Chapter 17
As they started a family, each secretly dreamed of becoming a missionary.
One day they decided to leave their comfortable lives behind.
After long months of rigorous training, they set out for Lubondai in what was then called the Belgian Congo.
Tshiluba was the main language spoken, the area rich in gold, diamonds, coffee, cotton, and tobacco.
The Saunders lived in a small, sunbaked brick house that had no running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing.
They kept a chicken coop, grew vegetables in raised beds, eating antelopes and other animals Manford shot in the jungle.
He caught fish in the nearby river, watching out for crocodiles.
Giant mounds around the house teemed with flying ants that the Saunders would roast and eat as a snack.
While I lived with the Saunders, Lenore often talked about her years in Africa, the stories harrowing and nothing like Tarzan.
She described getting a fever and slipping into a coma, her family and others believing she was dead.
She couldn’t react to them talking about placing her into a coffin.
She feared being buried alive, waking up just in time, and I remember my horror.
I admired and liked him immensely, and that began my fall from grace.
Lenore didn’t appreciate it when I began paying attention to him inside Buck’s Restaurant during that first dinner with them.
He didn’t seem to care how I held my fork or if I picked up a french fry with my fingers.
He didn’t glare or reprimand, and I talked to him instead of her.
It was pitch dark and freezing cold when we returned to Montreat, stopping at my house briefly, the lights off inside and out.
Lenore escorted my brothers and me to collect any belongings that Mom hadn’t burned.
Toothbrushes. Schoolbooks and supplies. Shoes.
My plastic coin purse. I remember the smell of smoke and soot, the cold air empty and dead.
The Saunders lived in Montreat on a back road near the baseball field.
I’d passed their place many times, noticing that the two-story wood-sided house was nicer than most. When we walked in, I was startled by the African animal trophies mounted on the living room wall.
Exotic birds flattened on plaques. Heads with horns.
I was reminded of Perry Nichols’s barge, and it seemed another bad sign.
My bedroom on the first floor had a dresser, a closet, and a full bathroom, luxurious by my standards.
It occurred to me that the Saunders seemed to have plenty of money for missionaries.
How else could they afford their big car and eating at Buck’s?
The older son was away at Springfield College in Massachusetts, the daughter at Queens College in Charlotte.
I was asked not to use their names and won’t.
The youngest child attended Asheville Country Day, an expensive private school that was rigorous academically.
Bright and hardworking, he’d been awarded a full scholarship.
Some of his projects looked college level to me, including an intricate model of a building he designed in the fourth grade.
I wasn’t surprised when he grew up to be a successful architect.
The mother, Lenore, was from a strict South Carolina family, her father a gentleman farmer.
He owned considerable land in Florence and wasn’t known for a kind disposition.
Sixty years old when Lenore was born, he couldn’t abide children or noise.
A severe disciplinarian, he’d be called abusive today, and Lenore was no different.
Her traits were exacerbated by growing up during the Great Depression, and spending the better part of a decade in the Congo, where danger literally was outside the door.
If her children didn’t do as instructed, they could be killed by wild animals like the leopards that drank out of the rain barrel near their small home.
Green mamba snakes camouflaged themselves in the grass and trees.
The black ones disappeared in the dirt and rocks, and there was no surviving a bite.
While Lenore was hanging up laundry one day a mamba reared up like a cobra.
It chased her back to the house, where her husband blew it away with a shotgun, also taking out their front door.
Mambas were just one threat. There were cobras, puff adders, pythons, and crocodiles.
Tsetse flies and mosquitoes carried sleeping sickness, malaria, and yellow fever.
Elephants could stampede and flatten a village.
When a herd was nearby, the ground would tremble and shake like an earthquake.
Lenore ruled her household with the severity of a prison wardress.
My brothers and I were undisciplined, and Mom used to call us schnickelfritzes, or mess pots.
Lenore had her hands full with us and was determined nothing would happen on her watch.
