by Rod Dreher
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.
When Claire turned thirteen she and Hannah fought over fashion. Hannah needled Claire about her disinterest in trendy clothes and cosmetics; Claire, who felt most comfortable in a T-shirt and blue jeans, and who thought it was ridiculous to cover her glowing skin with makeup, pushed back, and pushed back hard. Rebekah was the peacemaker between her sisters. Though she shared her father’s taciturnity, at least around people she didn’t know well, she was in truth a merry trickster.
Bekah, as they called her, inherited both her mom’s and her dad’s talent for athletics, playing team softball in the summer and cartwheeling across the lawn and down the hallway at home all year round. Like her mom and Claire, Bekah loved nature and going barefoot outside, but she hated the idea of hunting. “Why would anybody want to be so mean to animals?” she asked Claire one day. Claire has long suspected her younger sister will grow up to be a veterinarian.
In 1999, when Claire was born, Mike was working full-time for the Louisiana National Guard. He also served as a volunteer firefighter for the Starhill squad, which was founded in 1988, with Paw as its chief. Now people in Starhill wouldn’t have to wait for fire truck
s to come all the way from St. Francisville—but only if enough men in the community agreed to give time and labor to fighting fires. Paw asked Mike, who was Ruthie’s boyfriend at the time, to consider joining the crew. Mike agreed, because doing something hard like this to take care of the community seemed like the manly thing to do.
One hot and humid summer day the Starhill Volunteer Fire Department received its first-ever call: a house on Paper Mill Road was burning down. Like the other Starhill men Mike converged on the burning house in his pickup. He saw flames roaring from the windows and doors of the wooden house, and felt a shot of adrenaline course through his body. He didn’t have time to think about fear. The fire was burning wildly, consuming a family’s home. He quickly dressed out in his firefighting gear and presented himself to Paw, the fire chief, for duty.
“Put this air pack on,” one of the men told Mike. “We’re going in.”
Carrying hoses gushing water from the pumper truck, Mike and the others forged ahead into the burning house. The blasts from the firehose knocked the flames off the walls. In minutes the fire was out. Mike was awestruck by the power of the men of the community, working together, to bring that raging fire under control.
Hot, sooty, and exhausted the Starhill men took off their gear, stood in the yard by their trucks, and talked about what had just happened. They had heard the alarm and dropped everything to run into a burning building on a scorching day, risking their lives to save the house of a family from the community. They didn’t do it for money; they were volunteers. They did it because this is what a man does.
Mike walked away from the charred and smoldering house a changed man. In the flames and amid the camaraderie, he had seen a vision that would guide the rest of his life. “For me,” he would say later, “there was no turning back.”
Mike started thinking about firefighting as a vocation. In 1990 he took the test to become a Baton Rouge firefighter. He aced it, but couldn’t get hired. He took the test three more times in ten years, scored one hundred percent each time, but he wasn’t called. He decided that it just wasn’t meant to be.
In 2000 Mike was out of town on National Guard business when Ruthie phoned him to say she had just watched a TV news report saying the Baton Rouge Fire Department was starting a new recruiting drive. She thought he should take the test again. By department rules no rookies over age thirty-five were allowed, and Mike was getting close to the line. He wasn’t sure he should bother.
Besides, because he was at Fort Polk, the US Army base in north Louisiana, Mike couldn’t get the job application. Ruthie drove down to Baton Rouge and filled it out on his behalf. She knew how important the dream of being a firefighter was to Mike. This time Mike got the call. With the firefighting job, the hours would be irregular, the commute from Starhill longer. Worse, the cut in pay over his Guard job would be steep: he would lose over one-third of his annual salary, a big blow to their family. Could Ruthie stand to tighten their belts even more?
“She didn’t hesitate one bit,” Mike says. Ruthie’s willingness to support her husband’s vocation was a gift. She gave Mike a second family, for he would grow inextricably close to his fellow firefighters over the next few years. While on duty the men lived with each other in the firehouse, which usually meant hours spent together, just talking. Firefighter families would come by the station to visit during downtime, allowing the men to get to know each other as more than work colleagues. Weekend camping trips knitted the ties among the men and made their families even closer.
“Being a fireman, you knew you were going to put yourself in harm’s way, and take more of a risk than in any other job,” he said. “I enjoy serving. I guess it’s just something innate. I try to help somebody out when they’re down, or at their worst. It feels good to at least try.”
Fresh out of rookie school Mike met a firefighter who would become one of his, and his family’s, closest friends: Steve Shelton, a tall, burly man with a chiseled jaw, a laidback demeanor, and eyes that sparked with merriment. Everybody called Steve “Big Show,” a nickname he earned in a charity boxing tournament in 1998. It was a cops versus firefighters contest billed as Guns and Hoses. Each boxer had to pick a stage name; someone stole the moniker of a professional wrestler and christened Steve “The Big Show.”
