The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree Read online

  “We did,” Ophelia said, taking off her hat and fluffing her brown hair. “Except for Voleen Johnson, of course. She thinks Beulah’s sign looks tacky. Well, I s’pose it is a bit colorful, but since Beulah painted it, we love it. Then we cut the dues, which annoyed Voleen even more. She thinks it’ll encourage riffraff to join, although she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it in so many words.” She bent over and straightened the crocheted lace antimacassar on the arm of Jed’s chair. “Really, I don’t know why that woman bothers with the Dahlias. She—”

  Ophelia straightened and caught the look on her husband’s face. “Something’s wrong?” She looked around uneasily. “The kids. Where are the kids?”

  “Down the street at the folks’. Sis and her pair came over for the afternoon.”

  Jed’s parents lived in a two-story white frame house four doors down on the other side of Rosemont, where one or another of their grown children, along with their broods, usually showed up for Sunday dinner or homemade ice cream on Sunday afternoon. Sis was Jed’s youngest sister. She lived out by Jericho. Her twins were only four, much younger than Ophelia and Jed’s two, Sam and Sarah, now thirteen and eleven. There’d been another baby before Sam, their first boy, but he had died at birth. And then Sam came along, robust and squalling, and they had put their loss behind them and got on with what had to be done.

  “That’s good,” Ophelia said with satisfaction. “They’ll eat there, I reckon.” She glanced at the clock—the walnut tambour clock Jed’s parents had given them for a wedding present—on the shelf beside the radio. It was nearly six. “Are you hungry? We had refreshments—you know the Dahlias, plenty to eat. But I can fix you a sandwich. There’s some ham.”

  Jed shook his head, and she saw that his frown was deeper. “Who was that on the phone?” she asked.

  He hesitated imperceptibly. “Roy Burns.”

  Ophelia tilted her head. Roy was the sheriff. He and his deputy, Buddy Norris, kept close tabs on all the criminal elements in Darling. The job didn’t amount to much, though, since the only people who came to Darling were friends and relatives of the folks who lived here or hoboes off the freight trains. Of course, there was the occasional crime of passion, some man getting liquored up and beating his wife, or a knife fight at the Watering Hole or the Dance Barn on Briarwood Road. There wasn’t supposed to be any liquor out there, or anywhere else for that matter, but the moonshiners took care of that. The jail, on the second floor of Jed’s Farm Supply building, had only two cells, which were mostly used to give drunks a place to sleep while they sobered up.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. Today was Sunday. Why was Sheriff Burns calling Jed on a Sunday afternoon, when families were settling in for supper and Sunday night church afterward and—

  “Some sort of trouble at the prison farm. Dunno, exac‘ly.” Jed went to the row of pegs beside the door and took down his suit coat and his hat. “Reckon I better get on out there, Opie. See what’s goin’ on.”

  She went to help him on with his coat. “Out where?”

  “Ralph’s place.” He jammed his hat on his head. Ralph Murphy was Jed’s cousin on his mother’s side. The two of them went hunting and fishing together as often as they could.

  “But why? Why did the sheriff—?”

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, honey-pie.” He bent down and gave her a quick kiss. “Nothin’ for you to be concerned about.” He always said this and she always took it to heart, for Ophelia would rather look on the bright side whenever she could. The way she saw it, wasn’t any sense to go digging up dirt when there was enough of it right under your nose. Same with trouble. And if Jed said there was nothing to worry about—well, there wasn’t.

  “You be careful, now,” she said, and stood on tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “What time will you be back?”

  “Look for me when you see me.” He went out the door and clattered down the wooden steps. A few minutes later, she heard the Ford starting up, with its characteristic cough and chug, and Jed drove off.

  Ophelia sat down in her husband’s maroon plush overstuffed chair and turned on the table model Philco that had been the whole family’s Christmas present. Jed liked to listen to Lowell Thomas read the news, and the kids loved to sprawl on the floor and listen to Amos ‘n’ Andy. Ophelia enjoyed music. The musical program that was on right now was the A&P Gypsies half hour on WODX, which broadcast from the Battle House Hotel in Mobile. Ophelia liked the Gypsies’ music. Liked Milton Cross, too, who did the announcing, in tones that were considered “mellifluous.” Frank Parker was singing “Just a Memory,” one of her favorites, although it always made her feel sad.

