The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

Verna didn’t quite get his point about the Romans and Hannibal, or about the French and Indians, either. But accepting things at face value wasn’t her nature, which was good, given what she did for a living, working in the probate office. Her detail-oriented focus came in handy when she had to do a plat search or look up property records, and the people who worked with her had learned to rely on her ability to smell a rat when there was one in the neighborhood. Or not even a rat, necessarily, just something that wasn’t right and needed fixing.

So Verna went on being naturally and happily suspicious and mistrustful and wary, and Walter went on being driven almost crazy by Verna until he died ten years ago, when he crossed Route 12 without looking up and the Greyhound bus ran over him. Verna always suspected that when it happened, he was crossing the Alps with Hannibal or building Hadrian’s Wall with the Romans or was off someplace else where there weren’t any buses but maybe a lot of camellias.

She opened the screen door and went into the cool, quiet dark. She still lived in the same small house that she and Walter had lived in. She liked it because it was paid for and Verna was always one to be careful about money, and didn’t mind it being small because she didn’t have any children.

Inside the door, she was met by her black Scottie, Clyde, who climbed into her arms and washed her face thoroughly while he was saying hello. Then he jumped down and ran into the kitchen to wait for her to open a can of Ken-L Ration—horsemeat, although Verna had never told him what it was. Clyde adored Racer, the bay gelding who belonged to old Mr. Norris, next door on the south. Mr. Norris’ son Buddy owned a motorcycle, but old Mr. Norris refused to have anything to do with automobiles and hitched Racer to a two-wheeled cart when he had to go somewhere that was more than a good walk away. Racer spent his off-duty hours in the pasture behind the Norris house, where Clyde kept him company. Clyde would be horrified if he knew he was eating horsemeat.

Verna went into her bedroom, took off her hat, and put it on the dresser. Then she changed out of her brown-and-orange plaid dress and into her garden clothes—a pair of Walter’s baggy green canvas pants and one of his old plaid shirts (Verna never threw anything away), and went out to the garden. Clyde immediately scampered off to see what Racer was up to and Verna went to her garden shed for the hoe, then headed out to give the weeds in the bean rows a quick haircut.

Walter had never cared much for vegetable gardening. It was flowers he had his heart set on. In fact, Verna always suspected that he loved his camellias a great deal more than he loved her. He had filled their backyard with them, big floppy bushes with big floppy flowers that she had never appreciated, never even liked very much. To her, they always seemed exotic (well, of course—they came from Asia, didn’t they?) and overly demonstrative, flashy, flamboyant show-offs that took up too much room, took too much pampering, and seemed only too willing to surrender to root rot, dieback, bud drop, sunburn, scale, scab, and flower blight. And if Walter’s anxious fussing enabled them to survive these afflictions, they were bound to keel over the next time the thermometer dropped down to twenty, which it did every three or four winters—just often enough to allow Walter to start his camellia collection all over again.

After Walter walked in front of the bus, Verna mourned for the requisite period of time, then invited all her camellia-loving friends to come and take starts from Walter’s bushes. Then she had every last one cut down and the roots dug out, and Mr. Norris came over with Racer and plowed up about half of the backyard. Now she grew vegetables and a few flowering annuals and roses around front and felt like these were all the garden she wanted. More than she needed, actually. Which was why when she was done hoeing, she picked a tin lard pail full of green beans and carried it through the gate to the Norris house.

“Yoo-hoo, Mr. Norris!” she called, standing on the back wooden steps. She called loudly, because Mr. Norris was hard of hearing. “It’s Verna, from next door. You here?”

Mr. Norris came to the screen. He had a water bucket in his hand and was on his way to the well pump on the cistern. Their street had been on the water main for ten years, but he refused to have city water. City lights, either, or city gas. Coal oil lamps had been plenty good for his momma and daddy, he said, and they were plenty good for him.

“Got somethin‘for me?” he asked, and peered into the lard pail. “My, my, them’s a nice mess o’ beans, little lady.” He eyed her mischievously. “Got some fatback to go with ’em?”