Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  Billy, it would turn out, was not at home in rusticity. His idea of comfort was a hotel. “When Bill gets to Heaven and finds it’s not like a Holiday Inn or a Marriott,” Ruth would joke over the years, “he’ll be back.” His only request regarding the new house was that it have comfortable chairs and adequate lighting.

  Ruth hired the same mountain men who had remodeled her parents’ home. Her fondness for the neighboring clans had begun when she hired “Old Dad” Roberts to come work for her at her first house. He was a short, wiry man with black hair and a busy mustache, and dark eyes like volcanic glass. He raised his voice almost to a chant when he talked about religion, and he had a talent for tracking rattlesnakes, which smelled like cucumbers, he claimed. When he detected a snake, Roberts would freeze and sniff as he slowly laid down his hoe or rake. “I smell me a rattlesnake,” he would announce. Workmen gathered around as he began stalking. When the enemy was spotted, Roberts would snatch it up behind its head and snap its neck like a raw green bean. Slitting the carcass with a penknife, he would tie a string to the tail and hang the rattlesnake over a tin can to drain it for “snake oil.”

  “It’s good for the rheumatiz,” he would explain.

  Roberts was as honest as a tuning fork, and when Ruth began building her home, he went to the mountain with her. Ambling through the property, he took apart old still furnaces, for moonshiners were no strangers to this part of the world. He rolled boulders along a streambed to the construction site, where they became part of the native rock walls around the house.

  The contractor was Gregg Sawyer, a mellow, good-natured man. Unlike several of the temperamental artisans who worked for him, he submitted to Ruth’s preferences. A taut leather belt encircled his ample middle, holding up a pair of perpetually wrinkled khaki trousers. Usually he wore a plaid flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and he had a habit of cleaning his wire-framed spectacles between his thumb and forefinger, smudging the lenses until it was a wonder that he could see a blueprint or drive a wooden peg into a floorboard. His chin was sandy with stubble and he wore a battered felt porkpie hat. Zeb Sawyer, his brother and partner, was the best fireplace builder in the valley. Both were craftsmen of the first order and in later years would be commissioned to restore former Governor Zebulon B. Vance’s birthplace in nearby Weaverville.

  Zeb Sawyer’s skill in building fireplaces and clean-drawing chimneys reached its zenith with the construction of Ruth’s house. Billy basically wanted none, and conceded that Ruth could build two. The instant he went out of town, she ordered Sawyer to build five as fast as he could. While a bootlegger mixed the mortar, Sawyer fashioned fireplaces in the guest room and Ruth’s bedroom. Those in the living room and the family room were as cavernous as they would have been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the family baking and cooking were done over the fire. The fireplace in Billy’s bedroom unfortunately smoked the first time he came home and saw what his wife had done.

  All but the frame of the new house was built of old wood, most from log cabins Ruth discovered in the mountains. Dressed in blue jeans and an army jacket, she drove her jeep through western North Carolina, stopping at gas stations to leave her telephone number with attendants in the event they heard of cabins for sale. Six months after her first inquiry, she began getting calls. She bought a two-story cabin for four hundred dollars. A dog-trot, or two cabins connected by a breezeway, she picked up for a hundred and twenty. Most cabins sold for about fifty dollars, and when she didn’t buy the entire building, she would pay several dollars per wormy chestnut, oak, or yellow poplar log. Often the owners of the cabins would throw in a few bonuses with the sales, such as an old lazy Susan table with a broken leg, a smokehouse, or a broadax that had been used to hew logs in a century past.

  She discovered a large, century-old Victorian house being torn down near Asheville and for forty-five dollars per thousand feet bought all of its usable heart-of-pine lumber. “Couldn’t buy it new for a hundred and twenty dollars a thousand,” Gregg Sawyer chuckled as he eyed her find. She became an expert at hand-staining new lumber, rubbing such curiosities as leftover lipsticks and shoe polishes into the wood until it was highlighted with subtle shades of red, gray, and brown, like the old wood she preferred. From a school razed in Asheville, she salvaged tons of old brick and floored the living room, a porch, and the glassed-in hallway that connected two wings of the house. She bought miscellaneous items from a salvage yard.

