“Marvin,” she said, hugging him with feeling.
Since late June he had been touched only by the hands that restrained him. He was lifted and moved by her warmth, and would later say that the idea of her still caring after what he had done was overwhelming. Most people would have consigned him to oblivion, he was certain. It was a paradox of her existence that she was clear and no-nonsense when dealing with the concept of anything the Bible labels as wrong. This sort of cataloging was easy enough until a sin became embodied by a human being, until she came face to face with the adulterer, the thief, the murderer, or the friend or child who had gone astray. Then Ruth was no judge, but a friend, the first to say someone was wrong, but loved and worthwhile.
She was often the first to visit the lawbreaker or appear at the crime scene, her impulse, like her physician father’s, not to punish, but to heal and help. Years later, a Montreat woman would sneak into a neighbor’s home and kill herself with a shotgun. Ruth arrived with towels to help clean up the gory mess. She moved the family up to her house for the night, and paid to have the room repainted and refurnished, to obliterate reminders of what had happened there.
“What does God say to a Christian who’s committed suicide?” a member of the woman’s family asked.
“I once heard someone say,” Ruth replied tenderly, “‘God did not call her home, but He welcomed her.’”
“What about punishment?” she was often asked. “God does not punish us for our sins but by them,” she would say.
When a young friend dropped out of college and was hospitalized for an eating disorder, Ruth was the first neighbor to call and take her out for an afternoon. As they drove to Asheville, she gave her young friend encouragement. There was no humiliating and invasive probing, no quizzing as to why the young woman wanted to quit college and slowly die. Ruth offered no quick offers of easy fixes, no advice. She voiced no judgment when marriages fell apart, and did not nag about smoking or alcohol. In truth, no matter what she preached in her Sunday school classes, it was the reality of those who knew her that she could not think in rules when faced with people who had lost their way.
Guards in black slacks and kelly green jackets stood sentry, bored and cynical that afternoon in Jackson. They eyed Marvin King and his guest with mild curiosity.
“Isn’t that Billy Graham’s wife?” one whispered loud enough for King to hear.
“Why should this black convict be having such famous company?” the other asked in a loud sarcastic tone.
She sat in an upholstered chair, King across from her on a bench.
“You were wrong,” she told him. “But you still have a chance. The Lord can forgive you. You can be a witness.”
“I have been living disobediently,” he told her quietly. “But I have truly repented, and though I cannot undo this horrible deed I am grateful I can at least pay my debt to society. I can accept God’s forgiveness but it’s hard for me to forgive myself.”
“Marvin, let me tell you a story,” she said. “Some fishermen in the highlands of Scotland came back to an inn for tea. Just as the waitress was serving them, one of the men began describing the day’s catch in the typical fisherman’s gestures, and his right hand collided with a teacup. The contents splashed all over the whitewashed wall and an ugly brown stain emerged.”
“I’m so terribly sorry,” the fisherman apologized repeatedly.
“Never mind,” said a man who jumped up from a nearby table.
“Pulling a crayon from his pocket, he began to sketch around the tea stain, and there emerged a magnificent royal stag with antlers spread. The artist was Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, England’s foremost painter of animals. If an artist can do that with an ugly brown stain, what can God do with my sins and my mistakes if I but turn them over to Him?”
Later, he watched her leave, walking gracefully. She carried her black leather Bible, dull and soft from use, with pages so swollen and fragile that she now bound the book with a black leather belt, her Bible belt, she jokingly called it. He felt a tightness in his chest, and would recall her words continually, month after month. Periodically he received letters from her and classical music tapes. Two and a half years later he was transferred to Muskegon Correctional Facility in Michigan, and two and a half years after that was granted an early parole.
“I sometimes find it hard to forgive myself,” he reflected years later. “But Ruth was a woman God chose to use in keeping the candle of hope and love burning when fate had plunged me into the abyss of guilt and despair.”
