Leaving Cold Sassy: The Unfinished Sequel to Cold Sassy Tree

by Olive Ann Burns

  That done, she tackled the fan mail, finally agreeing to write an all-purpose letter to her readers, too. Even so, she couldn’t resist adding personal notes when Norma brought the letters back for her to sign. “Andy and I would tease her that we wouldn’t give her the mail until she had dictated a chapter of the book,” Norma recalls, “but that fan mail was as important to her as writing, and she answered every letter.”

  At the end of January, Olive Ann reported, “If I can dictate the book as easily as I can dictate letters, this is going to be no problem at all. Norma knows how much I rewrite and says that won’t bother her a bit. I can just talk it out any way I want to and she will double-space it and I can correct and rewrite and she will do it again....What a great, great blessing! It has already changed my life. All of a sudden I have something to do instead of lie here with my mind turned on to most anything or nothing, whiling away four hours a day on ‘All Things Considered.’”

  It may sound dramatic to suggest that Time, Dirt, and Money saved Olive Ann’s life, but it certainly gave her the escape she needed, for the only way she could get away from her bed, her financial worries, and her physical discomfort was on the wings of her own imagination. Her hair was just beginning to grow back, but, by her own admission, she looked like “a ridiculous refugee, with rib cage and arms being just skin and bones, and this huge stomach.” She had been unable to eat normally for months, but her weight had gone up as high as 151 pounds—all from fluid retained in her abdomen. The pressure was so great that it was all she could do to sit up for a half hour before backache forced her to lie down again. With the dictating machine as a means of communication, Olive Ann began to feel a certain pride in her ability not only to cope, but to enjoy life in spite of all the obstacles. She found a great sense of accomplishment in answering a hundred fan letters that month, and she was deeply moved by a book about a blind leader of the French Resistance movement in Paris, who had overcome his handicap with joy—even when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp. “The impact it had on me was partly because I realize that—wherever it came from—I have this kind of joy, too,” she wrote to me. “My back can hurt, but I am still undismayed. A lot of it comes from acceptance, but I know that’s not all of it, and I hadn’t realized this before. The longest I can be depressed is about two hours and that’s not often. I was depressed for about a month when I got home from the hospital with this problem—the congestive heart failure—because I realized I might never get to write the book and because I might be more or less bedridden for the rest of my life. At some point I did accept this and was back to my usual self.” She promised that she would have some chapters ready for me to read “any minute now.”

  Working on the book turned out to be much harder than doing letters, but Norma was patient, transcribing every page twice, once as a rough draft, and then again after Olive Ann had edited it by hand and read it back into the machine. “For the first time I believe it will work!” Olive Ann wrote happily.

  It did work, but in fits and starts. Just when she would get on a roll with the writing, the pain in her back and shoulder would flare up, and, as Olive Ann said, she would feel “waylaid as a person and as a writer.” Her back hurt if she got up, and her shoulder hurt in bed, and a few days of this, combined with lack of sleep, would result in another setback. Progress—on the book and on getting well—was slow indeed. “I still look as if I’m carrying surrogate twin grandchildren,” she said in one letter.

  As spring rolled around, Andy began to make day trips to the Write House, and Olive Ann realized that any hope she might have of accompanying him would lead only to disappointment. Instead, she took pleasure in the way the world seemed to come to her. Craig Claiborne wrote her a fan letter, and they became pen pals, a new friendship that she enjoyed immensely. Faye Dunaway called to introduce herself and to say that she would love to come to Atlanta and talk with Olive Ann about turning her novel into a film. Meanwhile, Cold Sassy Tree was banned in a high school in Florida, which only resulted in more publicity as parents and teachers came forth to defend its virtues. (Much to Olive Ann’s amusement, the principal of the school appeared on television to explain why the book was banned. “With hands shaking, she said, ‘It’s just an awful book. Full of rape, incest, and SOUTHERN DIALECT!’”) One day Oprah Winfrey announced on her show that she was reading a great novel called Cold Sassy Tree; that night Olive Ann heard from every friend in Atlanta who had seen the program. “But I decided I had really arrived,” she wrote in a letter to Chester and Joan Kerr, “when I heard that last summer a high school girl went into a bookstore and asked for the Cliff Notes on Cold Sassy, which was required summer reading in her school.”

