Saturday, August 31, 1935
The thick green vines of the pole beans in the garden next to the Darling Dahlias’ clubhouse were heavily loaded with bright green Kentucky Wonder string beans. Which was a very good thing, Bessie Bloodworth thought, since it was the Dahlias’ turn to feed the crowd at the annual supper for the men and boys of the Volunteer Fire Department, collectively known as the Hot Dogs. Bessie’s Cajun green bean casserole (a recipe borrowed from a Louisiana cousin) was on the menu. So she, Aunt Hetty Little, and Ophelia Snow were picking beans—early, to avoid the heat of what promised to be another simmering late-summer day. While they worked, they discussed the plans for tonight’s dinner, which featured (what else?) hot dogs.
“Liz is managing the hot dogs and buns,” Bessie reported, stretching up to snag a bean hanging at the top of the tall cane-pole teepee. This year, she had been the one to organize the food, a job she always enjoyed. “Beulah is bringing all the stuff that goes with hot dogs,” she added. “Mustard, catsup, relish, onions—and cheese, of course. She’s also offered to fry a couple of chickens if we need them. She says she has an extra rooster.”
“I don’t think we’ll need Beulah’s rooster.” Ophelia tossed a handful of beans into the bucket at her feet. “I’m making a pot of potato salad and three dozen deviled eggs. And Mildred and Earlynne are each bringing a big bag of roasting ears.”
“And I’m bringing a bucket of coleslaw. Everybody likes that.” Aunt Hetty straightened up with a hand on her aching hip. She was eighty-something, sometimes walked with a cane, and always tried to snatch a little nap in the afternoon. But she never let age or temporary infirmities keep her out of the garden. “And Myra May and Violet are bringing a kettle of pulled pork and sandwich buns. That ought to be enough to feed the thirty who have signed up for the supper.”
“Plus my green bean casserole and Alice Ann’s stewed okra,” Bessie reminded them. “Oh, and Lucy says she’s got more ripe tomatoes than she’s got time to fool with. She said she’d slice them up with some red onions and dill.”
Ophelia swatted a mosquito. “Don’t forget pie. Raylene said that she and Euphoria will bring as many as we want from the diner.”
“Plus the five or six gallons of iced tea that Mildred is brewing, and that should just about do it,” Aunt Hetty said. “Sounds like a feast, girls. Let’s hope the Hot Dogs bring big appetites.”
“Oh, they’ll be hungry, all right,” Ophelia said. She held up the lard pail she was using to collect her beans. “I’ve got three quarts here. How are you doing, Bessie?”
Bessie looked down at her basket, which was gratifyingly full. “Almost a gallon. You, Hetty?”
“Three quarts,” Aunt Hetty said. “That gives us close to three gallons, which ought to be enough for your casserole, with some left over for your Magnolia ladies’ supper.” She dusted her hands on her rickrack-trimmed red print apron and regarded a leafy green teepee still studded with beans. “Don’t you just love these Kentucky Wonders? Best pole bean ever. We’ve picked enough for the supper and there are still plenty left.”
“Which is good,” Ophelia replied, “because the First Baptists are coming this afternoon to pick for their Labor Day canning party. Liz told them they could take beans and okra, plus all the cucumbers they want. Mrs. Rothbottom said they were getting together to put up dill pickles.”
The long, hot Alabama summer still wasn’t over, but the Darling churches were already starting to stock the town’s free food shelf—the big pantry closet in the courthouse basement—against the coming winter. Now in its fifth year, the Depression had hit everybody hard. There were too many people with empty cupboards and hungry children to feed. The Dahlias helped by putting in a garden big enough to share, free of charge, with those who wanted to come and pick for themselves and others.
Well, not exactly free, Bessie knew. There was a sheet on the back door where people could sign up to trade a few hours of weed-pulling and row-hoeing for a bucket of vegetables. Most did, and as a consequence, the garden was well tended. It looked very pretty, especially considering that there hadn’t been any rain at all in the month of August and it was hot enough to fry an egg on the courthouse step—as Earlynne Biddle’s boy, Benny, had demonstrated last week. He had even broadcast this sizzling event on WDAR, Darling’s recently launched radio station, which he helped to manage. A remote broadcast, he said it was. Which Bessie wondered about because the courthouse was not a bit remote. It was smack-dab in the middle of town.
“Let’s call it quits and get these beans snapped,” Bessie said, holding out her basket for Aunt Hetty’s and Ophelia’s beans. “With three of us on the job, we’ll be done in a jiffy.”
