The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

since I was a chile. Wears a long black cape, she does. Carries a spade and digs in dem bushes at the back end of the garden. You’ll see her, too, if’n you come round here one night when the moon’s full.”
    Lizzy nodded, although she had the feeling that Zeke’s adult encounters with the ghost might be the product of his notorious adventures with the local moonshine whiskey—and his childhood sightings the product of an active imagination.
    “Well, thanks,” she said. “Let me know when you’ve put up the sign, and I’ll pay you.”
    She walked away, wondering if there was a way the Dahlias could exploit the legend of the Cartwright ghost to help them raise money to fix the leaky roof Maybe a moonlight garden tour, with one of their members dressed in a long black cape, playing the part of the ghost? She did a quick calculation. If the roof cost twenty dollars to fix and they charged a nickel apiece for the moonlight garden tour (half the price of a movie ticket), they would need four hundred people.
    She laughed at herself. Obviously a silly idea.
    They’d have to think of some other way to raise that money. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Nobody in town had much of anything to spare.

TWO
    Ophelia
    Ophelia Snow didn’t have far to walk home, for her house was around the corner on Rosemont Street, down Rosemont across Mimosa to Larkspur Lane, in a block that Ophelia had always thought was the prettiest in the entire town of Darling. (And since she believed that Darling must be the prettiest town in Alabama, that was saying something.) The well-kept houses, most painted white with blue or red or even yellow shutters, had wide front porches and green lawns under arching water oaks and magnolias and there were pretty flowers along the street all summer long. It was a place where kids could ride bikes and play wherever they wanted to, and where people cared about their houses and wanted them to look nice. It was the pride of Darling.
    Ophelia had been glad when her husband, Jed, announced that he intended to run for mayor. The two of them had been born right here in Darling, had lived here all their lives, and felt a sense of responsibility for what happened here, good and bad. Ophelia’s father, dead now, had been a lawyer and part-time pastor of the Methodist Church. Jed’s family had been river-bottom farmers but his dad had sold out back in 1912 and opened Snow’s Farm Supply, a few blocks north on Rosemont. Jed began working there when he came back from France in ’18—all in one piece, thankfully. When his father retired a few years later, he took over.
    Like Ophelia and Jed, most of the people who lived in Darling had been born there, or nearby. The town was located seventy crow-flying miles north of Mobile, in the modestly hilly region east of the Alabama River. It was named for Joseph P. Darling, who felt that a country rich in timber and fertile soils, with fast-flowing Pine Mill Creek close by and the Alabama River not far away, could benefit from a market town. He had planted his foot down right there, as Bessie Bloodworth (whose hobby was local history) liked to say. And where he had planted his foot the town had grown up, surrounded by farm fields and stands of loblolly and longleaf pines, with sweet gum and tulip trees in the creek and river bottoms, and magnolia and sassafras and sycamore and pecan.
    Darling had grown apace without experiencing much in the way of noteworthy historical events, except for some brief but serious unpleasantness when Union soldiers occupied the town during the War Between the States and some considerable celebrating when the Louisville & Nashville Railroad came close enough to make building a rail-line spur and a rail yard a realistic scheme.
    When the spur—the Manitee & Repton line—was completed, the town had blossomed. Now the seat of Cypress County, Darling was centered around a brick courthouse with a bell tower and a white-painted dome with a clock, the