DRIVING MISS FANNIE

A HOMELESS WOMAN RETURNS TO HER PAST

When we pulled up at Luther Place shelter on the morning of the trip, Fannie was standing outside in a basement stairwell. She was smoking furiously. Other homeless people were milling around. The word had spread fast:

Two men are taking her home.

"I don't inhale," Fannie said, not really talking to us. "Just puff. Yeah, I'm nervous. Nervous as a damn cat. Haven't slept since I been in here. Took cold too. Been out on that bench all winter and did fine and came in here and caught a damn cold."

She had lipstick on, her clothes were clean, her face had an almost rosy glow. Her things were in a maroon plastic Hecht's bag. I'd never seen her look so good. "Yeah, hope my brother thinks so," she replied.

"Witch," she said a minute later. "Now you guys are stuck with this old witch."

We'd better go, we said.

A woman named Karen, who's at the shelter a lot, hugged her, started crying. "I'm so happy for you, Fannie," she said. "Be good to your people. They love you."

Karen followed us to the car. We got Fannie belted in and were starting to pull away. Karen made an almost panicky motion to roll down the window. "You don't know anybody's going to Paris, France?" she said.

We weren't going to France. We were going to Mountain City, Tenn., in the company of a 66-year-old semi-blind and beat-up but oddly vital homeless woman who'd spent the winter wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags on a park bench in McPherson Square -- and her nights up against a plate-glass window under an overhang of K Street. Her full name is Fannie Eldreth Ray. It was a trip of about 370 miles that took roughly eight hours. And it took her to the intersection of two lifetimes.

The Brother's Appeal

Three weeks before, a semi-retired Tennessee tobacco grower and cattle raiser with a weak heart had called The Washington Post. He'd read my portrait of his older sister early in the new year in a Style section series on the homeless. She happened to be a sister he'd seen once since World War II.

Now Arlis Eldreth spoke simply. "She's my flesh and blood. I can't sleep nights thinking about it. I get up and walk around. She has a place here. She doesn't have to live like that. If you could just get her to come."

Could we? Right up until the moment we left, that was never entirely sure. Because Fannie's apprehension about going back to her people seemed exactly the measure of her desire to make such a journey.

The next several weeks were not without a certain ribald strain. Robin Marcus-Vazques, director of the homeless senior center at Luther Place Memorial Church on Thomas Circle, had known Fannie and tried to help her for about a year, and now she too was feeling the sting of Fannie's abuse as the actuality of the trip bore in. Robin cut Fannie's hair, scrounged some clean clothes for her, found her a plastic travel satchel with makeup cases, took her fine old hand and told her everything was going to be all right.

Two days before we left, Fannie and I met at Robin's office and put in a call to Arlis in Mountain City. Fannie was fidgety.

On the phone to her brother, she said, "Well, I'm ashamed for you to see me this way. You know I've always paid my own way. Worked my whole damn life. Haven't asked anybody for anything."

You couldn't hear the talk on the other end of the line.

"How old are you?" she said to Arlis. "Well then, how old am I? Oh, come on."

She asked about Eddie Dean and Francine, who are Arlis's grown children.

"Yeah, well, I guess we're coming," she told her brother. "Friday, they tell me. Sure, I know how to get there. Heck, yeah, I want to come."

When she got off, she said, "I just can't figure out what's happening."

She slept in the shelter those last two nights -- and despised it. Robin had nudged her into coming indoors. She was afraid something might go wrong at the last minute if Fannie slept on the sidewalks of K Street. "People get raped out there, robbed, the worst things imaginable," Robin said.

Tennessee Bound

"It's through Baltimore, isn't it? Isn't that how you go?" Fannie said as we were starting out at the tag end of morning rush hour on K Street. "Well, maybe that's how you go on the bus."

After we had gotten her things in the trunk, after it was suggested that she take the back seat so she could spread herself out, she'd said, staring in, not yet taking possession of this enclosed space, "Mmm, looks a little like the bench."

We left about 9:15 and pulled onto Muddy Branch Road in Johnson County, Tenn., a little after 5. Three of us were going. The third was Tom McClenahan. He's 38 and works for a packager in Alexandria. For six months he had been visiting and aiding Fannie Ray on her Washington park bench. She wanted him to go on this trip.