  Being bedridden may have been the greatest challenge Olive Ann had faced so far, but every day brought its own reminder that she continued to touch people’s lives. What’s more, after three years in which she had made almost no real progress on her novel, she was now in a situation where the only thing she could do was write. She had a good laugh when a friend called to say she had heard that Olive Ann’s publisher had sent a secretary down to Atlanta for her to dictate the sequel to. “Thanks but no thanks!” she wrote. “Norma suits me just fine, and I think she’d shoot anyone who tried to take her job. The ms. is now 40 pages.” Norma never complained when Olive Ann scribbled all over her perfectly typed pages. More important, she knew just when to urge her to keep writing and when to insist that she rest. “I know if it weren’t for Norma I would still be wishing I could write but not doing it,” Olive Ann admitted in one letter. “Maybe planning scenes, but not writing them.”

  Olive Ann’s goal that spring and summer was to perfect a hundred pages to send to Ticknor & Fields. As long as she had a telephone and a commode by the bed, she could be alone for a few hours, and she looked forward to that time for dictating and rewriting. When Olive Ann had two finished chapters, she gave the first to Andy one night to print out on her computer. “In the morning,” she wrote me, “he waked me like Prince Charming with a kiss and the words ‘I read the first chapter and I think it’s delightful. I knew you could do it.’ Isn’t that a nice way to wake up?” In August, John came home for a visit from Colorado and read several versions of the first chapter. Olive Ann was still in a quandary over how the book should begin, but it helped her to have a fresh pair of eyes on the manuscript. She reread one of her old beginnings, written in the third person, and felt that it worked. “I can’t wait to get this all together and see what you think,” she wrote. “I’m more excited about TDM now than ever before. Not from anything John said but from my own confidence. At last.”

  On October 5, Olive Ann sent me 113 pages of Time, Dirt, and Money for my birthday. It was the best present an editor could have received. Olive Ann felt that she, too, had been given a great gift—the courage and the inspiration to keep writing. Finally, she had something to show for all those nights of lying awake, planning scenes in her mind; for all those hours spent dictating; for all those first chapters. “As I’ve told you before,” she wrote, “anybody who ever worked for Angus Perkerson can’t get hurt feelings from criticism, so you don’t need to try to veil your words in kindness.” A stack of manuscript pages wasn’t the only thing Olive Ann had to celebrate. She felt stronger, and she was finally able to get up and walk from one room to another. “The fluid retention in my stomach has been reduced to about the size of a large baking hen,” she reported. Olive Ann’s doctor was impressed by her progress; he told her he had never been able to get a patient to stay in bed this long. As Olive Ann wryly observed, “It was no temptation to be up. Between the backache and the fact that I had a definite forward list when I walked, it was easy to stay in bed.”

  After a whole year of that, though, it felt wonderful not to have to be waited on for every little thing. “Now, other than the fact that Jack (the cat) and I have fleas—we’ve got a flea collar for him and we may well get one for me—everything here is going well,” she wrote. When Steve and I went to visi
t that fall, Norma cooked the meal for our reunion dinner, but Olive Ann and Andy were definitely the hosts. They opened a bottle of homemade scuppernong wine in honor of the occasion, set out the fine china and lit candles in the dining room, and talked of the past year as if it had been one of the happiest of their lives. After dinner, Andy read a funny scene from T.R. Pearson’s novel A Short History of a Small Place. He was a marvelous reader, with a rich, expressive voice, and he knew just how to play up the humor, but he couldn’t keep a straight face himself. Once he started to laugh, he couldn’t stop. The more he read, the harder he laughed, and that laughter was so infectious that all of us ended up gasping for breath, urging him on. Sitting around the table that night, it was hard even to imagine what Olive Ann and Andy had just been through; not a mention was made of pain or hardship.

