Items related to A Song I Knew by Heart (Women of Faith Fiction)
“And Ruth said,‘ Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’” —Ruth 1:16
During a cold Massachusetts winter, a man’s car fatally skids on black ice, leaving a mother childless and her daughter-in-law a widow. Naomi and Ruth, bound together as kin, are now each other’s only comfort. Naomi lost her own husband, Eli, eight years ago, and now she has lost her son.
Watching Ruth struggle through grief, Naomi suddenly realizes what she must do to make herself whole again: She must return to her childhood home in coastal South Carolina. There, she remembers, was the innocence of youth and first falling in love. But when she tells Ruth about her plan, she receives an unexpected reply: “Where you go, I will go. Where you live, that’s where I’ll live too.” So the two women plan the journey together.
The only family Naomi has down South are in-laws, people she hasn’t seen in decades, having kept in touch over the years only through annual Christmas cards. But when she phones, apprehensively, to tell them of her plan, they welcome her with openness and warmth. Arriving at a home full of sons and daughters and grandchildren, Naomi and Ruth are flooded with a love they are nearly too fragile to accept.
Yet Naomi carries a deep secret in her soul—and not even this change of scenery can erase its dark shadow. As the long Southern days seep into their hearts, both she and Ruth begin to find themselves reawakened. And as the love of her newfound family and her enduring bond with Ruth prove themselves stronger than sin, stronger than heartache, redemption finds Naomi once and for all.
A Song I Knew by Heart is about the healing power of family—in particular, the bond between a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. As Ruth and Naomi share their individual sorrows, together they find an uncommon strength. The pages of Bret Lott’s deeply moving novel flow with a lilting beauty that is as heartrending and as restorative as the relationship at its center.
During a cold Massachusetts winter, a man’s car fatally skids on black ice, leaving a mother childless and her daughter-in-law a widow. Naomi and Ruth, bound together as kin, are now each other’s only comfort. Naomi lost her own husband, Eli, eight years ago, and now she has lost her son.
Watching Ruth struggle through grief, Naomi suddenly realizes what she must do to make herself whole again: She must return to her childhood home in coastal South Carolina. There, she remembers, was the innocence of youth and first falling in love. But when she tells Ruth about her plan, she receives an unexpected reply: “Where you go, I will go. Where you live, that’s where I’ll live too.” So the two women plan the journey together.
The only family Naomi has down South are in-laws, people she hasn’t seen in decades, having kept in touch over the years only through annual Christmas cards. But when she phones, apprehensively, to tell them of her plan, they welcome her with openness and warmth. Arriving at a home full of sons and daughters and grandchildren, Naomi and Ruth are flooded with a love they are nearly too fragile to accept.
Yet Naomi carries a deep secret in her soul—and not even this change of scenery can erase its dark shadow. As the long Southern days seep into their hearts, both she and Ruth begin to find themselves reawakened. And as the love of her newfound family and her enduring bond with Ruth prove themselves stronger than sin, stronger than heartache, redemption finds Naomi once and for all.
A Song I Knew by Heart is about the healing power of family—in particular, the bond between a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. As Ruth and Naomi share their individual sorrows, together they find an uncommon strength. The pages of Bret Lott’s deeply moving novel flow with a lilting beauty that is as heartrending and as restorative as the relationship at its center.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
BRET LOTT is the author of the novels Jewel (an Oprah Book Club selection in 1999), Reed’s Beach, A Stranger’s House, The Man Who Owned Vermont, and The Hunt Club; the story collections How to Get Home and A Dream of Old Leaves; and the memoir Fathers, Sons, and Brothers. He is a professor of English at the College of Charleston, and lives with his wife and two sons in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1
I stood outside my son Mahlon and his wife Ruth's bedroom door, in my hands two coffee cups, the pain sharp shards in my old fingers looped through the handles. I had on my pale blue bathrobe and slippers, my hair still in a net. I'd had it done just yesterday morning, before the funeral, and though I wore a net every night, funeral or no, there came to me last night as I slipped it on and settled into bed that somehow this was wrong. That worrying over my hair enough to put it in a net might somehow be a sin, this vanity.
But I put the net on, like every night, because it was what I'd done every night. It was my life, the way I lived it. Who I was.
A widow who lived with her son and daughter-in-law.
Eight years I'd been there with Mahlon and Ruth. Eight years since my husband Eli passed, and our old house out on 116 had revealed itself to be too big to live in. Just too big once Eli was gone, though the space he took up was no more than any other a man might take.