He showed her where the seat belt was, offered to help her with it. "I'm not going to cause any trouble," she said. We laughed out loud.

Basically, we sailed the interstates -- got onto I-66 at the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, caught I-81 at Front Royal, curved south, split the Shenandoah Valley, wove in and out of the Blue Ridge. Three travelers riding on the spine of time at 70 per to Fannie Ray's Tennessee mountain home.

Which she left behind at about age 15. In all these years she had been back once. On a Greyhound.

She never once the entire day asked us if she could go to the bathroom. She just sat in the back, bulked up in her newly cleaned pink goose parka. Of this parka, she said: "Feather coat. This one I got on doesn't have any holes in it. Last one, I'd sit there, the damn feathers blowing around me on the bench."

I now think she would have gladly gone as far as Key West without asking us to pull over. "Time myself," she said. "You're outdoors on the bench all day, you time yourself. Got to. Otherwise, you'll be pissing right and left."

Her amazing kidneys notwithstanding, I think not needing to get out and go to the bathroom was also about something else: She just wanted to get to Tennessee -- no matter how scared she was about getting there too. But in the bargain a homeless and impecunious woman was teaching two middle-class men something about patience, about not needing things you think you need. Because we were the ones who kept having to pull over for Dr Pepper and bags of Planters peanuts and coffee at Hardee's.

At one point when she hadn't spoken to either Tom or me for many miles -- I think we'd just passed Lexington, Va. -- I turned around and said, "You okay back there, Fannie?" She didn't answer. Her head was reclined against the top of the seat, her mouth was open and aimed toward the roof of the car, her body seemed rigid. Was she dead?

She kind of cocked open one eye. "I'm thinking about my brother," she said.

The very act of being borne back to Tennessee seemed to be unearthing in a memory-damaged woman some rich and unexpected reservoirs of recollection. Maybe it was the hum of the tires. It was as if her past was suddenly returning to her, but in bites, without particular logic or continuity. But you could get the flow of it.

"Granny had 13," she said. "Kids. Fell off the porch and died. I always thought one of my aunts pushed her."

"Sylvie's in West Virginia," she told us. "Visey's oldest. She takes snuff. Gotta see my cousin, Etta Mae. Always called her Tex."

She would perk up, fall quiet, lean forward to peer out the window as if she were encountering visions. "Lots of these farms look like farms down home," she said, nodding gravely. " 'Baccer. Wheat. Cows. Pigs."

She saw a small landing strip parallel to the highway. Her head came halfway around as she stared at a plane lined up on the tarmac, as if the thing were going to race us.

"Had a parakeet once," she announced. "Gave $3 for her. She could talk. She'd say, 'Here come them drunks.' " This memory didn't have to do with Tennessee; it had to do with lost years up north with a man named Steve. He's dead now, she says. He was a Greek American from West Virginia. She loved him and lived with him and can't summon his last name.

"Had a pooch once," she said. "Friend of mine took him outside, let him get away."

About an hour into the trip, apropos of nothing, she said, "It ran away from me last week. My mind. Went all around the block, wouldn't come back." She cackled.

At another point, talking of her former husband's mother, whom she'd been devoted to and taken care of in her final illness many years ago in Florida, before a lot of things in Fannie's life turned bad and a blur, she said: "I don't know. When she passed, something just passed in me."

She described with such vividness that you could almost see them "all those white strawberries up on Strawberry Hill. That's where the family cemetery is. They won't be out yet. That's where Mama is buried. We all got lots up there. That's where I'll end up."

Why, the strawberries on Strawberry Hill are "this big," Fannie said, forming an oval with her leathery thumb and forefinger. "Pure white. Up on Forge Creek. You can't believe how juicy."

There were points during the southward roll when Fannie Ray began to talk almost with longing of the ones she was leaving behind -- the other homeless men and women in McPherson Square and Farragut Square and Lafayette Park who didn't have a Tennessee brother to help save them.

"Lee," she said, her voice sad. "He used to sit behind my bench and watch my stuff." And: "Paula owes me $10." And: "Wilma could speak two languages, you know." Wilma was Fannie's best friend. Nights, she and Fannie used to sleep together on K. She was an alcoholic. They found her dead at Christmastime.

