The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

None of that was true with her new three-day-a-week job at the CCC camp, which was five miles out of town. She left early in the morning and barely got home in time to put supper on the table. (Jed was always complaining that they never had dessert on weeknights, and when they did, it was Jell-O, which he wasn’t crazy about.) She couldn’t be reached very easily, which was bad enough. But probably more important, Jed didn’t know the people she worked for. It wouldn’t be right to say that her husband was jealous, exactly, because she never gave him any reason for jealousy. But it would certainly be fair to say that he was uneasy at the idea of her working among so many strange men—strange men in uniform, and Yankees, to boot. She suspected that it was the Yankee part that bothered him the most. Jed’s grandfather had been a captain in a Confederate regiment. To Jed, Yankees wearing uniforms—even if they were CCC uniforms and didn’t look much like the regular military—were soldiers in an invading army.

But while Ophelia kept a wary eye on the Yankees, she loved working at the camp. She was on the job at the Dispatch on Wednesday and Thursday, helping Charlie put the paper together for Thursday night printing and Friday mailing. But on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, she got up early, put the family’s breakfast on the table, then rushed to catch the bus to Camp Briarwood, where she worked as a liaison between the camp and the local people who supplied it with goods, equipment, and services—an important job, and she was the right one to do it.

Jed’s mood had improved somewhat when she handed him her first pay envelope, but he was still acting surly about it. “You watch out for those damn Yankees,” he’d muttered. “You can’t trust a one of ’em any farther than you can throw him.”

Charlie’s reaction, on the other hand, was entirely different. When Ophelia told him about her new job, he had thought it was a grand idea. He even improved on it, coming up with the suggestion that she should start writing a weekly newspaper column about the camp. He would pay her a dollar fifty for each column, which was the same amount he paid Liz for the “Garden Gate” column she wrote for him.

“We’ll call it ‘Camp Briarwood News,’” he said. “Folks are curious about what’s going on out there. You can tell them what’s happening. And if you’ve got enough material for a feature story, we can run that, too.” And then just yesterday, he had come up with the more interesting undercover investigative assignment, but that was a different matter. A different matter entirely.

Ophelia was delighted to be writing the column, and not just because of the money. It gave her a chance to satisfy her curiosity and find out much more about the camp than she could have learned just by working there. For her first column, she had interviewed Captain Gordon Campbell, the camp commander, who heartily approved of Charlie’s idea for a newspaper column. He was eager, he said, for the local folk to learn about the camp’s activities and its plans.

“Our work will go a lot more smoothly if we can count on local cooperation,” he had said. “And people will be better able to cooperate if they know what’s going on out here, especially now that we’re employing a few townspeople.” Ophelia got the feeling that Captain Campbell really cared about making his camp successful and that the camp’s success could depend on the support it got from Darling. The captain was pleased by the letters that people wrote to the editor about that first column, and told Ophelia that if he could help in any way, all she had to do was let him know.

“Well, here we are,” Ophelia said, slowing the car at the top of the small hill that overlooked the camp, beside a large wooden sign.

Welcome to Camp Briarwood

Civilian Conservation Corps

Company 432, Camp SCS-8

“Golly,” Sarah said, her eyes widening. She sat up and looked through the windshield at the camp below them. “It’s huge, Mom! It’s a lot bigger than I thought.”

“One of the biggest camps in the state,” Ophelia replied proudly. “It’s really something, isn’t it?”