Mississippi Sissy (28 page)

I let go of Mom's hand and rushed into the kitchen. I grabbed onto the counter and took deep breaths. “Honey, you all right?” I heard her voice ask behind me once she had made it to the door. “Is it the Holy Ghost? Is it something you ate?”

I turned and hugged her, hugged her as tightly as I could without hurting her. “N-nobody loves me,” I said, trying not to sob. It was the meanest thing I now know I could have possibly said to her. “N-nobody loves me, Mom. N-nobody.”

She fashioned again something that resembled a fist and hit me over and over with it on my back where she held on to me and would not let me go. Unlike me, she was glad to have an excuse to cry. “Oh, honey. Don't you say no such thing. Don't you dare,” she said. “You ain't nothin' but loved. You just have t'learn how t'feel it. There's somethin' inside you that's always fought bein' loved. I ain't never understood it. I just know it's a fact as true as anything Billy Graham can quote letter-perfect from the Bible. Don't fight it so. It's a fine thing: to be loved.
You go on and feel it. No more fightin' it off.” Her fist pounded me. “You listen t'Mom. Stop a'cryin'. Stop it now. Shshsh . . .”

Billy Graham had disappeared from the television in the other room and I heard Carol Burnett now answering questions from her studio audience. Mom hummed “Just As I Am” and rocked me in her unsteady arms. The audience laughed at an answer.

________________

Billy Graham has continued to play a part in my family's life long after those nights when Mom and I would watch his crusades and try not to cry when the Holy Ghost moved through yet another stadium full of families with histories no doubt just as troubled, just as tragic as our own, families who also sought solace and sometimes, as we did, found it when all that was left them was faith. Religion's consoling presence in our lives cannot be discounted while my brother and sister and I were growing up, but its hold on Kim and Karole has remained steadier, its grasp more secure, than it has in my own life. Maybe it's because they still live in Mississippi and churchgoing is not so much a choice one makes there; it is a social obligation. That is not to say their deeply held religious beliefs are not sincere. I'm sure such beliefs have enabled them to heal from our shared past in ways I have been unable to heal. It has molded them into good and decent people, though very dissimilar in their grown-up lives. Karole, just as devoutly Christian as Kim, is a lesbian who has been in the same relationship now for almost twenty years. Her politics are as liberal as mine. Kim, who married his childhood sweetheart just as my parents married theirs, is the father of four children and his politics are rock-ribbed red-state Republican. And yet, such early trauma in our lives has caused a bond among the three of us that is undeniable. Early trauma can also lead—this is my own most devoutly held belief—to a creative spirit in those who somehow gracefully survive
it. In fact, Karole and her partner, H. C. Porter, own an arts studio in Vicksburg called just that, Creative Spirit, and travel around the country selling Porter's art, which is based largely on images of African-American life in the state. And the only thing that has come close to equaling Kim's Christianity in importance—other than his wife and kids, certainly more than his medical practice—is his own artistic bent, which has finally manifested itself in his sculpture. All creative spirits are Godlike in our belief that we can imbue life with the shape of art. It is what initially led me to make sense of our shared childhoods. It led Kim to Billy Graham himself.

After sculpting his busts of Eudora Welty and Andrew Wyeth—both having posed for him—Kim headed up to Montreat, North Carolina, to meet with Reverend Graham at the mountaintop home he shares with his wife, Ruth, in order to put the finishing touches on the bust of Graham he had been working on for almost a year. The Wyeth bust had already been cast in bronze and was in the trunk of Kim's car as he drove up the steep mountainside. Miss Welty's head, however, had not yet been cast and, like Graham's, was still formed in clay. Her head and the reverend's sat side by side secured on a platform Kim had rigged up on the car's backseat. He was careful not to speed around any mountain curves as he headed up to the Grahams' homestead, in case the heads shifted and all his work came to naught in two massive smashed-together clumps of sculpting clay.

Kim had been introduced to Ruth Graham by a mutual Mississippi friend and she had commissioned the work without even telling her husband about it. Kim's arrival would be an early Saturday morning surprise for him. “This will definitely be a case of outwitting and not submitting,” she had told Kim over the phone a few months before. “But it is an idea whose time has come. We simply must find a way.”