A Woman's History

There are great unexplained gaps in this homeless life, as perhaps in any homeless life. How did a woman get from there to here -- there being Johnson County, Tenn., half a century ago. And here being all the bad that has happened in the time since.

But good too.

Fannie has a story about going to New York as a teenager and being caught by police and stuck in a convent school. I think none of it is true. Her brother thinks this too.

This is known: Decades ago she worked at a powder plant in Elkton, Md. This also is known: She was once married to a man named Bill Ray. He repaired motors. He was a sailor, or at least she says that. They broke up. She thinks he's somewhere in Florida now, if alive.

In the '50s, she lived in Asheville, N.C. You can find her and her husband in old city directories.

Two and a half months ago, when I first encountered the McPherson Square life of Fannie Ray, her brother told me on the phone from Mountain City: "I think it must have been our mama dying young. That and the alcohol. It just ate up her life. I was 11 when our mama died, she was 13. There were six of us kids in the family. She went up north to work. She disappeared and I never did see her again. I lost track of her for 30 years. I called and called and couldn't get a trace."

Arlis lost her at about age 15. He'd gone north to Maryland to make a living too, his heart always in Tennessee. Eventually he went back. But he could never find his sister. Then one day Fannie rode a bus to Tennessee.

"It was like seeing somebody back from the dead," Arlis said.

Fannie used to live at the House of Ruth in Northeast Washington. Since last March she had been in McPherson Square. Her pattern throughout this winter was the following: All day she'd sit in the park, same bench, except for several hours at midday when she'd walk up to Luther Place Memorial Church. She'd have lunch there and maybe some TV. Sometimes she'd do a wash, sometimes she'd bathe. Afterward she'd come back to the square. People would pass and hand her bills, which she'd tuck inside her glove. At dark she'd cross K Street and make her bed on the sidewalk.

She spent Christmas Day alone, except for a visit from Tom McClenahan. He drove in to see her from his home outside Leesburg. On Christmas Eve a stranger came by and handed her $15 in a church envelope. She left her bench once on Christmas Day -- for coffee at McDonald's. She talked a little to the counter clerk.

What She Asked For

About halfway to Tennessee, we stopped at a Hush Puppies outlet to get her a new pair of sneaks. Although she was a traveler who asked almost nothing of us, Fannie Ray made it clear she didn't want to face her brother wearing moldy shoes. She almost seemed to be fixating on the subject of shoes. These insulated black boots with mottled fur that she'd been wearing all winter, hated the damn things.

"Not that they stink," she said. "My feet never did stink, that's one thing, I don't know why."

We found an outlet in a mall of outlets south of Roanoke. Fannie was in the place maybe 30 seconds before she'd made up her mind: white low-cuts, 38 smackers and change, although she wasn't aware of the price. That was stickered on the undersides, and she didn't turn them over.

"I'd like these," she said. "My size too."

"But wouldn't you like to try a few pair on, Fannie? Look around a little?"

"Nope."

But she did agree to try this pair on. She sat in a chair and pulled up her pant leg. She had on a thick fire-engine-red sock that went halfway up her leg. "I got short wide feet," she said. "This is the foot I broke. Fell over a pipe. Feel that knot. You feel that lump? Not supposed to be there."

I felt it. It was hard as a squash ball. I helped tie the laces.

Fannie wore her blinding-white sneaks out of the store. She was so proud. Her walk almost had bounce in it. The clerk watched us go from the window.

When we were rolling again, Fannie said, as though she were announcing it to the air of the world: "It doesn't seem possible I could be this lucky. How did I get off that damn bench?"

Two in the Half-Light

Her brother was waiting by the back door when the car pulled into the yard. He approached it carefully, peering through the side window into the rear seat. It was close to dark now.

"Get out of there, Sis," Arlis Eldreth said, his voice choking a little on the final word.

"I don't know you," Fannie said, and you could hear small liquid in hers too. In the previous few minutes, as the car had passed through a valley she dimly recognized, she'd patted into place the clipped pewter-white hair that was hidden beneath a silky scarf; she'd buttoned up the old yellow cardigan they'd given her at the shelter.