  In a November letter to her Cold Sassy Tree fans, Olive Ann said, “I’m up more now. I’ve been out once to ride, I’ve had on lipstick seven times and a dress five times, I’ve put on a chicken to roast, last night I fried some fish, and the doctors think the heart muscle is getting well, not just better. (They say the only way to be sure is with an autopsy, but I say never mind being so sure!)” The same day, however, she wrote to me that about ten pounds of the abdominal fluid had reinstated themselves. After just a month of the very mildest activity, she was being sent back to bed. It didn’t seem to faze her. This time, she knew she could handle it and, besides, she had work to do. Ticknor & Fields had made an offer for the novel based on the first hundred pages of manuscript, and Olive Ann now had a contract in hand and a deadline toward which to work. “Just knowing about it has liberated me,” she wrote. “Suddenly I don’t want to read the newspaper in the morning before I even think about writing. The first two chapters are already improved, and I’m now on chapter five.”

  Although she had tried out several different narrative voices, the chapters Olive Ann had sent in October were written in the third person. Will’s voice was nowhere to be heard. When I told Olive Ann that I missed Will, she admitted she missed him, too. It was hard to suggest that she start all over again, knowing how much effort and sheer force of will it had cost her to produce these chapters, but I also knew that she wanted a truthful reaction and that she could handle the criticism. She did handle it, magnificently. In fact, she hardly needed to hear it, for her instincts were telling her the same thing I was. Andy, who had watched the painstaking writing process day by day, was moved and deeply impressed by Olive Ann’s willingness to go back to square one. In a letter to friends he wrote, “Olive Ann sent 113 pages to her editor, who said she liked it, but would she mind starting over....So Olive Ann started over, writing as Will as an older young man, and says the book is much more fun. She said she had written herself into a corner, having to explain everything from the girl’s point of view, when Will can just dive in. She now has 85 pages that she is happy with, although she keeps rewriting. Norma and I say, ‘Get on with Chapter 7.’”

  That winter of 1988–1989, the continuing success of Cold Sassy Tree and Olive Ann’s “fat contract” for Time, Dirt, and Money seemed to be the only bright spots. Shortly after our October visit, Andy began to feel pain in his lower back. Late in December tests revealed that his lymphoma had come back yet a third time, now in the form of a large tumor pressing against his lower vertebrae. In February he underwent four weeks of radiation, to be followed by nine months of chemotherapy. “We are now a two-wheelchair family,” Olive Ann wrote.

  She wanted to care for Andy as he had taken care of her over the past two years, but with both of them in wheelchairs, the day-to-day tasks that they had just managed before were now impossible. Friends and relatives all pitched in to help, and members of Olive Ann and Andy’s Sunday school class took up the cause. This group of nearly a hundred friends organized themselves, drew up a schedule, and saw to it that hot food arrived at Olive Ann and Andy’s doorstep several times a week. When they were too ill for company, the cook would drop off his or her wares and slip out quietly; when Olive Ann and Andy were up to it, they would visit and catch up on news of the outside world. “All those Sunday school class people who bought books by the dozen at Rich’s are bringing soup and casseroles,” Olive Ann wrote. “I am still amazed by what Cold Sassy has done and now I’m even more amazed by the kindness of people and by how many friends in various places we have who care and help. And Norma is our mainstay. She is typing this, of course, and I’m not saying it just so she’ll hear it and clean out the dishwasher real quick.”

  On days that she felt well, Olive Ann undertook some of the cooking and housework herself, but she wasn’t able to combine being up and about with any writing. Every exertion tired her, and besides, as she said, “How could I retire into Cold Sassy when Andy was hurting?” That spring, she sent out a letter to “special friends,” bringing them up to date on her health and Andy’s and on other events at 161 Boiling Road. “The doctors say my heart is working fine,” she wrote, “and I’ve lost all of the abdominal fluid. I don’t look like Tweedledum or a California raisin anymore.” She hoped that her return to a normal shape meant that she would begin to feel stronger; nevertheless, she had grown almost accustomed to a universe that extended no farther than her living room. “In October Andy took me to see the fall leaves,” she wrote, “and I sat outside on the front lawn three times, but otherwise I haven’t been out of the house since November of 1987, when I got home from the hospital. But I don’t feel lonely or cut off from the outside world, partly because of Cold Sassy Tree and the mail it brings, and partly because so many people come here. Somebody said yesterday, ‘You and Andy have such a wonderful attitude!’ We have a whole houseful of attitude, and most of the time it sustains.”

