Chapter 15
Jim’s job at bedtime was to cover it with a big square of thin steel that had been custom cut in Black Mountain.
During the day it was stored behind the upright piano in the parlor.
The heavy metal cover would dampen the din when I’d peck away at “Chopsticks” (a musician I’m not).
Mom made sure we knew how to get out in a fire, a flood, or other catastrophe.
First, we’d dash to her bedroom at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen and family room where the problem most likely would start.
Next, we’d climb on top of her wormy chestnut dresser below the window overlooking the woods in front.
We’d remove the screen, jumping six feet to the ground.
We’d do this over and over, her drills and deadly scenarios always leaving me unsettled.
While my brothers huddled in their bedroom, her purposeful footsteps sounded in the hallway. She appeared in the family room with another armload of clothing, her eyes vacant and haunted. It seemed she had no awareness of me standing near the fireplace. I was invisible. A ghost. Nonexistent.
“Mom! Why are you doing this?”
I felt confused and helpless as she shoved clothing into the wall of flames, sparks swarming, the ashes getting deeper.
“Mom! Stop!”
She didn’t, and my bedroom was next. I watched as she raided my closet, yanking dresses, skirts, blouses off hangers. She emptied my dresser drawers of sweaters, socks, shorts, and T-shirts, piling them on my bed.
“MOM!”
Back down the hallway she’d go with as much as she could carry. All of it was consumed by flames greedy and huge, black smoke gushing up the chimney.
“NO, MOM!”
“It has to be done.” She’d head back for more.
“WHY?”
“Be quiet and do as you’re told.”
“PLEASE NO, MOM!”
The rest of her life we wouldn’t talk about that day. There was no discussion of much that happened while I was growing up. I knew better than to introduce certain topics. Countless electroconvulsive shock treatments later, she wouldn’t remember most of the dramas that have helped create who I am.
Perhaps without intending to she taught me the world was unsafe.
Bad things happen. Monsters are real. So are miracles.
Also, fairy tales, and she’d scripted one that January morning in 1966.
She would give us to the perfect family.
We would be raised in their magic kingdom and live happily ever after.
When there was little left to burn and the fire died down, Mom removed the antique model of a clipper ship from a wall in my brothers’ bedroom. It was time for us to leave without looking back like the people fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah. She said it was what God wanted and He would save us.
I don’t know what escaped the conflagration, but our coats must have been spared.
I vaguely remember struggling to zip up mine.
I put on my galoshes while overwhelmed by a sense of doom.
We followed Mom out into the snow, and she told Jim to carry the clipper ship.
He didn’t want to, embarrassed by how kooky that would look if anybody saw him. But she insisted.
We began trudging up Kanawha Drive, a slippery mix of fresh snow on top of crusty ice.
The world was quiet, just the sound of our feet crunching.
We’d not gotten very far when I heard the rumble of an engine as we slipped and slid.
What a strange sight we must have been when John Rickman appeared in his orange Jeep, the snowplow blade scraping away a layer of wintry mess.
He was the caretaker for Billy Graham, his wife, Ruth, and their five children living straight up the winding road on top of a ridge.
I’d heard the Grahams had a huge tract of wooded land and a unique house.
It was rather much like living near Buckingham Palace.
Whenever Billy was on TV we watched. Mom read his books, the newest one called World Aflame, and ours was.
We didn’t know the Grahams, hadn’t seen them in person, much less been on their property.
There would be no reason. But we were acquainted with Mr. Rickman, as I’d address him.
He lived outside the Montreat gate on Rainbow Mountain.
In those days it was occupied by mountain people, an impoverished closed population, the families often intermarrying.
A recovering alcoholic, John Rickman became a Christian after Ruth’s father, Dr. Nelson Bell, found him passed out drunk in the woods.
Dr. Bell took care of him, sobering him up.
For a while, Mr. Rickman did odd jobs for the Bells on their property set back from Assembly Drive.
Eventually, he went to work for the Grahams on their mountaintop.
Always friendly and respectful, Mr. Rickman was helpful and kind.