A few minutes later, the ladies had divvied up the beans and settled down to work in the shade of the big pecan tree behind the Dahlias’ little white frame clubhouse. It had needed a new roof and some major repairs when they inherited it, but they had rolled up their sleeves and gotten to work. They were still at it, too. Just the week before, Violet Sims and Myra May Mosswell had teamed up to paint the kitchen a bright, sunny shade of yellow—a great improvement, everybody agreed.
It wasn’t ten o’clock yet, but Bessie could feel the perspiration beading on her forehead. It was going to be another blister of a day, maybe the hottest yet this summer, which was one of the hottest anybody could remember. She was sick and tired of the sweltering heat but there was nothing you could do about it—just as there was nothing you could do about the Depression except smile and act like you meant it, even when you didn’t. What was the name of that song she’d heard on the radio the other day? Something about letting a smile be your umbrella on a really rainy day? But it wasn’t an umbrella or even a smile she needed right now, Bessie told herself. What she needed was for Mr. Hawkins to fix the switch on the electric fan so the residents of the Magnolia Manor—her home for genteel older ladies, right next door to the clubhouse—could enjoy a cooling breeze while they played bridge or worked on their jigsaw puzzles after supper.
This morning’s breeze wasn’t exactly cool, but it carried the fragrance of the Dahlias’ flower garden, over an acre of lovely plants and lush green grass, all the way down to a little wooded area and the clear spring that was surrounded by bog iris, ferns, and pitcher plants. The garden had been designed and lovingly tended by Mrs. Dahlia Blackstone, who had bequeathed it and her little frame cottage to the garden club that had taken her name.
In its heyday, the garden had been written up in the Selma Times-Journal, the Montgomery Advertiser, and in newspapers as far away as Tennessee and North Carolina. In Mrs. Blackstone’s later years, however, the garden had gotten away from her—which happens to every garden when the gardener gets busy or gets old or just stops paying attention. Even the most mannerly and well-disciplined plants, left to their own devices, grow unkempt and disorderly. They wander off in whatever direction suits them, putting out a stray bud here and an unruly branch there and dropping seeds or poking roots and tubers into their neighbors’ beds. By the time Mrs. Blackstone’s estate was settled and the cottage and gardens turned over to the Dahlias, her backyard was more like a subtropical jungle than a garden.
“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see a tiger in there,” Violet Sims had said, surveying the tangles.
“Or an anaconda or two,” muttered her partner Myra May Mosswell. “There’s bound to be snakes, girls. Watch where you step.”
But nothing daunted, the Dahlias pulled on boots and gloves, got their garden tools out of the old shed by the fence, armed themselves with Flit guns to fend off the mosquitos, and went to work. They snipped the overgrown clematis, mandevilla, and wisteria. They trimmed the trumpet vine and the untrammeled Confederate jasmine. They divided and replanted the orange ditch lilies that Mrs. Blackwell had loved, and the oxblood and crinum and spider lilies, as well as daffodils and narcissus. They cleared the curving perennial borders of weeds and invaders, giving the larkspur, phlox, Shasta daisies, iris, alliums, and asters more room to relax and spread out. They pruned the gardenias and roses—the climbers, the teas, the ramblers, the shrubs, and the boisterous Lady Banks, whose gorgeous yellow blooms in spring were a sight for sore eyes.
And even at the height of a sultry summer, something was bound to be blooming. Today, it was (fittingly) the August lily, which Miss Rogers, the Darling librarian, insisted on calling by its Latin name, Lilium formosanum. Its massive white trumpets hung heavy on five-foot stems, their delicate, delicious fragrance filling the air.
It was the August lily that Bessie smelled now, as she, Aunt Hetty, and Opie pulled up chairs and settled down under the pecan tree. The quiet of the Camellia Street neighborhood was broken only by the distant hoot of the railroad train on other side of town, a dove’s melodic who-cooks-for-you, and the distinctly unmelodic disharmonies produced by the student who was taking a piano lesson from Ruth Annie Perkins across the street. “The Moonlight Sonata,” Bessie thought it sounded like—when it sounded like anything at all.
The ladies could share the latest news as they worked, for all three had been snapping beans since they were girls in pinafores and knew just how to do it. Kentucky Wonders weren’t just any old green beans, however. They were string beans. That is, a thick strand of vegetable fiber ran the length of every bean and had to be pulled out before the bean was cooked—a job worth doing because Kentucky Wonders were so flavorful. An experienced bean-snapper could flick off the tip ends with a thumbnail, zip out the string, and snap the bean into three or four crisp pieces without looking—and without dropping a syllable.
