Love Lifted Me

William C. Noble

Description

A collection of short stories addressing the elusive and complex origin of identity to be found at the convergence of inheritance, experience, and context.
As a replacement child, William Noble was born to replace a little boy who died twenty-six years before - just before another pandemic. Born in July 1909, Little William lived for only five years—yet his short life continued to have consequences long after his death for those he knew and for those he was never to know. Now the author, who shares the same birthday with the other William, lives to tell the story.
In a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories covering a timeframe from 1914 through 1958, the writer shares insight into the lives of those who surrounded Little William before and after his untimely death to illustrate the lasting and intergenerational impact of suffering and death, especially when the death is not grieved. As he invites others into his life experiences from birth until age eighteen while living in Vienna, Georgia, the writer shines a light on family dynamics, his personal story, and the diverse characters who influenced his life and views.
Love Lifted Me is a collection of short stories addressing the mysterious origin of identity as located in inheritance, experience, and context.

Sujets

• Identity
• Short Stories
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: WestBow Press
• Date de parution: 21 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781664293953
• Langue: English

Extrait

Love Lifted Me
 

 
Stories from the Childhood of a Replacement Child
 
 
 
William C. Noble
 
 

 
Copyright © 2023 William C. Noble.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
WestBow Press
A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.westbowpress.com
844-714-3454
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6642-9396-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6642-9397-7 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6642-9395-3 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023904066
 
WestBow Press rev. date: 03/21/2023
Contents
Preface
1Two Silver Dollars
2Tippettville Tea
3Central Park
4The Western Union
5First Grade Guilt
6Chinaberry Lunches
7The Peach Tree Switch
8House Plans, Picture Puzzles, and the Ouija Board
9The Picture Show
10The Not-So-Free Beer
11Shredded Wheat
12Dad and the Power Dam
13Silence and Color
14Sin and Suicide
15Sign and Salvation
Preface
These short stories, mostly autobiographical, are dedicated to Little William, who was born on July 29, 1909, and lived for only five years, but whose short life continued to have consequences long after his death for those he knew and those he was never to know. Some of these stories have appeared in the regional quarterly Georgia Backr oads .
“Strife closed in the sod” is a line from a poem written in 1924 by William Alexander Percy and published as Hymn 661 in The Hymnal 1982 of The Episcopal Church in a section titled “The Christian Life.” The line may not describe all those whose bodies rest in the city cemetery of Vienna, Georgia, where each grave faces East, but it certainly describes the members of the family into which I was born. The hymn reads:
The peace of God, it is no peace,
but strife closed in the sod.
Let us pray for but one thing,
the marvelous peace of God.
The writings in this collection are offered as a prayer for that peace of God, the marvelous peace which is no peace.
As a childhood friend once said, “Forgiveness is the ultimate achievement in the work of grace.” Denial impedes grace, the truthful exposure of neglect, abuse, and cruelty, as well as the naming of those who were responsible, must be done before forgiveness and healing are to be achieved. As the Psalmist says, “Health and wholeness are found at the joining of truth and righteousness” (Psalm 85:10–11). This memoir rests on what I have experienced and what I have been told, on what I have seen or heard.
Each of the stories could stand alone. This collection, from the first eighteen years of my life, is the beginning of what one might call the arc of my life. It goes without saying that the arc is not complete. The mysterious lifting of love and grace comes from the Risen One, who not only is ahead of us but from that position pulls us to Himself. Until He returns, it is a movement to be completed in another world.
If I should ever meet Little William in a life to come, I will ask, “What do you think of the way I have lived our life?” His evaluation, God’s evaluation, and God’s mercy are important to me now and surely then.
1 Two Silver Dollars
1914

