by Rod Dreher
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To Hannah, Claire, and Rebekah
This is your mother; these are your people
What matters in life are not great deeds, but great love.
—ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
CHAPTER ONE
Country Mouse, City Mouse
Here’s the thing I want you to know about my sister.
A long time ago—I must have been about seven years old, which would have made Ruthie five—I did something rotten to her. What it was, I can’t remember. I teased her all the time, and she spent much of her childhood whaling the tar out of me for it. Whatever happened that time, though, must have been awful, because our father told me to go lie down on my bed and wait for him. That could mean only one thing: that he was going to deliver one of his rare but highly effective spankings, with his belt.
I cannot recall what my offense was, but I well remember walking down the hallway and climbing onto the bed, knowing full well that I deserved it. I always did. Nothing to be done but to stretch out, facedown, and take what I had coming.
And then it happened. Ruthie ran into the bedroom just ahead of Paw and, sobbing, threw herself across me.
“Whip me!” she cried. “Daddy, whip me!”
Paw gave no spankings that day. He turned and walked away. Ruthie left too. There I sat, on the bed, wondering what had just happened.
Forty years later, I still do.
Ruthie would grow up to be a schoolteacher, a friend, a neighbor, and quite possibly the kindest person many people in our Louisiana parish had ever met. But our little town, St. Francisville, suffers no lack of kind people. There was something different about Ruthie, though. I didn’t always see that, of course—and I didn’t really see it until the end. Ruthie had always been my little sister, which, in our family, meant my frequent foil.
My little sister was born on May 15, 1969. My parents named her Lois Ruth Dreher, accomplishing the neat trick of honoring four elderly female relatives with only two names. As far as I was concerned at the time, the kid ruined my life as a two-year-old prince of the realm. When Mam and Paw brought her home from the hospital to our house in the country, I was appalled. Ruthie had a crib in her own room, across the hall from mine. That was too close.
When she had been home from the hospital for about two weeks, I told my parents, “I don’t want her.”
“Okay, we’ll take her back,” replied Mam. She loaded Ruthie in the car after making a show of packing up a little suitcase. Then Mam put me in the car and started to drive, wondering how far we’d have to go before I gave in. We got all the way to Highway 61 before I started crying and said that I wanted her. “My baby, my baby,” I cried. Crisis averted, Mam turned the car around and headed for home. But I was still jealous and would remain so for some time.
This scenario or some variation of it should be familiar to anyone who has been a sibling or raised siblings. But as time went on—and not much time, either—it became clear that Ruthie and I were so different it was hard to imagine that we came from the same family.
The Drehers were country people. We lived in Starhill, a rural community six miles south of St. Francisville, a town of two thousand souls and the county seat of West Feliciana Parish. Though our little red brick house wouldn’t have been out of place anywhere in late 1960s suburban America, it had the intimidating distinction of being smack in the middle of plantation country, a land of magnolias, Spanish moss, and architectural grandeur. West Feliciana is in English Louisiana, a southeastern region settled by people of Anglo descent, some of them Tories escaping the American Revolution. They built magnificent cotton plantations, and sold their goods at Bayou Sara, a trading port on the Mississippi, just below the bluffs on which the town of St. Francisville was built.
Growing up in St. Francisville you can’t escape history. Every schoolchild goes on a field trip to Grace Episcopal Church, and stands under the moss-strewn oaks to hear the story of the time a cannonball from a Union gunboat on the river struck the church’s bell tower. Our ancestor Columbus Simmons fought as a Confederate sniper in the battle of Port Hudson. For eleven days, he lived in a hollow tree, eating grubs, his legs peppered by shrapnel, until his capture. After the battle the Yankees let their prisoners go, and he limped back to his home in Osyka, Mississippi, and rejoined the Rebel army. Later Columbus migrated to West Feliciana, bought land in Starhill, and raised his family there. His children were George; Clint; my great-grandmother, Bernice; and her two younger sisters, Lois and Hilda. My sister and I learned about Columbus as a small boy at Lois’s and Hilda’s ancient knees. That’s how close history was to Ruthie and me.