Because it was the love we had for each other filled that house. Love, one for the other. Then he was gone, me left behind to wander through our rooms, the house emptied of love with the last breath my husband gave out.
Now here I was, with coffee for two at Ruth and Mahlon's door. Up and breathing like every morning, but bringing coffee upstairs. Not sitting downstairs to my kitchen table, where until four days ago there'd been three cups poured and waiting, breakfast on the way.
Because now my son Mahlon was gone, too.
I pushed open the door, and there lay Ruth on the bed, beneath the Wedding Ring quilt I made for her and Mahlon. Cold sunlight fell in through the window, the shade left up last night. She was still asleep, inside the sometime blessing I'd known sleep could be, though half her face was in that light, the other in shadow. Her mouth was open, eyebrows knotted, her chin high like she might be singing some cold and sad song in her dreams, a song so sad she had no choice but to keep her eyes closed to it.
A song I knew by heart.
I looked out that window. Morning sun shone down on the frosted rooftops of the houses in this Massachusetts town, where I'd lived for the last fifty-six years. The air was the thick white veil November air will be, white with itself and that light. Through it, and beyond anything I could ever hope to touch, lay the hills beyond town, gray and empty as my heart this morning.
My only child had died. Killed four days before in a trick of light itself: my Mahlon, on his way home from visiting Lonny Thompson up to Sunderland, hit a patch of black ice from a cold snap too early.
Lonny Thompson. My Eli's best friend since their days at the submarine yards out to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, just after the war. Him the reason we'd moved here in the first place, why Eli brought me here once they were out of the service. He'd been like a father to my Mahlon after Eli was gone, and then'd been diagnosed with the cancer last April, Mahlon on his way home from visiting him.
Black ice on the roadway home. No way for Mahlon to know it was there, his headlights no help at all. Useless as this sun in through their bedroom window.
And it came to me then, a moment as deep as the sorrow I was inside. A moment as unexpected and sharp as the death of my child.
This: the memory of light.
Light, and the way when I was a girl it fell through the pine and live oak I grew up in a thousand miles south of here, the way it fell through palmetto and magnolia and water oak too. Light sifting down through the woods to spread like scattered diamonds on the ground before me as I walked to the creek. Bright broken pieces of light on the pinestraw at my feet so many perfect gifts of warmth.
All this came to me, whole and perfect and real. All of it in just the time it took to look out that window to see those empty hills, the rooftops.
My boy, my Mahlon.
Ruth woke, stirred beneath the quilt. Her eyes blinked open, blue-green eyes so clear and crystalline there was never a doubt in my mind why my Mahlon'd loved her from the minute he met her. You could see in her eyes her good heart, constant and certain. It'd been my Mahlon's blessing to find her, to see that good heart, recognize in those eyes a heart worth holding on to. Twenty-three years they would have been married this next February.
Ruth's eyes shuddered open to this cold room, and I saw the ugly promise of what was left to her, a promise I'd seen fulfilled every day for the last eight years of my own life: her husband was gone, and wouldn't be back.
She blinked, blinked again, squinted at the light, her eyebrows still knotted up, her mouth still open. She quick reached from beneath the quilt to beside her, where, if God loved us all as He said He did, Mahlon should have been.
She still had on the black dress from yesterday. From the funeral. She hadn't taken it off last night.
I knew what she was just then being given, knew the pain of that move, of a hand to the flat quilt, to the pillow gone untouched, to cold sheets. It was a move wouldn't go away, this touching to see if any of what'd happened weren't a dream.
It was what I'd done every night these last eight years: come awake sometime from inside the forgiveness of sleep, and reach for my Eli.
Ruth's hand stopped when she found the empty pillow beside her, on her face the puzzlement that showed she knew it wasn't a dream.
"Bless your heart," I said, and moved toward the bed. Ruth blinked again, her eyes now on me and still with the startled look. Like I was no one she'd ever known.
Then her mouth finally closed, her chin set to trembling, and I knew her now better than I ever would've hoped.
It was grief she'd been given, the black and empty gift God gives you like it was something you were owed. It was grief she'd been given, and grief we shared.
"Naomi," she whispered, the word only sound. She reached that hand from the quilt out to me, sat up in bed, her full in the light now.
Naomi. My name.
Now she was crying, her eyes closed again, her mouth and chin giving in to this morning's discovery. One she'd make brand-new every morning from here to the end.
Still her hand reached for me, her shivering in her black dress. And still that empty whispered word Naomi hung before me, its own black dress. One I had to wear whether I wanted it or not.
