Chapter 14
A blackbird on a telephone wire meant death. A tree shaped like a sailing ship was a sign that help was on the way. Or maybe danger was coming, and we needed to flee as we had from Florida. Snow promised the past was scrubbed clean and no longer hurtful. But it also portended death and abandonment.
A fierce wind might hint that God was angry at human behavior, and Mom would pray to be forgiven.
I don’t think she ever felt she was, thanks to the vile things Dad said.
He’d made her feel broken and shameful. She spent hours reading the King James Bible presented to her at the Billy Graham Miami crusade.
She wrote copious notes on the tissue-thin pages. Verses that held special meaning she’d underline in red or blue colored pencil.
“The battle is not yours but God’s.”
Scattered on her bed were inspirational books that she’d read repeatedly, scouring for insights and solace.
“God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain,” she quoted C. S. Lewis in her Bible’s marginalia.
She’d been complaining that the neighbors were spying.
They were talking about her, and that much was true.
A transplant from Miami and divorced, she didn’t fit in, nothing about her provincial or rural.
She spoke with a midwestern accent and had been raised Catholic.
She was a first-generation German, her father from Luxembourg, her mother from Baden-Baden.
Our Montreat neighbors were southern evangelical Christians, most of them kind and well-intended.
But they had their impenetrable ideas about how people were supposed to live.
Some were judgmental and believed that worldliness was evil.
A few were Pentecostals, unnerving me with their talk of divine healing, speaking in tongues, and raising the dead.
Most of our neighbors were skeptical of my mother as they pretended otherwise.
They didn’t know what to make of her, and women found her threatening.
Single, she must be on the prowl for a man to replace the one who left her.
Inappropriate and unpredictable, she wasn’t right in the head.
But her biggest flaw was being beautiful.
The Montreat women resented and didn’t trust her.
Their husbands were keenly aware of Mom’s attributes, through no fault of her own.
If anything, after leaving Florida she was overly modest, bordering on prudish, nothing clingy, short, or showing cleavage.
She didn’t flirt or want attention, especially from the town drunk, Mr. Reilly.
Soon after we’d moved into our new house on Kanawha Drive, he’d become the self-appointed welcoming committee.
One morning, I spotted him staggering up our white gravel driveway, stabbing the ground with his cane.
Dressed in filthy threadbare overalls, he carried a big brown paper grocery bag spotted with stains.
He reminded me of the Bogeyman and was the only person in Montreat I feared, not putting anything past him. I’d heard stories about his wife dying from an alleged self-inflicted shotgun blast. There were rumors about Mr. Reilly getting drunk in bars and bragging that he’d murdered her.
Supposedly, he was distilling moonshine deep in the Montreat woods, and Jim claims he came across a still that he was certain was Mr. Reilly’s.
It was known among the local kids that if we came upon a collection of steel pots, columns, and coiled tubing, turn around and run.
If the still was active, likely the armed owner was in the vicinity.
When Jim was older, he and our minister Calvin Thielman made a wellness check on Mr. Reilly in his unheated house.
It was the dead of winter, and he was passed out drunk near his shotgun.
Most of his frozen toes had to be amputated.
But long before that he staggered and stumbled with a lurching gait.
I’d see him with his cane weaving along the side of Assembly Drive, his wily eyes tracking every car and pedestrian.
At the playground, Lake Susan, and elsewhere he’d dig for bottles in the metal trash barrels, turning in the empties for the deposits.
Jim and some of the other boys in Montreat did the same thing.
But if they saw Mr. Reilly there first, they stayed away.
He had an energy about him that was frightening.
Right or wrong, I felt he was dangerous. I didn’t doubt that he killed his wife.
I wasn’t happy when he appeared at our front door on a fall afternoon in 1965 when Mom was sick with a cold.
Grabbing the railing and struggling up the front steps, he rang the bell.
I stayed close to Mom as she opened the door.
He introduced himself, slurring that his wife had died some years back.
He volunteered to help with odd chores as Mom obviously had no man of the house.
He asked her to marry him, presenting a bag of rotten apples he must have picked off the ground somewhere.
