Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291)

by Burns, Olive Ann

  One Sunday morning, two months after Andy’s death, Olive Ann wrote that she had woken up at six o’clock and, for the first time, was able to think about him without crying. “It was a joy and a delight to think about him,” she said. “I think one reason I’ve missed him so is having to try not to, in order not to cry all day. I guess I’m healing, at least emotionally.”

  By November she was catching up on her correspondence and getting ready to go back to work on the novel. She wrote a long letter to Faye Dunaway, complimenting her work on the movie and recalling the day they had spent together. “For myself,” she wrote, “it was enough to be with you as a delightful human being, so interesting that we could both forget photographers. It really was a lovely day, which Andy enjoyed as much as I did. The whole time that you were in Concord, we were getting reports and photographs of what was going on and felt we were a part of it. It really added a great sense of fun to those last months. He has disappeared now, and I miss him, but I’ll soon be back to the sequel, and writing has always been my best escape, my best therapy, and my most pleasure.”

  In the months that followed, Olive Ann did get back to work on her book. As always before, fiction transported her to a place where she could call all the shots. Having lost first her own health and now her husband of thirty-three years, she was glad to have at least one aspect of her life in her control. Although she was almost completely bedridden again, she spent the afternoons alone in the house, dictating and editing. “I do enjoy the afternoons by myself,” Olive Ann wrote to me, “and that’s usually when I get around to working on the book.” Her deadline was just a year away, but, as she told us, “My first job is to stay alive, so there’s no chance I’ll be burning the midnight oil to make up for lost time during the last few months.” Olive Ann’s doctors gave her permission to sit up but said that she mustn’t walk any more than was absolutely necessary. “For the most part my walks now are to the bathroom and to the front door once a day to let Jack out, Jack being the cat,” she wrote.

  To some, such a life might seem little more than a prison sentence, but Olive Ann didn’t think of it that way. That winter, she indulged herself and wrote long, thoughtful letters, something that she truly loved to do. In answer to a letter from a young woman who had worked on the film of Cold Sassy Tree, Olive Ann wrote, “If balancing a career and family ever puts too much pressure on you, don’t mind lightening up on the career for a few years. It’s better than chronic exhaustion.” My Christmas letter from Olive Ann was full of memories of the first camping trip she and Andy had made with John and Becky, and reflections on being a parent. “The wonderful thing, I think, about children is that you see the world all new through their eyes,” she wrote, “whenever you try to show the world to them, whether it be a red maple leaf, a ladybug, dinosaur tracks, or the Metropolitan Museum. That’s what it really is all about—that and love.”

  ***

  On December 18, 1989, my husband called Olive Ann from my hospital room to let her know that I had just given birth to a baby boy. Over the next few months I sent more photos than letters to Boiling Road, and Olive Ann devoted herself to her book. She was feeling well enough to write and was determined to make “real headway now.” Rather than dictating the first draft, she was jotting down lines and paragraphs on scrap paper, fiddling with them till they were the way she wanted them, and then dictating them for Norma to type. “That way I have something on paper that I can see and work from,” she explained, “and I think it will cut out the necessity for so much rewriting of the first draft.” Arduous as the process might be, Olive Ann still refused to settle for anything that was less than perfect; she had worked out a method that enabled her to tinker more while Norma typed less. It seemed a good sign.

  The eight-page, single-spaced letter Olive Ann sent me in March 1990 was, it turned out, the last. It seems a fitting farewell. As Olive Ann herself warned, “You may have to read this letter in sections between feedings. Unless my voice gives out, it will have all the things I’ve stored up that I’ve thought about and wanted to tell you since last fall.” She began by reflecting on the friendship with Norma and what it had meant to her and Andy over the years. “I really love each person in my family, and we are all very close,” she wrote, “but Norma being next door and being over here so much washing dishes and cooking when we needed her, and typing, and needing Andy’s advice about gardening, I think she—like you and Steve—had much in common with Andy and enjoyed and really experienced him in the same way I did. It was always a merry threesome whenever she came over.”

