The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (6 page)

“What is wrong with y’all?” she said. “Listen to you. You sit here for hours talking about this crap, and it doesn’t mean anything. You’re just talking; you’re not
doing
anything!”

We thought she was putting us on, but Ruthie wasn’t joking.

“I’m serious, y’all,” she said. “I don’t understand the two of you. I really don’t. What good is any of this y’all are talking about going to do anybody? Do you really think you’re going to support yourselves with this stuff? What does any of it mean in the real world?”

She wouldn’t listen to anything either of us had to say in defense of philosophy or philosophizing. At the time I thought Ruthie’s prickly anti-intellectualism was funny. Ruthie wanted to get as far away from people like us as she could. As soon as she finished her student job on Friday afternoons she pointed her big blue Crown Victoria north, left campus, and lit out for Starhill.

Halfway through her undergraduate career, Ruthie and Mike decided to marry. They had been together for over four years and did not want to wait until she finished her degree. Ruthie expected Mike to do the traditional thing and ask her father’s permission to marry his daughter. He sat down with Paw three days in a row, but couldn’t muster the courage to speak his mind.

Ruthie finally lost her patience.

“I’ve had enough!” she declared. “Daddy, Mike’s been coming over here because he wants to tell you that we want to get married. And he won’t do it!”

Mike’s abashed cowardice amused Paw. That the high school sweethearts would one day marry was a foregone conclusion. Though he wasn’t happy with the idea of Ruthie marrying while still in college, Paw knew it was bound to happen. Ruthie had put him on notice earlier. Standing in his living room during her freshman year, Ruthie told Paw that she and Mike wanted to get married at some point between semesters.

“Well, honey, your grades are good now, but do you think you’ll be able to keep that up if you’re married?” Paw said. He spitballed a number of rational arguments against early marriage at her.

Ruthie leveled her gaze at her father, stepped to him, put her finger in his face, lowered her voice, and growled: “Daddy, don’t you make me choose, because you aren’t going to like the choice I make.”

That was that. On the Mike question Paw knew better than to cross Ruthie.

All her life Ruthie had trouble making decisions. Once she started pricing wedding packages, Paw saw the potential bill growing ever longer. Intending to cut his costs early, he gave Ruthie five thousand dollars to pay for her wedding, saying it was all he could afford, and told her she would have to work within that budget. What she didn’t spend, she could keep.

Ruthie found that flummoxing. “But, Daddy,” she said, “when it
was your money, it was different. Now that it’s my money, I don’t know what I’m going to
do
!”

The girl was naturally, reflexively frugal. Ruthie found a less expensive dress than she would have chosen otherwise, and got on with it. By the time she and Mike married on December 30, 1989, Ruthie had the wedding paid for, and two thousand dollars in her purse to pay for the honeymoon. The weather was cold and wet in St. Francisville that day, but the rain stopped before the ceremony. Mike stood with the pastor at the front of the Methodist church, nervously glancing at the plain white walls and at friends and family gathered in the aged wooden pews. And then the music began, the old wooden French doors at the rear swung open, and there was his bride, luminous, on Paw’s arm. He thought:
This is my life now. She chose me. How can I be so lucky?

After a formal cake-and-punch reception in the church hall, the wedding party moved down the street to the Red Horse tavern, a saloon in an old two-story wooden building. Ruthie and Mike were having so much fun dancing—especially to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” which was their song—and drinking beer under the neon lights with their friends that they were late leaving for their honeymoon.

The newlyweds motored north in the Crown Vic to Natchez, Mississippi, to start their wedding trip. After a couple of days there they looked at each other and said,
Where do you want to go?
They took off driving west, not knowing where they were headed, and not caring. They were married, and that’s all that mattered. The dream had come true. Mike and Ruthie. Ruthie and Mike.

Back home Ruthie moved into Mike’s trailer in Starhill, and got ready to start the spring semester at LSU. She also threw herself into being a housewife. Ruthie loved making food for her husband. She was already an accomplished Southern cook, laying a nightly feast for Mike of hearty country fare like pork chops, roast, rice and gravy, meat pies, snap beans, and corn on the cob. Mike felt cared for as he never had been.