The name of a woman whose husband had died, who knew the feel of cold sheets. The name now too of a woman whose only child was gone.
The name, I heard in the shattered heart that'd spoken it, of a woman whose life'd been poured out like water on the ground.
Ruth still held her hand out to me, and I whispered again, "Bless your heart," though the words were just as empty as my name. Just sound, air out of me.
I went to the dresser, set the coffee cups on Mahlon's side, next to his nametag from work, and the penholder, the spare change, and half-roll of cherry Lifesavers he dumped out of his pockets at the end of a day. What four days ago was only the clutter of a man's daily life, but was now, I saw, bits of the failed history of my own blood.
I turned to Ruth, up on the edge of the bed now, hands in her lap. Her eyes still closed, her heart let out the broken silver sound of grief I'd heard myself give up too many nights and days, and then I was beside her, and I reached to her. I touched her hair, felt the softness of it, felt the deep chestnut beauty of it. Beauty my son'd known and felt and never would again, and in that cold moment of seeing what had been and would never be again, I took my daughter-in-law in my arms, pulled her close to me. I closed my eyes, felt her arms rise to me, move slowly to me, and we held each other.
Two widows, in each other's arms. Another house emptied of love.
God in His heaven, and nothing right with the world.
And I had to ask again: Why call me Naomi?
Naomi was a teenage girl in a flowered cotton dress, a girl who walked summer afternoons barefoot through that broken perfect light of the woods to the creek. She was a girl who walked the pinestraw littered through the woods, a warm and prickly carpet beneath her, a girl born and raised in that South Carolina light, in a small town on a deepwater creek that led to a harbor that led to the great green sea.
And once through those woods, she was a girl who stood at the edge of the marsh that bordered the creek all bathed in unbroken light, colors all around too rich and beautiful and full of the peace of a girl's afternoons to be believed: the greens and browns and reds of the saltmarsh hay and yellowgrass, the shiny solid black of pluff mud at low tide, the soft green and blue of the creek itself. Shattered light banged up off the water those afternoons, the sun on its way down too fast, too fast, even though these were the longest days of the year, days that seemed somehow to stretch long and slow and full of themselves until now, in the afternoon, when the day seemed to hurry itself too fast for how slow and forgetful it'd been all day long.
That was when the girl, this Naomi, watched the water, and the harbor, and the church spires of Charleston across it all reaching up like they might pierce the sky itself; that was when she watched and watched, and then finally here they came: her daddy, and his shrimp boat, the Mary Sweet, making the long turn in from the harbor and into the creek, the trawler seines pulled high beside her clean white hull like hands up in praise, she always imagined, this girl standing each afternoon on a small bluff on a deepwater creek in a South Carolina town, all of it loved by this sun, warm down on her, perfect and whole and light.
And once she saw her daddy's boat head into the creek, she waited, waited, and then, when the Mary Sweet pulled near even with her, she waved to her daddy high in the cabin, there at the wheel, her daddy always putting on surprise she was there-his mout...
I stood outside my son Mahlon and his wife Ruth's bedroom door, in my hands two coffee cups, the pain sharp shards in my old fingers looped through the handles. I had on my pale blue bathrobe and slippers, my hair still in a net. I'd had it done just yesterday morning, before the funeral, and though I wore a net every night, funeral or no, there came to me last night as I slipped it on and settled into bed that somehow this was wrong. That worrying over my hair enough to put it in a net might somehow be a sin, this vanity.
But I put the net on, like every night, because it was what I'd done every night. It was my life, the way I lived it. Who I was.
A widow who lived with her son and daughter-in-law.
Eight years I'd been there with Mahlon and Ruth. Eight years since my husband Eli passed, and our old house out on 116 had revealed itself to be too big to live in. Just too big once Eli was gone, though the space he took up was no more than any other a man might take.
Because it was the love we had for each other filled that house. Love, one for the other. Then he was gone, me left behind to wander through our rooms, the house emptied of love with the last breath my husband gave out.
Now here I was, with coffee for two at Ruth and Mahlon's door. Up and breathing like every morning, but bringing coffee upstairs. Not sitting downstairs to my kitchen table, where until four days ago there'd been three cups poured and waiting, breakfast on the way.
Because now my son Mahlon was gone, too.