“I had a visit from Voodoo Lil last night,” Aunt Hetty said. “She brought me some cane syrup—and a warning about the weather.”
Big Lil Boudreaux, also known as Voodoo Lily, was a special friend of Aunt Hetty’s and the most respected of Cypress County’s half-dozen conjure queens. Big Lil lived in a wood-frame tin-roofed cottage in Briar Swamp, where Darling folk, white and colored, consulted her regularly on matters having to do with their pocketbooks, their hearts, their health, and the weather. When Lil predicted that something was going to happen, people listened.*
Ophelia looked concerned. “What kind of a warning? Not more of this heat, I hope.”
“A hurricane warning. Lil says it’s going to be a bad one and kill a lot of people. It’ll hit the Florida Keys first, on Labor Day. She doesn’t know where it’s headed after that. It could turn into another one of those bad Gulf storms, though. She says she’s got a feeling. We should get ready for anything.”
Bessie made a mental note to ask Mr. Dalby to come over and check her storm shutters. Darling was only about seventy miles inland. Some years before, a hurricane had blown up in the Gulf, crossed the coast west of Mobile, ripped the roof off Jake Pritchard’s Standard Oil station, plucked up fine old trees all over town, and sent Pine Mill Creek out of its banks, drowning Tate Haggard’s cow. And late August, early September was prime hurricane season.
She had a different piece of news to share, though. “Have you heard that Rufus Radley has decided to run for fire chief?”
“But Archie Mann has been fire chief for years.” Aunt Hetty was surprised. “And everybody says he’s a genius at his job. That man knows fires.”
“Rufus might know how to repair cars, but what does he know about being fire chief?” Ophelia wondered. “Is he qualified?”
The Hot Dogs always elected their officers at the meeting they held after the August hot dog supper. Archie Mann, the owner of Mann’s Mercantile, had been chief of the Darling VFD for the past six or seven years. Nobody had expected any opposition to his candidacy—least of all from Rufus Radley, who owned Radley’s Auto Repair two miles out on the Monroeville Highway and had joined the VFD only a few months before.
“Rufus thinks he’s qualified to do anything,” Bessie said with a dark chuckle. “But he’s probably running for chief because he wants to drive that fancy new fire truck Miss Tallulah donated to the Hot Dogs.”
“And blast that truck siren, to make everybody jump out of his way,” Aunt Hetty said. She had been a schoolteacher when she was a young woman. “Rufus was a pushy little boy. I had him for third and fourth grades. When there were goodies being handed out, Rufus Radley always managed to get himself to the front of the line.”
The chief was the one who got to drive the shiny new fire engine that the civic-minded Miss Tallulah LaBelle (a plantation owner whose family fortune mysteriously survived the 1929 Crash) had recently bought and donated to the fire department. Respectfully called Big Red, Miss Tallulah’s truck had been the star of this year’s Fourth of July parade, eclipsing the VFD’s old truck, a rusty, banged-up 1925 Model T Ford stakebed that was weighed down with fire hoses, fire buckets, and a 100-gallon water barrel. Archie Mann had looked pretty fine at the wheel of Big Red, wearing the chief’s shiny helmet (bright red, of course, with a gold No. 1 on the front), and running the siren while people cheered. Everybody was proud of the Darling VFD.
But Rufus Radley always got what he went after, and Bessie knew that if he wanted the fire chief’s job, he was going to get it—one way or the other. It didn’t matter that Archie Mann was the more experienced candidate and knew what it took to do the job. She hoped the Hot Dogs would reelect him. But Rufus always had a trick or two up his sleeve. If he wanted to get his hands on the wheel of that new truck, there wasn’t much that was going to stop him.
