The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star (2 page)

“Well, it’s almost all over,” Mildred Kilgore said in her slow Southern drawl. She sat down at the table in the Dahlias’ clubhouse kitchen. “I don’t mind saying that I, for one, am glad.”

Aunt Hetty Little came to the table with a pitcher of cold lemonade and began to fill the four glasses on the table. “All over?” She chuckled wryly. “Why, bless your heart, child, it’s just
begun
!”

Mildred was nearly forty, but Aunt Hetty was no spring chicken and felt qualified to call everyone “child,” especially when they were talking about presidential elections. At eighty, her memory of presidents went back to Abraham Lincoln, although she had only been able to cast her vote since Mr. Harding, twelve years before. “Can’t blame the mess in Washington on us women,” she liked to say. “That place was a mess long before we got the vote.”

“The nominating conventions are just the beginning,” Elizabeth Lacy said, agreeing with Aunt Hetty. She put her Dahlias’ club notebook on the table and sat down, taking a deep breath. The kitchen door was open and the sweet scent of honeysuckle filled the room, along with the evening song of a perky Carolina wren, perched in the catalpa tree just outside the window. “It’s a long time to the elections, although Mr. Moseley says he’s pretty sure that—”

“We all know what Mr. Moseley says, Liz,” Verna Tidwell put in dryly. She took a chair on the opposite side of the table. “He’s been angling for months to get that fellow Roosevelt on the ticket. I sure hope he doesn’t regret it. We all know Hoover. Nobody knows what FDR will do.”

Verna was tall and thin, with narrow lips, an olive complexion, and dark, searching eyes under unplucked (and thoroughly unfashionable) brows. She didn’t pay much attention to fashionable dressing, either. She had come to the meeting straight from her office in the Cypress County courthouse and was still dressed in her working clothes: a plain white cotton short-sleeved blouse and a belted navy gabardine skirt. But what Verna might lack in conventional prettiness, she more than made up for in smarts, which was why Lizzy Lacy liked her so much.

Lizzy reached for one of the pecan jumbles, an old-fashioned cookie that Aunt Hetty had brought. The previous week, the Democrats had nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York, on the fourth ballot, after a floor fight that just about wore all the delegates out. At least, that was according to the story in the Darling
Dispatch
. What Lizzy herself knew about politics wouldn’t fill a peanut shell. But for over a year, Mr. Moseley (her boss and the most prominent lawyer in Darling) had been working like a stubborn mule for Roosevelt, and she tried to keep up with what he was doing. She and Verna and several of their friends had got together in the diner after closing on Saturday night to listen to Mr. Roosevelt’s acceptance speech on the radio. The governor had actually chartered an airplane and flown all the way from Albany to Chicago to speak to the convention delegates. An airplane! That was a first for any presidential candidate.

Lizzy wasn’t sure how she felt about Governor Roosevelt. He had talked about the federal government’s responsibility to help people who needed to find work. But he’d been pretty vague about what he intended to do, except for promising a “new deal,” whatever that was. Some people thought they could guess, based on his plans for an old-age pension and unemployment insurance, which he had tried to push through the New York state legislature. But nobody knew for sure.

Lizzy was the kind of person who always liked to know as much as she could about what was going on, so she had asked Mr. Moseley for an explanation. But even he didn’t know what a “new deal” was, at least, not specifically.

“It’s something the Brain Trust cooked up,” he said. When she asked what a “brain trust” was, he’d just laughed. “You might call it a kitchen cabinet,” he replied, which left her even more mystified—until he had handed her the third volume of James Parton’s
Life of Andrew Jackson.
A scrap of paper marked page 338, where she read about the men who were “supposed to have most of the president’s ear and confidence.” The kitchen cabinet, she imagined, got together over cigars and coffee (or something stronger) to cook up policy.

Aunt Hetty finished filling the lemonade glasses. “Mr. Moseley is doin’ more than just angling,” she observed wryly. “I read in the
Dispatch
that he’s organizing a group called Darling for FDR.”

