The Bell children got out and explored. In the backyard Virginia discovered the crumbled balustrade and inquired if they could each have two bricks from it to take back with them. Ruth headed straight toward the eight-foot-high gray brick wall at the edge of the yard.
“I wonder if it’s the same wall,” she muttered to herself. “I wonder. Right along here…”
“What was there?” Yeaworth asked her.
“My little pet dog,” Ruth said, referring to Tar Baby, the mongrel she’d buried among the irises half a century before. “My first one and the one I loved most,” she said as she took slow steps, absorbed in an unsuccessful search.
Inside, whitewashed walls were mottled like greasy butcher’s paper, and naked lightbulbs dangled from twisted cords. It was time for tea, and they were led upstairs into a room dominated by a large table. They were seated in what had once been their parents’ bedroom.
“I’m sure our father would be very, very happy to know that we his children have come back here,” Rosa told their hosts. “He always loved the people in Qingjiang. He dreamed about them many, many times.”
“People here,” a Chinese man replied in English, “still have very good memory of your father and they knew that many of them were treated by your father and they knew that your father had done good things.”
There was more exploring, and reminiscing out loud and squabbling about the previous location of furniture and whose bedroom had been where. The nook in the house Ruth wanted to see most was her favorite attic bedroom over the kitchen wing. But it was impossible, their Chinese host told her, for the occupants had locked the door and he did not have a key. The party was told it was time to leave. Reluctantly, the Bell family headed for the cars. The only visible sign that they had ever lived there were two hooks in the porch ceiling where the swing had once hung.
As they continued the tour of the compound, they found that all of the buildings they had known as children were standing except for the Woodses’ home, the boys’ school and the men’s hospital. The women’s hospital and administration building were missing entire floors and had been converted into classroom buildings. The hospital where Dr. Bell had practiced surgery was now a technical school. The Chinese-style house where Ruth had been born still stood, as did the schoolhouse where Lucy Fletcher had taught Rosa, Ruth, Sandy Yates, and the Talbot boys each morning.
“The walk to school,” as Ruth remembered it, “had been long.” But now she was surprised at how close it was to the house. It seemed that time shrank distance and buildings as well as people. The schoolhouse had been newly whitewashed and each room was filled with industrious young students, with heads bent intently over books while a portrait of Chairman Mao watched them from above the blackboard. The family toured several former missionary homes. All were overcrowded. Porches had been bricked in to make extra space, and entire families lived in one room. The Chinese guides could not contain their amazement that this American family had once had an entire two-story house to themselves.
“What,” the interpreter asked Rosa, “did you do with all that room?”
By afternoon it was time to leave. Ruth, Rosa, Virginia, and Clayton took more photographs of their old house and climbed back into the limousines, preparing to drive to a nearby garment factory for another tour. When they emerged from the brick gate, they found the street lined with hundreds of Chinese applauding and waving. An elderly man rushed toward the car and grabbed Clayton’s hand through the open window, shaking it warmly and with recognition. When Nelson Bell had left China he had been the same age his son was now. Ruth wondered who among the crowd along the roadside remembered her parents. She would never know.
On May 15, at a sandalwood factory in Suzhou, Ruth bought a fan for ten dollars because its spicy fragrance stirred up memories of her mother fanning herself and perhaps a nearby child during church services and prayer meetings in the stifling hot Qingjiang summers. In an open market downtown she spotted an old Chinese peasant loitering beside his cart. She began bartering with him over the bian dan propped beside him, holding up one, two, and finally five yuan. He took the money and handed her the split bamboo pole which the Chinese had used for centuries to carry burdens across their shoulders. As she picked up her new purchase, the crowd began to yell at the old man, claiming he had cheated her.
“You charged her too much,” a young soldier shouted. “You should give her some back.”
The man sheepishly handed one yuan back to Ruth.
“She could have gotten it for sixty cents in the country,” a peasant woman muttered as Ruth walked away.
Ruth returned to her group and found the interpreter laughing. He explained that the money she had paid the old man was special money issued by the government to tourists and worthless to the natives.
“Well, anyone crooked enough to charge me so much will find a way to spend it,” Ruth replied.
The morning of May 18, the family attended a Sunday service at the Mo An Church. The sanctuary was filled and they were told that people had begun lining up at three o’clock that morning to get seats. Entering the old Gothic building, they were greeted by the piano playing “This Is My Father’s World.” Other traditional hymns and a sermon followed. That night, a retired Chinese schoolteacher approached Ruth. He was the son-in-law of the former pastor of the Chinese church the Bells had attended so many years ago in Qingjiang. The man told Ruth that he had once had a badly infected foot and had visited Dr. Bell.
“Your father not only healed my foot,” he said, “he led me to Jesus Christ and I am a Christian today. I am your father’s fruit.”
That afternoon Ruth asked their government companion if she could visit a Chinese man and his wife, a couple known and loved by friends of Ruth’s in the States. The man, a former pastor, had been released the previous March after twenty-two years of imprisonment with hard labor. His wife had spent fifteen years in another camp. Permission was granted and she took a taxi to the quiet street, finding the cramped, two-story house where the couple lived. The doorman told Ruth that the man and his wife were not in. In broken Chinese Ruth left the message that she would be back at five o’clock that afternoon. She returned to her hotel, disappointed and frustrated.