Two strangers who weren't strangers stood in half-light and shivery mountain evening air. It was as if whole lifetimes, oceans of awkwardness, were conspiring to keep them from touching. This was the last two feet of a journey, and neither of them could seem to make it. They sort of rocked back and forth for several seconds. One started to grin. The other grinned back. And then Fannie and Arlis came into each other's arms.

Not for long, though.

"Della's got you the biggest piece of apple pie you ever saw," the mountain brother said.

"And how is Della anyway?" the wandering sister answered.

Della, Arlis's wife, was standing on the porch in an apron holding open the metal storm door. Waving.

On a hill up above the neat white frame house was a patch of reddish earth newly plowed. It was for the spring garden. And next to this patch was an acre and a half of turned ground where the burley tobacco would shortly be going in. And trickling down along the edge of Della and Arlis's groomed front yard was a stream about a foot wide. It was very clear and looked very cold.

Across the fence row, in a pasture, 15 head of cattle stood like cardboard cutouts.

Fannie Ray, against odds, had come home.

Later that evening at the kitchen table, when much of the strangeness had fallen away, when night had dropped a coal-black net over the house, when the brother and sister inside were cutting up and talking almost nonstop in their coded sibling shorthand, the younger of the two said, "I'm going to put you to work in that garden up yonder there, Sis. Ain't going to be any sitting around on benches down here. Nosir."

The reply from the older one seemed trapped somewhere between a snort and a grunt of approval.

Morning Reflections

"Guess how many I seen eating at one table?" Arlis says.

"I don't know," I say.

"Thirty-five, one big round table," he says. "That's how it was up there on Eldreth Mountain 50 years ago."

"We were raised up in a log house," Fannie says.

"Gone now," says Arlis.

"Those were sled-drawn roads," Fannie says. "You never saw a car."

"I don't think there were two or three cars on all of Forge Creek," Arlis says.

"Walk 2 1/2 miles to school," Fannie says. "Walk till your feet get sore."

"Walk till your shoe leather wore out," says Arlis. "You only had one pair, then you were done. You can't believe those times."

"We were the closest, me and him," Fannie says, motioning at her brother.

Next morning. We're at the big table in the kitchen. Della is at the counter with her arms folded across her middle. Spring sun is slanting in behind her. Arlis, bulky and white-haired and freshly shaved, a man with music in his speech, a man with a heart bypassed six times, has come in from feeding the stock. He's a happy guy. His sis is home. He slept last night.

The talk today is a river with a thousand currents. But the theme is always family blood.

"Flossie," Arlis says.

"She was our granny," Fannie says.

"A midwife," Arlis says. "They'd come and get her at midnight with coal lanterns."

Tom and I stayed at a motel last night. It was the sleep of the angels -- I barely got the light out. Earlier, Arlis had taken the two of us into town for dinner. He said he intended to buy us the biggest damn steak in Johnson County. Arlis knew half the people in the restaurant. "This is the finest we got," he said. "I've only been here about once."

At the restaurant I asked about the strawberries on Strawberry Hill. "I have no idea where she got that," he said.

This morning Sis has on a blue oxford button-down shirt. Shelter donation. Her eyes aren't hidden by dark glasses. She looks years younger.

Last evening, out of Fannie's earshot, Arlis had said: "I'm shocked. She's fell away so. Her voice. I wouldn't know her if I'd met her out." Then he'd said: "I just hope she stays. I'll buy her a trailer if I have to."

This morning, again out of her earshot, he'd said: "I won't be here long. It's my heart. Then it'll be the two of them. They'll have each other. Della will treat her just like a sister. Della can get along with anybody."

A little while ago, Arlis took us outside to the fruit cellar. Last fall, Della and her daughter, Francine, put up about 300 jars of beans, beets, corn, tomatoes. They can survive Armageddon with what's in the fruit cellar. "Take your pick, boys," Arlis said. I picked a quart of pickled beets.

We're leaving now. It's awkward. Will she be back on the bench in a week's time? It's as if all of us except Fannie, but maybe Fannie too, are silently asking it.

And Fannie Eldreth Ray says, "Come back and visit me." Which is what she'd once said on the bench.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.