The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree Read online

  “A tad too many dahlias,” Mrs. Johnson repeated, putting up a hand to push her Mrs. Hoover white hair under her stylish purple hat, which she’d had made for her by a milliner in Atlanta, rather than Fannie Champaign, who had a shop right on Darling’s courthouse square and made hats for every other lady in town. She said it a little softer this time, but Aunt Hetty Little was standing right behind her and heard it.

  “That’s only your opinion, Voleen,” Aunt Hetty said tartly. “If you had your way, there’d be nothing but lilies growin’ in this world.” She raised her voice. “Beulah, those dahlias are just fine. You have done us right proud, dear. Now, smile, ever’body, so Lizzy can get our picture and we can get on with our meeting:”

  This time, everyone agreed with Aunt Hetty, so enthusiastically that Beulah Trivette turned pink with pleasure and Mrs. Johnson pressed her lips together. Lizzy smiled as she snapped the photo. Aunt Hetty was the only person in town who could use that tone to Mrs. George E. Pickett Johnson. This was because Aunt Hetty really was Mrs. Johnson’s aunt, although the Littles were a big family and Hetty was either aunt or cousin or other kin to just about everybody in town. And of course Aunt Hetty was right about the lilies, because Mrs. Johnson loved lilies with a passion, but only the pure white ones, never those common orange ditch lilies that everybody else had in abundance. The Johnson garden was full of white flowers, and Mrs. Johnson sent a big bouquet to the bank every morning all summer long, for the table by the front door.

  Lizzy snapped another picture, and then a third, because Bessie Bloodworth was squinting. “All right, ladies,” she said, “let’s have our refreshments now. We can finish the meeting while we’re eating.”

  The Dahlias were much too ladylike to shove, but nobody tarried. They trooped inside, the heels of their Sunday pumps clacking on the wooden floors, and straight to the back porch, where the table was spread with an embroidered cloth and decorated with a big blue glass vase full of flowers from the Dahlias’ gardens: gladiolas from Aunt Hetty, iris and azaleas from Verna, cutleaf lilacs from Earlynne Biddle, Japanese cherry and dogwood from Lizzy, and lacy ferns from next to the back door for greenery. Times might be just a little difficult, but that didn’t stop the spring flowers from blooming or the Dahlias from gathering big bouquets to share with their friends.

  They’d brought plenty to eat, too. Bessie Bloodworth had piled a big plate high with those little deviled-ham finger sandwiches that are so light and tasty you could eat a half dozen before you knew it. Mrs. Johnson had brought a sandwich plate that was probably made up by her cook, Lucretia, with stuffed tomatoes and stuffed squash blossoms arranged around it so that it looked like something out of Better Homes and Gardens, where Mrs. Johnson had won a dollar the year before (and kept it, too) for Lucretia’s butterscotch pie recipe. Most of the Dahlias didn’t have time to stuff squash blossoms, even for a party, but they had brought their usual dishes of pickled okra and watermelon pickles and pickled eggs, along with spiced figs, pear compote, and fresh strawberries. Verna Tidwell brought molasses cookies, Mildred Kilgore brought her famous ribbon cake with peach filling, and Lizzy brought some of those little thumbprint cookies filled with raspberry jam made from the berries from the patch behind her house. Ophelia Snow had brought a couple of gallons of cold rosemary lemonade. She had extra ice from Friday’s delivery, so she brought that, too, and the lemonade was frosty cold. When their plates were full, the Dahlias carried them into the parlor and settled down to enjoy their friends’ cooking.

  You’re probably curious about the Dahlias’ new clubhouse and gardens, so while they’re eating and chatting, we’ll have a quick look around. The house isn’t very large, just two rooms in front, the parlor where everybody is sitting in wooden chairs, and the front bedroom, wallpapered in green and white roses. This room has been turned into a sitting room featuring photographs of old Mrs. Blackstone and her beautiful garden—the way it once was, years before—and shelves that now contain the club’s gardening library. On the wall is a big gold-toned plaque from the Darling Town Council naming Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone Darling’s Woman of the Year. She earned the plaque three years running, 1926, 1927, and 1928, which annoyed Mrs. Johnson, who has never gotten it even once.