  In fact, this letter is full of stories and recollections of happy times, from the days she and Andy had spent at the Sunday Magazine to the magical connections and friendships that had come about as a result of Cold Sassy Tree. Olive Ann described the afternoon she and Andy had spent with Jessica Tandy, who came to visit while she was in Atlanta filming Driving Miss Daisy. She gave a progress report on Time, Dirt, and Money, and brought me up to date on Cold Sassy Tree news, concluding, “Cold Sassy Tree does seem to have a life of its own, like a river with lots of little branches—or maybe I should say like a sassafras tree with many branches.”

  And, much as she missed Andy, Olive Ann also wanted me to know that she was growing accustomed to life without him. “At first I had the feeling that Andy’s death was a dream and I would wake up,” she said. “When I did wake up, my feeling was as if a meteorite had hit the earth in September and killed every witty, interesting, sweet, cheerful, courageous, loving, exciting, sometimes irritable, determined man of seventy who lived at 161 Boiling Road. It doesn’t hit like that anymore, and I’m very grateful for the kind of marriage we had. We were married for thirty-three years but worked together every day for nine years before that.” Still, she felt that her recovery was occurring in stages, and that the process was a continuing one.

  “The first few weeks, every morning when I woke up I had to remind myself, with surprise and amazement and often out loud, that ‘Andy is dead!’” she admitted. “Then for four months I hardly ever thought about him. I couldn’t let myself. Any time I ever thought about him I cried, and even with a good heart it’s exhausting to cry all day. I looked forward to the nights because I would sleep and not have to try so hard not to think.”

  Once all of the legal and financial affairs were tended to, Olive Ann decided it was time to go through Andy’s things, something she had dreaded. “It seemed like just another painful, overwhelming widow-type task,” she wrote, “until it dawned on me this was something I could do for him! He did hate to go through stuff, as is clearly evident when one opens his closet door or his drawers or his desk. I started with the desk, and it’s turning out to be a happy time. The desk is like a profile of Andy and his life and his interests, with constant interesting or funny surprises.”

  She found Andy’s uncle’s gold pocket watch; a box of coal ash containing the burned remains of a diamond ring that Andy’s Aunt Mamie had wrapped in a piece of paper and accidentally thrown in the fire; a box of gold inlays (“Years ago I heard inlays are worth something, so whenever I had to have one replaced I’d make the dentist give me the old one. Even Andy, who was embarrassed by such, started asking for his”); and two stamped envelopes from Andy’s mother’s Aunt Em, mailed during the Civil War. “This desk work has been like being with Andy again,” Olive Ann wrote. “Too interesting to cry about, and full of memories of happy times, including my love letters that I didn’t know he’d kept, and notes from the children when they were little. It’s amazing what a difference it’s made—feeling I’m doing something for Andy, almost with him. I bring batches out of the pigeonholes to my bed to go through, and I’m having a good time. But, oh, law, he’s got two file cabinets full in the basement!”

  Written words were never discarded in Olive Ann and Andy’s household, and Olive Ann’s going through Andy’s desk didn’t necessarily mean that she was throwing anything away; in fact, she was annotating, as I discovered a year later whe
n I sorted through many of these same papers. To a bundle of tender and funny notes that Olive Ann had written to Andy over the years, and that he had saved, she added this explanation: “Whenever Andy was away overnight, I would tuck a card or a note into his suitcase. I never knew he kept them.”

  “I really am being long-winded,” Olive Ann exclaimed toward the end of this extraordinary letter, so full of looking back. “Most of all I want to express my joy in everything about yours and Steve’s and Henry’s new life. My feeling is a little like something said by Ray Moore, a local TV newscaster whom I dated for four years—seriously but not exclusively. I never dated anybody exclusively until I told Andy I’d marry him. But the night I told Ray I was in love with Andy, he thought a minute and said, ‘I envy Andy, but I’m not jealous of him.’ He and Andy and I stayed good friends, and the last time he called I reminded him of what he said, thinking it was such a genius way of delineating the difference between our friendship love, which had been romantic at times, and what I then felt for Andy. He didn’t remember that, or that shortly before we married, he took Andy and me out to lunch and said, ‘I can’t come to the wedding because the three of us will be the only people in Atlanta who will know I wasn’t jilted.’ The point of all this is to say I envy you all right now, but I’m not jealous. Actually I don’t think I envy—I’m just happy for you. I’ve had my turn.”