“You know I needed to see them,” she prayed silently. “I need to learn from them. We who have never been through what they have been through need to hear how You supported them. It may help prepare us for what lies ahead.” The words floated through her mind, “Look to the Rock from whence you were hewn.”
Later, she wrote, “We are so prone to look to one another for help which we can only get from Him. When our time comes, He will sustain us, not with what He used to sustain these dear Christians necessarily, but He will sustain us Himself in whatever way He sees we need the most.” When she returned to the apartment several hours later, her desire, she recalled, was to go in, “not in order to get, but to give.”
The doorman led her upstairs and, without knocking, opened the couple’s apartment door. Ruth found herself facing a thin, balding man squinting at her curiously. “His eyes were almost blind with cataracts. His wife was younger and almost as blind. ‘At least,’ the wife pointed out, ‘she had more teeth than her husband had.’ He has five teeth, it was her wont to tease, only two of which meet.”
Ruth introduced herself and the man’s mouth spread into a wide grin. Weeks earlier, several Chinese friends in the United States had asked Ruth to visit the elderly couple. One woman had suffered in a labor camp with the wife. She asked Ruth to deliver a letter and photographs to the couple. The pastor held the photographs close to his nose and talked excitedly when he recognized the figures. Ruth produced the letter and, mindful of the couple’s deafness, read it at the top of her voice, though she was sure that anyone outside the apartment could hear every word.
“Once,” said the pastor toward the end of the visit, “your father invited me to Qingjiang to hold meetings for the hospital staff and the patients who could walk and th
e families of the patients. But,” he paused apologetically, “I was too busy.”
“That’s understandable,” Ruth assured him.
She left them, somehow learning what she had wanted to know. There was no bitterness or complaining, no hatred for those who had caused their suffering. There was peace. The husband and wife were grateful because they had been given the strength to bear it all. At 4 Quinsan Road, when Ruth found the old four-story Mission Home, she remembered a young girl on top of the sheets in the stuffy darkness, crying because she did not want to leave home. She remembered preferring death to the pain of separation. She remembered being given the strength to endure it all.
Ruth would return to China twice more before arthritis and other ailments would render such arduous travel impossible. She had become the missionary she had always wished to be, but somehow could never quite see it. She had built her life ruggedly and alone, really, on the Roof of the World on top of her mountain. She had healed and left her mark on others as privately as she might have on a compound in another land. Ruth had loved a man who needed her, and lives were changed in a world that did not seem much better.
1. Ruth Bell Graham, Sitting by My Laughing Fire (Waco, Tex.: Word Books, 1977), 226.
Little Piney Cove, 1996
RUTH AND BILLY GRAHAM
Many years have passed for the house on the mountain and the woman who built it. Time has weathered old wood, and, last I checked, the rail fence around the yard had been chewed up by scary dogs that bark at air and lick. All that training in Germany, I always think as they wag their tails when people drive in. Chester the cat recently passed on, and I feel very guilty since I’ve teased Ruth for years about how enormously fat he was. In my letters to her, I used to draw rather rude cartoons of him ballooning bigger than the Graham mountain.
He was so inflated with self that when he sat in Ruth’s lap, she complained she could not breathe. I witnessed this on a number of occasions while we were visiting before the fire in her living room. Chester would silently sneak in and up he’d jump. When she would gently put him down and check to see if her bones were intact, it sounded like a medicine ball thudding on old heart-of-pine flooring.
There is now a new Chester, this one much smaller, although I know it is simply a matter of time. Ruth’s house is still well stocked with field mice that scratch inside the walls at night, causing me to sit straight up in bed, my heart crazed with fright. Since I wrote her biography, my emotional landscape has been dramatically changed by shadows and morbid things. She says she drove me to murder.
She claims it is hard for her not to take it personally that my first activity after writing her book was to find a morgue and immerse myself in homicide for the rest of my days. I am often asked about what seems an incongruous and jolting transition in my career, but it really does make sense. Ruth is good. She is love and life. Knowing her inspired me to create a character who wants to leave the world a little better than she found it.
Besides, after the biography, I missed her. For years, I had Ruth by my side, even when she wasn’t there. Then my work with her was done. I decided I had to find some other remarkable person who would put up with me for more than one crime. That’s the genesis of Scarpetta, the heroine of my series. It is Ruth’s fault. She is responsible for people around the world knowing a lot more about blood spatter patterns, autopsies, and DNA.
It’s hard to know Billy’s thoughts. I remember he came home from a crusade and found his wife wearing a necktie she had gotten from me. I have a photograph. I can prove it. He’s suspicious about what other mysteries I might bootleg up there, and fixes me in a blue stare as intense as the light sources my scientists use.
“What are you doing to my wife?” he said. “I come home and she’s wearing a tie.”
“It’s very stylish,” I nervously replied.
He thinks about this, trying to be open-minded as he pries the lid off a big tin of popcorn.
