The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

“I’ll second that!” Earlynne Biddle said, very fast. Her husband, Hank, was the manager at the Coca-Cola bottling plant. The plant was laying people off, and Earlynne knew that, for a lot of families in Darling, every nickel counted.

“I’ll third it.” That was Ophelia. Her husband, Jed—Darling’s second-term mayor—owned Snow’s Farm Supply, on the northwest corner of the courthouse square. He carried as many farmers as he could on credit, but the past several summers had been dry and most crops hadn’t brought in enough for folks to pay their seed bills. Jed hadn’t laid anybody off yet, but he’d had to cut the employees’ hours. Like everybody else, the Snows were pinching pennies.

“Moved and seconded and thirded,” Lizzy said. “The motion’s on the floor.” She looked around. “Is there any discussion?”

“Just one thing,” Lizzy,” Aunt Hetty said. “You’re right about the roof on this house. We can probably get some volunteers to help, but we’ll have to buy roofing material. We can’t expect to pay for something that expensive out of what we collect from our members, though. I think we ought to lower the dues and find another way to raise money for the roof.”

“Hear, hear,” Bessie Bloodworth called from a corner of the room.

“I’m in favor,” Mildred Kilgore added, and others were nodding. “If we lower the dues, maybe we’ll get some new members. There’s lots of work out there in the garden. They could help.”

Silence. After a moment, Voleen Johnson said, in a sour tone, “Well, I’ve said my piece. Might as well vote, I suppose.”

“Mrs. Johnson has called the question,” Lizzy said crisply. “All in favor, say aye. Opposed, nay.” There was a loud chorus of ayes. Mrs. Johnson didn’t say anything.

“Motion carried,” Lizzy said. “So everybody, pay your dues. At our next meeting, we’ll discuss what we can do to raise money to fix the roof. But for now, could we have a motion to adjourn? And of course, there’s still plenty of food.”

“I move we adjourn,” Beulah said. “I want a piece of Mildred’s ribbon cake—if there’s any left, that is.”





Later, after the rest had taken their dishes and gone home, Lizzy, Opelia, and Verna put on aprons and tidied up the kitchen, washing the plates and silver, wiping the counter and table, and sweeping the floor.

“I sometimes wonder why she wants to belong to the Dahlias,” Ophelia said. “Voleen Johnson, I mean.” She put the clean forks into the silverware drawer. “The rest of us are way below her on the social ladder. Voleen was a Butler before she married into the Johnsons, you know.”

Lizzy carried the enamel dishpan to the back screen door and tossed the water onto the trumpet climber that arched across the roof. “Maybe it’s our friendly company she craves.” She chuckled. “Must be kind of lonely at the top of that social ladder. Nobody can afford to climb high enough to join her.”

Lizzy knew she was exaggerating, but what she said was mostly true. Darling had once had an aristocracy of sorts—the Blakes, for instance, and the Robbs and the Butlers and the Cartwrights, of course, Mrs. Blackstone’s mother’s family. They were the cotton kings and queens, with fine plantations on the richest bottoms and landings along the river, where the stern-wheel steamboats plied their weekly runs up from Mobile and down from Montgomery. The boats stopped at every landing to leave farm equipment and blocks of ice and barrels of flour and bags of sugar, and pick up bales of cotton and wool and bushels of corn and sweet potatoes and barrels of turpentine—a strong commerce built on agriculture.