I pushed open the door, and there lay Ruth on the bed, beneath the Wedding Ring quilt I made for her and Mahlon. Cold sunlight fell in through the window, the shade left up last night. She was still asleep, inside the sometime blessing I'd known sleep could be, though half her face was in that light, the other in shadow. Her mouth was open, eyebrows knotted, her chin high like she might be singing some cold and sad song in her dreams, a song so sad she had no choice but to keep her eyes closed to it.
A song I knew by heart.
I looked out that window. Morning sun shone down on the frosted rooftops of the houses in this Massachusetts town, where I'd lived for the last fifty-six years. The air was the thick white veil November air will be, white with itself and that light. Through it, and beyond anything I could ever hope to touch, lay the hills beyond town, gray and empty as my heart this morning.
My only child had died. Killed four days before in a trick of light itself: my Mahlon, on his way home from visiting Lonny Thompson up to Sunderland, hit a patch of black ice from a cold snap too early.
Lonny Thompson. My Eli's best friend since their days at the submarine yards out to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, just after the war. Him the reason we'd moved here in the first place, why Eli brought me here once they were out of the service. He'd been like a father to my Mahlon after Eli was gone, and then'd been diagnosed with the cancer last April, Mahlon on his way home from visiting him.
Black ice on the roadway home. No way for Mahlon to know it was there, his headlights no help at all. Useless as this sun in through their bedroom window.
And it came to me then, a moment as deep as the sorrow I was inside. A moment as unexpected and sharp as the death of my child.
This: the memory of light.
Light, and the way when I was a girl it fell through the pine and live oak I grew up in a thousand miles south of here, the way it fell through palmetto and magnolia and water oak too. Light sifting down through the woods to spread like scattered diamonds on the ground before me as I walked to the creek. Bright broken pieces of light on the pinestraw at my feet so many perfect gifts of warmth.
All this came to me, whole and perfect and real. All of it in just the time it took to look out that window to see those empty hills, the rooftops.
My boy, my Mahlon.
Ruth woke, stirred beneath the quilt. Her eyes blinked open, blue-green eyes so clear and crystalline there was never a doubt in my mind why my Mahlon'd loved her from the minute he met her. You could see in her eyes her good heart, constant and certain. It'd been my Mahlon's blessing to find her, to see that good heart, recognize in those eyes a heart worth holding on to. Twenty-three years they would have been married this next February.
Ruth's eyes shuddered open to this cold room, and I saw the ugly promise of what was left to her, a promise I'd seen fulfilled every day for the last eight years of my own life: her husband was gone, and wouldn't be back.
She blinked, blinked again, squinted at the light, her eyebrows still knotted up, her mouth still open. She quick reached from beneath the quilt to beside her, where, if God loved us all as He said He did, Mahlon should have been.
She still had on the black dress from yesterday. From the funeral. She hadn't taken it off last night.
I knew what she was just then being given, knew the pain of that move, of a hand to the flat quilt, to the pillow gone untouched, to cold sheets. It was a move wouldn't go away, this touching to see if any of what'd happened weren't a dream.
It was what I'd done every night these last eight years: come awake sometime from inside the forgiveness of sleep, and reach for my Eli.
Ruth's hand stopped when she found the empty pillow beside her, on her face the puzzlement that showed she knew it wasn't a dream.
"Bless your heart," I said, and moved toward the bed. Ruth blinked again, her eyes now on me and still with the startled look. Like I was no one she'd ever known.
Then her mouth finally closed, her chin set to trembling, and I knew her now better than I ever would've hoped.
It was grief she'd been given, the black and empty gift God gives you like it was something you were owed. It was grief she'd been given, and grief we shared.
"Naomi," she whispered, the word only sound. She reached that hand from the quilt out to me, sat up in bed, her full in the light now.
Naomi. My name.
Now she was crying, her eyes closed again, her mouth and chin giving in to this morning's discovery. One she'd make brand-new every morning from here to the end.
Still her hand reached for me, her shivering in her black dress. And still that empty whispered word Naomi hung before me, its own black dress. One I had to wear whether I wanted it or not.
The name of a woman whose husband had died, who knew the feel of cold sheets. The name now too of a woman whose only child was gone.
The name, I heard in the shattered heart that'd spoken it, of a woman whose life'd been poured out like water on the ground.
Ruth still held her hand out to me, and I whispered again, "Bless your heart," though the words were just as empty as my name. Just sound, air out of me.
I went to the dresser, set the coffee cups on Mahlon's side, next to his nametag from work, and the penholder, the spare change, and half-roll of cherry Lifesavers he dumped out of his pockets at the end of a day. What four days ago was only the clutter of a man's daily life, but was now, I saw, bits of the failed history of my own blood.