When I talked to her younger son in 2025, he told me that she was petrified my father would have us kidnapped.
She feared someone with a gun might show up at her door.
It was a constant worry that we would sneak out and end up abducted or dead.
I understand her concerns, but there’s little excuse for most of her behavior.
The house had an intercom system that was always turned on so she could hear what we were doing.
Our first night there I remember I was cold and scared.
I tucked in my arms and legs, rocking in bed, quiet so she didn’t hear me.
When I woke up the next morning, I looked out my window at trees materializing as the sun rose behind the snowy foothills.
The sky was marbled different shades of gray, reminding me of Dad’s boat cover when it rained.
A chickadee landed on a branch in a puff of whiteness, turning his head, looking right at me.
“Patsy, get up!”
The intercom blared with Lenore’s stern voice, reminding me of the witches I drew flying on brooms past the full moon. I hurried into the same clothes I’d had on the day before at the Grahams’ house. My brothers were upstairs, and I could hear them moving around as I walked into the kitchen.
Lenore was cooking eggs, ham, and something called grits that looked like Cream of Wheat. It clumped on the wooden spoon as she stirred the pot, and my stomach flopped. Once again, I had no appetite.
“Set the table and make the toast” was her good morning.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Meals were formal affairs in the dining room overlooking the front of the house.
I was mystified by the white linen cloth spotless and crisply ironed as if we were expecting important company.
Matching napkins were snuggly rolled in hand-carved ivory rings from the Congo, a velvet-lined wooden chest gleaming with sterling flatware.
We had silver and china in the breakfront at home from our lives in Miami. We’d yet to use it or the formal dining room table and matching chairs. Most meals were at the white Formica kitchen counter where my brothers and I perched on wooden stools. Sometimes we sat at the table in the family room.
Setting up for meals at our house meant folding paper napkins by each place.
Our everyday dishes were white with fluted edges, something inexpensive and durable that Mom bought at Kmart.
If a fork was required, that’s what each of us got.
If something needed cutting, she did it for us.
We drank out of Tupperware glasses, dirtying as little as possible.
The instant my brothers and I gobbled our food, the stools or chairs would scrape back as we got up without asking to be excused.
We didn’t bother carrying our dishes to the sink or know that we should.
When I began setting the Saunders’ table, I didn’t realize there was an order to it, rather much like arranging a chessboard.
I had no clue what to do with salad forks, dinner forks, butter knives, serrated knives, soup spoons, teaspoons, serving spoons, ladles, cake servers.
I picked out what seemed to make sense, arranging them with no rhyme or reason while panic mounted.
When Lenore saw the chaos I’d created, she was taken aback that I didn’t know better.
Clearly, I had no domestic skills whatsoever. She declared early on that it was time I learn how to cook and clean. At the time, I had no insight about why her default was to berate and terrorize. She seemed angry all the time like an animal turned vicious and fear-biting.
I’m unaware of when the Saunders’ marital problems began but suspect their relationship was strained in early 1966.
Lenore’s health was precarious after almost dying of malaria and other illnesses in Africa.
My brother Jim and I remember seeing her taking multiple pills at dinnertime.
Years of living in the primitive and dangerous conditions of the Congo made her a candidate for post-traumatic stress disorder.
I didn’t understand that my gender was a factor in her going after me.
Mom had many old-fashioned values, but she didn’t impose limitations on us.
She never said I couldn’t do anything my brothers did or that I was inferior somehow.
Not once did she tell me to stop playing with the boys, that I should stay home and do “women’s work. ”
“If you’d been helping your mother around the house, she wouldn’t have gotten sick!” Lenore often said, and I believed her.
At the age of nine I didn’t realize that my affection for her husband ignited her hostility toward me.
I don’t know how long he was unfaithful to her or when she became aware of it.
Maybe he’d had a wandering eye for a while.
I suspect she took exception to any female attention paid to him, including mine.