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

by Rod Dreher

  John Bickham didn’t get word of Ruthie’s death until later in the day. It was a busy time for him at the Exxon refinery. He was in a control room, outside of mobile phone range, and missed Paw’s call. When he finally heard the message he told his boss he needed to go. He wasn’t sure how this would be received. According to the plant’s strict regulations, an employee can’t leave under those circumstances unless the dead person was an immediate family member.

  “Look, I need to go. This is family to me,” John told his supervisor. He was prepared to throw his badge down and quit on the spot if the answer was no. But John’s boss told him to hit the road, that he would take care of John’s work that day. John Bickham drove straight to Starhill, where he found Paw alone at home, grieving.

  As the long afternoon dwindled down into evening, friends told Mike to take a break, but he refused. Hannah wanted to be alone, wanted everyone to get out of her mama’s house. But she saw that her father needed their friends around him, that he drew strength from their presence. Abby would later reflect that she had never seen anything like this. People weren’t coming by with grim faces to pay their dutiful respects. They were so strangely, unaccountably happy. And they didn’t do the usual thing, which is stay for what seems like a decent interval before slouching home from the scene of heartbreak and grief. They stayed. They laughed. They told stories about Ruthie.

  God, thought Abby, would Ruthie love this.

  In late afternoon, when Tim finished with his schedule of patients, he drove out to Starhill to check on everybody.

  Tim too was struck by merriment abounding. Yes, the Lemings’ was a house in mourning, but everyone there—Ruthie’s family and her circle of friends—were living in the bright sadness they had first seen around Ruthie when she met her cancer diagnosis with such hope and gratitude.

  “It was just friends and family loving on one another, and rejoicing for Ruthie’s life,” Tim told Laura later that night. “It was like a celebration. They were laughing and crying, eating food, drinking beer. It was a celebration.”

  What had happened that day was too much for one person to bear alone, Tim thought. But they were all holding each other up.

  Hannah did not realize until then how her mother had been the animating spirit of every party at their house. She made everything so fun, Hannah thought. Why can’t she be here with us, having fun now?

  When I made it to Starhill that night from the airport, I sat with my father at his house, trying to work up the courage to walk across the field and see Mike. Mam walked in from Mike’s place, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “You can feel Ruthie’s spirit strong over there.” I took a deep breath, and headed out into the warm autumn evening.

  Opening the door I found Abby and Mike sitting together at the kitchen table, mulling over the remains of the day. Strangely enough, in Ruthie’s kitchen that night, it felt like every other night. There should have been no peace there, but there was peace, an overwhelming peace. There was pain and there was exhaustion, but above all, there was peace. Mam was right: Ruthie’s spirit was there. The most terrible thing had happened, God knows, but somehow there was a sense of order, and purpose, and serenity. Just like Ruthie told us there would be.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “The Choir Invisible”

  The sun came up for the first time on Starhill without Ruthie in it. And there, knocking on Mam’s back door that morning, was Jane Daniel.

  Jane and her husband, Bobby, raised their family a mile up the road, just around the bend from the Starhill cemetery. Mam and Paw used to see their little boy Robert Edward—”Red” was his nickname—riding his bike on the blacktop road past our house. He was a sweet kid who became a good man. And then, in his twenties, five months after his wedding, Red died of leukemia.

  Jane, who had been mourning her son for five years, knew what Mam was going through. That’s why she came that morning.

  “Everyone’s heart was broken, but Jane knew exactly how my heart was broken,” Mam recalls. “I don’t remember what she said, but her presence was what really mattered. I knew what it took for her to come. I hope that if anybody else around here loses a child, that I will have the strength to do what Jane did for me that day.”

  Across the field at the Leming house, things weren’t so somber. I dreaded walking back into the house where Ruthie had died not twenty-four hours before, to be around her shell-shocked widower and motherless children. It was startling, however, to find that Ruthie’s spirit still ruled over her household. I walked in and found several of Ruthie’s friends in the kitchen with Mike, drinking coffee and sharing happy memories. After telling a tale of mischief at Thompson Creek, one of Ruthie’s friends slapped me on the back and said, “Your sister loved her cold beer, and she loved having a good time.”

  That’s the Ruthie everybody gathered at the Leming house talked about in those days after her death. Day and night friends crowded into Ruthie’s kitchen, drinking beer, telling funny West Feliciana stories, and laughing hard. There was one account that featured the phrase, “You know his momma lost all her teeth, right?” There was a tale of Baton Rouge firefighters responding to a 911 call from an obese naked woman who had eaten jalapeño peppers and gotten aroused. An irate Mel Percy was wound up about how his blind dog got lost that morning and drowned in the pond out back. “You want to know which end of a dead dog floats?” groused Mel.

  I suppose all this merrymaking the day after Ruthie died might have struck some as being in poor taste. In fact there could not have been a greater tribute to the woman Ruthie was, and the effect she had on those who loved her, than their gathering in her kitchen to eat, drink, and comfort each other.