In the fall of 1976 the administrators at Montreat-Anderson College and Calvin Thielman planned what they called the Fall Festival of Faith. The guest singers were Armenian brothers Dennis and Danny Agajanian. Ruth drafted them, forming a roving band that began showing up at such places as the Juvenile Evaluation Center, the Veterans Hospital, the Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center, local high schools, the Orthopedic Hospital, and the county jail.
Without the demands of home, she immersed herself in the suffering of others, carrying with her the message of love and forgiveness. In the Orthopedic Hospital, she stopped by the bed of Cindy, a five-year-old girl who had once been pretty, with delicate features and curly brown hair. Two years earlier her mobile home had caught fire, and she received third-degree burns over most of her body, her features melted away like wax. She was hideous to look at, her head smooth like a cabbage. Life to her was broken in half. “There was the time before I was burned,” she would whisper, “and there is now.” When hospital attendants passed out little presents, she always chose costume rings, though she had no fingers.
Through two tiny holes she glanced shyly at this woman hovering over her. A hand lightly touched her shoulder. The face was soft and smiling.
“Honey,” Ruth said to her, “what would you like this man to sing to you?”
“Jesus …” Cindy began to cry mutely, small drops trickling down her scarred face, as Dennis Agajanian bent down to her eye level and played “Jesus Loves Me” on his guitar.
At the city jail a female inmate also wept as the Agajanians sang. Ruth talked to her, touching her through the bars. “Perhaps the Lord Jesus allowed you to come to a place like this so you could learn of Him.”
Ruth befriended a twenty-year-old convicted murderer named Carol, a bright, green-eyed blonde from Kingsport, Tennessee. By Carol’s fifteenth birthday she had been arrested on drug charges and sent to a rehabilitation center in Asheville. By twenty, her drug habit was costing her five hundred dollars a day. On December 28, 1976, she borrowed her boyfriend’s .357 Magnum revolver. She tucked her hair beneath a dark blue ski mask and attempted to rob an Asheville beauty salon. She claimed it was an accident when the gun discharged and killed the shop’s seventy-four-year-old receptionist. Three months later, Ruth visited Carol in the county jail. Ruth wrote her and called when Carol began serving a sixty-year sentence in Raleigh’s Correction Center for Women.
“I had a lot of people that tried to get in the jail to see me, the more or less want-to-save-your-soul type people,” Carol recalled from prison. “Most of them were trying to cram a whole Bible down my throat in fifteen minutes, typical for this section of the country anyway…. I was hearing so much of how I was being damned and going to hell. But Ruth wasn’t like that. She wasn’t judgmental. She didn’t try to push me.”
The stories weren’t always warmly poignant. There were days when the world snapped at Ruth and her partners. One day they visited war veterans in a local hospital, and as soon as the guitar began to play, an old man jabbed a finger in each ear and rolled his wheelchair out of the room, disgusted. On another afternoon as Ruth, Calvin, and the Agajanians headed back to Montreat, they stopped the car at Pack Square in downtown Asheville to run an errand, inadvertently parking in front of a pornographic bookstore. Without a word, Dennis left the car and sauntered inside.
“Dennis,” remarked Ruth to the others, “has no idea what kind of shop that is.”
Moments later he burs
t out the door, shouting. He climbed up on the car hood and had just begun to strum his guitar when a short, portly police officer waddled up, looking a bit like an overdone Christmas pudding, as Ruth described him, and rather angry.
He ordered Dennis to stop singing. “I always obey the law,” Dennis replied, climbing down.
Then the officer ordered him not to move until he radioed for his supervisor. Ruth and Calvin boiled from the car. “This amounts to false arrest!” they objected hotly.
Another officer arrived, informing them matter-of-factly that if they wanted to have a street meeting, they’d have to get a permit.
“All right,” Ruth said. They promptly drove to City Hall where, much to her amusement, she was issued a slip of paper that read: “Mrs. Billy Graham has permission to sing at Pack Square.”
