Chapter 9 #2
Everywhere I looked, I saw people carrying folders and Bibles.
They wore big nametags that included where they were from.
Mom explained that we’d driven all the way from Miami where she’d heard Billy Graham preach earlier.
If he lived in Montreat it must be special, she asserted, and Grier Davis agreed that it was very special indeed.
She said we were moving here because she wanted a safe place to raise her children, and obviously Miami wasn’t.
As I listened, I felt shame again. Dad left because I talked too much.
We were fleeing Florida because of what the patrolman did.
I’d upended our family, and halfway expected Mom to tell the future Montreat mayor that.
Grier Davis was sorry for our troubles and would try to help.
But we couldn’t have shown up at a worse time of year, he explained.
Suitable accommodations had been reserved long ago.
There were no vacancies at the imposing stone Assembly Inn.
All the summer cabins and cottages were taken.
He said he knew everyone in town and had a few ideas.
We shouldn’t expect much beyond a roof over our heads, he apologized. But as Mom was always telling us, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” She thanked him, relieved and grateful. He scribbled his phone number on a piece of notepaper, handing it to her, promising to make inquiries on our behalf.
He needed time to return to his office and make a few calls, he said. Mom was to find a pay phone and check with him a little later. Before the day was out, we’d rented a first-floor efficiency in a dump on Assembly Drive across from the balding athletic field with its dusty baseball diamond.
An older woman named Mrs. Arnold owned the paint-peeled white frame house. She lived upstairs with her nephew, Mom told us. When we pulled up for the first time, he was stretched out in a lounge chair, sunning and reading in the weed-choked front yard. Putting down the book, he got up.
In his thirties with dark blond hair cut short, he was friendly, welcoming us.
I remember he had the wonderful last name of Crimm that I would appropriate decades later in my crime spoof Isle of Dogs.
The real Mr. Crimm was terminally ill. That’s why he warmed himself in the front yard, Mom explained.
Or maybe there was some other reason he was out there watching people go by, a lot of them kids, she noted.
He seemed pleasant enough but made her uneasy.
Not long after we moved in, she discovered that he’d invited Jim upstairs for a visit.
She forbade my brothers to be alone with Mr. Crimm despite him doing nothing to merit suspicion, as best I could tell.
From Mom’s point of view, everybody was a suspect because of what happened to me in Miami.
I’d been molested, and she worried my brothers would be next.
She was like that all the while we were growing up.
If a man paid attention to her, he was really after her children.
Over the years there would be many people Mom falsely accused.
On Mrs. Arnold’s dilapidated front porch was a hammock that looked like a fishnet suspended between sticks.
I thought the wicker chairs were fashioned from broom straws.
Mom introduced us as my stomach grumbled.
I wondered where the nearest Royal Castle was, not realizing the chain had no restaurants in North Carolina.
“What’s in your box?” Mrs. Arnold asked me.
“Sniffy,” I replied, my arm getting tired from holding her.
Whenever I’d move, the cat would slide around inside the cardboard carrier, a corner of it jabbing me in the leg. Mom asked about places to run errands, and topping the list was a grocery store. Mrs. Arnold told her where the A&P was, and a drugstore and other shops in Black Mountain.
We moved our suitcases and several boxes inside the tiny downstairs apartment. I lifted Sniffy out of her carrier, holding her up to a dusty window.
“Look, Sniffy, here we are!” I told her happily.
Mrs. Arnold’s house was in such poor repair that the leg of my bed broke through the rotting floor the first night there.
The sleeve of Mom’s bathrobe caught on fire the next morning when flames shot up too high from the malfunctioning gas stove.
We hadn’t been staying there long when Sniffy got out and we couldn’t find her.
I looked with no success and was bereft.
Montreat is less than three square miles, and I could walk from one end to the other without getting lost. Mrs. Arnold’s house was in the middle of town, and in ten or fifteen minutes I could reach the playground or lake.
During the summers, a club program offered activities to occupy children while their parents vacationed or attended conferences.
Mom had a lot on her as she got us settled in a place she’d never lived in or visited before now.
It was the first time she’d been to North Carolina.
There was only so much she could manage with three young children needing her attention.
Unlike Miami, Montreat was the sort of place where we could run around without needing supervision.
She’d enroll Jim and me in the clubs when she could manage the fee.
We joined other kids on scavenger hunts, hikes along mountain trails, and learned to shoot a bow and arrow.
The rest of the time we played on our own, exploring the woods, rock hopping in streams, and swimming in the kiddie pool at Lake Susan, a lifeguard posted on the shallow, gritty beach.
We hadn’t been in Montreat long before Dad was out of the hospital and realized we were gone.
Mom told him where we were, and he began sending money for alimony and child support.
I suspect my aunt Dolores and uncle Bill might have been subsidizing us also.
They would in the future when we had nowhere else to turn.