Opening Doors

After years of living in rural Montana, my grandmother had a policy about opening doors to strangers at night: it simply wasn’t done. Out there, far away from civilization, all the freaks and losers were bound to appear where they could wreak havoc without anyone being the wiser.

She had at least one good reason to think twice before opening her door to strangers. For a short time in the mid-1940s, my grandparents had left Montana to farm in Sandpoint, Idaho. At about nine o’clock one night, when my grandmother was in her 20s and alone in the house with her two young daughters, someone knocked on the door. She hesitated to open the door, although she was acutely aware there was no one else for miles who could help him. She spoke to the man through the door first, and he said he just needed to use the phone to call someone to pick him up.

As soon as she opened the door to let him in, she immediately regretted her decision. The man was covered in blood, and he was clearly in no mood to explain why. She didn’t know whether he’d killed someone, or been in a fight or a car accident. If it was the first option, she had no intention of being his next victim, so she suppressed her natural curiosity and didn’t ask him what had happened. She went into the other room and prayed that he would just make his damned phone call and get the hell out. And God being a providential God, that is just what he did. He went outside to wait for his ride and didn’t bother her again. But that was enough to convince her for the rest of her life that opening the door after dark is too risky.

My grandmother was one of the hardiest people I’ve ever known. When she was in her sixties, she would shovel the walkway wearing only an unlined vinyl windbreaker, even when it was dark and well below zero. She was scrupulous about maintaining her health and her appearance, so she had rarely indulged in any of life’s vices.

She was the best housekeeper I’ve ever met. Even when she was busy helping my grandfather run the farm, my mother remembers you could eat off my grandmother’s floors. Well-developed organizational skills, learned early as a farmer’s daughter and honed as a farmer’s wife, accounted in large part for her productivity. She had an amazing memory for family members’ birthdays, keeping files for each month of the year. She shopped for cards all year around, dropping them into her files already signed, stamped and addressed long before birthday months rolled around.

After my grandfather’s ill health no longer permitted him to work the farm, it made perfect sense for my grandmother to take a job as a motel maid in nearby Bozeman. Keeping things neat and clean was a huge part of her life’s work. Her commitment to giving people more than they expected makes me certain her rooms were especially clean. After she left that job, she worked as a custodian at the junior high until her retirement.

Along with her sense of orderliness was a fascination with what was out of order. My grandmother was especially attracted to stories of human failing. She frequently bought the National Enquirer and other tabloid magazines to confirm that wealth, beauty and power conferred no special immunity to the inherent messiness of life. She was especially fond of gruesome stories, and she didn’t spare my two sisters and me any of the gory details even when we were very little girls.

One of the most memorable stories she told was a supposed close encounter she believes she had with a serial murderer and cannibal in the late 1960s. At that time, a number of people had disappeared mysteriously. Eventually, police arrested a man who had murdered several people, butchering their remains with an ax, and storing them in a freezer on his property.

Between the time of the disappearances and the murderer’s arrest, my grandmother, a notoriously light sleeper, had awakened one summer night upon hearing sounds outside. From her bedroom upstairs, it sounded as if people were talking on the walkway. She tiptoed downstairs with the intention of getting a better look. She saw nothing, but what she heard chilled her blood—and mine, too, every time she told the story. What she heard was a single voice, not a conversation, and the voice was a child’s, whining plaintively, “I want my mommy! I want my mommy!” over and over again. She was too terrified to go outside and see what was going on. Nor did she wake my grandfather, who had emphysema and needed his rest and would have told her she had nothing to worry about. After a few minutes, the crying stopped. Then she swore she heard a car pull away.

Police later arrested a suspect and released the grisly details of his crimes. When my grandmother read that at least one of his victims had been a child, she was almost certain it was that child’s voice she had heard that night. For maximum shudders, she also threw in a story she’d read about the murderer before he’d been caught. Someone who claimed to have picked him up while hitchhiking in Gallatin Canyon had noticed something resembling human fingers sticking out of his shirt pocket.

Some years later, in the 1980s, it was a warm Sunday in late April, the kind that lulls Montanans into believing summer is just around the corner. Never mind we could and often did get deep snow past Memorial Day.

Cautious as my grandmother was, she got an unholy glint in her eye when it came to fire. Burning the ditch banks around her property was a much-anticipated rite of spring for her. Her love of fire dovetailed with her love of neatness; burning a big load of trash in a 50-gallon barrel reduced it to a small heap of ash.

Early that morning, Grandma had burned some trash before she went to 8 a.m. Mass. By mid-afternoon, after the lunch dishes had been put away, she shoveled the ashes, which she believed had cooled sufficiently, into a cardboard box which she placed atop a Rubbermaid trash can set against the back porch. She’d performed the same ritual many times over the years.
By 11 o’clock that night, we were in bed, neither of us asleep yet, when I heard an automobile pull into the drive. Strange, I thought, who would be coming to call at this hour. Then the bell at the back door rang at rapid, frantic intervals. I lay there in my bed, assuming my grandmother, as lady of the house, would be the one to answer the door.

