by Rod Dreher
“They’ve been dead twenty-one years,” Susan continued. “But you never know when you’re going to wake up one morning and it’ll feel like just yesterday.”
On Christmas Day the Starhill crew arrived at our house on Fidelity Street just after noon. After only six days somehow my tireless Julie had the house looking festive, warm, and welcoming. As Mam, Paw, Mike and his three girls sat down with us to feast on the turkey and ham, I popped the cork on a bottle of ice-cold Prosecco, and poured a glass for all the grown-ups. We lifted our glasses of bubbly wine and drank a toast. “To Ruthie Leming,” I said, and we clinked our glasses.
After dinner everyone migrated to the living room, where Matthew had warmed up the Beatles Rock Band game on the Wii. Our cousins Melanie and Bob Bare came over, along with our musician cousin Emily Branton and her little girl, Ava. The wine flowed generously. Even Mike, who had been so solemn throughout dinner, began to brighten, smile, and sing along with the kids. At one point I went to the kitchen to fetch another bottle of wine, and came back to see a room full of family, all singing the Beatles together.
“ ‘Here comes the sun,’ ” my family sang in unison. “ ‘It’s all ri-i-ight.’ ”
Coming home to the place where I grew up would not be easy, but if I was going to live more like Ruthie, I was obliged to stick it out, come what may. In this my patron saint, Benedict of Nursia, came to my aid. St. Benedict was a fifth-century Italian monk who more or less founded monasticism in the West. In his famous rule Benedict required his monks take a vow of what he called “stability.” That means that the monastery in which Benedictine monks profess their vows will in most cases be their home for the rest of their lives. St. Benedict considered the kinds of monks who moved from place to place all the time to be the worst of all. They refused the discipline of place and community, and because of that, they could never know humility. Without humility they could never be happy.
The implication for me was clear: if I wanted to know the inner peace and happiness in community that Ruthie had, I needed to practice a rule of stability. Accept the limitations of a place, in humility, and the joys that can also be found there may open themselves.
I’m not sure what St. Benedict would have made of the Blue Horse Saloon, a downtown alehouse that was—until it burned down in 2012—one of a handful of places in town where nightly revels commenced. On Christmas week, one of the bar’s more vigorous diversions had attracted the eye of my mother.
“I think,” she told me, “that I’m going to ride that bull.”
“You what?”
“The mechanical bull at the Blue Horse. I think I’m going to ride it on Friday night.”
“Mama, are you out of your mind? You’re sixty-eight years old. When was the last time you were in a barroom?”
“Hannah said that I should ride that bull. She was just messing with me, but I don’t know, it sounds like a fun thing to do. I feel like I’ve turned a corner. I think it was the candles. I told Hannah that sounded like a good idea, and she put it on Facebook. Now she’s got about forty people saying they’ll come out and watch me do it. You want to come?”
On Friday night there was a rowdy scrum of Mam fans crowded into the back end of the Blue Horse, a laidback but respectable honky-tonk with a handsome bar, a pool table, and an air of good cheer. When the bright blue inflatable pallet surrounding the bull began to rise, Mam’s moment in the neon spotlight of the beer signs arrived.
“Go Mammy! Go Mammy!” the crowd chanted. Grinning broadly enough to swallow her ears, Mam, wearing a baggy red sweater and a pair of tight jeans, donned a straw cowboy hat and climbed onto the spongy pallet. But the years had not been kind to the six-time grandmother. She couldn’t figure out how to mount the metallic beast.
Big Show came to the rescue. He gallantly offered his cupped hands as a stair step. This didn’t work. Then Show seized Mam by the thigh and, with a mighty shove, hoisted her atop the bull. He gave her bottom a robust slap and wished her luck.
“Merry Christmas!” she cracked.
With a big smile we hadn’t seen in ages beaming from her face, Mam lifted her cowboy hat high above her head as a signal for the bar owner to start the bucking.