The nickname might not have survived the day if not for a startling turn of affairs. Steve is a big man, but he was puny compared to the muscle-bound behemoth of a Louisiana state trooper they pitted him against. Not too long after the first bell, Steve somehow connected with the big bruiser’s jaw, cleanly cold-cocking him. Down went the giant for the TKO!
Steve has been Big Show ever since.
After they became close Mike invited Show to come up to Starhill from his home in the nearby town of Zachary and hunt deer on Paw’s place. Show readily accepted, and quickly fell in love with Mam and Paw. When Mike had to leave town for an extended period of Guard training, Show started helping Paw, who had an ailing back, take care of his land. This is how he became tight with the Starhill crew.
“Your mom and dad never meet a stranger,” he said. “Once they get to know you, you become family right off, especially if you help them with something. Whatever’s theirs is yours.”
Whatever’s theirs is yours. That’s the first thing John Bickham noticed about Mam and Paw when he moved with his wife and two girls to Starhill. John, a trim, unassuming man of average height and build, and thinning salt-and-pepper hair, does not stand out in a crowd. He doesn’t speak loudly or forcefully, but when he does you realize that he sees a lot more through his wise, observant eyes than you might have thought. John Bickham—or J.B., as Paw calls him—is intensely conscientious, and never talks about or draws attention to himself. He works as an operations controller at the ExxonMobil Refinery in Baton Rouge, one of the largest petrochemical complexes in the world. He sits at a bank of computer screens all day keeping things moving in the synthetic rubber unit. When you find out from someone (never J.B.) how much responsibility for the life-and-death safety of refinery workers rests on his shoulders, you think, “Of course; that’s the quiet man you would absolutely trust with your life.”
Growing up in Baton Rouge John had always longed for country life. In 1990 he and a pal bought a piece of land in Starhill, split it between them, built houses there, and moved north out of the city with their families. John’s father had always wanted to live in the country too, and his son talked his folks into making plans to move to Starhill with them.
Within a month of John’s relocating to West Feliciana, his father died. His mother chose to remain in Baton Rouge to be close to her church. At the time John, who worked with the fire department at the Exxon refinery in north Baton Rouge, also served on the Starhill Volunteer Fire Department. That’s how he got to know Paw. In his grief over his father’s loss, John drew close to the older man.
John saw that keeping up Paw’s barn, mowing the grass around the pond and Paw’s pastures, and maintaining the tractors, was too much work for Mike to handle alone. So he pitched in. Besides John enjoyed working alongside Paw, even as age and infirmity diminished Paw’s ability to do for himself.
As Big Show and John, both deer hunters, found out, to be part of Mam and Paw’s circle is to gain access to good hunting grounds on Paw’s fifty acres. It also meant access to the bass, bream, and catfish in the pond. Hunting and fishing in “the Back,” as we called it in our family, was a passion for Ruthie that lasted past childhood.
“She always wanted to go fishing,” Mike says. “She would go buy crickets, or she liked to use a plastic worm. She’d fix lunch, and drinks, and we’d just go to the pond. Because she loved hunting and fishing so much, she never begrudged me a chance to go off somewhere with my friends to do it.”
It’s not uncommon for women raised in West Feliciana to accustom themselves to their husbands’ hunting and fishing habits. It is less common for them to share those interests. And then there was the way Ruthie did it.
When
Mike killed a deer, Ruthie dashed to the skinning rack in Paw’s barn to clean the deer herself. She wasn’t content simply to slice the hide off the deer’s carcass and butcher it. She approached the task like an amateur forensic scientist, examining the deer’s entrails for clues.
When Mike came in from a fishing trip, Ruthie instructed him to leave the stringer of slimy fish in the kitchen sink for her to take care of. She would whip out her electric knife, gut the fish, debone them, and freeze the fillets or prepare them straightaway for dinner. If the girls were around, she would enlist their help, and take the opportunity to give them a biology lesson about fish anatomy. Mike’s buddies found it hard to believe that his wife not only gave him no guff for stinking up her kitchen with fish, but that she also demanded to process them herself.
In fact it’s hard to overestimate the part fishing, especially on Paw’s pond, played in the Leming family’s life. “When did we start going to the pond? Well, how old are you when you start walking?” Claire Leming, now a teenager, asks rhetorically.
Fun for the Lemings often meant summer afternoons down at Thompson Creek, near Ronnie Morgan’s camp. They call it the Starhill Riviera. Ronnie is a longtime neighbor and contemporary of my parents, but perpetually youthful in his crackpot joie de vivre. With a heart as big as his head is bald, Ronnie is the kind of good ol’ boy who lives perpetually poised between his third beer and the question, “Hell, what could it hurt?” As Starhill’s version of Jimmy Buffett by way of Hunter S. Thompson, he would get the Margaritaville vibe going down at his camp in the late afternoon. Ronnie cooked potluck—gumbo, jambalaya—and all you had to bring was cold beer, a bottle of whiskey, and, if you liked, something to put in the pot. In cool weather, folks would build a bonfire. David Morgan, Ronnie’s son and a country singer and guitarist, would play solo, or sometimes get his band together. Starhill danced. That was a Louisiana Saturday night.