The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “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.

  “You said you were going to tell us whether Mr. George E. Pickett Johnson stole money from the bank,” Bessie replied. “That’s what.”

  “No,” Earlynne said, sipping her tea. “She’s going to tell us that he’s going straight to jail for what he did. Where he belongs. And that’s the blessed truth.”

  “Oh, but she didn’t say that,” Lizzy put in diffidently. “Not quite, anyway.”

  Lizzy was wondering just how much Verna actually knew about the situation. Verna worked all day on the second floor of the courthouse, where she got to hear a lot of things that most of the other Dahlias knew nothing about. In the same way, Lizzy herself, working in Mr. Moseley’s office, knew more about what was going on behind the scenes in Darling than a lot of other people.

  But Lizzy and Verna had different approaches to what they heard. Lizzy usually tried to tune out the worst of it, figuring that life would be a little brighter if she didn’t clutter it up with all that dark stuff. The world was full of things she didn’t need to know. When she locked the door to Moseley’s law offices, she left it all behind and went home to her pretty little house and her beautiful garden and her dear cat, Daffodil, and did her best to forget all that unhappiness until the next day.

  Verna, on the other hand, had a dim view of human nature to start with. Her suspicions were usually fed by her habit of peering “under the rocks,” as she put it, on the lookout for people’s dirty doings. Since Verna’s job required her to collect the county taxes and pay the county’s bills, her habit usually paid off. It never surprised her to discover that a county employee had helped himself to a load of gravel from the pile out behind the road maintenance building, or that the contractor who built the new road out past the sawmill had double-billed the county for over a hundred hours of labor.

  “That’s just people for you,” she’d say with a little shrug. “They’ll do anything they think they can get away with. If you turn a blind eye to their dirty tricks, they’ll figure they can get away with even more.”

  Verna never turned a blind eye, though. And when she found out about the gravel or the double-billing, you could bet your bottom dollar that the perpetrators were going to be called to account, even if they were big shots. Big shots had never impressed Verna Tidwell.

  “Well, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Mr. Johnson did steal a lot of money,” Bessie said darkly. “I heard that the bank examiners grilled him for hours and hours before they closed the bank.”

  “And Hank says that the state attorney’s office has decided to throw the book at him,” Earlynne put in. She looked at Verna. “So what’s going on, Verna? Do tell.”

  With a glance at Lizzy, Verna pulled on her cigarette. “What I can tell you,” she said quietly, “is that Voleen Johnson took the train to Montgomery this morning. She says she’s going to stay with her sister for a few weeks.”

  The Dahlias pulled in their breaths in a unanimous gasp of surprise, and Bessie said softly, “That does take the cake. You’d think she would stand by her husband, wouldn’t you?”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised,” Earlynne said, reaching for another one of Bessie’s cookies. “Voleen Johnson has the backbone of a wet noodle. When her husband is arrested, she won’t be able to hold up her head in this town and she knows it.” She munched. “Bessie, these are the best sour cream cookies. I have to get your recipe.”

  “Oh, dear,” Lizzy murmured. She had read Verna’s glance, and thought her friend might know more than she was saying. However, Verna had never much liked Voleen Johnson, who was a Dahlia in name only. She usually came to the meetings to cause trouble, rarely offered to roll up her sleeves and help on a workday, and was never, ever seen with a speck of garden dirt under her prettily manicured fingernails. The Johnsons lived in the biggest and fanciest house in town, and while they didn’t have as many servants as they used to, Voleen still had two maids and paid a colored gardener to take care of her garden, which included a large greenhouse full of exotic tropical plants. She loved white flowers and—thanks to that fabled greenhouse—saw to it that there was a big bowl of fresh, pure white blossoms in the lobby of the Darling Savings and Trust every morning. Her exotic blooms always took first place at the Cypress County Flower Show, which made some of the Dahlias grumble resentfully that she was taking unfair advantage of her . . . well, her advantages.

  Lizzy hadn’t heard about Mrs. Johnson leaving town, and she immediately felt uneasy. Mr. Moseley always insisted that a person was innocent until he was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and even then, his conviction could be overturned on appeal. Guilty didn’t always mean guilty, in the long run.

  But Lizzy knew the citizens of Darling well enough to know that the minute Mrs. Johnson climbed on that train, it was as good as a guilty verdict—and one that couldn’t be overturned on appeal. People wou
ld decide that she was leaving town because she knew her husband was guilty and she didn’t want to stay and face the music.

  Aunt Hetty nodded regretfully. “I’m sorry to be the one to say it, but Voleen should have had better sense. People’s feelings are running high enough the way it is. Her leaving will just make a bad thing worse.”

  It was certainly true that feelings in Darling were running high. Coming back from Lima’s Drugstore yesterday afternoon, Lizzy had overheard a conversation between two farmers who were standing out in front of the bank, glaring at the CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE sign. One of them had gritted his teeth and growled, “Bankers are the damnedest, rottenest liars on God’s green earth.”

  And the other had nodded in agreement. “Goldurned shysters and thieves to boot. Somebody oughta take Johnson out behind the woodshed and teach him a thing or two.”

  Bessie put her cup down. “Is Mr. Johnson still in jail, Liz?”

  “I certainly hope so,” Earlynne said.

  Lizzy hesitated. Because of Mr. Moseley’s gag rule, she didn’t feel right, talking about the matter. But what Bessie was asking was a public fact, yes or no. She could answer that, couldn’t she?

  “No,” she said. “I mean, well, yes, it’s true that Sheriff Burns took him over to the jail last night, for a little while. But it’s not true that he was arrested. Mr. Moseley went over and had a talk with the sheriff and Mr. Johnson went home.”

  She got up to give the rhubarb a good hard stir with the wooden spoon, feeling uncertain. Had she said too much? But Sheriff Burns wasn’t muzzled by Mr. Moseley’s gag rule. He would have told Mrs. Burns, who would have gone straight to the telephone to tell her daughter and her sister-in-law, who were both on the party line.