  She leaned her head against the back of the chair and listened for a moment, trying to imagine the Gypsies and Frank Parker and Milton Cross in a New York studio, playing this beautiful music just for her, sitting right here in Darling, a thousand miles away, with the sound rippling in waves like water, but through the air.

  The music changed to a faster beat, something Latin, and she got up and began straightening things, picking up a stray sock, emptying Jed’s ashtray, folding his Mobile Register. The article at the top of the page accompanied a photograph of Mr. Hoover, with a quotation from a recent speech: “We have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover.”

  Well, good! Ophelia loved it when the president sounded so encouraging. Encouragement was what everybody needed right now. If people believed that things would turn out right in the end and kept their spirits up, that’s what would happen. And Mr. Hoover was doing all he could, reducing taxes and trying to get the states to spend whatever they could on public works. It wasn’t his fault that Wall Street was in such terrible shape and people couldn’t find jobs. She was sure that the president was doing the best he could.

  She disposed of the sock and the cigarette butts, then collected her Ladies’ Home Journal and put it back with the others in the rack on the end table by the sofa. The children’s cat—an orange tabby named Rudy Vallée (because he was a vagabond lover)—came into the room and meowed plaintively. Ophelia followed him into the kitchen, where she opened the icebox and took out a pitcher of fresh milk and poured some into a saucer. Purring, Rudy lapped it hungrily.

  She put the milk away, frowning. Ralph’s place. Last year, Jed’s cousin had married himself a new wife, Lucy—a little thing, pretty, with all that flaming red hair, but not very sensible. Ralph and Lucy and Ralph’s two boys didn’t live too far from the Jericho State Prison Farm. Occasionally there was trouble out that way, but why trouble at the prison farm should involve her husband, or why Roy Burns would call and ask Jed to drive out there, Ophelia couldn’t fathom. It made her feel vaguely uneasy, as if a dark cloud were hanging over the horizon out in that direction, which of course it wasn’t.

  In fact, the sun was shining the same way it always did at this hour, the evening light slanting in through the window over the kitchen sink and turning Rudy Vallée’s fur into bright gold. Ophelia looked around at the pleasant room, with its yellow wallpaper, starched white curtains, white-painted cabinets with red-painted knobs, and yellow linoleum on the countertop and the floor, which was as clean as Florabelle could make it. There was a pot of ivy on the windowsill and a red geranium in a yellow ceramic pot on the table. Red and yellow, her favorite colors, in a sunny, cheerful kitchen. Red and yellow made her smile.

  Well. Jed was gone to Ralph’s, the children were at Momma Ruth’s, and the house felt empty. Ophelia went for her knitting bag, which held the socks she was working on. She’d just walk down the street and see if Sis knew anything about trouble out at the prison farm. They could sit on the porch and visit and watch the children playing hide-and-seek in the yard. She could knit and Sis could brag about how many quarts of green beans she’d already put up in that new National pressure cooker she bought last year—Ophelia wanted one, but couldn’t justify buying it when her canning kettle worked just fine. After a little bit, Momma Ruth w
ould put out the leftovers from Sunday dinner, fried chicken and new-potato salad and sliced tomatoes sprinkled with dill, and green beans and okra cooked up with onions and bacon. They would all help themselves, and then take their plates to the porch and eat, where it was cool.

  Ophelia smiled happily to herself. She loved these late-spring Sunday evenings, before the brassy heat of summer settled in, the twilight falling softly across the familiar street, the shouts of happy kids, the contented squeaking of the porch swing, the sleepy melodies of evening birds and cicadas and frogs in the ditch behind the house. For her, this was the best time of the day and the week, the best time of the year, the best place to be.

  Milton Cross and Frank Parker and the A&P Gypsies could keep New York.

  She would rather be right here in Darling.