The next day Ruth, the Agajanians, and a busload of Montreat-Anderson students unloaded at Pack Square. They held their street meeting, abruptly awakening the Christmas pudding officer who had been sitting inside his Cushman beneath the obelisk. He stepped outside to investigate, walking with uncertainty, when a six-foot-seven, three-hundred-pound college student with bushy brown hair billowing over his shoulders lumbered toward him.
“God bless you,” the giant said, handing the befuddled officer a tract.
The student, who most of his life had been known as “Moose,” was one of the Agajanian brothers’ converts. Of course, he was one of Ruth’s newly acquired friends. Malcolm Winger was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, son of a mill executive. Winger’s mother had died of cancer two days before Christmas when he was twelve. “And I pretty much made up my mind then that I was going to be my own man,” he recalled years later in an interview. “I never agreed with my father and I was going to be totally different from him.”
A talented guitarist, Winger succumbed to the enticements of rock and roll and the self-destructive lifestyle that often goes with it. After high school he washed up on the shores of Montreat-Anderson College, and on a fall night in 1976, he and several friends were walking in the rain, popping a mixture of speed and heroin called MDA. Drenched and dazed, they slogged through the puddled sidewalk flanking Anderson Auditorium, a massive native-stone building between the lake and the post office. The auditorium’s windows glowed and the applause inside sounded like the rain beyond. The concert ended and Billy and Ruth Graham moved into a receiving line in the lobby to greet guests. Winger and friends peered in from a side door, eyes glazed with chemicals and mischief.
“I dare you to go in there and shake hands with Billy Graham,” one of the fellows nudged Winger with a laugh.
“Just watch,” he replied.
Clad in tattered T-shirt, patched blue jeans, and a twenty-year-old Pendleton jacket, his long wet hair plastered to his meaty back, he pushed through the door. Strolling through a sea of tuxedos and evening gowns, he boldly made his way to the line. He shook the Grahams’ hands simultaneously. Ruth smiled.
“I was there to shock everybody. But she wasn’t upset. She wasn’t shocked,” Winger would later say. “She was radiant and friendly. It was like I was in a tuxedo.”
Weeks later, he met the Agajanians, and Dennis brought him to Ruth’s house. “When I walked in,” Winger recalled, “I expected this very staunch prude. But you can’t get past her laughing eyes. You immediately become attracted to her.”
They became friends. She wrote and telephoned, advising him as if he were a son. She played pranks at his expense, and invited his friends to her home for pizzas and discussions. But what meant most to Winger was that she took an interest in his music. He and a friend named Rodney “Flash” Ferrell had formed a band. Ferrell, from Johnson City, Tennessee, was five foot ten and weighed a hundred and thirty pounds, a rowboat to Winger’s Titanic.
Ferrell had earned the name “Flash” during high school football days when he would wind and weave to avoid being tackled. A guitarist, Ferrell had been entrusted with a set of keys to the college choir room where the public address system and various amplifiers were kept. The equipment, which rested neatly on the Montreat Presbyterian Church platform on Sunday mornings, made the rounds on the weekends, when Ferrell and Winger would sneak it out of the choir room and use it for their barroom acts.
Their ear-shattering rock and roll was complete with original Christian lyrics like “Jesus help me quickly, I’m sinking in the sewer.” In the spring of 1978, just before they graduated, they invited Ruth to one of their concerts, certain she wouldn’t come. She surprised them by arriving at the opening song and sitting through it all, a good sport who wished she had remembered to take aspirin before leaving the house. When the last note died away, she approached them.
“How would you like to attend this Bible school in Colorado?” she asked, referring to Ravencrest Chalet in Estes Park.
“Well,” Winger said with a good-natured shrug, “why not?”
She sent both of them there.
Most people she tried to rescue were not transformed overnight, if ever. After Bible school Winger began playing the bar circuit. Ferrell drifted. Tony Mendez disappeared, leaving his battered gray Oldsmobile rusting on the Graham mountain until weeds pushed through the floorboard and Ruth had it towed away. When he reappeared in the spring of 1982, it was in a red Cadillac with white leather seats. He owned an arcade of slot machines and video games in Barbados, he told her. He added brightly that he was merely saving his money until he could afford to become a minister and join the mission field.