“Roger is getting some supporters together to campaign for President Hoover,” Mildred said in an offhanded tone. She was wearing a new white tucked and pleated cotton shirtwaist dress—her golfing costume. The outfit looked very snazzy, Lizzy thought with a quick stab of envy. The Kilgores had plenty of money, and Mildred—who was plump and rather plain—went to New York to buy her clothes. She always looked like something out of
Vogue
, while the rest of them made do with the out-of-date clothes in their closets. Or, in the case of Verna, a gabardine skirt that was a little shiny in the seat.

“But we’re afraid it’ll be an uphill fight for Mr. Hoover,” Mildred added ruefully. “Here in Darling, anyway.”

That was probably true, Lizzy thought. Mildred and her husband, Roger Kilgore (the owner of the only automobile dealership in town) had cheered when Hoover and his vice president, Charles Curtis, were renominated at the Republican convention in Chicago in June, on a “balanced budget” platform. Back in 1928, the Republicans had coasted into the White House on a wave of economic prosperity and a booming stock market. But that was before Black Tuesday, when the bottom fell out of the market, the banks began to fail, and people lost their jobs. The Crash wasn’t President Hoover’s fault, of course. But in Darling and around the country, his administration was being blamed for not doing anything to ease the miserable situation. People were ready for a change.

“You’re right about that uphill fight, Mildred,” Verna said with an ironic lift to her eyebrow. “People might not know Mr. Roosevelt from Adam’s house cat, but lots of folks are ready to cast their vote for good old A.B.H.”

“A.B.H.?” Aunt Hetty sat down at the table. “Never heard of him. Who’s he?”

“Anybody but Hoover,” Verna replied. “I predict it’ll be Roosevelt in a landslide.”

Aunt Hetty chortled, and even Mildred had to laugh.

But the Dahlias hadn’t given up their evening to discuss politics. Lizzy opened her notebook, picked up her pencil, and cleared her throat.

“Okay, everybody. We’re here to go over the last-minute planning for next weekend’s festival. There’s plenty to do, so let’s get started.”

Darling’s clubs and organizations took turns coordinating the annual Watermelon Festival, which would be held over the coming weekend at the Cypress County Fairgrounds, just outside of town. This year, it was the Dahlias’ turn to coordinate the event and make sure that things ran as smoothly as possible—which was usually
not
very smoothly, since the unexpected had a way of cropping up, well, unexpectedly.

Take last year, for instance, when the Masonic Lodge was in charge of the festival. A trio of Mr. Burley’s milk goats unexpectedly escaped from their pen in the livestock pavilion and nipped off all the blossoms in the Dahlias’ flower booth. Somebody kicked a tent peg loose and the Ladies Club tent collapsed on the unsuspecting (and newly shampooed and set) head of Voleen Johnson, wife of Mr. George E. Pickett Johnson, the owner of the Darling Savings and Trust Bank. The Eastern Star’s hot dog stand ran out of hot dogs halfway through the event. The Chamber of Commerce popcorn machine caught fire. And Mrs. Peabody fell off the stage in the act of awarding the 1931 Darling Baby award to Mrs. Starks’ little Bluebelle. Bluebelle, whom Mrs. Peabody was holding at the time, was unharmed. Mrs. Peabody broke her nose.

But the worst happened when the motor on the Ferris wheel burned out, leaving a dozen juvenile Darlingians stranded some thirty feet above the ground. This was not a serious problem for the strandees, of course. They were thrilled by every delicious minute of their extended ride, especially since they could look down and see everybody pointing excitedly up at them and yelling at them to be brave.

But their mothers were hysterical, and with good reason, for it took two hours for the Darling Volunteer Fire Department to get their youngsters down from their precarious perch. The Ferris wheel motor turned out to be unfixable. The merry-go-round quit shortly thereafter, so that was the end of the carnival rides. The Darling children, who had been saving their hard-earned pennies for months, were inconsolable.