The bull rocked back and forth gently, like an aged Holstein trundling out to pasture. Mam rolled with it, pitching and yawing and, incredibly, failing to fall off. She lasted almost thirty seconds before tumbling onto the pallet below, roaring with laughter. The crowd whooped and hollered, helped Mam to her feet, sweeping her up with a flood of hugs, backslapping, and words of encouragement.
She stayed till one in the morning, singing karaoke with Hannah, and for the first time in a very long time, having a blast.
Even though Mam’s state of mind improved after the holidays, she still struggled to maintain her balance. She steadied herself by taking as much care of Ruthie and Mike’s girls as she was able to—but that, at times, was too much for Claire and Rebekah. They sometimes felt she was hovering too close. For Mam, though, as long as she could feel that she had the chance to fulfill her vow to Ruthie, she had a reason to carry on. She had trouble finding a middle ground with Ruthie’s children, and she struggled with her sorrow. Every evening at dusk Mam drove a mile up the road to visit the cemetery, to make sure the candle in the lantern she had set atop Ruthie’s grave was burning. Paw worried that this prolonged her mourning; she promised him she would stop after the first year without Ruthie.
Paw was in rough shape too. Watching his daughter die broke his spirit. At seventy-seven, with his back and hip pain, he was too weak and infirm to be active. This was hard on a man who had always defined himself by what he could do. He spent too much time at home in his armchair, watching TV, drinking brandy, and despairing.
Right after we returned Paw said to me, “Not too long before he died, I took my daddy to a burial at the Starhill cemetery. When I was walking him out he said to me, ‘I’ve had about enough of this place. I’ve come in and out of here too many times. Next time I come here, they just as well ought to leave me.’ I feel the same way.”
What consolation he found in the wake of Ruthie’s death came from the company of others. He especially loved spending time with Lucas, who exudes ebullience and sunshine and was turning into an enthusiastic athlete and BB gun marksman. He was a city kid whose instincts were all country boy. That’s why he and his aunt Ruthie were so close. It wasn’t hard to figure why Paw felt so drawn to him these days.
One morning, on my way into Baton Rouge, I dropped Lucas off in Starhill to spend the morning with his grandfather.
“I’m glad we homeschool,” Lucas told me. “That way I can go do things with Paw when he has time.”
It seemed to his mother and me that this time with Paw added a priceless dimension to Lucas’s education. Paw told me later that day how much he enjoyed his time with Lucas. They saw construction workers building a driveway. They went fishing on the pond. They learned about compasses. Lucas stacked Mam and Paw’s firewood, and beamed telling us about how he’d helped them.
“He’s Johnny-on-the-Spot, let me tell you,” Paw gushed. “Lucas is ready for anything.”
Though I was back in town John Bickham and Big Show remained Paw’s main supports. They loved and respected him like their own father, and they could give him things—understanding, and practical help maintaining the land—beyond my power to provide. They were both aware of his faults, but they loved him—and he loved them in return—with a purity and simplicity that wasn’t possible between the two of us.
I had no illusions about what my relationship with my father would be like when I returned. I had made that mistake once before. Besides I didn’t need his approval as much as when I had returned nearly twenty years earlier. I had become my own man. I built a good career as a writer and journalist, had a wife and three children, and had been a success on my own. I was doing meaningful work, and was happy. I had nothing left to prove to him or to myself. I could therefore afford, emotionally and psychol
ogically, to live close to my dad because my sense of self-worth no longer depended on his favor. He never has understood me, and may never, but I knew that he loved me, and that he needed me to be with him during these last years of his life. That was enough; I had no right to expect more.
Still, in my heart, I wanted a sign from him, however small, that he blessed, in retrospect, the journey I had taken through life—that even though I did not do it his way, the way I had done it was worthy in his eyes. Ruthie’s contempt for things she did not understand—especially anything she considered artificial or snobbish—came from somewhere. I may have decided to walk a path more like the one my sister had chosen, but that did not mean I believed my former path had been a mistake. Nevertheless I could not shake the dread that as Ray Dreher’s only son and male heir—a big deal in Southern families—having turned my back on my birthright would always mark me as a man of suspect character.