  In addition to her own eight pages, Olive Ann enclosed all the letters I had written her during my pregnancy and after Henry’s birth, explaining, “You may have been too busy or too tired to have kept a journal in this period. It is hard to part with them, they make such pictures of you and Steve and little Henry, but they could go in your baby book.” And at the end she added a final note: “The doctor made a house call after I finished this—heart much better, and he said by all means accept an offer from a retired doctor-friend and his wife to take me and all food to the mountain house for a few days!”

  Olive Ann made that trip, but by the time she got home she had caught a cold. Over the next weeks, she felt worse and worse, and by May she was in the hospital with bronchitis, which took a severe toll on her already weakened heart. Olive Ann believed that, with time and patience, she would rally, as she had so many times before. But in June she was in intensive care, and the doctors were considering a heart transplant. Mercifully, they concluded that she was too weak to undergo the surgery. It is impossible to know what Olive Ann thought about as she lay in her hospital bed while doctors deliberated her fate, but I don’t doubt that she found some comfort in words she had written herself, for Grandpa Blakeslee to say to Will Tweedy after the boy narrowly escaped getting crushed by a train:

  “Life bullies us son, but God don’t. He had good reasons for fixin’ it where if’n you git too sick or too hurt to live, why, you can die, same as a sick chicken. I’ve knowed a few really sick chickens to git well, and lots a-folks git well thet nobody ever thought to see out a-bed agin cept in a coffin. Still and all, common sense tells you this much: everwhat makes a wheel run over a track will make it run over a boy if’n he’s in the way. If’n you’d a got kilt, it’d mean you jest didn’t move fast enough, like a rabbit that gits caught by a hound dog...When it comes to prayin’, we got it all over the other animals, but we ain’t no different when it comes to livin’ and dyin’. If’n you give God the credit when somebody don’t die, you go’n blame Him when they do die? Call it His will? Ever noticed we git well all the time and don’t die but once’t? Thet has to mean God always wants us to live if’n we can. Hit ain’t never His will for us to die—cept in the big sense. In the sense He was smart enough not to make life eternal on this here earth, with people and bees and elephants and dogs piled up in squirmin’ mounds like Loma’s dang cats tryin’ to keep warm in the wintertime.”

  In a letter she wrote just before she got sick in March, Olive Ann had said, “I guess what gracious living all comes down to is acceptance and forgiveness. Forgiveness has never been a problem for me and now acceptance isn’t either.” Everyone who visited Olive Ann in the hospital that June remembers that, sick as she was, she never seemed to despair. The last time that Andy’s sister, Jane, saw Olive Ann, they spoke about the possibility of an afterlife. “I wish it were true,” Olive Ann said. “That would be wonderful. But if it’s not, that’s all right too.”

  One day Olive Ann’s brother Billy went to see her in the intensive care unit. She was having a terrible day, was very sick, breathing through an oxygen mask, and unable to talk much at all. After a short time Billy concluded that she might be better off just resting alone. But as he headed for the door, Olive Ann spoke. “Just a minute,” she whispered.

  “What is it?” he asked, turning back.

  “I just wanted you to see me smile,” she said. And she did. That was Olive Ann.