It was the Odd Fellows who had booked the broken-down carnival, so the Ferris wheel problem was rightly their responsibility. But the Masonic Lodge was in charge of the festival and the fine finger of scorn was mostly pointed at them. It was months before they lived down the disgrace. Lizzy was determined that the Dahlias were going to do a better job. As the Dahlias’ president, she wasn’t about to let the club’s sterling reputation be besmirched by a few unexpected incidents. She was even more determined, because she knew that this would be the most exciting festival ever. This year, the festival was going to feature a special, never-been-done-before event that had the whole town buzzing.

Well. Now that we’ve come this far in our story, it’s time to pause for a few words about the Darling Dahlias. The club was founded in the mid-1920s by Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone, who died after wearing herself out in decades of community service and left her small white frame cottage at 302 Camellia Street to the town’s garden club. The club promptly renamed itself the Darling Dahlias
in honor of this generous lady and committed itself to the beautification of Darling, one blossom at a time.

With the cottage, the Dahlias inherited almost an acre of once-beautiful flower gardens, as well as a half-acre vegetable garden in the adjoining lot. The yard in front of the cottage was planted with wisteria, azaleas, Mrs. Blackstone’s prize hydrangeas, and the old-fashioned wiegelas that came from her mother—an everyday-pretty Southern front yard that people admired as they drove down Camellia Street.

But it was the garden behind the house that people liked to talk about. It had once been truly spectacular, sweeping down a sloping, velvety green lawn toward a stately cucumber magnolia, a clump of woods, and a small, clear spring smothered in ferns, bog iris, and pitcher plants. The borders and beds were rich in roses and camellias, iris, stokesia, hibiscus, and dozens of different lilies—along with a rainbow of brightly colored annuals. It was so beautiful that it had been written up in the Selma
Times-Journal
, the Montgomery
Advertiser
, and in newspapers as far away as North Carolina.

In Mrs. Blackstone’s declining years, however, the garden had gotten the best of her. Left to fend for themselves, the plants grew rowdy and rumpled and dreadfully tousled—because gardens don’t just
grow
,
of course; they require looking after. When the gardener isn’t around to pay the right kind of attention, plants have a tendency to wander off in whatever way they prefer, putting out a bud here and a branch there and dropping seeds (or extending roots) into their neighbors’ bed. Without the gardener, a garden quickly becomes a disorderly, unruly place.

As a result, when the Dahlias inherited Mrs. Blackstone’s garden, it was no longer as tidy as it was when Mrs. Blackstone could put on her garden gloves and get out there every day. The ladies had to arm themselves with rakes and hoes and trowels and clippers and set about restoring the necessary botanical order—which they did, although the job took the entire summer and most of the following autumn. Now, although there was always plenty of weeding, trimming, pruning, and even planting to be done, the Dahlias were pretty much ready to rest on their laurels as far as their “show” garden was concerned.

But then (as if they hadn’t already worked hard enough) Lizzy and the other club officers decided that it would be smart to use the vacant lot next to the clubhouse to grow vegetables. Times were hard, and people needed beans and okra and corn and tomatoes even more than they needed roses and camellias and gladiolas—although as Aunt Hetty Little liked to point out, a life without a few glads is a very sad life indeed. The Dahlias sold their vegetables, cheaply, at the Saturday farmers’ market on the square. And what they didn’t sell, they gave away to people who were hard up for cash—including some of their very own Dahlias who were having a tough time making ends meet.

So they hired old Mr. Norris and his bay gelding, Racer, to plow up Mrs. Blackstone’s empty lot, where they planted snap peas, corn, green beans, collards, Swiss chard, okra, Southern peas (purple hull was the hands-down favorite), tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, cantaloupes, cucumbers, and sweet potatoes. This month, the garden was yielding its summer produce in great abundance. They would be selling it at their booth at the Watermelon Festival, with Aunt Hetty Little in charge. They planned to use the money to buy a pressure cooker and a case of Mason jars with new lids and rings. That way, they could can up the vegetables and give them to the Darling Family Food Pantry.