The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

“You give that rhubarb to me, Mildred,” Aunt Hetty had said. “I know just what to do with it.”


So today, five of the Dahlias had gotten together, under Aunt Hetty’s direction, to can rhubarb. They were using the two new 23-quart pressure canners they had bought with the proceeds from their vegetable sales the previous year, and canning jars donated by fellow club members. They would give the canned rhubarb, rhubarb sauce, and rhubarb butter to the Darling Ladies Guild, which would distribute it to people in need. (Unfortunately, there were a lot of people in need this spring. A jar of rhubarb would be just the thing to cheer them up.)

“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Earlynne!” Bessie Bloodworth said from the sink, where she was washing pint jars and lids in hot, soapy water. “I believed Mr. Johnson when he said that our bank was as sound as a bell. What we’ll do now that it’s closed, I can’t for the life of me guess. Everybody’s out of money!”

“Oh, surely it won’t be closed long,” Aunt Hetty Little said reassuringly. She picked up another rhubarb stalk and began to chop it. The oldest of the garden club’s fifteen members, she always looked for the silver lining in every dark cloud—and most of the time she found it. “I heard it might be open again in a couple of weeks.”

Earlynne groaned. “A couple of weeks!” She pushed a straggly wisp of brown hair out of her eyes. “People could starve to death in a couple of weeks. They could lose their homes. Their businesses, too. And think of poor Alice Ann. She could be out of a job!”

Earlynne usually overstated the problem, but this time, Lizzy knew that she was right, especially about their friend and fellow Dahlia, Alice Ann Walker, who was a teller at the bank. Things were difficult enough for the Walkers, with Alice Ann’s Arnold not able to work because of his leg. And now this!

“It’ll be hard,” Lizzy agreed sympathetically, scraping her chopped rhubarb into a little heap. “Most folks don’t have much to start with. And now that the bank’s closed, they won’t be able to get their paychecks. Not from Ozzie Sherman’s sawmill, not from the Academy—”

“Not from the bottling plant,” Earlynne put in, pulling the fibers off a tough stalk. Her husband, Henry, managed the Coca-Cola bottling plant, a couple of miles south of town on the Jericho Road. “Hank had to lay off a couple more of the guys last month, but he’s still got five on the payroll, plus me. I’ve been working out there in the office to earn a little extra money. But there’s not a penny to pay any one of us. The plant has money in the bank, but it’s frozen solid, like all the other deposits.”

On the stove, the regulator on the club’s shiny new pressure canner was hissing and dancing merrily, and Verna got up and turned down the burner. “They won’t get their paychecks from the county, either,” she said grimly.

Verna was the acting county treasurer and knew what she was talking about. What’s more, Cypress County was a bigger employer than the sawmill, the Academy, and the bottling plant combined, so the loss of a paycheck or two would cause hardship among families all across the county.

Lizzy would be all right, though—at least, she hoped so. A few days before, Mr. Moseley, her employer, had warned her that there might be some difficulty at the bank and suggested that she might want to withdraw her money until the worst of it blew over. She had followed his advice, and now the cash was securely hidden in a coffee can beneath a loose board in the back of her closet, under her shoe rack. It sounded as if the others hadn’t taken their money out before the bank closed, and Lizzy’s thought of her secret cache was shadowed with a little guilt. Maybe she should have passed Mr. Moseley’s warning along to her friends.