  Her building philosophy baffled and annoyed many of her workmen. “Use the new lumber for framing and the old lumber for finishing,” she reminded them daily.

  It didn’t make a bit of sense. They had all been born in log cabins, spending every night of their childhoods sleeping on feather beds with stars shining through the gaps in the shingles. They had worked hard to leave all that behind. Prosperity meant linoleum floors and department store furniture. They couldn’t understand why Ruth wanted the hundred-year-old lumber on the outside where everyone could see it. They could not figure out why she wanted the massive exposed beams in the living room roughed up with a broadax. Two rock masons quit on the spot when she asked them to build walls without the mortar showing, “to look like dry rock walls,” she explained.

  “If I can’t lay rock the way it’s sposed to be laid,” one mason told his boss, “then I’m not a-going to lay it.”

  A carpenter quit when she gave him weather-beaten log cabin doors and asked him to install them in the front hall closets. He picked up his satchel and stalked outside to the Sawyers. “I weren’t mad at none of you men,” he explained after announcing he was leaving. “But everything I done up there, I had to do wrong. A man can’t take no pride in this kind of work.”

  Troy Former, a tall, broad-shouldered plasterer, came close to quitting. He was respected as a master craftsman, his ceilings smooth as beaverboard. Ruth told him she wanted her ceilings imperfect, the wide sweeps of the trowel visible as they would have been two hundred years ago.

  “Go on back to the boiler room and practice,” she told him cheerfully.

  “OK, Mrs. Graham,” he said, “I’ll do it for you on one condition. You won’t tell anybody who did it.”

  The other men stayed on the job after Ruth volunteered to replace all broken drill bits and pay for the extra time it took to sharpen saw teeth dulled by nails embedded in the old wood. They continued muttering behind her back, saying they hoped nobody ever found out who had built her house, for they feared it just might ruin their reputations.

  As Ruth’s creation began to rise from the earth, Billy once more became suspicious that he had been relieved of all home responsibility. It was obvious, especially when the workmen would walk right past him to discuss business with his wife. His frustration began to surface.

  “Why is it,” he demanded one afternoon, “that my authority seems to end at home?”

  “Listen,” she said, “do you want me to call you every time a door needs painting, the furnace needs repairing, the septic tank needs emptying, the drains need cleaning…?”

  “No,” he had to admit.

  “I’m assuming the home responsibilities,” she explained, “to free you for your more important ones.”

  By late 1955, old logs were in place and chinked with rust-colored brixment, resembling the less durable red-clay chinking of the mountain cabins. The men built a split-rail fence around the yard and from the leftover lumber constructed Ruth’s and the guest rooms’ beds. Damming the stream below the house, they built a small swimming hole so cold it took your breath away when you first jumped in. Like the small pool Dr. Bell had built in Qingjiang, the one on the Graham property became the center of entertainment in the warm months. It was enjoyed by family, friends, tadpoles, water bugs, frogs, and an occasional water snake.

  Ruth furnished her home with castoffs, hunting in such unlikely places as the town dump, where the workmen found a heavy slab of wood that had once been Lake Susan’s diving board. It soon had been fashioned int
o the fireplace mantel in the living room and carved with “Eine Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott” (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God). She rummaged through furniture stores, antique shops, and junk shops. One day, she and a local antique dealer named Tom Rezutto followed a seldom-traveled dirt road to look at an old bench on a cabin porch. Hewn from solid board and complete with legs with Chippendale turnings, the bench was covered with dirt and chicken droppings, its only squatters obviously of the feathered variety. The owner, an old mountain man with a face like a dried apple, was sitting on the porch when Ruth parked her jeep beside his yard.

  “Would you like to sell your bench?” Rezutto asked him.

  “Nope, don’t think I care to sell it,” he said, staring past them with faded eyes. “I like to sit on it of an evenin’ and watch the cars go by.”

  “How about thirty dollars?” Ruth suggested.

  “Give me the money and take the bench,” he said.

