing the truth made her feel better. She could finally stop grieving over the past and get on with the present.

  Bessie was reflecting on all this as she walked toward the square that morning, having hung the sheets on the backyard clothesline and left Roseanne to finish the rest of the laundry. Her first stop was at Lima’s Drugstore, on the southwest corner of the square, where she bought a box of Wildroot Wave Set for Leticia Wiggins, a tube of Dr. West’s toothpaste for Mrs. Sedalius, and some Blue Jay corn plasters for herself. Then she took a shortcut across the courthouse lawn to the grocery store, where she handed her weekly shopping list to Mrs. Hancock.

  Bessie always took care with her list, including the prices and totaling them up at the bottom so she’d be sure to stay within the week’s grocery allowance. Today, she was getting two pounds of spare ribs (twenty-five cents), two pounds of Eight O’Clock coffee (forty-five cents), self-rising Split Silk flour (twenty-four-pound bag for sixty-five cents), ten pounds of red potatoes (fifty cents), four pounds of prunes (twenty-five cents), a one-pound box of Blue Grass macaroni (five cents), a three-pound bag of grits (ten cents), and two boxes of Octagon soap powder (twenty-five cents).

  She was standing at the counter when she smelled something tangy and turned to see a box of oranges, sitting on top of a barrel of cabbages. The hand-lettered sign said that they were nineteen cents a dozen, a bit pricey, but they did smell good. The Magnolia Ladies loved nothing better than fresh-squeezed orange juice for breakfast, and she could dry the peels for flavoring.

  “I’ll take a dozen of those oranges, too,” she said impulsively, and Mrs. Hancock nodded approvingly.

  “Good you got ’em now,” she said, putting them into a paper bag. “That’s such a nice price, they’ll all be gone in another hour or two.”

  Bessie didn’t think it was a nice price. She’d bought oranges last month at fifteen cents a dozen. But it didn’t pay to argue with Mrs. Hancock, who owned the only grocery store in town. Before the Crash, there’d been talk about A&P building a self-service market on the other side of the square, where Sevier’s Stationery had burned down a few years ago.

  But Bessie thought it was just talk, with the economy so shaky. At least she hoped so. If A&P opened a store here, that would likely be the end of Hancock’s. But A&P wouldn’t give credit—you’d have to pay every time you went shopping. They wouldn’t deliver, either. Mrs. Hancock would jot down each amount and the total ($2.69) in her black book, and then put Bessie’s purchases in a cardboard box for Old Zeke to deliver to Magnolia Manor. Bessie or Roseanne would come in and pay the bill, in cash, at the end of the month. Some folks couldn’t pay everything they owed every month, and Mrs. Hancock would give them a hard look and sometimes a little lecture. But she’d carry them until they got back on their feet—or as long as she could, anyway. And in the meantime, she’d take on trade anything they could give her, from chickens and eggs to woodstove lengths.

  Bessie left the groceries to be delivered, went back out onto Franklin Street, and walked one door to the east, to the Dispatch office, to leave Miss Rogers’ paper with Charlie Dickens. She was just about to enter when, to her surprise, the door was flung violently open and Angelina Dupree Biggs rushed out. Her face was flushed, her eyes were wide, and her yellow straw hat was crooked. She ran straight into Bessie, bumping her so hard that she almost knocked her over.

  Back in high school, Angelina had been a slightly plump but very pretty girl, blond and blue-eyed, with bee-stung lips and a figure that was nicely rounded in all the right places. She had a perky personality that (along with her physical attributes) made her the most popular girl in school. All the boys were crazy about her, so when Bessie read Charlie’s torrid love letters, they hadn’t come as a big surprise. Edna Fay had made fun of her brother’s extravagant language and Bessie had joined in. But she had been unaccountably affected by the depth and sincerity of Charlie’s passion and wished with all her heart that Harold Hamer, her sweetheart, would write letters like that to her. Harold couldn’t, because he was basically your boy next door. Charlie could, because he had always had a way with words, even when he was still a skinny, all-elbows boy with brown hair that stuck up no matter how much Brilliantine he put on it.

  But Angelina had never been what you’d call skinny, even in high school. For the past several years, she had run the kitchen at the Old Alabama Hotel, where her husband Artis was the manager. It was her duty to sample the pies and cakes and fried chicken and potato salad the cook produced, and as a result, she had gained quite a few extra pounds, many of them settling comfortably around her hips and bottom.