  Behind the front bedroom is the pink-check-papered bedroom, which the Dahlias are planning to use as a workroom. Behind the parlor is the kitchen, which has a gas range (installed just a couple of years before) and an icebox on one side, a sink under the window, and cabinets and a pine table with white-painted legs. The house, built sometime in the 1890s, is on city gas and water and there’s an indoor bathroom at one end of the back porch. It also has electricity, for back in the mid-1920s, Ozzie Sherman installed a Delco generator to power his sawmill just outside of town. A smart businessman, he talked the Darling City Council into installing streetlights around the square and letting him run electricity through the town. Last year, the council took over the Sherman Electric Company and bought two new generators. If the money held out, they planned to run electricity all the way out to the Cypress County Fairgrounds.

  Mrs. Blackstone’s garden is much larger than the house itself If you stand on the back porch and look down toward the creek, you can probably see why it has been written up in the Montgomery Advertiser and the Selma Times-Journal and who knows where else over the years. Back there beyond the trees are the ruins of what was once the splendid Cartwright mansion, Mrs. Blackstone’s mother’s family home. Built in the glory days of Old King Cotton, it burned to rubble after the Union troops occupied Darling during the War Between the States. Later—in the 1880s and 1890s—its manicured lawns and lovely gardens were carved into town lots along what is now Camellia Street. A row of houses stands there now, each one fronted by a white picket fence.

  Mrs. Blackstone inherited the largest lots and a piece of the Cartwright gardens, which was only right, since her mother was the sole surviving Cartwright. Her share of the garden is full of blooming shrubs and trees—including another large cucumber tree—meandering down the hill and into the pines. Inside the fence that encloses the backyard are Mrs. Blackstone’s wide, curving perennial borders, filled with iris, larkspur, phlox, and mounds of Shasta daisies and sweet alyssum. Mrs. Blackstone was sick the last few years of her life, so the borders are unkempt now and full of weeds, and the lilies she loved—Easter lilies, spider lilies, oxblood lilies, and those common orange ditch lilies—need to be dug and separated and replanted. There are tangles of sweet peas and cardinal climber and honeysuckle on the fences, and roses, roses, roses everywhere. Mrs. Blackstone was always very fond of roses, especially those big, floppy cabbage roses that smell like paradise, but all the plants are in need of pruning and general cleanup. Old Zeke, who lives in a tiny cottage the next street over, keeps the grass mowed but that’s about all. The rest is a mess. If the Dahlias want to enjoy their garden, they’ve got their work cut out for them.

  If you step off the porch and follow the path to the right around the back of the house, you can see the big vegetable garden plot at the corner of Camellia and Rosemont. Mrs. Blackstone always grew enough sweet potatoes and okra and green beans and squash for the whole neighborhood. The garden hasn’t been planted for a couple of years now, and the Dahlias haven’t yet figured out what to do with it. But the soil is rich, the space large and sunny, and if they want to, they can turn it into flowers or mow it, or whatever. They can even sell it, although times are hard and property isn’t moving very fast in Darling. It might be difficult to find a buyer.

  But we’re not finished with our tour just yet. If you walk on around the house to the front yard, you’ll see Mrs. Blackstone’s prize hydrangeas, the old-fashioned weigelas that came from her mother, the wisteria climbing the front of the house, and the gorgeous azaleas, pink and lavender and white, massed under the front window, with a border of hostas at their feet.

  And the cucumber tree, of course. It’s such a big tree, and so pretty when it blooms, that it’s earned quite a reputation. Peo
ple driving or walking down Camellia Street always stop to admire it, especially at this time of year. It’s in full bloom just now and covered with beautiful creamy blossoms as big as dessert plates, some of them. The flowers produce little red fruits that look like baby red cucumbers.

  The cucumber tree. That’s what everybody calls it, even though Dorothy Rogers, the town librarian and a Dahlia, insists that it ought to be called by its proper Latin name, Magnolia acuminata. But that particular tree and its twin in the back garden are both over eighty years old and have stood tall and proud since before the War Between the States. As far as people in Darling are concerned, they have always been cucumber trees, and cucumber trees they always will be. Aunt Hetty says that if you called it a Magnolia acuminata, nobody would know what in the Sam Hill you were talking about, and she’s right.