If he were able to give me his benediction, it would be a matchless grace. The time for that, though, had surely passed. My task was to offer him as much grace as I could muster, to bless him with acts of love, and to forgive and forget the rejection and alienation from him that I had felt as a young man.
But I didn’t like it when he was drinking brandy, and hated to be around him when he’d had too much. I understood why he was doing it; his child was dead, his body was breaking down, and even though he was tired of life, life wasn’t tired of him. Blood may be thicker than liquor, but nothing was as thin as my patience. Big Show and John Bickham weren’t like that. They knew how to abide. I had a lot to learn from them.
I had a lot to learn as well about how to make the transition back to a town where ancient history—my ancient history—still lives. One afternoon, not long after our return, I saw the girl who had been the chief instigator of my high school misery jog by.
She was now, of course, a middle-aged woman, but she looked great. She had mellowed over the years; you could see in her face that she was a much happier person now than she had been in high school. She stopped to talk to Julie and me, and was wonderful. It was awkward for me, though. Should I tell her that everything ugly that happened between us back in the day is gone and forgotten? For me it really was, and had been for a long time; the epiphanies after Ruthie’s passing confirmed that. Would it be presumptuous to tell her I forgive her? After all she did not ask to be forgiven, and maybe she cannot even remember what she did. Maybe it’s better to leave things in peace. I discovered years after her hazing of me that she herself was struggling with some serious personal problems during her teenage years; her torment of others and me was the result of her private pain.
Besides she had phoned me in Philadelphia days after Ruthie’s diagnosis to tell me how sorry she was to hear the news, and that she was praying for our family, and for me. Maybe I should take her aside and tell her that things were fine between us, and that if she in any way labored under a burden of guilt, that she should not carry it on my account, because I held nothing against her. In fact if she and her friends hadn’t made my life so unbearable back then, it is entirely possible that all the good things that followed for me, from the Louisiana School onward, might never have happened. What they intended for evil when we were kids, God, in the years that followed, turned into good.
This is what it meant to move home. Communitarian romanticism is fine, but what do you do when the past isn’t even past, but is in fact jogging down your street, and stepping onto your front porch to say hello?
The people of the town had been terrifically welcoming to us. The real challenges to reentry were almost entirely within my family, and inside my head. For me to follow Benedict’s rule of stability, I would need to work at achieving some kind of closure with my father and to get to the bottom of the root cause of an underlying tension that existed between me, a decent person, and my sister, a beatific one. Mam’s anxiety and Paw’s despair were tough cases, but I was on familiar ground with them. With Ruthie’s children it was a different story.
One afternoon before she returned to college for the spring semester, Hannah and I borrowed Paw’s truck and drove to Baton Rouge, stopping off at furniture stores, looking for chairs for our new house. She was anxious and confused about her mother’s death, and what it meant for her.
“Why does anything mean anything, Uncle Rod?” she asked as we motored into the city. “I mean, we’re here, and then we die. What’s the point of any of it? Why don’t we just do whatever we want to do while we’re alive? We’re going to end up dead anyway.”
I had to remind myself that I too had once been a teenager who dwelled on these kinds of philosophical questions. I did it out of curiosity, but in Hannah’s case fate had taken her hard by the hair and rubbed her nose in them.
Hannah knew her mother was a good woman who did everything right, and still she died young and in pain. I quickly discerned that Hannah didn’t really wonder how she should be living. What she was really asking was how to reconcile what happened to her mother with the belief that God is all good and all powerful.
“I don’t know why this happened to your mom,” I said. “And I can’t tell you why anybody has to die the way they do. There are answers, but it’s not for us to know them now.”