  So when she flung open the door and ran into Bessie, the impact nearly knocked Bessie off her feet. Bessie gave an involuntary “oomph!” and grabbed at the door to keep from being bowled over.

  “So sorry,” Angelina gasped. She seized her hat with both hands and jammed it on her head. “I didn’t see you, Bessie. Door didn’t hurt you, did it?”

  “I’m all right,” Bessie said, and sucked in a deep breath. With it, she got an overwhelming whiff of Emeraude perfume. Angelina must have soaked herself with the stuff. “Are you okay?”

  Angelina nodded, but Bessie thought she was fighting back tears, which was odd, because over the years, Angelina had settled into an almost stolid placidity. Bessie, who had worked with her on several Ladies Club committees, had never once seen her upset.

  “You’re sure?” Bessie persisted. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  “Yes,” Angelina gulped. “I mean, no. Sorry, Bessie—I gotta go.” And she blundered off down the street, nearly running into Myra May Mosswell, who was just coming out of the diner, carrying her shopping basket and heading up the street toward Hancock’s.

  “Wonder what got into Miz Biggs,” Myra May said, when she was within speaking distance of Bessie. She glanced back, following Angelina’s progress across the street. “That lady really oughta look where she’s going. Heavy as she is, she’s kind of like a battering ram when she gets up a head of steam.”

  “No idea what could have set her off that way,” Bessie said. “How are you, Myra May?”

  “I’ve been better,” Myra May said grimly. “Have you seen Verna this morning?”

  “No, I haven’t.” Bessie frowned. “Why? Is something the matter?”

  Myra May looked as if she might be about to speak, then changed her mind. She shook her head mutely. “On my way to the grocery,” she muttered. “See you later, Bessie.”

  Myra May’s evasiveness made Bessie curious, but she was still wondering why Angelina had come shooting out of the Dispatch office like a pebble out of a peashooter. Did it have something to do with Charlie Dickens? Surely not—their relationship was ancient history. Wasn’t it?

  She opened the door and went inside. The newspaper occupied one large room (partitioned into several spaces) on the building’s street level beneath the second-floor law office where Liz Lacy worked. The front door opened with the chirpy ding-ding of a bell, and the visitor stepped up to a wooden counter a few paces inside, which was always stacked with the latest edition of the Dispatch. It was an eight-page weekly, four pages of ready print (world news, photos, comics, and women’s items printed by a shop in Mobile and shipped to Darling by Greyhound bus) and four pages of home print. Behind the counter was the editor’s desk and, behind that, a row of tall wooden bookshelves filled with bound volumes of newspapers formed a partition that blocked off the composing room
, where the Linotype, type cases, makeup tables, and job press were located. Along the back wall sat the formidable-looking newspaper press surrounded by stacks of newsprint and buckets of ink. Charlie ran the press on Thursday nights, so he could get the Dispatch into the mail on Friday. When it was operating, it rattled every window in the old building and the windows of Hancock’s Groceries on one side and the Darling Diner on the other.

  Just behind the customer counter, under a hanging lamp, stood the editor’s desk, with a black Remington typewriter, a dictionary, and a stack of wooden letter trays. That’s where Charlie Dickens was seated in a wooden desk chair, hunched over his typewriter and pecking furiously with two fingers, slamming the carriage hard when he came to the end of a line. An empty bottle of Hires Root Beer sat on the corner of his desk, next to an overflowing ashtray. The place smelled of cigarettes and ink. And of Angelina’s perfume.

  Charlie looked up and saw Bessie and smiled, a little crookedly. He rolled his chair back, pushed himself out of it, and came to the counter. He was wearing his usual green eyeshade, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up, his tie loosened. He was a large man, several years older than Bessie, and his hair was thinning on top. His penetrating gaze didn’t quite match the soft plumpness of his face.

  “Bessie Bloodworth,” he said, in his rumbling voice. “Don’t see you in here much these days. How ya doin’ this mornin’?”

  Bessie knew that Charlie Dickens had been to college and journalism school and spoke French and German as well as English. But she had heard him say that folks were always a little easier with him if he “talked down-home.” She thought he was probably right.

  “I’m doing right well, thank you, Charlie,” Bessie said. She wanted to ask why Angelina Dupree Biggs had flown out of the Dispatch so fast that she barreled over anybody in her path, but she resisted the temptation, in part because of the downturn of Charlie’s mouth. His eyes were dark and he looked troubled. Whatever had propelled Angelina out the door obviously hadn’t made Charlie very happy, either.