  Late in the evening, folks began to peel away and go home, leaving Mike and his children alone with the embers of the day. After saying goodnight and taking my leave, I walked back to Mam and Paw’s across the field. I saw deer running in the moonlight and surprised a possum eating cat food outside Mam’s workshop. How beautiful it is here in the country, I thought. For many years now, I have lived away from this place, and dined out telling stories of Southern Gothic lunacy. Never making fun of this place, but celebrating its strangeness, its particularity, and its peculiar joie de vivre.

  But there is something more here, I thought. I had just spent the darkest day of the Dreher family’s life in the house where my sister had just died, and yet I felt unburdened by grief and anxiety. Those people, Ruthie’s friends, had given that to me. All of us were in mourning, all of us worried about what the future would bring for Mike and the children. But everyone knew that they would go through it together, that they would carry each other.

  Nobody had to say it; everyone could see it with their eyes and know it in their hearts. In a way all those afternoons down on the sandbar at Thompson Creek, late evenings of margaritas at Que Pasa, nights of pool parties and barn dances and Ronnie Morgan’s campfires followed by pancakes and kitchen camaraderie, and church on Sunday morning—these things were like a levee the people of Starhill had spent a lifetime building together. Now, facing a catastrophe that felt like it had the power to wash them away, the levee was holding.

  This, it occurred to me, was the deeper meaning in the mournful merriment I had been part of that day. I stood at Mam’s sink before bedtime, filling an iced tea glass with water, and thinking that I had underestimated this place where I was born. I knew it was a good place to be from. I had no idea how great a place it was to be.

  As word of Ruthie’s passing spread beyond West Feliciana, the family began to hear from faraway people to whom Ruthie meant something. Shannon Nixon Morell, who credited Ruthie with setting her on a path out of poverty and to professional success, wrote from San Diego to say that Ruthie had been an “angel” of rescue. Another of Ruthie’s former students, a woman who had become a teacher, wrote with a story of a moment in Ruthie’s classroom, seventeen years earlier, when Ruthie, in celebrating the straight A’s the student had made on her report card, made her, a gir
l who lacked confidence, feel her own worth and capability. That was the birth of her teaching vocation, the woman said, because that was her “first true moment of when I knew what I was supposed to do.”

  Kendrick Mitchell, the child who had been a bullied sixth-grade outcast, called Mam from Houston to say that Mrs. Leming had been such an encouragement to him back then.

  “You don’t know me, ma’am,” Kendrick said to my mother, “but I feel like I need to tell you this about your daughter. If she had not been there for me to encourage me and to let me know that things were going to get better, I might not be where I am today.

  “Everything I am today,” he said, “I owe it all to Mrs. Leming.”

  After Kendrick’s call Kay Graves took Mam out for a ride around town, to get away from the hubbub in Starhill. They stopped at the Sonic Drive-In for a Coke. The girl who brought their drinks to the car said, “Are you Mrs. Leming’s mom?”—and then started talking about how Ruthie had been her teacher, and all the wonderful things Ruthie had done for her. A man sitting in the car next to theirs, eating his burger, overheard this and said, “You’re Ruthie Leming’s mother? She taught my children.” And off he went, talking about what a difference Ruthie had made in his children’s lives.

  The day after Ruthie died Mike’s cousins Josh and Karen Gott rolled in from north Texas and quietly took over running the house, freeing Mike to give his full attention to the task of burying his wife. Mam, Paw, Abby, and I accompanied Mike to Charlet Funeral Home to pick out the casket and make the arrangements. Jan Curwick, the Methodist pastor, met us there, and helped us through the process. Everyone in St. Francisville knew the Charlet family, which has for two generations buried the sons and daughters of West Feliciana. Just a day earlier Mike had been sitting with his wife drinking coffee. This morning he was choosing her casket.

  Julie and our children arrived from Philadelphia on Saturday. That afternoon Tim and Laura Lindsey came out to Starhill to check on Mike and the girls. Tim took several of us aside and advised us about what we could do to help them deal with the reality of life without Ruthie. Later Julie and I watched Tim and Laura sitting in rocking chairs on Ruthie’s front porch, flanking Hannah, talking to her about her grief, and helping her understand, both emotionally and theologically, what it meant to face death.

  As I watched Hannah taking Tim’s message in, it struck me that although my sister was dead, and Tim’s service to her as a physician was over, he didn’t see it that way. There was still healing to be done in Ruthie’s family, the kind of healing that medicine, strictly speaking, could not effect. Because Tim approached his vocation as a work of love, he found the strength, the direction, and the inner resources to treat the Lemings in ways beyond the reach of standard medical practice. Here was a family doctor treating his patients like family.

  Later that morning, I said to Julie, “You know, I’m sorry we live so far away. I wish we had Tim taking care of our family.”

  Julie said, “I was thinking the same thing.”

  My sister had died on a Thursday. On my first Sunday morning without her, I needed to be in church. I drove into Baton Rouge to the Orthodox liturgy at St. Matthew’s, a mission parish in a south Baton Rouge strip mall. At the end of the service Father Mark Christian announced that Ruthie Leming, who had been on the parish prayer list for the last year and a half, had just reposed. They sang “Memory Eternal” for my sister, whom none of them had ever met, but for whom they had been praying for these nineteen months. I was not expecting that, and had to fight back tears.