My father, Ray Dreher, was the first in our branch of the family to go to college, though against his will. He wanted to be outside, building things and working with his cows. But after returning from a stint in the US Coast Guard, my grandmother Lorena insisted that her son take advantage of the GI Bill and enter Louisiana State University. In 1958, while working on a degree in rural sociology, Paw bought sixty-seven acres in Starhill from his great-aunt Em—the asking price was forty dollars an acre—and began small-scale farming on part of the old Simmons place. He also started a job as the parish sanitarian, which, in a rural parish like West Feliciana, meant he was not only the health inspector, but often the public official who helped impoverished families get basic plumbing into their houses. To look upon my father as a young man—freckled forearms, sun-scorched face, chest the size of an oak trunk, fiery orange cowlicks blazing atop his head—was to understand immediately that he was a man who had no business confined to a desk. It wasn’t in his nature.
Dorothy, Ruthie’s and my mother, moved to town with her family from Mississippi at age eleven, when her father took a job at a sweet potato canning plant. She was nine years younger than Ray. One day in 1962 Paw walked into Robb’s Drugstore, and was startled to learn that the beautiful young woman behind the counter, the one with the tender brown eyes, the sunshiny smile, and the way of speaking that made you feel like you had known her forever, was Dorothy Howard, all grown up. They began courting, and married in the summer of 1964.
Dorothy and Ray—Mam and Paw, as everyone calls them now—built their Starhill house when I was two years old. It sat in an open field at the edge of a pasture where Paw grazed his cattle herd. Paw would raise his children in the country, a mile as the crow flies from where he had grown up. His parents, Murphy and Lorena, still lived in the old cottage on Highway 61, and his brother, Murphy Jr., a real estate broker and world-class joker who once—no kidding—prank-called Ayatollah Khomeini, was raising his family across the road from them.
Starhill was where all the Drehers lived. There were fields and forests everywhere. For us, going to town meant driving the six miles north on Highway 61, in those days a two-lane blacktop, to St. Francisville. Baton Rouge, thirty miles in the other direction, was an exotic journey. New Orleans, an hour and a half farther downriver, might as
well have been Paris.
From an early age Ruthie loved the country life. “Ruthie wanted to be with me whenever I was doing something outside,” Paw says. “I never will forget the time when Ruthie was in diapers, and taking a bottle. I came in the house frustrated. It was in the wintertime, and I had planted sixty acres of rye grass back on the place. Old man John I. Daniel’s cows kept tearing down the fence. His cows were getting in there eating all the rye grass I had for my cows.
“Ruthie heard me telling Mother that I was going to be back there a while fixing fence. She told her Mama that she wanted to go with Daddy, and she wanted Mama to fix her a bottle. She went herself, got her two diapers under her arm, and got in the truck. This was eight thirty in the morning. I was back there till eleven o’clock. That baby never said one time that she wanted to go home. She would kneel at the window watching me, or take a nap on the seat, or call me if she needed a diaper change.”
Wherever Paw went in his pickup truck, Ruthie wanted to go too. Me? Not so much.
“If I didn’t take her, she’d be mad at me. You? You didn’t give a damn,” he says, laughing. “You were watching TV or reading. Me, the kind of man I was, I wanted you to be outside, with me.”
Most of all I preferred to be with Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda, technically my great-great-aunts and the last of the Simmonses. The sisters, born in the final decade of the nineteenth century, were in their seventies by the time I came along. They lived together in a tumbledown shack at the end of a gravel road that ran through a pecan orchard near our house. That tin-roofed wood cabin, framed by sweet olive trees and enclosed by groves and gardens, was, like C. S. Lewis’s enchanted wardrobe, a doorway into another world.