A few moments later I heard a knock at the front door, and someone entering through the screen door onto the all-weather porch, which by some fluke Grandma had left unlocked. By this time I was scared. I tiptoed into Grandma’s room, where she had already climbed out of bed to survey the scene below. The man was outside again, clutching some short pieces of hose, apparently looking for a faucet to hook them up. The fall before, Grandma had trimmed leaky portions of the hoses, and with uncharacteristic slovenliness, had left them beneath the lilac bushes in the back yard. I figured his pickup had overheated, and he needed to put water in his radiator. But there we stood, looking down on him without moving to assist him. After nervously running around for a minute or two, he got back into his truck and drove off. The strange thing was I could still see some light wavering against the windbreak along the road. It almost seemed as though he was still parked in the drive, waiting, his headlights shining on the trees. We both got back into our beds, wondering what all that had been about.

Ten minutes or so later, we heard his truck in the drive again, carrying a basin and apparently continuing his search for water. By this time I was putting on my robe and heading downstairs to find out what was going on, ignoring my grandmother’s protests to the contrary. My curiosity was getting the better of me. I was determined to find out what he was up to.

“Don’t go down there!” she hissed, as she followed me down the stairs and through the kitchen. “Don’t open that door! For all we know, he’s a rapist!”

As soon as I opened the back door, I instantly understood what he’d been doing. The box of ashes had ignited the Rubbermaid trash can, and there, right beside the house, a fire the size of a large burning bush was blazing, flames shooting against the aluminum siding and beneath it to reach the old clapboards. The flickering light I’d seen on the windbreak had been the fire.

“Lady,” the man cried, stating the obvious, “you’ve got a fire!” In no time, my grandmother was down the stairs and running to the shed to grab a hose and hook it up so she could douse the fire. By the time the two fire engines the man had gone home to call for had arrived, the fire was out.

Soon after, I came to understand how our refusal to answer the door at night under any circumstances was not in our best interests. My own belief that it’s not always a good idea to stick to hard and fast rules, though based on a youthful optimism and unearned by the seasoning of a longer life, was reconfirmed that night. Since we’d failed to respond spontaneously to his knocking, we were blessed to have something else working for us—one man’s uncommon concern for his neighbors. If not for this, my grandmother and I might have had a much ruder awakening later.

Being neighborly is about more than waving to passersby as they drive past the house. Being a neighbor is not risk-free; it sometimes means sticking your neck out when it’s least convenient to do so, or even when you feel completely unqualified to help. As the people in closest proximity to us, neighbors are in the best position to help each other when there’s any type of crisis. In real life, of course, there are plenty of examples of how unhelpful neighbors can be. The rape and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City in 1964, as two dozen neighbors watched and did nothing to help her, is a particularly egregious example.

What this man did that night to save our lives and our home exemplifies the best of neighborliness. As my grandmother and I watched him from our roost above, it never occurred to us he was trying to help us. My first thought was that he was trying to help himself to water, and good luck to him, too, because neither of us was about to help him. My grandmother thought it was all an elaborate ruse to gain access to our house and hurt us. She had been alert to the risk of two women, one old and one young, opening the door to a strange man at an odd hour of the night. In reality, he was only doing what any decent person would do—helping neighbors protect their property and their lives.

We’d never met before. He wasn’t a close neighbor; we found out later he lived more than a mile away, on the other side of the river. Although he never mentioned it, he was probably in a hurry to get home and get enough sleep to go to work the next morning. He could have easily gone on his merry way, hoping we would soon find out about the fire on our own.

Instead, he took the time to stop and alert us. When he couldn’t rouse us the first time, he then drove all the way home to phone the fire department. That certainly would have been enough action on his part. But he drove back to continue his attempt to put out the fire in the meantime. I’ll always be thankful to him for following his better instinct.

My grandmother didn’t want me to tell this story because it embarrassed her. She felt foolish for starting the fire in the first place, and she especially didn’t want her three younger brothers razzing her about it. I could hardly blame her for that, because they were merciless, first-class teases. Only now, fifteen years after her death, am I breaking my vow of secrecy. Some stories are just too good not to be told.

If she was troubled by her unwillingness to open the door that night, she never let on. She never seemed to consider that not opening the door that night could have cost us our lives. So accustomed was she to bringing a certain amount of order in her world, she may have believed she would have noticed the fire in time without his help.

I’d be disingenuous to claim I have since dedicated myself to becoming the model neighbor. I’ve fallen far short of my neighbor’s example, naturally choosing more often than not to pursue my own interest and to mind my own business, even though opportunities to be gracious to those around me abound. Metaphorically speaking, I’ve been reluctant to open my door, fearing what it might require of me. Despite the powerful lesson I got that night almost twenty years ago, I sometimes forget the nature of grace is very much like a persistent knock on the door, daring us to welcome it in whatever form it presents itself.

Story ID:	2286
Written by:	Diana Shellenberger (bio, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Family History
Writers Conference:	$500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project
Location:	Bozeman Montana USA
Year:	1986
Person:	Grandma