  Back home in the country I found my parents wrestling with a problem. The phone had been ringing with people asking if Mike had set up an education fund for his and Ruthie’s children. They wanted a way to donate more than flowers. It hadn’t occurred to any of us to do that sort of thing. I called Bess Kelley from the Bank of St. Francisville to ask her what information I would need on Monday morning to set the account up for the children.

  “Why don’t we do it today?” she said.

  “Well, it’s Sunday. The bank is closed.”

  “I’ll meet you there in an hour.” Bess gave an hour and a half of her Sunday afternoon to make sure people coming to Ruthie’s wake that night at the Methodist church would have a place to donate for the children.

  That evening, as a warm rain fell, the doors of the Methodist church opened onto Royal Street for mourners to pay their respects. For hours they came, standing in the rain and amid the mosquitoes swarming in the muggy interludes between showers; white and black, children and old folks, people who had known Ruthie since childhood, people who had known her only the year she had taught them, and even people who only knew my mother and father, but came because they loved and respected them and knew they were hurting.

  The church’s bell tower stretches into the limbs of the live oak trees shading the structure, built on this patch of ground in 1896, when the congregation at the Bayou Sara church under the bluff grew weary of routine Mississippi River flooding. Built of wood and painted a chaste white, the Methodist church is as modest as the brick neo-Gothic Episcopal church across the way is grand, but no less dignified. The church is small, its interior unadorned, the pale abstractions of the stained-glass windows its only ornamentation. There are dark wooden pews, a dark wooden communion rail, and dark wooden trim around the arched windows. It is a plain country church for plain country Christians. Five generations of my family have gathered there to pray, to sing, and to consecrate the milestones—births, marriages, deaths—of our lives.

  This little church had not been enough to hold me as a teenager, nor to reclaim my loyalty as a young man stumbling back toward the Christian faith. Today, though, I felt gratitude for this place. No European cathedral would have done Ruthie’s memory justice like this Methodist chapel under the live oak trees. This church was who my sister was, and if I could no longer share the form of faith proclaimed and taught from its pulpit, I could love it all the same, if only because Ruthie, like so many of our ancestors, did.

  Paw was not strong enough to be on his feet and settled into the second pew on the left—the Dreher pew—to receive friends. The rest of us stood in the front of the church, next to Ruthie’s body in the open casket, which sat on the same place where she and Mike stood all those years ago and promised to be together until death.

  Mam and I flitted around the church, greeting people in line, checking on Paw, and returning occasionally to our perch in the front. Mike and the girls, though, stayed in place, receiving mourners for four hours. Late in the evening Claire and Rebekah took off their shoes. They did it because their feet hurt from standing, but then thought it would be a fitting tribute to their mother, who was famously a fan of going barefoot. Few of those filling the church that night knew that Mike was in intense physical pain. He had injured his back trying to save Ruthie.

  The line unspooled down the street and far around the block. A police officer told me the only wake she had seen as big as this one was General Robert H. Barrow’s. General Barrow was a scion of an old West Feliciana family, a World War II hero who went on to become commandant of the US Marine Corps. He had turned down President Ronald Reagan’s invitation to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the grounds that the armed services were not ready for a Marine in that role. Before retiring to his farm in the Feliciana hills, General Barrow was one of the most powerful men in America. It impressed me that, to judge by the police officer’s comment, folks here had the same degree of love and respect for a humble schoolteacher known to virtually no one beyond the parish’s borders.

  At one point in the evening I left Mike and the girls and slipped through the back door into the church hall for a cup of coffee. Julie, who was talking to folks on the sidewalk out front, sent me a text. “Check your e-mail,” it read.

  There was a letter to us from the owners of that beautiful eighteenth-century farmhouse in Bucks County we had toured the day before Ruthie died. In the confusion after her sudden passing,
we had not had time to work out the details on the lease before leaving for Louisiana.

  Now the landlords had written to say they really needed to get this house leased before they departed for California. They were sorry, but they had decided to rent it to another family.

  I dashed to the front of the church, expecting to find Julie in tears. We had lost our dream house! But when I found her she looked strangely serene.

  Feeling bold, I confessed, “I have to tell you that I’m actually kind of relieved.”

  Her eyes registered surprise. “Me, too!”

  Something was going on with us.

  Just past nine that night the church had emptied except for a handful of friends, most of them schoolteachers who had worked with Ruthie. They planned to hold an all-night vigil with her body. Nobody could recall the last time anybody had done something like this for the dead in West Feliciana. But for Ruthie? Her friends figured it wouldn’t be right to leave her there all by herself.

  It began informally, with a reading by Nora Marsh, who by now had retired from the classroom. She was working as a school librarian in New Orleans, but drove up to the country for the wake. She had not only taught me, but Ruthie too. Nora recited the George Eliot poem “The Choir Invisible.” “It made me think of Ruthie,” she said. I understood what Nora meant when her recitation concluded with these lines:

  … May I reach

  That purest heaven,—be to other souls

  The cup of strength in some great agony,

  Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,

  Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,

  Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,

  And in diffusion ever more intense!

  So shall I join the choir invisible

  Whose music is the gladness of the world.