It had been the kind of summer when fire departments all over the country were keeping busy. Everywhere, it seemed, temperatures had been in the nineties with no rain. In the Plains states, drought conditions had become so dire that the newspapers were calling it the “Dust Bowl.” The land was literally drying up and blowing away—blowing as far east as Washington, DC, where the days were turned to nights by dust carried on the “black blizzards” all the way from Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Big Red and the Darling Hot Dogs had been in great demand in the last few weeks. July and August were spectacularly hot and dry, and a rash of fires had blazed up around town—a bad burn at the north end of the railroad trestle, another in Mrs. Murchison’s pasture on the Jericho Road, still another across from the Academy’s baseball field, plus one or two more that Bessie couldn’t remember. And just the previous day, in town, when Reverend Peters had made the mistake of burning the Presbyterian parsonage trash in a rusty metal drum when the wind was blowing hard from the south. Sparks got away from the reverend and landed on the roof of Doc Roberts’ garage, catching the shingles on fire. But Chief Mann, Big Red, and the Hot Dogs were johnny-on-the-spot. They had a hose on the blaze in nothing flat. The only serious casualty was the parsonage fence and Reverend Peters’ reputation. He had been heard to use a bad word or two, and then to excuse himself by muttering that the devil made him do it.
“But there’s more,” Bessie said, now getting to the point of her story and dropping her voice to indicate that this was really confidential. “I heard that Rufus Radley has been calling each of the Hot Dogs to tell them that he will personally see that they receive a five-dollar bonus if he gets elected fire chief.” She had heard this just yesterday from Myra May, at the Darling Diner. Myra May almost never passed along newsy bits she picked up from overheard conversations, but she had been so angry when she realized what Rufus Radley was doing that she repeated what she had heard to Bessie.
Aunt Hetty was incensed, too. “But that’s . . . that’s just the same as buying votes!” she spluttered. “Rufus Radley knows he’s not supposed to do that!”
“Who’s going to stop him?” Ophelia asked cynically, dropping a handful of snapped beans into the bowl in her lap. “That’s politics, isn’t it? That seems to be the way the game is played these days. Everybody knows that Rufus Radley is a bully. If he wants to win, he won’t let anything stop him.”
Round and bouncy, Opie had flyaway brown hair, freckles scattered across her nose, and a sweet smile that made dimples appear in her cheeks. She also had a sunny and optimistic disposition, so when she said “That’s politics” with such fierce skepticism, both Bessie and Aunt Hetty noticed.
Aunt Hetty sighed. “Rufus Radley gets away with a lot of shenanigans, but that don’t make it right.” She snapped a bean. “Politics,” she muttered. “Seems like that’s what’s on everybody’s mind these days. That’s all that’s on their tongues, anyway. Folks can’t stop talking about it. About Huey Long, for instance. You can’t turn on the radio without hearing about him.” She sniffed. “Some of us prefer to have nothing at all to do with politicians. No offense intended, dear,” she added, with a slantwise glance at Bessie.
Bessie didn’t take offense. She didn’t share her friend’s view, either. Politics might not be a pretty subject, but she believed that everybody who had the right to vote ought to have an informed opinion about whether or not the country was going to the dogs. And since women had had the vote since the 1924 election, she also believed they shouldn’t ought to be shy about sharing their opinions just the way the men did. The 1936 presidential election might be fifteen months away, but it was already a hot topic—in the newspaper, on the radio, at the diner, after church. Whenever Darling folk got tired of talking about the weather, they could talk about who was going to throw his hat into which ring.
On the Republican side, there were a whole flock of potential candidates. Former president Herbert Hoover, soundly defeated for a second term in 1928, was said to be eager for a chance to get even with now-President Roosevelt. But the newspapers were also mentioning Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, as well as Theodore Roosevelt’s oldest son, Ted, who happened to be FDR’s fifth cousin—“fifth cousin far removed,” as both Roosevelts liked to joke. (There wasn’t a lot of love lost between the Republican Oyster Bay Roosevelts and the Democrat Hyde Park Roosevelts.) At this point, the GOP nomination was anybody’s guess.
The Democratic ticket was still a mystery, too. Most people thought Franklin Roosevelt would run for a second term, but the man preferred to play his cards close to his vest, like a gambler who refused to tip his hand until the last minute—the week of the convention, likely. Nobody knew whether he intended to be a candidate in ’36, unless maybe it was Mrs. Roosevelt, although she claimed that even she didn’t know. “My husband never tells me anything,” she said, in that funny, warbly voice of hers.
But Huey P. Long—the former Democratic governor of Louisiana, now a United States senator with presidential ambitions—was already blazing like a meteor up and down the campaign trail. He hadn’t officially declared, but he was making it plenty clear that he intended to challenge FDR for the nomination. And his progressive platform, “every man a king” and “share our wealth,” was getting plenty of attention.