“Want some?” He offers it to me as he helps himself.
Ruth is in another part of the house, and the dogs start to bark. I can hear her slippers along the polished old brick hall. It is dark out, and the canary in its cage over her favorite chair starts to sing. Ruth walks in, tightening the sash around her robe; she is seventy-six and still beautiful, as life continues to sculpt her into something finer.
“They’re hungry,” Billy says to her as their two-hundred-pound German shepherds continue to bay pitifully.
He goes out with treats, and the silence lasts maybe fifteen minutes before he goes out again with more biscuits.
“Honey,” Ruth says, “now you’ve made sure they’ll bark all the time.”
She’s always been the one who disciplines people and pets. Billy is simply incapable of that. A humble, unaffected human being, he walks into a room in jeans, his shirt half tucked in, telling Ruth he can’t find his glasses (because he has them on). He acts as if I’m doing him a favor whenever I spend my time with them. He’s always seemed to think that other people are more famous than he is.
I was to join them in a small European seaside city several years ago, and by the time I arrived he had let everyone know. He was bragging about me to people who mostly spoke French. Billy is fascinated by what other people think, it doesn’t matter who. Some months back, we were watching one of his crusades on TV. Ruth and I were mesmerized, and he kept trying to change the channel while the canary competed with his preaching.
“We don’t need to see this,” he kept complaining, pointing the remote control from his recliner chair.
“Yes, we do,” Ruth said.
She never could take her eyes off him. She asked her bird to stop singing, and it wouldn’t, so Billy unfolded his considerable length. He unhooked the cage from a rough exposed beam and carried the protesting bird to another room.
“I hope I did the right thing,” Billy worried when he returned.
But the canary wasn’t on his mind as he sat back down with a troubled sigh. A Christian rock band had begun to play, and the drummer had long hair and was serious with his sticks.
“I think it’s great,” I chimed in.
“You know,” he went on, “I never would have allowed anything like this back in the old days.”
“Bill,” Ruth replied. “Look. There must be thirty thousand young people in the stands watching this instead of playing games on the Internet or reading trashy books.”
“Are you working on a new one?” he asked me, by the way.
Ruth has not so subtly suggested over the years that I use too many cuss words. I explain it’s the characters who talk like that, not me. She once wrote me a note: If I would clean up my language, she thought my crime novels would sell like hot-cakes. She doesn’t read them, probably has never read a single one, and I pay her back whenever I can. For example, in The Body Farm, which is set near Montreat, several of the characters make mention of their legendary neighbors Billy Graham and his wife. They whisper rumors they hear.
Before I give Ruth a lovingly signed copy of my latest novel, I secretly draw little boxes throughout its pages, and pencil in, “Check here if you’re still reading.” Of course, she never is. I once tried reading aloud to her. We sat on her porch in the gnarled rocking chairs that LBJ gave them, and I read, skipping over anything with four letters that I knew she wouldn’t like. I was very patient as she listened with a sweet smile, rocking, looking out at sun shining on the Blue Ridge mountains.
I skipped over another word or two, and got surprised by a love scene I had forgotten was there. I quickly flipped past pages that Ruth didn’t seem to miss.
“Patsy, how about some tea?” She got up right in the middle of the most exciting part. “You certainly have a way with words. Always did, but I don’t want to tire you out.”
She gave me my first leather-bound journal and told me I should be a writer when I was just a young girl down the road. When I used to walk to the tennis courts or post office, let’s say, and she would pass me going
the other way, I’d wait a bit and turn around. Later, she’d reappear, and since we were both heading the same direction now, she’d open the door and let me in. I always ended up right back where I started from, usually at my house. I’d wait until she disappeared in a swirl of exhaust, and head out again to wherever I was supposed to be going. Sometimes I had to run the entire way, because I was late.
I did anything to be with her for even a minute. She always admired my brother’s hand-me-downs, asked about my mother and what I was learning in school. When she wanted to read my poetry, I didn’t believe it was true. I found out she wrote poems, too, and painted funny creatures on the shutters of log cabins and cupboards. Maybe that’s where I got the idea to collect smooth rocks from the stream behind my house and turn them into silly painted birds that I glued to deadwood and moss. I gave her those and words.
I thought she was the loveliest, kindest person ever born. I still do. I thought there must be something special about me, too. Why else would she notice that I played baseball and tennis better than the boys, or wrote poetry and songs and was lonely?
I judge someone by how he treats children and those who are wounded and don’t have much. I remember a brilliant fall day when I arrived for a visit and walked into her house, calling out her name while the guard dogs licked me and nudged my legs. I couldn’t find Ruth anywhere, and I carried my bags to the room upstairs where I always stay. She had left a note on my pillow, distinctively penned by a hand that curls almost backward when it writes.
“Patsy, I’ll be right back,” it said. I sat on a bed not of this century and so high I have to climb up steps to get to it. I looked at the note for a long time as leaves blazed beyond the window beneath a perfect sky. I reread the words and stared, knowing I would always keep the scrap of paper somewhere. I felt like crying, but never told her.