Labor Day might be a holiday for some folks. But at Magnolia Manor, over on Camellia Street, it was just another work day, and Bessie Bloodworth and Roseanne Stewart planned to spend the morning on their usual Monday chores. Roseanne was the Manor’s colored cook and housekeeper. Bessie always rolled up her sleeves and worked right alongside her on their big jobs.
Like the sheets and towels, which they usually washed on Mondays. Out on the back porch, Bessie plugged in the big round Kenmore wringer washer, over a year old now and finally paid for ($87.25, including carrying charges, on Sears catalog’s Easy Payment Plan: five dollars down and seven dollars a month). The Kenmore had seemed like an extravagance, and Bessie knew they really couldn’t afford it. But the motor on the old wooden-tub Dolly Wonder machine had finally burned out and they had to replace it. Neither Bessie nor Roseanne wanted to go back to the corrugated tin washboards their mothers had used.
Roseanne filled the washing machine tub with water she’d been heating on the back of the stove. Bessie put in the Oxydol, a cup of Clorox, and the first load of sheets and pillowcases, then she and Roseanne let the Kenmore do its work while they went upstairs to strip the rest of the beds. Outdoors, the sun was bright and hot, with a breeze that lifted the leaves on the pecan tree in the backyard. It was a good day to dry sheets on the clothesline between posts along the hedge between the Manor and the Dahlias clubhouse next door.
There would be a dozen sheets and a half-dozen towels to wash because there were six residents at the Manor right now: Miss Dorothy Rogers, Leticia Wiggens, Mrs. Sedalius, and Maxine Bechtel, plus Roseanne, of course, and Bessie herself. Emma Jane Randall had unfortunately died in late spring—the least said about that the better. There was a new boarder, but she wouldn’t be moving in for another week.*
Bessie had turned her family home into a boarding house after her father died some six or seven years before. It had been a desperation move, because her father’s Civil War pension had died with him and there wasn’t a penny coming in. Hoping to make enough money to get by, she’d had a wooden sign painted for the front yard, with the words MAGNOLIA MANOR in fancy script, embellished by magnolia blossoms and leaves. She had put advertisements in both the Darling Dispatch and the Monroe Journal for “older unmarried and widowed ladies of refinement and good taste, to occupy spacious bedrooms at the Magnolia Manor.” The bedrooms weren’t exactly spacious, but the house had been mostly full ever since.
While the Magnolia Manor managed to pay its bills, the place wasn’t what anybody would call a gold mine. Nothing was these days, though, and Bessie knew she was lucky to have a good roof over her head, a garden to eat out of, and companionable friends to share it with. But it would be nice to have just a little extra money coming in, she often thought. She had considered charging more for board and room, but if she did, some of her ladies might have to leave—and where would they go? Certainly not to Mrs. Brewster’s Home-Away-From-Home for Young Ladies, where the residents were so unmannerly that Mrs. Brewster had to set strict rules for their behavior. Or to Mrs. Meeks’, the men-only boarding house over by the railyard. Or to the Old Alabama Hotel, where at $5.50 a week, the rooms were completely out of reach.
“There’s no getting blood out of a turnip,” she would remind herself with a sigh. “But a turnip isn’t half bad, if that’s all you’ve got for supper.” Anyway, if she just had a little patience, it wouldn’t be long before things looked up. On the fourteenth of August, after what seemed like endless squabbling in Congress, President Roosevelt had signed the Social Security bill. Once the program got underway, everybody who was over sixty-five and met the requirements would get thirty dollars a month. To her ladies, this was a fortune, and they all hoped to live long enough to take advantage of it.
Bessie was glad that the president had finally gotten it done, but she had to admit that he might have been pushed into it by Senator Long. The senator was lobbying for a guaranteed income of two thousand dollars a year for every family, as well as a monthly old age benefit. FDR, people said, might not have signed the Social Security Act if he hadn’t been worried that the Kingfish would steal the nomination in ’36.
But Bessie knew that while Senator Long had some good ideas, he made a lot of folks nervous. Some called him a corrupt politician who used his office to line his pockets and those of his friends. Others called him a demagogue who wanted to “Hitlerize” America. They pointed out that he had bragged that he was “Hitler and Mussolini both, rolled into one.” Maybe folks were right to be afraid of him, Bessie thought, although she felt she didn’t know enough to make up her mind.
But what she did know was that if Senator Huey P. Long had been the one to push Mr. conservative-at-heart Roosevelt into finally taking action, he deserved a round of applause. She would be in the front row when he came to town on Wednesday, along with the rest of the Share Our Wealth Club. She might even agree to carry one of the WE LOVE YOU HUEY! signs that Earlynne and the others were planning.