  She made a deal with the workmen that for every old possum lantern they brought her she would buy them a new one. The old tin lanterns were wired and hung beside the outer doors, in hallways, and on the front porch. Visitors now will find the kitchen and its adjoining keeping room haven’t changed. Hand-forged tools and copper pots hang from the fireplace, and an old black-iron Betty lamp tapers above the musket over the mantel. Colorful braided rugs cover the floors. Indian corn and a wrought-iron smokehouse hook hang from the exposed beams, and the furniture is overstuffed and inviting.

  The living room is full of light, the ceiling high, and floors made of old brick are oiled to a soft shine. Two walls are built of cabin logs and the others from leftover chestnut paneling. An expansive, deep-set window overlooks the lawn, and two smaller ones overlook the ridge. Treasures from Ruth’s rummages in English junk shops are scattered about. On the hand-carved mantel is a medieval helmet with bittersweet flowing from the mask like a misplaced plume. A pair of coach horns is propped in a corner, and a heavy jousting helmet turned upside down on a wooden base serves as a wastepaper basket. Framed on walls are two original letters by John Wesley, the Graham coat of arms, an etching of the Madonna and Child, an oil painting of a Chinese peasant, and a brass plaque that reads, “Pray for China.” Old leather-bound volumes, acquired through years of visiting English and Scottish antiquarian shops, fill bookcases on either side of the fireplace. It is a warm, comfortable room that encourages folks to sit and stay awhile.

  Over the years Ruth’s creation would come as a surprise to people who had heard tales of Billy Graham’s mythical mansion, which the IRS once listed as including a hundred acres of arable land and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The first time singer Stuart Hamblen visited the Graham homestead he unfolded himself from the car and surveyed the place for a moment. “I thought you lived in a fine mansion,” he drawled. “Thank God for all them logs.” When the retired three-time world champion heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali visited in the fall of 1979, his reaction wasn’t quite as approving. “I thought he lived on a thousand-acre farm,” he marveled to the press. “And we drove up to this house made of logs; [it was] the kind of house a man of God would live in.” He politely refused Billy’s invitation to spend the night there.1

  In early 1956, the Grahams moved to the mountain. They named their homestead Little Piney Cove. By this time the workmen had reconsidered their early negative attitudes about their lady boss’s notions. They were so proud of what they had wrought that some of them asked if their wives could see it, and soon women arrived with housewarming presents of a Dutch oven and a handmade quilt. “This place sort of grows on you,” said workman James Sawyer, “and before you know it you catch yourself a-liking it.”

  Ruth and the mountain people had developed a mutual affection and respect. She admired their honesty and craftsmanship. Their skills were virtually lost arts, and so was their native gentleness. Likewise, the mountain folk found Ruth to be trustworthy, appreciative, and deferential. Her loyalty, they sensed, was nondiscriminating. She wasn’t scared of a thing and spoke her mind.

  One workman, Joe Tolliver, was a tall, husky man who had been an alcoholic before he got saved, as the natives put it. No sooner had Ruth moved up the mountain than Tolliver slid back to the bottom, drinking like a wild man and staggering home covered with blood after barroom brawls he didn’t recall. Darlene, his slender, pretty wife, would wait for him and then clean his wounds, hoping with every breath that he would change. Finally, she began visiting Ruth and pouring out her despair. One day, as a last resort, she asked Ruth if she would talk to him.

  Ruth found him stretched out on his bed, pale and weak.

  “Why?” she asked him.

  A veil of shame dropped over his eyes. “I’m guilty of ever’ sin in the book, Miz Graham,” he admitted. “I’m too weak to resist.”

  “I’m scared for you,” she told him softly.

  Soon after, Ruth received a plain white dime-store envelope containing a short note written by Darlene: “In case anything happens to me, will you keep my baby?”

  Ruth told her she would.

  Then there was Bud Lominac, whom Tolliver had introduced to Ruth in early 1956. Lominac, Tolliver told her, was a drunk, but if she would just take him on as a caretaker he would surely mend his ways. Ruth needed a man to cut the firewood, mow the lawn, and do other odd jobs around the house. She let Lominac move into one of the cabins.

  Early one morning, as he and Ruth headed to a distant valley where they were dismantling an old cabin, she offered him a cup of coffee.