Days later he was back. This time with a jar of kerosene for Mom to rub on her chest. It would cure her cold.
He’d cooked an entire opossum, fur and all, the metal baking pan lined with newspaper, a few unpeeled carrots floating. Jim buried it in our backyard.
Mom warned us to stay away from Mr. Reilly. He was a bad man, and his brain was pickled. She said he was an alcoholic and would do anything for money. He’d killed his wife and gotten away with it. Mom didn’t hesitate to share such convictions with the neighbors.
Intelligent and talented, she was stunted emotionally by earlier losses and abuses. She perceived the world through the filter of a damaged child, a gifted and angry one. Saying exactly what she thought, she was unaware when offending someone.
“What a phony.” A typical remark.
“She’s fat! A blimp!” That’s another.
“The legalistic old biddy.”
“Oh, she’s holier than thou.”
“He looks like a drinker.”
“What a dirty old man!”
Worse were childishly rude gestures like her unsolicited oil painting of our minister’s wife, depicting her with a red clown nose.
I have no idea why my mother did this. Dorothy was always kind to my family and everyone else in Montreat.
When Mom presented the offensive portrait, it was relegated to the Thielmans’ basement.
More than fifty years later, when Dorothy was in her late eighties, her demeanor glinted with puzzled indignation when the subject came up.
I’m sure no other parishioner had done anything so outrageous.
She probably smiled at the time and said thank you.
But she knew. Everybody did. Mom was the town crazy.
My fourth-grade teacher, Jean Skidmore, started out as a social worker, her family moving to Montreat that past summer. Her husband, John, had been hired as the college’s business manager. She took a job teaching the fourth grade, and I was fortunate enough to be in her first class.
The Skidmores lived on Mecklenburg Circle around the corner from us, and it wasn’t unusual for me to stop by their house.
My favorite teacher so far, Jean was young and pretty, friendly, and fun.
She put up with a lot of my antics, including climbing out a classroom window, showing off.
I dropped five or six feet to the ground, practiced because of Mom’s fire drills at home.
I thought it was funny and so did the other students as I waved through the glass, trotting to the door, heading back inside the building.
When I returned to the room, Mrs. Skidmore wasn’t amused, scolding me, making a pretense of smacking me with a yardstick.
It’s a wonder she didn’t march me to the principal’s office.
But I think she recognized that I was unsettled, scared, and desperate for attention.
Since my father’s visit with his pregnant wife, Rita, then Laddy’s disappearance, Mom had relapsed into a dark depressive state.
She got worse as the fall dissolved into winter, and then in December the snows started.
I began trudging back and forth to the post office twice daily as she awaited the arrival of the extra check, as she called it.
If all was going well with Dad’s law practice, he’d send her the equivalent of a month’s income as a bonus. We never knew in advance if that would happen or not. When it didn’t, Mom was crushed and frantic, depending on the infusion of cash to help with outstanding bills and Christmas.
Day after day and no check, but other gifts from Dad arrived, adding to Mom’s disappointment and fear.
Nothing came except gifts to my brothers and me, and I hated mine, a gold metal Gruen watch with a thin stretch band four sizes too big.
It wasn’t anything I’d wear, and I walked through the snow to Mrs. Skidmore’s house, giving it to her.
I can still see the puzzled look on her face and her reluctance, but I insisted she take the watch.
It fit her fine. She agreed it was an “unusual” present for a little girl, suggesting I give it to my mother, and I explained that she wouldn’t wear it.
I don’t remember what Dad sent my brothers, but it wasn’t something as impractical as what I’d gotten.
Along with these presents from him was a wooden crate of Florida grapefruit and oranges that we picked up in Black Mountain at the train station.
We couldn’t possibly eat all that fruit.
How thoughtless when what we needed was money, Mom complained.
If Dad wanted to do something nice for my brothers and me, send us cash, she let him know over the phone.
His response was to tell her calmly that she needn’t worry.
He wouldn’t repeat the mistake. From then on at Christmas, we wouldn’t get fruit or anything else.
He no longer remembered birthdays either.
In later years he would claim that if he’d sent money to my brothers and me, Mom would have intercepted it.
Maybe that’s what he believed, but I don’t.