Bessie left Roseanne upstairs, making up the beds with fresh linens. Coming through the downstairs hall with her arms full of Miss Rogers’ and Mrs. Sedalius’ sheets and towels, she saw Leticia Wiggens with a feather duster. (All the Magnolia ladies volunteered to help with the housework.) Leticia—her silver-gray hair pulled back in a bun, her cane against her knee—was sitting in a living room chair beside the radio. Shoulders shaking, she held her head in her hands.
“Why, Leticia!” Bessie exclaimed, dropping the sheets in a heap and kneeling beside the old lady. “What’s the matter?”
Leticia lifted her head. Her eyes were filled with tears and her cheeks were wet. “Somebody on the radio just read a little something Will Rogers said about dying,” she whispered.
“Oh, I see,” Bessie said sympathetically. The Magnolia ladies had always tuned in to Will Rogers’ Gulf Headliners show on Sunday nights. They loved to listen to his simple, unpretentious humor and the homespun wisdom that often came with it. “Want to tell me what he said?”
Leticia swallowed hard. “I can try. Best I remember, it went something like, ‘When I die, my epitaph is going to be I never met a man I didn’t like.’” She hiccupped. “And then he said, ‘I am so proud of that, I can hardly wait to die so they can carve it on my tombstone.’” Her voice broke. “And now he’s dead, Bessie. Why, I feel just like I felt when my dear brother died!”
It was true, unbelievably. Just two weeks before, Will Rogers had been killed in a plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. He was with his friend, aviator Wiley Post, who was famous for being the first person to fly a single-engine plane around the world. Bessie gave Leticia a hug and gently wiped the tears from her wrinkled cheeks. For all Sundays to come, there would be a huge empty hour on the radio. And all across America, people would tell their children and grandchildren what a wonderful man they had lost. Nobody would ever forget Will Rogers.
But the laundry had to be done. Bessie gave Leticia one last hug, then picked up the sheets and towels and carried them to the back porch. The load in the washer was ready to rinse, so she turned off the dasher and began feeding the sheets through the wringer and into the rinse tub, being careful to keep her fingers—and her hair—out of the way. (She had heard terrifying stories about women getting scalped by their wringers.) A quick rinse in the tub and another pass through the wringer, and the damp sheets, still smelling of Oxydol, were all in the wicker basket, ready to be hung out on the clothesline.
This was usually Roseanne’s job, but she was still upstairs, so Bessie grabbed the clothespin bag (attached to a wire coat hanger so it would slide along the clothesline), picked up the laundry basket, and went outdoors.
But as she took out the first sheet, shook the wringer-wrinkles out of it, and began pinning it to the clothesline, she paused, sniffing. What was that smell? Certainly not Oxydol. Was somebody on the block burning trash? She peered around the sheet and through the gap in the tall hedge that separated the Manor from the Dahlias’ clubhouse. That’s when she saw it.
Smoke. Wisps of gray smoke coming from the back of the Dahlias’ clubhouse!
Her heart nearly stopped. “Fire!” she screamed. “Fire!”
Roseanne’s head popped out of an upstairs window. “Fire?” she cried. “Where at, Miz Bessie?”
“The clubhouse!” Bessie shouted, forgetting all about the sheets. She ran up the stairs to the back porch. “Phone the Exchange and tell them to sound the fire alarm!”
And with that, she grabbed up two empty pails and swiftly filled them, one at a time, in the rinse-water tub. Carrying both, she squeezed through the hole in the hedge and into the Dahlias’ backyard.
The fire was at the back, beside the kitchen door. The old house, like many Darling homes, was built on brick pillars with an open crawl space underneath. Bessie could see what was left of a substantial heap of dry sticks and rags under the house. It had evidently been burning for a while, and the flames could have ignited the kitchen floor. She caught a brief whiff of lamp oil. This fire was no accident. Somebody intended to burn down the Dahlias’ wonderful clubhouse!
At that moment, the shrill wail of the fire siren on the courthouse bell tower shattered Darling’s quiet morning, but Bessie scarcely heard it. Bending over so she could see what she was doing, she emptied one of the buckets of rinse water onto the blaze, and then the other. The burning pile sizzled, produced a puff or two of steam, and subsided into scattered coals. But had it been burning long enough to catch the kitchen floor?
The back door was unlocked because the Dahlias were often in and out of the house—and because Darling folk, trusting as they were, rarely bothered to lock their doors. Carrying both empty buckets, Bessie opened the back door and dashed inside. Close to the ceiling, the air was hazy with smoke, and a widening ring of char and blisters seemed to be spreading across the linoleum floor.
Bessie hurried to the kitchen sink to fill one of her empty buckets, then left the tap running to fill the other bucket while she doused the floor, producing more steam and choking smoke. By that time, Roseanne had come in with another bucket and the two of them formed a short bucket brigade, filling buckets at the sink and handing them off to one another. They were still pouring water onto the floor when Archie Mann and a pair of Hot Dogs pulled up in Big Red.
