Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) (34 page)

“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!”

In the end, we simply did our best to carry out Olive Ann's last wishes. Norma cleaned up and typed the chapters that Olive Ann had left for her. She transcribed all of the notes she found on the backs of envelopes and on innumerable scraps of paper tucked away in every room of the house. When it was all together, we had fifteen chapters—chapters that Olive Ann surely would have rewritten again, given the chance, but chapters that we feel are worth publishing just as they are.

Katrina Kenison
January 1992

A number of people contributed their time and their memories of Olive Ann for this reminiscence. I am grateful to Faith Brunson, Nathan and Jean LeGrand, Becky Sparks, John Sparks, and Jane Willingham. Frances Apt edited the manuscript with sensitivity and care. Special thanks go to Norma Duncan, who transcribed hundreds of pages of manuscript and did everything in her power to fulfill Olive Ann Burns's wishes for this book.

O
LIVE
A
NN
B
URNS
was born in 1924 on a farm in Banks County, Georgia, and went to school in nearby Commerce, which was the model for Cold Sassy. She attended Mercer University in Macon, Georgia; received a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and for ten years was on the Sunday magazine staff of the
Atlanta Journal and Constitution.
When she learned she was battling cancer, Burns decided to try her hand at fiction, “for something more exciting to think about than fever and chemotherapy.” The result was
Cold Sassy Tree,
which became a national bestseller and was nominated for an American Book Award. The sequel to
Cold Sassy Tree, Leaving Cold Sassy,
became a
New York Times
bestseller. It was Burns's final work before her death in 1990.