Wedding Bell Blues. Ruth Moose. Minotaur Books, St. Martin’s Press. Released August 23, 2016. Hard cover $25.99. ISBN: 9781250067418.
If you like zany characters (several degrees beyond interesting), a story line that verges on farce, and a heroine who doesn’t very often stop to think but has guts and somehow lands on her feet, you’ll enjoy Ruth Moose’s second novel Wedding Bell Blues in her Dixie Dew B&B mystery series. The narrative drive is constantly side-swiped by humor and the down home language of the Old South.
The setting feels like the 1950s, but then there’s the courthouse fire, which happened in Pittsboro, North Carolina, only a few years ago. Since other Pittsboro landmarks like the S&T Soda Shop are mentioned by their real names, I sense that it’s both 2015 and 1955–some fictional blend of reality and imagination, but then that’s what novels do.
Beth McKenzie moved back to Littleboro in Doing It At the Dixie Dew and opened her B&B, finding help from Ida Plum Duckett in the kitchen, and Scott, the handyman, in restoring the old house enough to go on with. We still have the New Jersey police chief, Ossie Delgardo, and Verna’s rabbit named Robert Redford. The focus is on Reba, the woman who lives hand to mouth and feels free to come and go through people’s houses. She isn’t quite right in the head. This time Reba has announced she’s getting married. When Beth rides to her rescue to find her sobbing over a body on a picnic bench whom she insists she has killed, we wonder: is it her fiancé, whom she calls God? His truck, parked nearby, has the logo GOD, General Overnight Delivery.
Beth gives the man artificial respiration, which she’ll regret several times later, but the MedAlert folks take him to the hospital, siren howling. The law (Ossie) won’t talk to Beth and doesn’t get coherent answers from Reba except that she keeps saying she killed him, which Ossie gets on tape. Then he takes Reba to jail.
The main event in the book is Littleboro’s first Green Bean Festival, supported financially by a rich newcomer, and now Mayor, Honorable Calista Moss. To raise more money she throws a trashion show. Participants are to dress up in trash bags, clothes that have been thrown away, recyclables, etc.
When Beth investigates the motel room where Reba had spent the previous night with the man she believes wants to marry her, she finds Reba’s make-shift wedding dress, but not Butch Rigsbee, the theoretical groom, whose wallet and photo were left behind. He has vanished, but the nearly dead man on the roadside picnic table is not Butch but Reba’s “better man,” and now he’s in ICU at the local hospital.
When you enter the pages of Wedding Bell Blues, you’re in a different universe, i.e., a new fictional world. The plot moseys along. Humor lies in wait in nearly every sentence.
Here’s a snippet:
“Festival. I was so involved with Reba and her God thing and the missing Butch Rigsbee that I’d pushed the whole shindig out of my mind. Not only did the Green Bean Festival have Scott gainfully employed for odds and ends, but all of Littleboro was buzzing both pros and cons. Who would come to our little town to celebrate the green bean? Who cared? Who even liked the stuff? We might as well salute something that had more guts and glory, like the black-eyed pea, for gosh sakes. Or as Ida Plum had said “Creasy greens. Now they are something special. Or collards.”
***
Ruth Moose is the 2013 winner of the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition. She has published three collections of short stories and six collections of poetry. She was on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for fifteen years and received the Chapman Award for teaching. She lives in Pittsboro, N.C.
My phalaenopsis orchids Spring 2015.
Can Flowers Change Your Life? XIX. April 24, 2016
Sometimes I have to wait. My desire to write
never leaves me, but other calls need answers.
This has been true all my life, but Memory
and her Muses save me. Like my orchid
plant, She waits. She can go through
summer, fall, and winter before She stirs
again to blooming. Sticks become stems
again, and two new ones rise and soon
form tiny pale yellow globes. Day by day
the globes grow larger, then hang down
their pale, one-eyed blooms. Air feeds
them; light wakes them. They ask so
little and give more than I expected,
not unlike my Muse. She, too, waits,
but when I read that phrase I wrote
twenty-six years ago: “I must put my
full weight on my writing,” I know I
must still do that. It’s my promise
to my own soul. I’ve made time before.