“Ruthie was always thinking about what she could do to help Mike. And he was all about, ‘What can I do to help Ruthie?’ Each one only thought about the other one. They were how marriage is supposed to be,” recalls Stephanie Toney Simpson, Ruthie’s childhood friend and a bridesmaid at her wedding.

My sister graduated from LSU in 1991 and began teaching sixth grade in the West Feliciana public schools. Meanwhile my career was taking off. After graduation I landed an intern job on the Baton Rouge
Advocate
, covering the police beat and drinking after deadline at the Thirsty Tiger, a dive bar across the street from the paper’s downtown office. True, there was a sense that newspapering’s rascally glory days were behind it. Many of the older journos had been through alcohol rehab; an oft-repeated story from the
Advocate
newsroom concerned a photo lab technician who nearly drowned after passing out drunk in the darkroom sink. I had no doubt, though, that I had chosen the right line of work. This was
fun.

After three months the newspaper’s longtime film critic, a gifted writer whom I had grown up reading, resigned to move to New York. The paper offered me his job. I was an inexperienced writer and was terrified of the responsibility, but I didn’t dare turn down a break like that. In the spring of 1992, as Ruthie completed her first year leading a classroom as a teacher, I got another break: an offer from
The Washington Times
, DC’s conservative competitor to the
Washington Post
, to become its television critic.

Washington! I had done a political consulting internship there during my junior year of college, and had fallen in love with politics and the city. Now, at the age of twenty-five, I would make my return. When I stood in Mam and Paw’s yard telling them good-bye, Paw’s face began to tremble all over, as if it were about to fly to pieces. He grabbed me hard and held me tight. This time I was going far away, and almost certainly for good.

It nearly killed him to watch me go. But it felt to me like I was starting
the life I had always wanted, answering the call I had been hearing since I crossed the Mississippi almost a decade earlier. I found a third-floor walk-up apartment on Capitol Hill, and jumped into my job and life in the city with both feet. On the morning Bill Clinton was first inaugurated, I watched the TV coverage of the ceremony from home. When the outgoing President George H. W. Bush stepped onto the military helicopter to fly away, I heard the rotors behind the Capitol a few blocks away. I heaved the window open and leaned out over East Capitol Street to watch the chopper rise over the Hill. I glanced back at the set, to see on network television the same scene I was watching from my window. As far as I was concerned, I was now living at the center of the world.

That’s not how Ruthie saw it. In her eyes I was living in Siberia.

“I don’t understand what he’s doing,” she told our parents. “He’s way up there in the big city where we can’t help him. What if he gets sick?”

This bothered her. This bothered her a lot. It concerned her too that I was, as she put it, “throwing money down a rathole” by renting an apartment. I ought to be saving to buy a house, putting down roots, living a respectable life.

At Thanksgiving I made my first trip back home. Ruthie and Mike were talking about building a house on some land Paw had given them across the gravel road, a long stone’s throw from his own house. Ruthie sketched the kind of house she wanted, and gave it to an architect. The house reflected Ruthie’s priorities. She planned for the two children’s bedrooms to be close to the master bedroom, so she could be near her kids at night. The kitchen and breakfast space was large; she wanted her friends to be able to gather there and drink wine while she was cooking for them.

Late on Thanksgiving afternoon I left Mam and Paw’s to walk over to see the house site. The cleared plot took in most of what had been Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda’s orchard. Their cabin itself sat on land that
belonged to cousins who lived far away, and with whom we didn’t get along. Standing where the new house would be, near a barbed-wire fence marking the property line, I could faintly see the outline of the cabin through a thicket. I decided to take a look.

I crawled through the barbed wire and navigated slowly through the overgrown brush. Brambles, briars, and overgrowth had consumed the camellia bushes Loisie had so carefully tended. The orchard and her gardens were a ruin, and so too, I now saw, was the old cabin, which predated the Civil War. I had not laid eyes on it since Loisie died and Mossie moved to a rest home some fifteen years before. The front porch was so overgrown by bushes and vines that I couldn’t reach it. A tree had fallen on the roof over Loisie’s bedroom, on the downstairs level, cracking open a window frame. I climbed through.