“Tony, in one gambling city, our security guard told us that those big hotels with the casinos in them have separate elevators to carry out the corpses,” Ruth said to him. “There’s nothing wrong with making money. It’s how you make it and what you do with it.”
They stood in the driveway, pausing before he left again.
“I guess one of the first things I need to do is sell that car and get a small one,” he said, his face pained as he looked lovingly at the red Cadillac.
“I think it would be a very good idea, because, Tony, you don’t want to drive up outside of a little country church in that long, bright red Cadillac.”
“You know, Ruth,” he said, “I guess that’s my ghetto mentality.”
Later, he would wind up in the hotel business in Las Vegas.
20
CHAPTER
Darkness Over the Face of the Earth
THE GRAHAM HOME IN THE MOUNTAINS
At last, you have come, and you have brought the sunshine with you.
—Polish girl to Ruth, 1978
Between 1977 and 1980, Ruth traveled around the world twice, following her husband throughout the United States and then to Hungary, Poland, Sweden, and the Philippines. When the trips were over, she was weary beyond remedy, and determined to stay on her mountain as much as possible for the rest of her days. Billy’s taking her on the road, she decided, was rather like a general taking his wife to battle.
In early February of 1978, the couple traveled to Las Vegas for a five-day crusade, their arrival coinciding with a macabre event that was being bruited about in the press. A beautiful young Spanish-American woman named Maria Torres had hacked off her left hand with a machete, claiming that Jesus had told her to do it. Reporters seemed interested in linking the story with the Billy Graham crusade. “What would Satan love better,” Ruth commented at the time, “than to have her do something hideous like that and blame it on Jesus?”
At the first press conference a reporter asked Billy if he planned to visit Maria in the hospital. Ruth wouldn’t hear of it. She reminded him, “It’s sure to be turned into a media event, which would defeat the purpose of the visit.” That afternoon she went in his stead. A nurse told her that Maria was sleeping and promised to telephone her when the young woman was ready to see her.
The call came the next day. In the hospital room Ruth was greeted by a lovely face with wide, brown eyes. Ruth sat beside her and gently touched the reattached left hand, bound at the wrist and resting on a pillo
w. It was black and as cold as death. For the first time since the young woman’s self-inflicted mutilation, she began to talk. After an hour of rambling about Old Testament massacres, a previous drug addiction, and her recent live-in boyfriend, she told Ruth why she had cut off her hand.
She was reading the Old Testament, she said, when suddenly, “I realized I was not living the way I should and I heard a voice saying ‘Because you are not living the way you should I want you to take a knife and cut off your left hand.’ The voice kept saying, ‘Cut it off! Cut it off! Cut it off!’” She tried a carving knife and then the machete. “I screamed and I screamed. But I hacked and I hacked and I finally got the thing off.”
At that moment, a doctor arrived to wheel Maria to the operating room, where the hand was to be reamputated. Ruth bent over her and said, “Jesus never told you to cut off your hand. It was the Devil. He can quote the Bible, too. Jesus loves you. Whenever you need Him, call. He’ll be right there.”
Later Ruth asked some doctors, “Could Maria possibly have experienced a drug flashback?”
“No,” they said.
Two days later Maria was transferred to a psychiatric ward in another hospital. Again, Ruth went to see her, carrying an inscribed New Testament to substitute for Maria’s Gideon Bible. “I wanted to get her out of the Old Testament,” she later explained, “especially the Old Testament massacres, because there is no way she would understand them.” Ruth found her sitting cross-legged in the center of her bed, her open Bible in her lap, cradled between her right hand and the freshly bandaged stump.
“Maria,” Ruth said, “look, I brought you another Bible.”
Her eyes remained riveted to an Old Testament passage, her body rigid, slightly swaying like a cobra. Slowly, she lifted her head, staring at Ruth with dull, unblinking hate.
Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham Page 27