  For the club, inheriting the house (and the gardens and the two cucumber trees) came as a huge shock. When Mrs. Blackstone died, everybody in Darling quite reasonably figured that her property would go to her husband’s nephew Beatty Blackstone, the owner of BB’s Auto Repair Shop and the Sinclair Filling Station, and the only living Blackstone. That’s the way property is handed down in Darling, from one family member to another. If you’re next in line, it’s pretty much a sure thing.

  Beatty had it figured that way, too. He’d been thinking of this all the while his aunt was declining, figuring that he could sell the house or trade it to the bank in return for the mortgage on his repair shop. Either way, he’d be free and clear forever and wouldn’t that just be swell? So on the day after Mrs. Blackstone’s funeral, he locked up his repair shop, put on a clean white shirt and a tie, and sauntered jauntily over to Mr. Moseley’s law office on Franklin Street to hear Mr. Moseley read the last will and testament of his aunt-by-marriage and pick up the keys to his new front door—only to learn instead that she had bequeathed the keys, the front door, the house, the garden, and the vacant lot at the corner of Camellia and Rosemont to the garden club. What’s more, she had prepaid the taxes for three years, so the club would have a little time for fund-raising before they had to pay taxes again.

  For Beatty, this was a stunning blow.

  It was equally stunning for Lizzy, who was the first Dahlia to hear this news, partly because she was the club’s president but mostly because she worked for Mr. Moseley. She was at her desk in the reception room, typing up the shorthand notes she had taken in a deposition about a cow that got loose and broke down a neighbor’s fence, when Mr. Moseley opened the door to his office and asked her to come in and hear him read Mrs. Blackstone’s will. He had a quirky smile on his face, which should have told her that something was up. Anyway, the next thing she knew, he was handing her the trust papers, the deed, and the key to Mrs. Blackstone’s house, while Beatty Blackstone sat with his arms folded and his lower lip pooched out, glowering furiously.

  Well, it knocked her for a loop, as she told Ophelia on the telephone the minute she got back to her desk. That was, the minute after Beatty had stomped out of the office and slammed the door behind him so hard that Mr. Moseley’s framed Certificate of Recognition from the Darling Chapter of the American Legion fell off the wall and the glass broke. And since Myra May Mosswell (also a Dahlia) was on the board at the telephone exchange in the back room at the Darling Diner, the news of Mrs. Blackstone’s astonishing gift to the garden club flew around town faster than you could say “Hello Central.” Beatty’s wife, Lenora, heard it from her cousin before her husband got home for lunch, and she gave him plenty of what-for-and-what-you-can-do-with-it. (It was Lenora’s opinion that if Beatty would’ve been nicer to his aunt while she was alive, she would’ve been more generous to her nephew when she died.)

  Beatty did get a consolation prize, however. His aunt left him her four-cylinder Dodge touring car with open sides and a canvas top, which hadn’t been driven since Mr. Harvey Blackstone went to his grave in 1926, after sixty years of marriage. Oh, and forty-two dollars, which was what there was left in the checking account after Mrs. Blackstone’s bills were paid, along with a big box of old Cartwright family papers and letters. These were of no interest to Beatty, since he was a Blackstone, not a Cartwright, and had no interest in Cart wright family history.

  But the car, the money, and the family papers satisfied neither Beatty nor Lenora, who had been planning the new drapes she was going to hang at the front windows of Aunt Dahlia’s house ever since Aunt Dahlia got sick. Pretty soon, the story got around town that Beatty was going to challenge the will in court. That would cost him more than forty-two dollars, though, and Mr. Moseley advised him that his chances were about as good as a snowball’s chance on the Fourth of July, so he let it drop.

  Still, he slanted Lizzy a narrow-eyed, nasty look every time he saw her on the street and muttered something about fixing her wagon. Lizzy had the feeling that as far as the inheritance was concerned, they hadn’t heard the last from Beatty. As events unfurled, it turned out that she was right.