The cabin was vacant and musty, but it still held the faint aromas I remembered from my childhood. The damp charry clay smell from the fireplace. The cracked corn dust from the bin in the pantry where they’d kept bird feed. That peculiar scent of their enameled cast-iron washbasin in the kitchen. If I closed my eyes I could recall absent smells: cut jonquils and paperwhites in a Mason jar; the Keri lotion Lois kept by her rocking chair to keep her hands moist; the nutty, buttery pecan cookies baking in the kitchen, or golden cupcakes from Loisie’s 3-2-1 recipe. I would sit on her lap at her table in the kitchen and stir the batter in her pale green 1940s Fire-King mixing bowl.
Batter.
Loisie taught me that word. I loved saying it, and licking the spoon when we were done mixing, feeling the grains of sugar with my tongue against the roof of my mouth.

As a grown man, I stood in the dark, cobwebbed kitchen, wondering where it all had gone. There, on a board above the washbasin that served as a shelf, sat Loisie’s mixing bowl. I held it in my hands, this priceless relic I had thought lost forever. My emotions overwhelmed me, and I felt the strong urge to leave. I took the pale green bowl in
hand, went down the back steps into the bedrooms. Out the French doors in Loisie’s bedroom was the tiny side porch where I fed Loisie’s cats with her, and where, after she was taken to the hospital in her penultimate illness, a wicked cousin came one Sunday afternoon, lured all the cats out with their dinner, and killed as many as he could with a shotgun. The rest ran away and lived wild in the woods. Hilda had asked the no-good cousin to get rid of the cats because she was tired of caring for them for her sister. And that’s what he did. My mother, my father, my sister, and I sat in our backyard that day, hearing what was going on, crazy with grief, powerless to do anything to stop it.

When we saw the cousin’s truck leave, Mam hurried through the pecan orchard to the cabin and ran to the side porch, where the cats were accustomed to getting their food. She saw spattered blood, empty shotgun shells, and saucers of milk. He must have taken the dead cats with him.

Lois died not long after that, never knowing what had happened to her cats. Before she died I went to Aunt Hilda and told her I knew what had happened, and that she had ordered it. “Darling, please don’t be angry,” she said, but I was, and told her I hated her, and ran home. After Loisie died that side of the family dispatched Mossie to the nursing home and looted the cabin of all the art objects and relics of their lives. I visited Mossie a few times, but her mind was starting to go in a serious way, and given what had happened with the cats, my heart wasn’t in it. Mossie died in 1988. I didn’t go to her funeral because I was backpacking around Europe with Paul, my college buddy.

I put those thoughts out of my head, climbed back through the bedroom window, slogged through the thicket, squeezed between the barbed wire of the fence, and was once again in the sunlight. I looked across the yard at Mam and Paw’s brick house in the near distance, as the evening began to fall. Suddenly it struck me that one day their house would be as Hilda and Lois’s cabin was today. I could hear
people inside, our Thanksgiving guests, laughing and talking, but they would all be dead one day. Perhaps some great-grandchild yet unborn, or one of his children, would come in through a back window and search for relics of a barely remembered past. I tucked Loisie’s mixing bowl under my arm and walked on back to my mother and father’s house.

CHAPTER THREE

A Family of Her Own

In the late spring of 1993 Ruthie and Mike had their first child, a daughter they named Hannah Ruth. They brought their baby home not to an old trailer, but to their new place in what used to be the great-aunts’ orchard. Ruthie called it her “dream house.”

“She was so content,” Mike says. “This was the way things were supposed to be. We wanted a family more than anything, and now we had one.”

Six years later Ruthie gave birth to another daughter, Claire Elizabeth Leming. If Hannah, by nature high-strung and eclectic, would become the melody among the Leming sisters, then Claire would turn out to be the steady bass line. She was an ornery baby with a cry that could bring down the walls of Jericho.

In 2002, during the birth of Ruthie and Mike’s third daughter, Rebekah Ann, Ruthie’s uterus ruptured. Doctors saved her and the baby on the operating table, but it was a chillingly close call, and the end of her childbearing.

As the girls grew older their personalities began to express themselves. Because of her age, Hannah—six years older than Claire, and nearly a decade older than Rebekah—considered herself an outsider in relation to her sisters. She was the restless one, the sister full of
nervous energy, impulsive, extroverted, and eager for adventure—especially in the city. Outwardly more solemn, Claire, who most physically resembled Ruthie, was the homebody, the caretaker, the hunter, and true-blue country girl who decided early on that she wanted to live in Starhill all her life, and teach school, just like Mama.