  THREE

  Verna

  The Snows lived at Rosemont and Larkspur. Verna Tidwell’s house was at the other end of Larkspur, just a block from Ophelia’s, at the corner of Larkspur and Robert E. Lee. As she went up the steps to her front porch, she caught the scent of roses and took a deep, appreciative breath. The climber at the end of the porch, a Zepherine Drouhin, was covered with lovely pink blossoms, and the Louise Odier beside the steps filled the evening air with its rich, heady fragrance. Nothing like the scent of a rose, she thought to herself, to wash away your troubles, if you had any.

  For the most part, Verna didn’t, although she was always just as glad to borrow somebody else’s. That was her nature, always had been, always would be, and it had driven her husband, Walter—now deceased—almost crazy. Walter had taught history and civics at the Darling Academy and always seemed to be living (or so Verna thought) in another time and place. He never paid enough attention to the real world or the minutiae of real life (except for his camellias, upon which he lavished hours every week). And he never was bothered by much of anything or anybody but Verna.

  “Why are you so suspicious?” he would ask helplessly, when she raised a little question about this or that. “You’re always poking around, looking for problems where they don’t exist. Why can’t you just accept things at face value? Trouble will go away, if you give it half a chance. Look at the Romans. And Hannibal. And the French and Indian War. All over now. All gone away.”

  Verna didn’t quite get his point about the Romans and Hannibal, or about the French and Indians, either. But accepting things at face value wasn’t her nature, which was good, given what she did for a living, working in the probate office. Her detail-oriented focus came in handy when she had to do a plat search or look up property records, and the people who worked with her had learned to rely on her ability to smell a rat when there was one in the neighborhood. Or not even a rat, necessarily, just something that wasn’t right and needed fixing.

  So Verna went on being naturally and happily suspicious and mistrustful and wary, and Walter went on being driven almost crazy by Verna until he died ten years ago, when he crossed Route 12 without looking up and the Greyhound bus ran over him. Verna always suspected that when it happened, he was crossing the Alps with Hannibal or building Hadrian’s Wall with the Romans or was off someplace else where there weren’t any buses but maybe a lot of camellias.

  She opened the screen door and went into the cool, quiet dark. She still lived in the same small house that she and Walter had lived in. She liked it because it was paid for and Verna was always one to be careful about money, and didn’t mind it being small because she didn’t have any children.

  Inside the door, she was met by her black Scottie, Clyde, who climbed into her arms and washed her face thoroughly while he was saying hello. Then he jumped down and ran into the kitchen to wait for her to open a can of Ken-L Ration—horsemeat, although Verna had never told him what it was. Clyde adored Racer, the bay gelding who belonged to old Mr. Norris, next door on the south. Mr. Norris’ son Buddy owned a motorcycle, but old Mr. Norris refused to have anything to do with automobiles and hitched Racer to a two-wheeled cart when he had to go somewhere that was more than a good walk away. Racer spent his off-duty hours in the pasture behind the Norris house, where Clyde kept him company. Clyde would be horrified if he knew he was eating horsemeat.

  Verna went into her bedroom, took off her hat, and put it on the dresser. Then she changed out of her brown-and-orange plaid dress and into her garden clothes—a pair of Walter’s baggy green canvas pants and one of his old plaid shirts (Verna never threw anything away), and went out to the garden. Clyde immediately scampered off to see what Racer was up to and Verna went to her garden shed for the hoe, then headed out to give the weeds in the bean rows a quick haircut.

  Walter had never cared much for vegetable gardening. It was flowers he had his heart set on. In fact, Verna always suspected that he loved his camellias a great deal more than he loved her. He had filled their backyard with them, big floppy bushes with big floppy flowers that she had never appreciated, never even liked very much. To her, they always seemed exotic (well, of course—they came from Asia, didn’t they?) and overly demonstrative, flashy, flamboyant show-offs that took up too much room, took too much pampering, and seemed only too willing to surrender to root rot, dieback, bud drop, sunburn, scale, scab, and flower blight. And if Walter’s anxious fussing enabled them to survive these afflictions, they were bound to keel over the next time the thermometer dropped down to twenty, which it did every three or four winters—just often enough to allow Walter to start his camellia collection all over again.