In fact, anytime, anywhere folks picked up a newspaper, they could see a headline about him splashed across the front page. The Tuscaloosa News announced “I AM THE CONSTITUTION!” LONG CLAIMS. The Anniston Star declared that HUEY THREATENS TO FIRE HIS CRITICS. The Birmingham News posed the question, CAN THE KU KLUX KLAN UNHORSE HUEY P. LONG? And TIME magazine featured him on the cover—picturing him with a clownish grin and an outstretched hand, as if he were reaching for something and aimed to grab it before it got away.
The story wasn’t very complimentary, either. TIME described Huey as “loud, rough, and profane” and warned that if he didn’t get the nomination, he was likely to run as an independent and split the Democrats. In that case, the only winner would be the Republican candidate, whoever he was, and Huey P. would be in an excellent position to take the White House in 1940. The Kingfish, as he liked to be called, was “obviously thinking ahead,” the magazine remarked sourly.
TIME wasn’t alone in its disdain. Most newspapers and magazines didn’t like Huey P. Long. He didn’t like them, either, and he wasn’t shy about saying so. “Enemies of the people,” he called the media. “Fake news.” A couple of years ago, he had persuaded the Louisiana legislature to levy a two-percent tax on newspapers’ advertising profits. “That’s two cents a lie,” he said, “and they tell millions of them.” His own newspaper, American Progress, was of course an exception.
Bessie wasn’t sure how she felt about Senator Long. But she had liked his ideas well enough to join Darling’s Share Our Wealth Club—especially the part about the thirty dollars a month Huey wanted to give to everybody over sixty-five. She knew how much her Magnolia ladies needed the money, so she was especially grateful when Huey’s share-the-wealth proposals had prodded FDR into proposing the Social Security Act, although the payments would probably only be about twenty dollars and nobody would get any money until 1940, by which time several of the Magnolias would probably be dead.
Bessie was also (and this was perhaps more relevant to matters of the moment) a cousin on her father’s side to Roger Bloodworth, who managed publicity for Senator Long’s campaign. She had read that the senator was scheduled to make a speech to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. So she had written to Roger, telling him about the Darling club and asking if there was a chance—any chance at all—of the senator’s stopping off in Darling.
She didn’t expect an answer. After all, she hadn’t seen Roger since the summer she was sixteen, when the two of them had shared a few—well, somewhat more than a few—uncousinly kisses in her grandfather’s hayloft just outside of Shreveport. But to her enormous surprise, Roger had answered her letter with a telephone call (long distance, all the way from Baton Rouge!) and the news that he had arranged for the senator’s motorcade to stop in Darling on the way back to Louisiana. The Kingfish would give a short speech and spend a few minutes shaking hands and posing for photos with members of the club.
Bessie’s heart was pounding and her breath was coming short and fast when she put down the phone. Little Darling was going to host the most talked-about politician in America! Why, the visit would attract people from all across this part of the state! It could put their town on the map! So the minute she could breathe again, she called Earlynne Biddle (the current Share Our Wealth Club president), who was just as thrilled as she was by the news.
“Senator Long, right here in Darling!” Earlynne cried. “How in heaven’s name did you manage that, Bessie? I can hardly believe it!”
“Neither can I,” Bessie confessed, and blushed when she thought about those kisses. When she hung up, she sat down at her writing desk and began making a list of the ways the club could spread the word about this momentous event. At the top, of course, was the new radio station WDAR, which could be counted on to include a bulletin in every local newscast and might even agree to carry the senator’s speech live. Charlie Dickens could run a front-page story in the next Dispatch. The club could get flyers printed with Senator Long’s picture and the words EVERY MAN A KING as well as make signs that could be put up in businesses around the courthouse square—The Flour Shop, the bank, the Palace Theater, Hancock’s Grocery, Musgrove’s Hardware, the Darling Diner, Mann’s Mercantile, Kilgore Motors, the Five and Dime, and Lima’s Drugs. However they felt about the man, they’d all be glad to cooperate. They knew that farmers would flock from miles around for a chance to shake the hand of a man who might be the next president of the United States of America—and do a little shopping before and after.
But Bessie knew that Aunt Hetty and Ophelia were not Long supporters, so she hadn’t mentioned any of this to them just now. They would find out soon enough. Instead, she cast a sympathetic look at Ophelia.
“You must be getting a big dose of politics too, Opie,” she said. “How’s your Jed holding up these days? Is he going to make it through the election?”
Ophelia’s husband was Darling’s mayor. Popular and friends with just about everybody, he had held the position for several terms but was now involved in a heated runoff against Marvin Musgrove, the owner of Musgrove’s Hardware. The election was in November.