  Back in the Dahlia House parlor, Lizzy called the meeting to order again.

  “Before we adjourn,” she said, “we need have a look at the calendar for this coming summer and fall. Nineteen-thirty is going to be an exciting year, with more than enough to keep us busy.”

  “Any more exciting than 1929, and I don’t believe we can stand it,” Miss Rogers remarked darkly. As librarian and the organizer of the Darling Chautauqua series, she was the nearest thing the town had to an intellectual (and she knew it). She lived next door at Bessie Bloodworth’s Magnolia Manor but was saving her money so she could have her own little house, the dearest dream of her heart. She had studied the stock market for several years, and in the spring of 1929, had taken all her savings out of the Darling Savings and Trust. She had wired it to a Wall Street brokerage firm to invest for her, with the idea of making enough money that she could say kiss-my-foot to Bessie Bloodworth and her Magnolia Manor. But her timing was terrible. After Black Tuesday, the only money Miss Rogers had to her name was a five-dollar bill in a mad-money envelope under her mattress. She had started saving again, but it would be a long while before she could recoup.

  “We’re all in the same leaky boat, Miss Rogers,” Ophelia Snow said sympathetically. “But we’ll bail it out. You know the old saying. ‘Gardeners never give in; they—’”

  “Just give out,” the Dahlias chorused, in singsongy unison, and broke into giggles. Ophelia, round and bouncy, with flyaway brown hair and a sweet smile that never stopped, was an incurable optimist, and this was her favorite saying.

  Miss Rogers bit her lip, and Lizzy was immediately sorry for joining in the laughter. Out loud, she said, “Miss Rogers is certainly right, ladies. None of us wants that kind of excitement, ever again. But gardening is a different kind of excitement. We’ve got a full calendar ahead of us, and I hope every Dahlia will roll up her sleeves and pitch in.”

  She began ticking things off on her fingers. “This coming Saturday is the annual plant sale. June is the Flower Show, July is the Tomato Fest, August is the Watermelon Roll, September we are having our Garden Tour, and October is the Harvest Festival. Oh, and don’t forget: every Monday night, we get together for a game of hearts. Never let it be said that the Dahlias are lazy!”

  Three or four people pretended to groan, but everyone else chuckled. There wasn’t a lot of entertainment in Darling, but the Dahlias always managed to find something to do. Lizzy was about to ask for a motion to adjourn, but Verna Tidwell raised her hand.

  “One more thing, Lizzy.” The physical opposite of plump, pretty Ophelia, Verna was tall and thin, with an olive-toned complexion, a firm mouth, and intelligent, searching eyes. But while Verna was not everybody’s idea of a Southern belle, she had a razor-sharp mind. She worked in the office of the probate court clerk, where she was in charge of keeping the records. This was a big job that involved shelves and boxes and cabinets of dusty plat books and details of property ownership, tax liens, wills, elections—papers and documents that went back g
enerations. Verna always said that her job gave her a perspective on Cypress County that she couldn’t get anywhere else.

  “As club treasurer,” she said, “I need to remind y’all to pay your dues. You can pay by the month—twenty-five cents. Or if you want to pay ahead, it’s just two dollars and fifty cents for the full year. That’s a savings of fifty cents.”

  Myra May cleared her throat. “I thought we discussed making it fifteen cents a month,” she said. “I’m not speaking for myself, of course,” she added hurriedly, although everybody knew that business at the Darling Diner had begun falling off even before the Crash. Myra May and her friend Violet Sims (they shared the apartment over the diner) were working two full-time jobs, supplementing the income from the diner with money they earned as telephone operators. Myra May always said the hours didn’t matter—she and Violet were just glad to have the steady work. Everybody knew exactly what she meant.

  “You know, Verna,” Lizzy said, “Myra May is right about the dues. I think maybe you weren’t at the meeting where we discussed this. But we did talk about dropping it down to fifteen cents.” She looked around. People were nodding. “As far as the club goes, we’ll be okay for money. Mrs. Blackstone paid the taxes on this house, so we won’t have to worry about that for several years.” She added, wanting to be fair, “Although there’s the electrical bill, of course. And the roof.”