While keeping the Grahams’ switchback of a road clear, he’d plow the streets for their neighbors at no charge.
That’s what he was doing when he spotted us making our way up snowy Kanawha Drive.
Slowing down, he stopped, aware that something was off.
“Morning, Mrs. Daniels,” he greeted us in his quiet drawl. “Where are y’all going?”
He acted like everything was status quo while Jim clutched the model of the clipper ship, self-consciously staring down at his boots.
“We’re going to the Grahams,” Mom announced. “They’re expecting us.”
I knew that wasn’t true. They certainly weren’t expecting us. Of course, Mr. Rickman knew it too. Recognizing our distress, and that Mom seemed delusional, he intervened on the spot. It’s what the Grahams would expect, most of all Ruth.
“Well now, y’all can’t walk up there. It’s way too far. Hop on in,” Mr. Rickman said to my astonishment.
I didn’t wait to be asked twice, scrambling into the open bed of the Jeep.
I remember the frigid metal biting through my pants, and the rubbery smell of the spare tire.
I felt as if I were in a dream. This couldn’t be happening.
Snow chains clanked as we roared up the mountain, miles of dense woods closing in on both sides, the drop-offs treacherous the higher we climbed.
I was dazzled, having never seen any place like this, and it was as Mom promised.
We were entering a magic kingdom where powerful and benevolent people reigned.
We were to be their guests, and everything would be fine.
In fact, it would be perfect. They’d make sure of it.
Beneath my misgivings, a simmering excitement began rolling into a boil.
Around a sharp turn I marveled over the stream-fed swimming pool filled with dark green water freezing around the edges, the diving board a graying rough-hewn plank.
I was filled with wonder as we clanked past a series of log cabins with whimsical flowers on the shutters.
Whoever painted them was talented like my mother.
Smoke curled above the canopy of trees as we neared the top of the ridge, warnings artistically lettered in white on homemade rugged wooden signs.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
BEWARE OF GUARD DOGS
TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN
Around another bend, we reached the carved-out shelf on the hogback where the Grahams lived in a house built of reclaimed wood and stone, two-story with dormer windows and a shake shingle roof.
We’d reached the top of the world, the valley spreading beneath us, the Blue Ridge Mountains rolling to infinity.
The front door opened, and an elegant, slender woman with chiseled features and a suntan stepped out on the stone patio. I remember she was dressed in a long gray skirt, a shawl around her shoulders that she held against the cold, her auburn hair pinned up like a Walt Disney queen or a movie star.
I thought Ruth Graham was the most glorious human being I’d ever seen as I watched her have a private word with Mr. Rickman.
It was obvious he had the utmost respect for her.
I was expecting to be banished from her kingdom, sent back down the mountain where we belonged.
She’d been given no advance notice. There were no mobile phones then.
I was thrilled when she invited us in, four complete strangers all but invading, and I looked around in awe.
Some of the floors were oiled dark red brick, the walls salvaged wood from log cabins, the chestnut boards with old nail holes from torn-down buildings.
Sweeps of a trowel were visible in the plastered ceiling, and hanging from exposed beams were smokehouse hooks and Indian corn.
Off the entryway, the living area had a fieldstone fireplace as big as a cave, the flames blazing and snapping.
The hand-forged poker, shovel, and other tools looked like something in an ancient castle.
Shelves on either side of the hearth were filled with old books, many of them leatherbound, the rustic mantel carved with Eine Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott—a mighty fortress is our God.
When I was grown and writing Ruth’s biography, I would learn what those German words meant.
And that the thick plank of wood they were carved into was the former diving board from Lake Susan.
Ruth discovered it in the town dump during one of her many scavenges while building the house.
She had a knack for finding things nobody wanted, including people.
The medieval knight’s helmet on the mantel had a plume of silk bittersweet flowers flowing from the visor.
Above it was a musket and a black iron betty lamp.
Propped in a corner was a pair of tarnished copper coach horns.
A big leatherbound Bible and a coffee mug were on a chairside table next to a wingchair, the room centered by a tan and beige patterned rug.