“Oh, Jed’s all right.” Ophelia spoke with a careless toss of her head and a tone that suggested that he really wasn’t, and neither was she. “Of course,” she added, “he’s not just real happy about some of the things Mr. Musgrove has been saying about him. He thought they were friends. And because the oldest Musgrove boy manages WDAR, his dad gets all the advertising he wants, free. We have to pay for it.” WDAR had started broadcasting in the spring and was already going great guns. Since the station covered all the local news (new babies, funerals, visits from relatives, local crops, and the weather), Darling folk listened all day long. And even if they weren’t actually listening, they had the radio on, in case something serious happened.
“You have to pay for advertising and he gets his free?” Bessie gave a disapproving cluck. “Mr. Musgrove knows better. Why, he’s a deacon in the Baptist church!”
“Politics,” Aunt Hetty observed wryly, “has a bad way of getting between good people.”
“I’m afraid you’re right, Aunt Hetty,” Ophelia said. “I don’t think Jed will ever feel the same about Mr. Musgrove. It’s a pity, too. They were great friends.” She sighed. “He also knows he’s got to make a few more speeches, which he really hates to do. He always says that mayoring would be a darned good job if it weren’t for the speech-making. And if it paid a salary, which it doesn’t.”
Ophelia’s voice was resigned. Snow’s Farm Supply, which her husband had inherited from his daddy when he and Ophelia were first married, was no longer the money-making proposition it had been in the days before the Great War. Between the boll weevil and the rock-bottom farm commodity prices, farmers had been in serious trouble all through the 1920s, and the stock market crash and subsequent Depression had just about finished them off. Things had gotten worse every year, and now the federal government was paying folks not to plant cotton or soybeans or corn and raise fewer cows and pigs and chickens. And if farmers couldn’t farm, farm businesses were in trouble. Snow’s Farm Supply was between a rock and a hard place. It could barely pay its bills, let alone pay the owner a decent salary.
So in spite of Jed’s publicly stated belief that a wife’s place was in the home, Ophelia had gathered her courage and found a job. She had started out at the Darling Dispatch as a cub reporter, ad saleswoman, and Linotype operator. Then she was offered a better-paying secretarial job at Camp Briarwood—the Civilian Conservation Corps camp. That position had come to an end when the new commandant brought in his own secretary and Ophelia got her walking papers. She had hoped to get on at the recently opened Vanity Fair lingerie factory in Monroeville, but they weren’t hiring. Charlie Dickens at the Dispatch had already found her replacement. And nobody in Darling needed a secretary.
Bessie knew that it had been a scary time in the Snow family. For several months, Opie and Jed had no idea where their next dollar was coming from. They persuaded Mr. Duffy at the bank to let them skip a mortgage payment, ate out of the garden and the chicken coop (“At least the hens are laying,” Ophelia said), and sent their two kids to school in last year’s clothes with the collars turned and the hems and sleeves let out.
But that spring, the WPA—the government’s Works Progress Administration, which employed millions of unskilled men on public works projects—had opened the brand-new Federal Writers’ Project. The program aimed to create a guidebook for each of the forty-eight states in the union, books that would include economic development, scenic areas, and places of interest, all aimed to encourage travel and tourism and boost local businesses. There was a focus on local history and folklore as well, documenting the stories of older folk, especially those who had settled the area.
Mr. Ryan Nichols, the director of the FWP’s Southern Division, had hoped to hire Elizabeth Lacy—legal assistant to Mr. Moseley and the Dahlias’ club president—as one of Alabama’s project coordinators. But Liz hadn’t wanted to leave her job with Mr. Moseley. Plus, her very first novel was being published and she had no idea what her life would be like after that. Not knowing what lay ahead, Liz had turned down the Writers’ Project and recommended Ophelia for the job. At the interview, Mr. Nichols liked what he heard. Now, Ophelia was responsible for producing a large section of the new Alabama guidebook. And Bessie, who prided herself on her reputation as Darling’s local history expert, had agreed to work as one of the writers for the project.
Thinking of that, Bessie snapped another bean and said, “Oh, by the way, Opie, I’m up to 1864 in the Darling history I’m writing for your Federal Writer’s Project. That’s when the telegraph came to town and changed everything.”