Kim had expected her to tell Reverend Graham about the sculpture at some point before he made his pilgrimage to the mountaintop, but Ruth had wisely reneged on informing her husband beforehand.
She said she knew him better than anybody and this was the best way to go about it. Kim was simply told to show up and she'd summon her husband, who would be too polite to back out at that point. Kim had his doubts about such a plan, but went along with her. He trusted her instincts for they had been honed by more than fifty years of marriage to the man. Though Billy Graham belonged, profoundly so, to God and to the millions who had heard him preach, he also belonged, more intimately, tenaciously so, to this strong-willed woman blessed not only with the patience of Job, not to put too fine a Biblical point on it, but also a movie star's beauty.

Nervous at what awaited him, Kim arrived that morning at the gates of Little Piney Cove, the 150-acre compound that Ruth, in an earlier secretive maneuver, had bought for $4,300 in 1954 while her husband was away behind yet another pulpit. The gates parted at Kim's prearranged two-honks-of-the-car-horn signal and he drove up the steep winding drive where he was met by a small bulldog of a man named Bill, the groundskeeper, who emerged from a garden house to welcome him to the property. “See you found your way up here to Piney Cove without a hitch,” Bill said, shaking Kim's hand. “Miss Ruth's expecting you.” They both walked up the stone steps of the elegant home, an elongated log cabin. The front door was opened by Mrs. Graham before they had a chance to knock. She was still in her ankle-length housecoat and slippers. Her white hair was swept back from her face and that beauty of hers was highlighted in the early-morning mountain light where it still lay pentimento, such beauty, beneath the many finely layered lines stroked into her flesh by age and experience and that very light—warming, Southern—that filtered through the towering trees on her beloved mountainside.

Ruth Graham's sister was visiting from California and the two women were finishing up their morning cups of coffee in the kitchen. After a bit of small talk, Kim unloaded the car and placed the two busts of Wyeth and Welty on the kitchen table. The one of her husband
he placed on a sculpting stand he'd brought along on which to do some work if Reverend Graham agreed to pose for him for a few hours. He positioned the stand next to a large comfortable wingback chair that sat in front of the kitchen's stone fireplace so that the bust would be staring right back at Reverend Graham when he came into the room. He then made one more trip to the car to get his sculpting tools. When he returned he found Ruth standing close to the stand and studying her husband's clay face. “I think it's marvelous,” she said. “I think he'll like it.” She turned to Bill, who was warming his hands at the stone hearth. “Why don't you see if he'll come up here to the kitchen?” she asked. “He's back in the bedroom.” She turned again to Kim, her voice apologetic. “He's not moving very well this morning—his Parkinson's, you know. But I think he'll be surprised and delighted when he gets in here,” she said.

Kim nervously fingered his tools. “So he still doesn't know about this?” he asked.

Ruth grinned a rather devilish grin for someone who had lived so long next to a man of God. “He will in a minute,” she said, snickering to herself, and went over to the kitchen sink to wash out her coffee cup.

Her sister came over to the stand to get a better look at the bust of her brother-in-law. She stared into the eyes. “It's uncanny, Ruth,” she said. “I think he's going to speak.”

At that, Kim heard the shuffle of feet easing down the planked floor in the hall adjacent to the kitchen. He went over to the bust and repositioned it one more time to make sure those eyes he'd fashioned so diligently in the clay were staring at the flesh-and-blood ones when the man entered the room. He turned and there stood the Reverend Graham in the doorway, all six feet and four inches of him, slightly stooped now, his long white hair, like his wife's, swept back from his face, his own movie star looks undiminished. He wore eyeglasses “tinted like Mom's ice tea in the summer when the ice cubes always melted too
quickly,” Kim told me later. He wore a pair of blue jeans and a jean jacket that once belonged to Johnny Cash, he bragged when Kim complimented him on it. Graham stopped staring at the bust of himself and turned his attention to this strange young man in his kitchen. Ruth dried her hands on a dish towel and snickered once more at her husband's disconcerted expression. Kim walked over to shake the man's hand and said, “Before you say anything, I want you to know this is really not about you or me. It's for your lovely wife. She sort of put this together, though I realize this all must be a little bit of a shock.”

A slight smile crossed Reverend Graham's lips as he shuffled closer to the bust. “Well, son, she's shocked me a few times before,” he said. A silence fell over the room as Graham inspected his likeness, then settled into his comfortable chair there by the fire. “How did you do this?” he asked Kim.