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  “Do you like it strong or weak?” she asked.

  “Strong!” exclaimed Lominac. “You know, Miz Graham, it don’t take near as much water to make coffee as some folks think.”

  Over the months his cabin became so filthy that the other workmen mentioned it to Ruth.

  “Mr. Lominac,” Ruth told him one day, “you have two choices. Either clean that cabin or get you a wife.”

  “Iffen you don’t mind,” he replied with a grin, “I’ll clean up the cabin.”

  He did and spent many hours there, propped up in bed with his bottle of whiskey. Days would pass without his showing up at work, and when he did put in a token effort, he cheated on his time. One week he didn’t appear for five days and Ruth sent a workman to check on him. When the man returned from the cabin, he reported sheepishly that he had found Lominac in bed, “a-readin’ the Bible.”

  “You should have looked under the Bible,” Ruth retorted.

  Lominac would never admit that he drank. He might reek of whiskey yet he would look Ruth squarely in the eye and say thickly, “Before Gawd, Miz Graham, I don’t drink.” With reluctance, she fired him, replacing him with Floyd Roberts, Old Dad Robert’s son, who with his wife and five children lived in a small cabin just outside the Montreat gate on Rainbow Mountain. Their brick-colored, unpaved road snaked up from Assembly Drive and disappeared into the woods.

  Ruth had become acquainted with him when she lived in the house across the street from her parents. She often joked that she kept him around just to hear him talk and engage him in lively bantering sessions. Pontificating about politics, he would launch into a diatribe about the evil deeds of “Adof Hilter” and “Joe Stallion.” Ruth chided him because he refused to take his family to church.

  “Church’s full of hypocrites,” he usually replied.

  “Well, Floyd,” she would say, “there’s always room for one more.”

  Roberts became so fond of the Grahams that he named his sixth and seventh children after them. So it was that the real Billy and Ruth Graham lived up a steep road to the left after one entered the Montreat gate, and their namesakes lived up a steep road to the left after one exited. Unsurprisingly, some of Montreat’s younger and more devilish neighbors occasionally directed unsuspecting Graham fans to the wrong Billy and Ruth.

  Needless to say, the mountain folk didn’t always appreciate the thousands of cheery Presbyterians and Baptists who stampeded below the
ir mountain into Montreat each summer for conferences and perhaps a peek at where the “Baptist pope of the Presbyterian Heaven lived,” as one minister referred to Billy. If a misguided tourist strayed from the herd and lumbered up Rainbow Mountain instead of Little Piney Cove, he couldn’t count on any sympathy. He most likely would pass by a certain unpainted cabin where there lived a woman who didn’t exactly qualify as the hostess of a welcome station. Worn out from too much work and too little comfort, she had little regard for tourists. On a typical summer day, she could be found sitting on her front porch, unperturbed, a shotgun propped on a nearby chair.

  Legend has it that one sweltering summer day, two men in a Cadillac made that wrong turn. When they reached the cabin and the unfriendly old woman who lived in it, the fancy car rocked to a quick halt, stirring up pinging gravel and billowing red dust. A window was rapidly rolled down and a smiling face greeted the woman’s inscrutable one.

  “’Scuse me, ma’am, but could you please tell me where Billy Graham’s …” the man’s voice trailed off as the oddity of the situation Struck him. “We must have made a wrong turn, ’cause this doesn’t look like …” he added lamely.

  Seconds later, the Cadillac was careening down the mountain, a double-barreled shotgun load of rock salt whizzing past the rear bumper. With so many tourists violating the local residents’ territory in search of Billy Graham, it was a wonder that the mountain folk and their neighbors didn’t resent the Graham family. But they were fiercely loyal to them. Ruth was known to carry casseroles or pots of soup to them when there was illness in a family, and she was always there to offer comfort in bereavement.

  She did the same for her Montreat neighbors. On one occasion a widow returned home from church to find that Ruth not only had left her a pot roast for dinner but had cleaned the oven. If a journalist made the mistake of telephoning one of the mountain folk to ask about the Grahams, he was answered by a resounding click. If a neighbor was asked, he likely answered with a smile and a platitude.