It did, too. After the telegraph arrived, Darling was no longer the last town in Alabama to get the news. It had brought word that General James H. Wilson and his Yankee boys had just taken the city of Selma and were on their way to Darling; that the battleship Maine (“Remember the Maine; to hell with Spain!”) had blown up in Havana Harbor; and that Galveston had been wiped out by a monster hurricane that had blown ashore without warning. The next big event in Bessie’s history would be the arrival of the telephone, which happened about the same time Woodrow Wilson took office. (For the first enlightening and entertaining year, all two dozen subscribers had been on a single party line.) After that would come the Great War and the Spanish flu epidemic that killed half the town and put the other half in bed for weeks. But Bessie hadn’t got that far yet.
Ophelia gave her a grateful look. “Thank you,” she said. “Mr. Nichols will be here on Monday. If you’ll let me have a copy of what you’ve done so far, I’ll show it to him.”
“Your boss seems like a likable enough young fellow,” Aunt Hetty remarked. “Not handsome, but with a certain magnetism.” She did not look at Ophelia. “Seems like a snappy dresser, too. Easy to work with, is he?”
“Oh, yes,” Ophelia replied, with studied nonchalance. “He knows what our research is all about and where we are with the actual writing. Any little problem I have, he’s always willing to talk about it. I can even call him, long-distance collect.”
Bessie was not terribly surprised to see Ophelia’s quick little smile and the sudden blush that rose in her cheek. She considered herself an astute judge of people and had already noticed that whenever Ryan Nichols made one of his periodic visits to Darling, Ophelia rushed right over to Beulah Trivette’s Beauty Bower and got her hair done, put on her prettiest frock, and smiled as if she knew a special secret. Bessie didn’t have to be Miss Marple to suspect that Ophelia had developed a crush on Mr. Nichols.
Her suspicions made Bessie uneasy, for this kind of thing was like playing with fire—you never knew when it might flare up and get out of control. But she was only a little worried, for she had known Ophelia for a long time and had a great deal of faith in her friend’s basic common sense. And a crush . . . well, everybody had at least one of those somewhere in her history. It was all just a part of growing up, wasn’t it?
Bessie certainly understood that, for she remembered the ill-advised attraction she had developed for the handsome, fine-figured fire-and-brimstone preacher who had come to Darling the summer she was seventeen. She had sat on the front row every single night of the revival, clutching her Bible, her eyes riveted on his sweating face and the tantalizing muscles under his white shirt, her heart pounding so loud she was sure he could hear it all the way up there in the pulpit. When he left Darling for the next town on his circuit, she packed her little cardboard suitcase, got on the Greyhound, and took a front-row seat for his next sermon. She had been heartbroken when he told her, pleasantly but firmly, to go home. She had cried for a week and moped for a month, until the boy across the street had asked her out and that was the end of that.
Bessie thought that Opie’s crush might be the same sort of thing, if maybe a little more . . . well, unfortunate. It was one thing for a teenager to go mooning after a revival preacher. It was quite another for a married woman to moon after her boss. To make things worse, Jed Snow was as fiercely territorial as a banty rooster, and he had always been a bit of a hothead. He had only agreed that Ophelia could go to work because it was either that or go on relief, which a Snow would never do. Mr. Nichols was surely no threat to their marriage, but Jed wouldn’t take kindly to the suggestion that his wife might be . . . well, sweet on her boss.
And Jed wasn’t very imaginative, either, Bessie thought. He would never, ever guess that Ophelia might be hungry for more than the humdrum dailiness of marriage, which had a way of wearing down to a jagged sawtooth edge over time—especially in the hard times they were all living through. A girl likes a little special attention now and then, and while Jed was a good man, he was not very good at demonstrating his affection.
What’s more, Bessie suspected that Mr. Nichols himself had no idea that he might have ignited a little fire in Ophelia’s romance-starved heart. Likely he didn’t, for he seemed to have his eye on Elizabeth Lacy, which in Bessie’s considered opinion was a very good thing. It might mean some temporary unhappiness for Opie but much less disturbance in the Snow family.
But it appeared that Bessie wasn’t the only one who had tuned into this complicated state of affairs, for Aunt Hetty chimed in again. “Well, Mr. Nichols seems to have more reasons than one to come to Darling,” she said in a knowing tone. “I saw him and Liz on their way to supper at the Old Alabama Hotel a couple of weeks ago. They were a good-looking pair, I thought. And Liz was all starry-eyed.”
She gave Ophelia an innocent-looking smile. “Grady Alexander nearly broke Liz’s heart, if you will remember. I’m sure all her friends are glad to see her enjoying a little romantic fling, even if the fellow is a damn Yankee.”