Even when it seems unlikely, it’s
always possible. Yes, I will: choose
wisely, govern my impulses to attend
to other than my true necessities,
clear space, rest quietly, take in
the world around me, and listen.
***
Drawing of Judy sitting by the Haw River writing poetry, used as cover for Russian translation of Beaver Soul.
Mikhail Bazankov, artist. 1997.
Can Flowers Change Your Life? XVIII. April 17, 2016
Flowers do help. I had one plant come up
in the oval garden along with the winter’s
crop of weeds and the daffodils. I couldn’t
tell: weed or flower? I waited. Then an iris
bloomed. The only one of that smaller kind
I had years ago. It has had several on that
one stalk, a star in weed heaven. Then my
big orchid with the long name phalaenopsis
began blooms. Two are open, and a third
starts today. I moved it from the western
window to my dining table, shifted file
folders to give it place. The big flat leaves
got too much sun and some turned yellow,
but on four stems it has twenty-one blooms.
A year ago it had twelve on two stems.
I’ve never had such an exotic bloomer in
my care. It not only survived, it flourished.
A happy plant. These days when I feel
the weight of all that I can’t do fast enough,
such surprises feed me. The cardinal visits
the new feeder, and the seeds disappear
faster. He sings in sun when I am wrestling
with weeds and their long, stringy roots.
The hens come rushing to wait for the
armfuls of weeds I’m removing so I can
plant onions, leeks, beets, peas, and carrots.
These crops are going into the earth late but
are taking hold. In the beginning I felt
lucky when anything grew. So many risks
plants take. Here am I, risking death every
day–in my mind. Aging has slowed me
only a little, yet I have to summon new depths
of personal courage when I put on my gloves
and pick up my shovel. I forget sometimes
that I’m working alongside the way the
world is made, that Grain of the Universe.
My hope is to flourish until I die.
Grace and Harvey Roys, my maternal grandparents, probably 1911 or 1912, Possibly in Kuling, maybe it will be on the cover of the book Grace.
Grace: A China Diary, 1910-1916, is a transcription of the diary my grandparents Grace and Harvey Roys kept in China 1910-1916, with my careful, extensive annotations. I first became interested in this diary some years ago, because Grace had suffered from bi-polar disease before it was well understood. My mother’s fear that her daughters would also suffer mental illness hung over my childhood and adolescence. Twelve years ago I decided to annotate the diary, which I hoped would help me understand Grace better.
In the meantime I have written and published other books, but at intervals I researched Grace’s life in Nanking. With the encouragement of Marie, a fellow writer, and Sam Hammond, who recently retired from Duke’s Rubentstein Library staff and is still the University Carillonneur, I did extensive research to follow up on all the people mentioned in the diary as well as on many of the domestic details. I also consulted Emeritus Professor Lawrence Kessler, who published The Jiangyin Mission Station: An American Missionary Community in China:1895-1951 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1996); he read the manuscript twice and gave me suggestions. My friend by email, Edith Barakat, born to missionaries serving in another part of China, helped me tremendously with the research. My siblings and cousins have also cheered me on!
In December 1910 Grace and Harvey were married, despite her having had a mental breakdown weeks earlier when her missionary father forbade the marriage. The diary records their early married life, the births of their first two children, their social life with other missionaries in China, many of whom made major contributions to Nanking life and education: medical doctors and nurses; theology professors; agricultural innovators; founders of universities, hospitals, nursing schools, and schools for young Chinese women and men.
Grace has been accepted for publication by Wipf and Stock, a religious publisher in Eugene, Oregon. Actual publication is likely to be in 2017 or even 2018. This gives me great joy, to bring Grace Roys’s life and suffering to the public.
As to its possible audience, Grace should contribute to understanding what a Protestant missionary’s life was like in the early 1900s in China. This book should appeal to those interested in missionary and Protestant denomination history, women’s history, and how mental illness was treated in China among the missionaries in the early 20th century.
***
Left to right, Grace, Jeanie, Grace's younger sister, baby Margaret (my mother), Charlie, the youngest brother of Grace, Samuel Isett Woodbridge, Grace's father, on the steps of their Nanking home, late 1913. Note Charlie's irreverent dirty feet.
