The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

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—’”