“Well, it's taken quite a bit of research,” my brother told him. “I watched a lot of your sermons on video. You're not a bad preacher, by the way.” The sisters chuckled, quieting themselves as Kim then explained to them all the process of building an armature and applying the clay as well as how the tools he was still holding in his hands worked.

“So, what now?” Graham interrupted him.

Kim nervously cleared his throat and moved toward him. “Well, to really get it right I need some measurements using these calipers,” he said.

Graham eyed the aluminum prongs suspiciously. “How does that contraption work?” Graham asked. “Those cali-
puhs
?”

Kim moved even closer. “Well, if you don't mind, I'll show you,” he said. He opened the calipers and carefully measured the center of Graham's right pupil to the center of his left one. He then measured the pupils of the sculpture. It was Kim's turn now to chuckle. “It's a perfect match,” he said, shaking his head in the only bit of disbelief allowed on the property. “Your eyes are the right distance apart.”

Graham shifted in his chair. “Aren't they supposed to be?” he asked, slightly bewildered by what was going on in his kitchen. Kim continued his measurements and found that he had placed Graham's ears too far forward on the sculpture. He took out a carving knife and sliced them off to move them back a few millimeters. Graham covered his real ears with his hands. The kitchen filled with laughter as the backdoor opened.

“Dr. G, how you feeling this morning?” asked Maury Scobee, Graham's longtime best friend and factotum, though a highfalutin' one, as he entered the increasingly crowded room. “Miss Ruth, you're up early,” Scobee said, stopping when he saw Kim and the three busts in the room, his eyes coming to rest on Graham's next to the fire. “Miss Ruth, what have you been up to?” he asked, instinctively knowing that she had surprised her husband once again. Scobee, after introducing himself to my brother, inspected the bust more closely, backing up to get a longer view of it before turning his attention to the ones of Welty and Wyeth. “Look at these, Dr. G,” he said. “Have you seen these?”

Kim walked over to the table. “I brought the Wyeth to show what a finished bronze looks like,” he told them. “The Eudora Welty I just thought Miss Ruth might enjoy seeing. I plan to take it to the foundry with this new piece of Dr. Graham for casting at the same time.

Scobee kept looking at the Welty. “What do you think, Dr. G?” he asked, pointing at her.

Graham shrugged. “I thought it was Eleanor Roosevelt,” he said from his wingbacked chair, and warmed his hands at the fire's hearth.

“You know, I hadn't thought of that,” Kim said. “But I can sort of see it now. I'll tell you this, though. When I drove up here yesterday from Mississippi, I kept noticing these cars passing, even truckers, and staring over at me. I kept wondering if there was something wrong with the car. Then it hit me. They were looking at you and
Eudora riding on that back platform looking out the windows. I know there've been no scandals in your ministry, sir, but I can see the headlines now—B
ILLY
G
RAHAM
S
POTTED IN
A
LABAMA WITH
A
NOTHER
W
OMAN
.”

A snicker, Ruth's loudest yet, shot through the room and mingled with her husband's smile. With a wire hoop, Kim went back to work and scored a thin layer of clay from the contour of the left ear on Graham's bust. He then palpated the man's real one. He went back to the clay. Back to the flesh. Clay. Flesh. Clay. Flesh. Graham patiently let him do his tactile work until Kim asked if he might take a few photographs out on the back steps in the natural light now filtering with greater authority through Piney Cove's abundant trees. Graham agreed. Kim and Scobee helped him from his chair as Bill held the door open. Once they were outside, Kim began to click away with his old Canon AT-1 at every crag and angle of Graham's face, his massive head, his shock of hair. Ruth stood at the kitchen window and, like Mom while washing dishes back in that mountain-less Mississippi of my sorrow-filled youth, she seemed with her knowing gaze to be watching not only all the life that passed in front of her but also all that had not. Kim squatted down low on the ground to get a shot from beneath Graham's prominent chin and felt a large mass of something furry pressing against his back. He knew it had to be an animal from the mountainside—a growl erupted somewhere in the vicinity of his own left ear—but why hadn't Reverend Graham warned him of its approach? Was it a wolf? A bear? Was Graham scared his famous voice would rile the creature even more?