  When Norma came to visit, on June 22, Olive Ann tried to talk with her about her hopes for Time, Dirt, and Money if she was unable to finish it. “There’s no need to discuss that now,” Norma assured her. “Of course you’ll get back to work on it.” But Olive Ann was not to be put off that easily. She would not give up hope, but she would be practical, too, and she knew she could rely on Norma to do whatever needed to be done. Late that night, she picked up her dictating machine and began to speak: “Norma, this is Olive Ann. Your visit and Charlie’s was just like a great gift...I’ve figured out a way that if I don’t get to finish the novel it might still be marketable as a small book.” She expected that she would be able to revise the first six chapters, and when she got home, she said, she planned to work on a synopsis—“which won’t hurt me to do—I may even write faster if I’ve got it, everything written down and decided.” She referred Norma to several scenes that were among her notes, and said she hoped that some of these could be used and that she would have time to write an ending. That way, even if the novel itself was not finished, there would be enough to satisfy those people who were interested in what happened. “In the meantime,” she concluded, “I’ll just keep working on the book, and aren’t you glad it’s in a fairly good state of repair?” Finally, yawning, she said, “Now this is the middle of the night, Norma, Friday night, and I’m getting sleepy so I’ll send this over to you...And so good night now.”

  Less than two weeks later, early on Independence Day 1990, Olive Ann Burns died. She had come home from the hospital four days before, accompanied by a portable IV tube that was to administer medicine continually for the rest of her life. She had declined the suggestion that she employ a home nurse, confident that Becky, a part-time housekeeper, and a few friends and relatives could manage the IV and oxygen. Olive Ann was delighted to be home, and she was eager to get back to work. On the morning of July 3, Billy’s wife, Rosalind, had come to stay with her while the housekeeper went out to run errands. “Olive Ann was scribbling notes for her book when I arrived,” Rosalind recalled. “She thought that she was missing a chapter, and I began to look around for it. We talked about the novel, and also about a book I had loaned her from my church library, called Better Health with Fewer Pills.” Olive Ann said she had read the book cover to cover, and she was so impressed that she’d asked a friend to buy two copies, one for Rosalind and one for herself.

  In his introduction to Better Health with Fewer Pills, Louis Shattuck Baer quotes Socrates: “If the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul.” Sick as she was, Olive Ann was inspired by the author’s conviction that faith and a positive outlook are as important to health and happiness as any medicine. This was one of the best books she had ever read, Olive Ann told Rosalind, and she wanted to inscribe a copy of it for her sister-in-law. Rosalind handed her one of the new books, and Olive Ann wrote, “For Rosalind...” She stopped. “I feel dizzy,” she said, and turned her head away, closing her eyes. Olive Ann would have thought it worth mentioning that she died with a pen in her hand, talking about a book she admired and a novel she still hoped to finish. If she could have written her own dying story, she might have done
it just this way.

  A week later, Olive Ann’s family and Norma gathered at the family cemetery plot in Commerce, the small Georgia town that had become famous as the inspiration for Cold Sassy. The death of Olive Ann Burns was national news, and hundreds of friends and relatives from across the country had attended her memorial service in Atlanta. Now, it was time for those closest to her to say good-bye. A hole had been dug to receive the ashes of both Andy and Olive Ann, and the family stood around it, under a hot July sun, John and Becky, who had lost both of their parents in less than a year, turned away and headed for their car. A moment later, they returned with a blanket of fresh roses. The two of them had made it early that morning, knowing that nothing would have pleased Olive Ann and Aridy more than this small act of life inspired by fiction. When the flowers were in place, each child took a plastic bag of their parents’ ashes and slowly poured them, mixing as they went, into the ground. Then, one at a time, they tossed in the first spadefuls of earth. They looked at each other and, without a word, continued shoveling until the hole was full of red Georgia clay. When they were finished, Andy’s sister, Jane, read aloud from Cold Sassy Tree.

  Fans of Cold Sassy Tree mourned its author’s death and asked one question: “What about the sequel?” There were newspaper reports that Olive Ann had left behind ten chapters, “all freshly typed by her secretary Norma Duncan.” There were suggestions that another author be hired to complete the book. There were rumors that she had in fact written an ending, if only it could be found. Needless to say, it had never occurred to Olive Ann that anyone else might try to finish her novel; there was no ending; and there were no “freshly typed” chapters. Faced with the formidable task of collating literally hundreds of pages of manuscript in various drafts, Norma exclaimed, “Who said that? Every time I find another scrap with a sentence on it, I feel that statement is hanging over my head!”