I now know that Lois and Hilda—whose father, recall, had fought in the Civil War—were the most extraordinary people I will probably ever meet. As a little boy, though, they were just Loisie—rhymes with “choicey”—and Mossie (Hilda married Ashton Moss, who died young). They had grown up in Starhill as strong-willed country girls who loved life on the farm, but who also yearned for adventure. When the United States entered the Great War, the sisters volunteered as Red Cross nurses. They caught the train at the bottom of the hill near their family home and didn’t stop their journey until they arrived at the Red Cross canteen at Dijon, France.
On many mornings in my early childhood, after Buckskin Bill, the Captain Kangaroo of Baton Rouge, told his loyal TV viewers good-bye from Storyland Cabin, my mother would give me a couple of diapers and let me walk through the orchard to Loisie and Mossie’s place for the day. Sometimes I would stray from the pea-gravel path and walk under the pecan trees, with their faintly tangy musk. In the springtime a spray of white dogwood flowers hung high in a thick grove of trees opposite the pecans, a bunting celebrating the end of winter and marking the border of Loisie and Mossie’s yard.
In that cabin I would sit with the two aged aunts, thin and frail as dried kindling, on their red leather couch and look through canvas-backed photo albums of their war years. There was the time, Lois said, when General “Black Jack” Pershing showed up at the canteen late one night and nobody could find the key to the kitchenware cabinet. Lois had to strain the general’s tea through her petticoat. Hilda told of being in Dijon on the day the Armistice was announced, and slapping a giddy Frenchman when he seized her on the street, shouted, “La guerre est finie!” and tried to kiss her. She pretended to be scandalized by this, but what I heard was the excitement of someone who had had a grand adventure in a part of the world unlike our own, where nothing ever happened. Sitting on the couch beneath three rare Audubon prints, the sisters told me of their travels through Provence, the Côte d’Azur, Toulouse, and Paris, beautiful Paris. We tracked their route on the pages of a vintage Rand McNally atlas splayed on our laps.
Sometimes I would sit in Loisie’s lap in the kitchen, not much bigger than a closet, and stir her pecan cookie batter by hand. We would pull sheets of those cookies out of the oven, each one buttery and crisp and about the size of a quarter, and eat them with cold milk on the front porch (or “gallery,” as the old aunts called it, in the antique usage). Often we would sit by the fire and read the newspaper together. I loved the look and sound of those exotic words in the headlines. Kissinger. Moscow. Watergate. I could only intuit it at the time, but these elderly ladies, spending their final years in rural exile, were among the worldliest people I’d ever meet. Hilda, an eccentric Episcopalian, taught herself palm-reading. Scratching her bony finger across my soft pink palm one day, she said, “See this line? You’ll travel far in life.” I hoped it was true.
Lois was an accomplished amateur horticulturalist, and took me with her on strolls in her gardens. There was a large Magnolia fuscata tree in her front yard, with its pale yellow blossoms that smelled of banana. Loisie and I would walk, me holding her hand, past her camellia bushes, the stands of spidery red lycoris, King Alfred daffodils, and jonquils. There was a pear tree, a chestnut, cedars, live oaks, flowering dogwoods, and, towering over the backyard, an old Chinese rain tree, its podlike blossoms puffed like a thousand and one pink lanterns.
There was a king snake that lived in the bushes under the huge magnolia tree in Loisie and Mossie’s yard. Loisie taught me that the old snake was our friend. If he was there, she said, he would keep rattlesnakes away. One day when I was eight, I walked with a friend to the aunts’ cottage, and there was the king snake, black as night and marked by pale yellow runes, stretched across the pea gravel, sunning itself. My friend was paralyzed by fear, but I stepped right over the snake without bothering him. Loisie had said he was our friend, hadn’t she, and inasmuch as she was the happy genius of this grove, who was I to doubt her?
This was my haven as a boy, a house and a garden a three-minute walk from my house, where I learned things that would shape the course of my life. But it was foreign territory to my sister. “Aunt Hilda turned Ruthie aside,” is how Paw remembers it. “She was one of those women who dotes on boys. And she favored intellectual-type things. You were reading at three and a half. Ruthie wasn’t. You liked books. Ruthie liked outdoor things. You were so interested in the lives those ladies had lived, and the places they had been. Ruthie wasn’t, but it still hurt Ruthie badly that she would never be included.”