  After Walter walked in front of the bus, Verna mourned for the requisite period of time, then invited all her camellia-loving friends to come and take starts from Walter’s bushes. Then she had every last one cut down and the roots dug out, and Mr. Norris came over with Racer and plowed up about half of the backyard. Now she grew vegetables and a few flowering annuals and roses around front and felt like these were all the garden she wanted. More than she needed, actually. Which was why when she was done hoeing, she picked a tin lard pail full of green beans and carried it through the gate to the Norris house.

  “Yoo-hoo, Mr. Norris!” she called, standing on the back wooden steps. She called loudly, because Mr. Norris was hard of hearing. “It’s Verna, from next door. You here?”

  Mr. Norris came to the screen. He had a water bucket in his hand and was on his way to the well pump on the cistern. Their street had been on the water main for ten years, but he refused to have city water. City lights, either, or city gas. Coal oil lamps had been plenty good for his momma and daddy, he said, and they were plenty good for him.

  “Got somethin‘for me?” he asked, and peered into the lard pail. “My, my, them’s a nice mess o’ beans, little lady.” He eyed her mischievously. “Got some fatback to go with ’em?”

  “Little lady” was a joke between them, because Verna was five-foot-eleven (taller, when she wore dress pumps with heels) and Mr. Norris, now in his seventies, was stooped, standing no higher than her chest. What’s more, since she usually wore Walter’s baggy old pants, she couldn’t rightly be called a lady. And “fatback” was meant to be funny, too, because Verna didn’t eat pork and Mr. Norris knew it. She had raised a pet pig when she was a girl and pork never seemed to taste right to her after that. Which was why she knew she shouldn’t tell Clyde what was in his can of Ken-L Ration.

  Verna walked to the well with Mr. Norris and watched him hang the bucket on the pump spout and raise and lower the handle. The water gushed out, clear and cool and every bit as good as the water that came out of the city mains. The full bucket was heavy and she took it from him.

  “Buddy’s not around to fetch water for you?” she asked. “He’s out lookin’ for a lady-friend?”

  Mr. Norris’ son’s philandering was another joke, although sometimes not very funny. Buddy had got himself in serious trouble a couple of months before, when his wandering eye lit on another man’s wife and the man took exception. Buddy had ended up with a broken arm and a black eye, which you might’ve thought would be embarrassing for a dep
uty sheriff.

  But not for Buddy, who was never embarrassed by anything. He had gotten the deputy’s job because he’d ordered a how-to book on scientific crime detection from the Institute of Applied Sciences in Chicago, Illinois, and had taught himself how to take fingerprints, identify firearms, and make “crime scene” photographs. When Deputy Duane Hadley retired earlier in the year and moved over to Monroeville, about fifteen miles to the east, to live with his married daughter, Buddy applied for the job. Sheriff Burns had been so impressed with his knowledge of fingerprinting and photography that he hired him on the spot.

  Of course, the fact that Buddy rode a 1927 red Indian Ace motorcycle was probably the deciding factor, since Sheriff Burns had heard that the New York Police Department bought nothing but Indian Aces for their crack motorcycle police squad. Buddy’s motorcycle gave Verna a headache every time he came roaring up to the house. But it gave Roy Burns the right to brag that Darling had the only mounted sheriff’s deputy in all of southern Alabama.

  “Buddy?” Mr. Norris shook his head. “Naw, he’s out on a case.” He liked this, so he said it again, louder. “He’s went out on a case. Sheriff come by in his automobile and told him to ride out to the Ralph Murphy place. At the end of Briarwood Road, out by Jericho.”

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “Jailbreak.” Mr. Norris was enjoying himself

  “From the prison farm, I reckon.” Prison farm guards with rifles sat on their horses and watched the work parties, but occasionally somebody, or a pair or a trio of somebodies, would walk off and head for the trees. If they didn’t get shot, they could be hard to find out there in the woods.

  “cup.”

  “Have they found them yet?” she asked. “The escapees, I mean.” Verna wasn’t all that anxious, but she knew that many people in town would be concerned. Once, years before, an escaped prisoner had made his way to Darling. Desperate, he’d broken into the diner for food and into Mann’s Mercantile for clothing to replace his prison stripes. He’d jumped a train and gotten as far as Montgomery before the police caught up with him, and until then, everybody in town was on pins and needles, wondering where he was.