Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns Page A

from Cold Sassy who got sent to Andersonville to guard Yankee prisoners and passed away in the smallpox epidemic there. He was buried at Andersonville. His family never forgave the Confederacy for not marking his grave. "In that cemetery," said Granny, "you couldn't tell Abner from a dead Yankee."
    If Aunt Carrie wasn't there, Granny would tell how Carrie's husband, Mr. Horace, went to the War right after they married and never was heard from again. "Everybody figgered he died on some Yankee battlefield, but you cain't be sure for certain," said Granny. She never liked Mr. Horace.

    Granny's cousin Selah Toy had been a boatman on the Savannah River and named his daughter Vanna, after the river. Not long after he got the top of his head shot off in the Battle of Chickamauga, Cudn Vanna married an Englishman, a blockade-runner for the Confederates. When the Yankees caught him, they stood him up on a barrelhead and, without a trial or anything, shot him. After the War, Cudn Vanna married three more husbands and lived to bury them all, even the one that was forty years younger than she was.
    Uncle Buson was the one I liked to speculate on. He didn't die. He just disappeared.
    "We never knowed what happened to him," Granny would say cheerfully, "but he was dead to the fam'ly from the day they read Grandfather's will. Hit said, 'My son Buson has not acted in a becoming manner so I leave him nothing.' That night, Uncle Buson he took off on my granddaddy's best horse and ain't nobody in Cold Sassy ever heard pea-turkey from him since. Somebody said he went out West and married one a-them Mexican women, but we never knowed if it was so or not." Once I asked Granny what Uncle Buson did that was so bad, but she wouldn't tell me. Said I was too young to hear such. It must of really been worth hearing about if it was too awful to mention.
    Granny's favorite was the Stokeses. "They was mighty wrought up about the South losin' the War," she would begin. "When the carpetbaggers commenced takin' over, them Stokeses built a rock wall around the fam'ly graveyard and took off for Brazil, lock, stock, and barrel. The whole lot of'm went, and never wrote one word back to Cold Sassy. Hit was like ever last one had passed away."
    When Granny passed away herself, I thought how dying was a lot like what happened when the Stokeses went to Brazil or when Uncle Buson rode off into the night. Whether you were up meeting God, down in Brazil hating Yankees, or out West somewhere loving a Mexican woman, to those left behind, you had just plain disappeared.
    The morning I was mourning up at Granny's house, I thought how disappointed she would be to of died so ordinary. She wouldn't call heart trouble, a stroke, kidney failure, and malignant spring fever worth mentioning alongside having two funerals, like my great-grandmother Arminda Tweedy, or being buried alongside Yankees at Andersonville, or dying on your wedding day.

    But after Grandpa went off to Jefferson in the buggy with Miss Love, it dawned on me that now Granny's passing wasn't so plain after all. Like everybody else in Cold Sassy, she would call it worth mentioning that her husband got married just three weeks after she went to her grave.

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    P URELY ON ACCOUNT OF being in mourning, my family missed most of the July the Fourth parade.

    Grandpa had thought up Southern Independence Day way back in February as a practical joke on the United States of America. Like everybody else in Cold Sassy, he still carried a grudge against the Union, and I reckon he had a right to. Grandpa was just fourteen when hejoined the Army of the South with his daddy. They served all through the War in the same outfit: Echols Battery of Georgia Light Artillery, Company K, 6th Georgia Regiment.
    Grandpa went in as a drummer boy, but one morning when the 6th Georgia was in retreat, he put his drum in a supply wagon and took up a gun, and that was the last he saw of the drum.
    His lieutenant told them one time not to get