T he story begins with an end. The story begins with a death.
When Lucy, then a girl of twelve, heard her mother say, “Sister, get the silver dollars,” she could hardly believe it. She stood as still as the curtains on the screenless window with no breeze to move them, still for a second or two because no one questioned or disobeyed Mama, and no one was allowed to touch the silver dollars except Mama.
“Lucy, Sister, get the silver dollars.”
Lucy could neither move nor take her eyes off her little brother. He had been sick for a day, coughing through the night. And now he was so still. Little William was not moving. His eyes were open but not blinking. His chest, still covered with last night’s mustard plaster, was bluish. Little William wasn’t breathing. At five, Little William was dead.
Setting aside a child’s fearful fascination with death and the long-standing prohibition against touching the silver dollars, Lucy left the bedroom she shared with her brother and ran to the hall closet. She opened the door, reached to the back of the shelf where the silver dollars were kept in a black leatherette box behind the guest towels, and took it to her mother. Only Mama had held the box of silver dollars before this moment, and only then when she was called on to clean, wash, and clothe a body for burial. In this moment, a community function became a family function.
In rural South Georgia in 1914, the dead were not embalmed. There were no funeral directors and no funeral parlors, just as there were no antibiotics, no antivirals, and no Xanax, Prozac, or Zoloft. People got sick at home, people died at home, and people were buried from home. The family doctor who came to the house the night before had said Little William had the flu, and there was nothing to do but to keep him comfortable and have him drink plenty of water. And so Little William died just before the great viral pandemic of 1917, from what was then incorrectly called the “Spanish Flu.” He was washed, dressed in his Sunday clothes, and spent the first night of death at home in his own little bed. The next day he was buried in a casket no bigger than the cedar chest he used to sit on in the hall every afternoon while waiting for Papa to come home from work. A cardboard casket, covered with a gray cloth stretched thin across the lid and around the sides.
When death comes suddenly and without warning, grief is doubled—often denied or delayed, and sometimes never finished. Little William’s mother, Mama, was my maternal grandmother. She was never able to grieve. She could not “come to terms” with his death; she could not “move on,” as we now say. She directed the anger she could not speak to those nearest her, toward her husband and her other children, defending Little William’s place within herself, a place of few images and simple memories. He was her baby. He was only five.
This is how Lucy, my mother, remembered the day.
“When I handed the box to Mama, she unclasped it quickly, took the two silver dollars from their dark velvet stage, and held them in her hands as if to warm them before putting them on Little William’s eyes. She held the silver dollars to his face for two or three minutes without moving, long enough for his eyelids to stiffen shut, and then she kissed him. I don’t think she cried. Come to think of it, I never saw Mama cry.
“Little William was buried the next day in the city cemetery, in a burial plot owned by a relative. We were too poor to afford one. Papa was a mail carrier, and Mama took care of us. Little William’s death changed everything. It changed Mama and Papa; it changed me. Mama was never happy again. It seemed Papa could do nothing right. And so, at nine, I found a purpose for my life. I would make Mama happy no matter what, no matter what it took.
“Mama said she saw him. Little William was dead and buried, but Mama continued to see him. She saw him swinging back and forth in the bicycle-tire swing that Papa had hung from a limb of the sweet gum tree in the backyard. She saw him in the wagon Papa had built for the goat to pull. She saw him in the zinc washtub on Saturday nights, playing in the water. Her hallucinations were real—and entirely unacceptable. Mama lost her mind.
“A little more than a month after Little William’s death, in a legal action that amounted to a sentencing, Mama was committed by her family and the courts to Milledgeville, the Central State Hospital for the Insane known by the name of the town in which it was located. Milledgeville was the largest lunatic asylum in the world, an institution housing as many as thirteen thousand patients where care was largely confinement, and therapy was little more than steam baths followed by cold communal showers. Beds were so limited that patients, both men and women, slept on the floor in the halls, many curled side by side in fetal positions in clothes stained by urine and feces.
“After a stay of less than a year, Mama came home to us, to the people who had committed her to Milledgeville— to what someone has called ‘man’s lowest degradation.’ She came home with resentment and anger which never lessened, and with a very clear memory of the few acts of unexpected kindness, which she told with such remarkable detail that they seemed like visits to an interior shrine to goodness itself.”
Twenty-six years after Little William’s death, and after a pregnancy that lasted a little more than ten months, I was born on July 29, 1940, weighing nearly thirteen pounds. I was born on Little William’s birthday. I was given his name, and then given by my mother to my grandmother to rear. My mother, responding to a deep desire to make her mother happy, gave me to my grandmother as an offering to assuage her grief. For me, my maternal grandmother was “Mama”; my mother was “Siste