MISS VIOLA is a tale of the purest love told from the bittersweet memories of an adoring, albeit alcoholic journalist grandson. His recollections of a love so pure and simple, a love between a gangly, freckled-faced religious young teen who finds a lifetime of happiness first with the solace and spiritual strength from her service to her church, and ultimately with the man of her dreams. Viola Mae Peavey, is a beacon of light that shines over an entire rural church-going Georgia community, but don’t ever cross her! She has a power-- steadfast and true--an uncanny force that surrounds her. She finds the love of her life in church during a basket raffle and it blooms a rare love at first sight. Earnest Emerson Peavey is a man with a mountain’s quiet majesty. Theirs is a magical love affair, replete with a lifetime of trials and tribulations both dark and, at times, humorous. Back when love was as simple as a picnic basket lunch, back when people were measured by their work, their handshake and their word, back when life was a just reward in itself and a happy marriage was shared quietly and privately by two adoring people, Miss Viola and ‘Emmy’ Peavey will live forever in legend around Dreadmere falls, Georgia.
Author Name: Randy D. Rubin
Author Bio
ISBN: 978-1-61885-409-4
Cover Artist: Dawné Dominique
Word Count: 19896
Formats: EPUB, HTML, LIT, MOBI, PDF
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Story Excerpt
Auntie Bella Marie was quite the opposite. She was the squeaky wheel needing a lifetime’s supply of grease. She felt that her life was a series of credits and debits; things were owed to her despite the fact that she was thrust upon this horrid world kicking and screaming against the miracle of her birth, and like no one else on this blessed planet, she constantly reminded us, had never asked to be born—as if any of us have.
My Papaw and Nana, knowing full well that she was wrong in her ravings agreed to pay all those debits she so vehemently demanded were owed her. They listened to her rants and her speeches and her petty excuses for why she couldn’t do something or be some productive element of society. It was easier to blame the whole world for her shortcomings and pitfalls. The whole world, she believed, owed my Auntie Bella a lifetime of debt because she never asked to be born, by God. She never asked to be any part of this hardship she was forced, on a daily basis, to endure. But the responsibility for such a monumental, incomprehensible debt was not to be shouldered by the whole world—that would mean she would have to go out into it and demand her restitution. Oh hells no! It was my precious grandparents who had to make recompense. It was all their fault! Her misery was a result of their existence, and she meant to make them pay. For two decades they pacified her, paying graciously just to shut her up. She brought the entire household down into the quagmire of her depression unless they shelled out the payment of hollow compliments and undue attention that she demanded of them damned near daily.
As she reached the age of her twentieth year they had had quite enough of her soap box oratories and washboard-thin excuses. Papaw decided he had paid enough into Bella Marie’s Pity Kitty. My Nana became a referee between “The Rock, Papaw—and the Hard Place, Auntie Bella—in the verbal boxing matches instigated. ‘In this corner, weighing in at one hundred and forty-three reasons why she can’t go get a paying job or even help at the church because she didn’t ask to be born’—my Auntie Bella! And here is her opponent, the man who gave her life’s essence against her wishes, paid for her every necessity and whim for twenty years—her wishes—gave her all the love and tenderness that a father could possibly bestow upon his “little baby-girl”, educated her—mind, body and soul—the church’s and Nana’s wishes—paying happily for two years of college—his and Nana’s wishes, before she decided to quit because it all seemed so hopeless and finally move back to the farm to spread more of her paranoid propaganda and delusions about how she was owed three meals a day and a roof over her head for the rest of her miserable life because she never asked to be placed here on this planet to suffer, and therefore those must be The Good Lord’s wishes.
She had, at long last, become pathetic to my Papaw, a living testimonial to his failure as a parent. She was a constant reminder of something inherently lacking in him and to some extent in his beloved wife, Miss Viola, who’d had a tendency to coddle the youngsters a bit too much in the past for his likings. After twenty years, he had finally reached his breaking point with his “baby-girl” and it pained him deeply to realize—
A. One of his offspring was so messed up in the head.
B. He was ready to quit on her, to give up on her completely. Done. Over her bullshit. Get out! And this from a man who never quit anything in his life once he started it.
C. He had to be stern to the point of mean with his baby, just to get her to leave so as not to continue to upset the rest of the otherwise happy family dynamic.
She was destroying any chance at happiness or peace in the family, putting thorns on the flower of his marriage, and he just couldn’t abide it any more. Even if all the drama and discord was coming from his ‘baby-girl’, he could not stand back and continue to let it destroy the other members of his family. Bella Marie must go and get out into that world she so strongly abhorred. She must be pushed from the nest and forced to fly on her own the way baby birds are sometimes pushed out to either flap their wings or die.
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