“But I want to know!” Hannah said. “I want to know why this happened.”
“But you can’t. Nobody can. What if you could know? What if God gave you a piece of paper with all the answers written on it? Would that make it any easier to live without your mama?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Hannah, your mom never questioned why this had happened to her. It’s why she had so much peace. If I had terminal lung cancer, I would read every theological book I could get my hands on, and at the end, after all my searching for answers, the best I could hope for would be to have the peace that your mom did from the very beginning.
“She didn’t try to understand the mystery. She just tried to live it. We have to try too. There’s no other way.”
Hannah said nothing. I was out of things to say. We drove on.
Ruthie’s younger children, Claire and Rebekah, posed a different kind of challenge. Claire was twelve when we moved back; Rebekah, nine. They remained shy, polite, deferential, and distant. How could it have been otherwise? We were the uncle and aunt they saw only a few times each year, and we spent all that time talking with the grown-ups, and Hannah, who was older, while they played with our kids. For all they knew of us, we were strangers who moved in and out of their lives, and never stayed.
One late winter night Claire and Rebekah spent the night with us. After dinner while Bekah played the Wii with Lucas and Nora, Claire and I sat in the room off the kitchen and talked. She was quiet and poised, but spoke tartly about her ongoing arguments with Hannah. I told her I worried about that she and Hannah were laying down battle lines that would define their relationship for the rest of their lives.
“Your mom and I did that,” I said. “Mam and Paw tried to warn us, but it happened anyway. We were both at fault, but as time went by, something hardened. After a while, there was nothing I could do to cross the line between us. We couldn’t even talk about it. And now she’s gone. I so don’t want that to happen to you and Hannah.”
Claire sat in the leather armchair across from me, a tendril of hair falling out of her ponytail and over her forehead, watching me with wide eyes, listening intently.
“Hannah has not been doing right by you, and she needs to change,” I said. “But you need to try to understand what the past few years have been like for Hannah. She told me that she felt like an outsider and a misfit in the family sometimes. The things that come easy for you—feeling at ease with yourself and like you belong in this place—are hard for her.”
“Your mom and I weren’t as close as I wish we had been,” I said. “I was a jerk to her when we were young, and when we got older, she thought I was weird. We loved each other, but I’m not sure how much we liked each other. It’s too bad, because we ca
n’t fix that now.”
Claire looked at me, blinking calmly.
“Your mom never knew that what she had, was what I wanted so much,” I said. “Your Mama knew who she was and where she was supposed to be. I’ve struggled all my life with that. I admired what she had and wanted to be like her. I really did. And I never told her that.”
Claire’s eyes widened.
“You wanted to be like Mama?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You wanted to be like Mama?!”
“Yes, I absolutely did.”
Relief flooded her face. I thought, Maybe I’ve gotten somewhere tonight.
Reconciliation with my folks, my nieces, my town, and my past would not come quickly or without difficulty, but with patience it might. Though Ruthie’s death had the unanticipated effect of making this broader reconciliation possible, she and I would never be able to reach an understanding. She was gone, but I still strongly felt her presence, and not in a peaceable way.
We may have informally put aside our differences on her front porch that warm February morning in her first cancer week, but that did not explain why things were always so difficult between Ruthie and me. God knows I held no grudge against her, but I could not grasp why I was perhaps the only person on earth whom she didn’t treat with patience and understanding. As I had explained to Claire, at some point after our childhood, an invisible wall came up between her mother and me. We could talk over that wall, but could not breach it. I would have loved to have spoken intimately with Ruthie before the end, to have cleared things up between us, to make sure we were solid with each other. Ruthie wouldn’t have it. She wouldn’t talk about matters she found unpleasant, and after she fell ill, resisted having “serious” conversations, because that was the kind of thing a dying person would do. What’s more, Ruthie had always been the sort who, having made up her mind about something, found it very difficult to question her own judgment.