Ruthie would have been bored stiff by parlor conversation and strolls through cultivated gardens. She wanted the woods, rough as it came. She loved it when she could prevail upon Paw to take her down to the hunting camp in Fancy Point swamp. I spent a fair amount of time there too, though the last place I wanted to be on a wet, frozen Saturday morning was standing in the woods with a shotgun—I was too young to handle a rifle—looking for a deer to shoot. For me the best part of those mornings was being with my dad and his friends in the warmth of the camp kitchen, drinking hot, sweet Community coffee, eating jelly cake, and listening to the crazy talk from Oliver “Preacher” McNabb, the old black cook who had once been in Angola State Penitentiary for murder. And then I had to go pretend to enjoy stalking deer, when I really wanted to be inside, cooking with Preacher and listening to his stories. Deer-stalking is what our culture told us young boys were supposed to love above all things.
Ruthie, she really did love all of it—especially the hunting. As soon as she was big enough to carry a shotgun, she did. When a hunter brought down a buck, the men took the carcass back to the camp to skin it. If I got too close, I would start to gag. Ruthie was right in the middle of it all, and in time, learned to skin a buck herself. “One time when she was a teenager, she and I went down on the edge of the swamp, down by Ed Shields’s house,” Paw says. “I put Ruthie on one hill, and I got up on the next one. After we sat there a while, we heard the dogs barking and coming. There were lots of leaves on the ground, and it was dry. We could hear the deer running in the leaves.
“As they got close, I heard Ruthie shoot that rifle of mine. I hollered, ‘Ruthie, did you get him?’ Her answer was, ‘Hell yeah, I did!’ That deer was running wide open, and that baby had hit
him square in the neck. That was a difference between y’all. That time you killed that big thirteen-point in the swamp, you were torn up about it. But she was on top of the world.”
Our family spent a lot of time outdoors, which was a normal thing around West Feliciana back then. In the spring, summer, and early fall, we fished in rivers, creeks, and ponds. When Ruthie and I were small, our dad had a pond built on his land and stocked it with bass, bream, and catfish. Fishing on that pond was what we did. It was great fun, especially when Paw gave us mini-cast rods and reels, which made pulling in those auburn-breasted bream, only the size of a man’s hand, like landing a trophy bass. Fishing was our family’s thing, and Paw’s pond was our family’s place. Though I was no fan of the outdoors, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.
But I would also be lying if I said I wouldn’t rather have been in the city, at the movies, or better yet, at a bookstore. I loved science fiction, and novels, and books about space, and comics from Richie Rich to Archie to the Green Lantern. And best of all, there was Mad magazine, with its smarty-pants humor, and its snappy Yiddishisms. Nobody around here talked like that. I wanted to be where people talked like that.
“You were our dreamer,” Mam says. “Ruthie wasn’t. She was satisfied with what she had in front of her. You had your head in books all the time. She loved nature, and being outside.”
If that’s what you love, there is no better place to be on earth than West Feliciana. But if not, well, you’ve got problems, or at least you did if you were growing up in our house. I think the incomprehensible strangeness of her older brother brought out Ruthie’s competitive nature, which manifested itself at an early age. She figured out soon enough that she was far more athletic than I, and that she could best me in most any physical contest.
She was a tough little strawberry blonde, barrel-chested like our father, with our mother’s deep brown eyes. I was pudgy, weak, and embarrassingly uncoordinated. In third grade the playground fad was a toy called the Lemon Twist. It was a plastic lemon connected to a strip of flexible plastic rope, with a loop around the opposite end. You slipped the loop over your foot, and let it rest around your ankle. Then you spun the lemon around, leaping over it with your free foot. You might as well have asked me to dance the tarantella. My little sister was an instant ace on the Lemon Twist.