I turned to Ruth, up on the edge of the bed now, hands in her lap. Her eyes still closed, her heart let out the broken silver sound of grief I'd heard myself give up too many nights and days, and then I was beside her, and I reached to her. I touched her hair, felt the softness of it, felt the deep chestnut beauty of it. Beauty my son'd known and felt and never would again, and in that cold moment of seeing what had been and would never be again, I took my daughter-in-law in my arms, pulled her close to me. I closed my eyes, felt her arms rise to me, move slowly to me, and we held each other.
Two widows, in each other's arms. Another house emptied of love.
God in His heaven, and nothing right with the world.
And I had to ask again: Why call me Naomi?
Naomi was a teenage girl in a flowered cotton dress, a girl who walked summer afternoons barefoot through that broken perfect light of the woods to the creek. She was a girl who walked the pinestraw littered through the woods, a warm and prickly carpet beneath her, a girl born and raised in that South Carolina light, in a small town on a deepwater creek that led to a harbor that led to the great green sea.
And once through those woods, she was a girl who stood at the edge of the marsh that bordered the creek all bathed in unbroken light, colors all around too rich and beautiful and full of the peace of a girl's afternoons to be believed: the greens and browns and reds of the saltmarsh hay and yellowgrass, the shiny solid black of pluff mud at low tide, the soft green and blue of the creek itself. Shattered light banged up off the water those afternoons, the sun on its way down too fast, too fast, even though these were the longest days of the year, days that seemed somehow to stretch long and slow and full of themselves until now, in the afternoon, when the day seemed to hurry itself too fast for how slow and forgetful it'd been all day long.
That was when the girl, this Naomi, watched the water, and the harbor, and the church spires of Charleston across it all reaching up like they might pierce the sky itself; that was when she watched and watched, and then finally here they came: her daddy, and his shrimp boat, the Mary Sweet, making the long turn in from the harbor and into the creek, the trawler seines pulled high beside her clean white hull like hands up in praise, she always imagined, this girl standing each afternoon on a small bluff on a deepwater creek in a South Carolina town, all of it loved by this sun, warm down on her, perfect and whole and light.
And once she saw her daddy's boat head into the creek, she waited, waited, and then, when the Mary Sweet pulled near even with her, she waved to her daddy high in the cabin, there at the wheel, her daddy always putting on surprise she was there-his mout...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication date2004
- ISBN 10 0375503773
- ISBN 13 9780375503771
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages320
- Rating
Buy New
Learn more about this copy
US$ 21.91
Shipping:
FREE
Within U.S.A.
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Stock Image
A Song I Knew by Heart (Women of Faith Fiction)
Published by
Random House
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0375503773
ISBN 13: 9780375503771
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # 0375503773-11-29479418
Buy New
US$ 21.91
Convert currency
Stock Image
A Song I Knew by Heart (Women of Faith Fiction)
Published by
Random House
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0375503773
ISBN 13: 9780375503771
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0375503773
Buy New
US$ 22.62
Convert currency
Stock Image
A Song I Knew by Heart: A Novel
Published by
Random House
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0375503773
ISBN 13: 9780375503771
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Brand New. 1st edition. 303 pages. 9.75x6.75x1.50 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # 0375503773
Buy New
US$ 31.32
Convert currency
Stock Image
A Song I Knew by Heart (Women of Faith Fiction)
Published by
Random House
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0375503773
ISBN 13: 9780375503771
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Buy for Great customer experience. Seller Inventory # GoldenDragon0375503773
Buy New
US$ 53.96
Convert currency
Stock Image
A Song I Knew by Heart (Women of Faith Fiction)
Published by
Random House
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0375503773
ISBN 13: 9780375503771
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Brand New Copy. Seller Inventory # BBB_new0375503773
Buy New
US$ 54.52
Convert currency
Stock Image
A Song I Knew by Heart (Women of Faith Fiction)
Published by
Random House
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0375503773
ISBN 13: 9780375503771
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0375503773
Buy New
US$ 54.28
Convert currency
Stock Image
A Song I Knew by Heart (Women of Faith Fiction)
Published by
Random House
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0375503773
ISBN 13: 9780375503771
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0375503773
Buy New
US$ 53.95
Convert currency
Stock Image
A SONG I KNEW BY HEART (WOMEN OF
Published by
Random House
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0375503773
ISBN 13: 9780375503771
New
Hardcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.85. Seller Inventory # Q-0375503773
Buy New
US$ 74.40
Convert currency