Ophelia seemed to get the message. Her cheek turned from blush to pale and she ducked her head, “Oh, of course,” she murmured, her gaze fixed on the bowl of snapped string beans in her lap. “I hope it works out for Liz, especially after all she’s been through.”
Aunt Hetty raised her eyes to Bessie’s. She gave a quick, conspiratorial wink, and Bessie could see that she, too, knew Opie’s little secret.
To rescue Ophelia from the uncomfortable conversation, Bessie took it in a different direction.
“Oh, by the way, Opie,” she said, “Miss Rogers asked me to tell you that the library just got the two books your Sarah was asking for.”
Housed in a ramshackle frame building behind Fannie Champaign’s hat shop, the Darling Library didn’t have a lot of extra money for new books. In fact, the library board sometimes couldn’t find the money to pay Miss Rogers, even though she only worked there part-time and for practically pennies. But the Dahlias had donated the proceeds from their latest bake sale to the library board, which had given Miss Rogers a five-cent-an-hour raise and fifty dollars to spend on books. She always made a special effort to order titles that the young people were asking for.
“That’s wonderful!” Obviously relieved for the change in topic, Ophelia added brightly, “Sarah will be so pleased. She’s an avid reader—has her nose in a book all the time. Do you remember the titles?”
Bessie did. “Two books by Carolyn Keene. One in the Dana Girls series—number four, I think Miss Rogers said. The other is a Nancy Drew mystery, The Clue of the Broken Locket.”
“Oh, good.” Ophelia smiled. “Sarah will run right over to the library and check them out. She’s crazy about Carolyn Keene.” She snapped a bean. “And when she’s done, I’ll read them myself. I like the Dana Girls but I adore Nancy.”
Aunt Hetty dropped a handful of snapped beans into the bowl in her lap. “That does it for me,” she announced cheerfully. “I’m finished. Are you girls just about done?”
But their answers to her question were interrupted by an earsplitting shriek that broke the quiet morning air. It was the siren that the city council had recently installed on top of the courthouse bell tower. Before, when there was a fire, Hezekiah Potts, the courthouse custodian, rang the courthouse bell to summon the volunteer firemen. Hezekiah was not as nimble as he used to be, and if there was a fire at night or when he was in church, the bell might not get rung at all. The siren was a lot more reliable—more efficient, too. It went on blasting for over a minute, just to make sure it got everybody’s attention.
Jolted by the noise, Ophelia had to juggle her bowl of beans. “Another fire? That’s . . . what? Two this week?”
“A grass fire, likely,” Aunt Hetty said. She stood and brushed off her apron. “Everything’s awf’lly dry right now. If’n we don’t get some rain soon, the trees are gonna start suffering.”
“I swear,” Ophelia said grimly, “every time that siren goes off, I jump right out of my skin.”
“Between the fires and the hot weather, everybody’s on edge,” Bessie said in a comforting tone. She held out her basket. “Thanks for helping with the beans, girls. If you’ll dump your snaps in here, I’ll take them home and get started on the casserole.”
Aunt Hetty dumped her beans. “Oh, and Bessie,” she said, “I meant to congratulate you on winning this month’s garden prize. Keeping a flower bed looking good is always hard in August, but you and your Magnolia ladies pulled it off. Those red hot pokers are spectacular.” The Manor’s corner garden also included orange dahlias (of course), orange and yellow daylilies, some hot pink cosmos, and spiky red salvia—all of it softened by a silvery border of Powis Castle artemisia.
“The pokers are like firebrands,” Ophelia agreed. “And I love the way the pale gray artemisia cools all those hot colors.” Her beans went into the basket, too.
Bessie smiled modestly. The Magnolia ladies worked hard on their garden, hoping to win the Dahlias’ monthly garden contest at least once during the year. “Thanks.” She settled her basket on her hip. “See you at the hot dog supper tonight.”
“Looking forward to it,” Aunt Hetty said with a wide smile. “Those volunteers do a great job for Darling, especially in weather like this. It’s only right that we serve them supper. It’ll be fun.”
But Ophelia just nodded, and Bessie saw that she didn’t look very happy. In fact, she had been glum all morning, not at all her usual smiling, chipper self. Jumpy, too. Bessie had a pretty good idea what was bothering her, but of course she didn’t say anything. Instead, she gave Opie an extra-warm hug—just to show her that a friend cared.
* For Lil’s story, read The Darling Dahlias and the Voodoo Lily.