  Even with Andy sicker than he had ever been, Olive Ann could look around her and feel grateful. In a letter that March, she wrote about signing a contract for a Hebrew translation of Cold Sassy Tree, about the paperback edition coming out in Great Britain, about the Turner Network Television company’s plans to start filming for the movie that spring, and about her son John’s engagement to be married. The wedding was to be in the fall, in Olive Ann and Andy’s backyard, so that they could both attend. Meanwhile, Olive Ann’s sister Margaret had come from Pennsylvania and was “keeping the house going, making oatmeal cookies, whole wheat rolls, and anything else she can think of to fatten us up.” That meant Olive Ann could conserve her energy and get back to her writing; she hoped to send a hundred revised pages to me within a week. “The suspense of waiting for so long for Andy’s treatment, and the difficulty of accepting seeing him feel bad, is not conducive to writing,” she admitted. “On the other hand, it’s the other world I can go to without leaving the house. He and Norma keep me at it.”

  By the time Margaret returned north to her family, after three months in Atlanta, Olive Ann and Andy were able to manage on their own. For the first time in nearly two years, Olive Ann felt well enough to sleep at night in her own bed with Andy. They used her hospital bed and a twin bed in the guest room for resting during the day. “We may be the only couple in Atlanta who has his bed, my bed, and our bed,” Olive Ann joked, adding, “It’s wonderful to be together again.” Once a week, Olive Ann’s sister Jean and her husband came by to help around the house, buy groceries, and run other errands. With the help of Meals on Wheels, they could feel somewhat independent, knowing that a hot meal would be delivered once a day. Olive Ann loved that she could be on the phone with Craig Claiborne one minute, hearing about his most recent culinary explorations in China, and then tuck into her own plate of plain fare from Brad-shaw’s Feedmill the next. “If we had our choice we wouldn’t eat at the Feedmill five days a week,” she conceded, “but it’s good average cooking.”

  Andy never did feel well that spring, but he was able to go out back and lose himself in his garden, just as Olive Ann could turn on her dictating machine and escape to Cold Sassy. John’s October wedding gave Andy a goal, and he was determined that by fall the backyard wou
ld be more beautiful than ever before. His chemotherapy wasn’t making him nauseated, as it had in the past, but he was terribly frail and often in pain. One day he came in from the garden, complaining of being weak. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said. Olive Ann replied, “Well, I do. You’ve got lymphoma, you’re taking chemotherapy, you’re very anemic, and you’ve been hauling concrete blocks in the garden.” Andy hadn’t lost his sense of humor. “Oh, good,” he said, “I thought it might be old age.”

  In May Olive Ann sent me the new version of the opening chapters, now written from Will’s point of view. She had never once questioned the wisdom of starting over, and now, six months later, she felt good about what she had done and was eager to keep going. “Of course I look forward to hearing what you think,” she wrote. “Please remember you don’t have to tiptoe around my feelings. If this beginning is too slow or you want something more exotic to start with, I can put Will and Sanna at the Army camp where everybody’s dying of the 1918 influenza epidemic—really strong stuff. I’d just as soon have that in the next hundred pages, but I can’t be sure this (what I’ve done) grabs the reader the way I want it to. I like it, but is that enough? Please tell me if there’s any section that seems slow. I’m not going to work on this (chapters 1–5) for a while. Norma and Andy both say I’ve got to get on with chapters six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Andy said one way to get ahead was to let Will pretend he lost one chapter and just skip from chapter five to chapter seven. But I’ve already done chapter six, so I’ll save that idea for a real emergency.”