“Sorry it couldn’t be sooner,” Archie Mann apologized at the back door. “I waited longer than I should for Chief Radley, but he didn’t show up.” He looked around. “Where’s the fire?”
“I think we’ve put it out,” Bessie said, wiping the sweat off her face. She knew she looked like a wreck but she didn’t care. The clubhouse was safe. “But it was no accident,” she added sharply. “Somebody set it. When I got here, I could smell kerosene.”
About that time, Sheriff Norris drove up and after a conversation with Chief Mann—former Chief Mann—the sheriff got a flashlight from his car and disappeared under the house. Some minutes later, he crawled out with a couple of finds. A charred piece of blue cotton rag, wrapped around a length of rope. And a book of matches.
He held up the matchbook, carefully, by the corners, in case there were fingerprints. On the cover, it had a picture of a baseball player. “Dizzy Dean,” he said. “Our man likes baseball.”
“St. Louis Cardinals,” Archie Mann said approvingly. “Dizzy’s having quite a year. The Cards could wind up with the pennant.”
“Not if the Cubs have anything to do with it,” put in one of the firefighters, a young man named Joe who sometimes mowed yards in the neighborhood. “They are hot this year. Gabby Hartnett is batting better’n three-fifty.”
“The Cubs?” Chief Mann chuckled dryly. “Afraid you’re whistlin’ Dixie, son.”
The sheriff brought them back to the situation, pointing out that this was obviously arson, like the earlier fires. And even more worrying.
“Because it involves a residence,” he said, “even though nobody lives here. The arsonist might have thought it was just another vacant house.” He cast an apologetic glance at Bessie. “I know you and your club members use it regularly. But he might not have known that.”
Bessie nodded. “We mostly use it for meetings, so we don’t have much furniture—just folding chairs. If you looked through a front window, you might think nobody lived here.”
“Let’s hope torching vacant houses doesn’t get to be a habit,” Chief Mann said grimly. “The way things are these days, there are too many here in Darling.” He bent over and peered under the house. “Well, looks to me like you ladies took care of things. But just to be on the safe side, we’ll wet it down good before we go. Let’s get to work, boys.”
The sheriff left and Roseanne went back to the Manor to check on the washing machine. As Bessie watched, the chief drove Big Red around to the back of the house and the two young Hot Dogs pulled a firehose off the truck and sprayed water against the underside of the kitchen floor while Archie Mann gave instructions. When they were finished and packed up, he and Bessie shook hands.
“Maybe we should name you an honorary Hot Dog,” he said with a grin. “Not only did you spot the fire and call it in, you put the gol-darned thing out—before we got here.”
“Not by myself,” Bessie reminded him. “Roseanne called it in and helped with the buckets.”
He nodded. “I know Miz Roseanne. Her oldest boy, Amos, and me, we used to go squirrel hunting together. You tell her I said a big hoorah to her, too.”
The fire truck had just pulled away when Wilber, the new reporter from the Dispatch, came riding up on his bicycle. “Where’s the fire?” he asked excitedly, looking around. “Have I come to the wrong address?”
“The fire was right here,” Bessie said, pointing. “We put it out with the rinse water.” She told him what had happened and showed him the damage to the kitchen floor, which had burned through in a couple of spots just over the fire. The pretty yellow walls, recently painted by Myra May and Violet, were smudged and smoke-stained. They would have to be repainted.
Wilber wanted to take a photograph of her, but Bessie made him wait until she could get Roseanne to join them. “It was teamwork all the way,” she said, as they smiled for the camera.
Wilber had just ridden off when Liz Lacy, the current Dahlias president, rode up on her bicycle. “I stopped at Hancock’s for some groceries on my way home,” she said, breathless. “Mrs. Hancock told me there was a fire here. What happened, Bessie? Is our house all right? Are you all right, dear? Should we ask Mr. Piper to come over and look at the damage, for the fire insurance?”
Liz was still there when Mildred Kilgore and Earlynne Biddle arrived. Tommy Lee Musgrove had just announced the news about the fire on WDAR. And then Mr. Greer stopped, on his way to the Palace Theater to set up the movie for that night’s special holiday showing of Little Women, which Bessie had been looking forward to for the longest time. (Katherine Hepburn was one of her favorites.)
And after that, it was Miss Rogers, just back from the Darling Library and eager to hear what had happened. She was the one who pointed out the obvious: that the clubhouse was only a few yards from the Manor. If Bessie hadn’t spotted the fire and if she and Roseanne hadn’t managed to put it out, the clubhouse would soon have been engulfed in flames. And the wind was just right to catch the Manor on fire, too!
Roseanne had the second load of sheets hung up to dry by the time Bessie finally got back to the washing machine.
Rufus Radley, the new fire chief, never showed up.
* Emma Jane Randall’s mysterious demise is the subject of The Darling Dahlias and the Voodoo Lily.