By the end of the book I grew to like the relationship Will had with his grandfather and the growing relationship between Rucker and Love from a marriage of convenience to a true, deep love. I loved the way Will’s innocent but unwise foray into impending doom on the train tracks was told. But perhaps Rucker’s theological convolutions were meant as just another window into a personality that wants its own way and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, which is manifested in various ways throughout the book.
He does decide to “study on this some more” and later decides that Jesus may not give exactly what you ask (healing, a new job, etc.), but He will give you the grace to deal with whatever He allows, which is closer to the truth. Or maybe them disciples tryin’ to start a church thought everybody would join up if’n they said Jesus Christ would give the Garden a-Eden to anybody believed He was the son a-God and like thet” (p. One example: when Will asks why we don’t get what we ask for in prayer even though Jesus said “Ask and ye shall receive,” his Grandpa says: “Maybe Jesus was talkin’ in His sleep, son, or folks heard Him wrong. A lot of the town gossip, prejudices, and family competition seemed mean-spirited Will had a minor obsession with ladies’ bosoms (trying to catch a peek when his sister-in-law nursed her baby, noticing how Miss Love jiggled when she played the piano), there is a smattering of bad language and some faulty theology (I do understand this is not at all meant to be a Christian book, but if a writer is going to get into theology, then, yes, I am going to evaluate that). I almost laid it aside many time but persevered because so many people told me they had liked it. I do generally like small-town Southern fiction, but it took me a long while to get into this one.
That’s the basic plot of Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns, but the story is told through the eyes of Rucker’s grandson, Will Tweedy, who is sympathetic with the couple, and whose teen-age perspective causes him to question things and not necessarily go along with the status quo. Thereafter she was the main subject of gossip (as if the marriage was totally her fault) and could seem to do nothing right in their eyes. That was the worst of it, but added to the scandal were the facts that she was “nearly a Yankee” and half his age. In the small town of Cold Sassy, GA, in the early 1900s, Rucker Blakeslee shocked and scandalized the town and his family by remarrying Miss Love Simpson just three weeks after his wife died.
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