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

by Rod Dreher

  For me this was humiliating. It was a pattern that would repeat itself. Once Paw mounted a campaign to encourage me to build my upper body strength. I was on the floor in the living room, struggling to heave out a pitiful few push-ups. Paw tried to keep Ruthie out of the house when this was going on, because he knew she couldn’t resist trying to outdo me.

  “There she came up the hall, saw you on the floor, then flopped down and started pumping them out,” he recalls. “That was the end of that ring-dang-doo. You just quit.”

  Ruthie was always a fighter. After we were both in school our mother took up driving a school bus. The drivers would line up outside the elementary school in the afternoon, chatting with each other until the final bell rang, letting the kids out.

  “One day,” Mam recalls, “Ruthie was probably third grade, I remember Clyde Morgan, one of the other drivers, sitting there with us saying, ‘That boy better watch out.’ Your sister was coming across the way to the bus, with her lunch box in one hand, and her book sack in the other. This little boy kept running by her, hitting her on the head. We watched her weigh the book sack in one hand, and the lunch box in the other. Clyde said, ‘Look, she’s choosing her weapon.’ She picked up that book sack, and when he made the next round, she whacked him with the book sack, knocked that boy on the ground. Calmly picked up her book sack and got on the bus. Never said another word about it.”

  Ruthie was a hard little nut. But if that were all she was, she wouldn’t have had so many friends, and no enemies. She was one of those rare people who had a natural talent for nurturing friendships with both boys and girls. And though sports, hunting, and fishing were her passions, she could be as feminine as she needed to be when the occasion called for it. Ruthie was probably our town’s only homecoming queen who really did know how to skin a buck and run a trot line.

  Our parents hadn’t let Ruthie go to kindergarten, so when she started first grade, all the other children had already hived off into groups. Ruthie was left out. That was the year Mam started driving the school bus. Ruthie’s first-grade class would be on the playground when Mam drove up for the afternoon bus run.

  “I would see Ruthie sitting by the tree alone, with nobody to play with. It would break my heart, but she’d never complain about it. She never forced herself on anybody,” Mam says. “I’d try to suggest to her ways of making friends, but she’d say, ‘I’m okay, Mama; I’m watching them play.’ After that first semester she was in the middle of everything. She was just kind of magical. She saw something good in everybody, even as a child.”

  In the summertime we’d all spend two or three nights each week in the baseball park in town, with either Ruthie or me playing on a team, or watching players from the older leagues compete. There were two ballparks—a little one and a big one—at Vinci Field, which had been carved out of the woods atop a hill near downtown.

  The ballpark was the center of social life for us. Moms and dads whose kids played on the peewee teams would back their pickups against the chain-link fence at the little field and drink beer while their kids faced off under the lights. After the peewee games, most folks moved over to the big Babe Ruth League field nearby to watch teenaged boys play serious baseball. Whether you watched the game or not, whether you played the game or not, the ballparks at Vinci Field were where you saw your friends and neighbors, made plans for weekend cookouts and fishing trips. You squared off on the diamond against boys named Tater, Booger, Sammy, and Allen Ray, and you hoped your umpire that night would be Tut Dawson, thin and tough as a razor strop, because he had an unerring eye for strikes and called them true.

  For my 1970s generation of West Feliciana kids, summer smelled like neat’s-foot oil, light beer in a can (you’d sneak a sip when your dad asked you to fetch him a fresh one out of the cooler), Off! mosquito repellent, the decaying wood of the big green Babe Ruth bleachers, and the smoke from our folks’ Marlboro Reds. You’d go home at night worn out, sunburned, with a thin film of dirt covering your body, scratching fresh mosquito bites with filthy fingernails. Your belly was full of Cherry’s Potato Chips and fountain Coke—free if you recovered and turned in a foul ball—and you’d barely be able to keep your eyes open long enough to take your shower.

  The ballpark was also the place where many of us were touched by tragedy for the first time. In the summer of 1974, on my first team, the John Fudge Auto Parts Angels, a towheaded Starhill kid named Roy Dale Craven was the star pitcher. That might not have meant much in a league where the oldest players were, like Roy Dale, nine years old, but Roy Dale was a real phenom.

  He was also a poor country boy with a million-dollar smile. His mother, Evelyn Dedon, and his father had divorced when he was very young. She raised Roy Dale and his brothers in a little brick house on the side of Highway 61, on the outskirts of Starhill. Roy Dale invited his father up from Baton Rouge one afternoon to watch him play his first game. The dad must have seen what a raggedy mitt his kid was playing with, and bought the boy a new glove. A week later that glove was as floppy and dirty and broken in as if Roy Dale had used it all season long.

  Roy Dale and his glove were inseparable. One day Paw drove home to Starhill for lunch and saw Roy Dale and his brothers headed across a bottom for Grant’s Bayou, carrying fishing poles. Roy Dale also had his glove. There was no one else to play with, but he couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Paw, who was one of the team’s coaches, remembers that Roy Dale was so passionate about baseball because he had so little, and grasped at every opportunity offered him. He was a sweet kid. The game was his life.

  One night the coaches pulled Roy Dale from the mound after he completed the second inning because he vomited up his supper in the dugout. All he’d had to eat before the game was pickles. No one knew if he had eaten so badly because he had chosen to, or because that was all the food his family had in the house that day. No one wanted to ask.

  On July 15, late in the afternoon, Roy Dale lit out from his yard to his cousin Allen Ray’s, across Highway 61, hoping to catch a ride to the ballpark. He did not see the northbound car, which struck and killed him. The driver was not charged. I found out about the tragedy sitting in the back of Paw’s pickup, headed to the game, when we were stuck in traffic backed up from the accident scene. Paw said later it was just like Roy Dale to be so excited about playing ball that night that he didn’t pay attention to anything else.

  That funeral was the first time most of us kids had seen death up close. At some point before the service started, one of the Angels found the courage to step into the aisle at the funeral home chapel, and go forward to pay respects to our teammate. A gaggle of six-to nine-year-old boys walked forward and saw that beautiful kid, Roy Dale, dead in his coffin. They buried that Starhill boy with his glove on his hand and his uniform on his back. This may have been the nicest set of clothes Roy Dale owned. That night I heard Paw and his friend Pat Rettig, the other coach, out on our back porch, talking. I stood by the screen door to listen, and realized these grown men were weeping in the dark. I didn’t know how to take it, and went away.

  The baseball seasons came, and the baseball seasons went, and the ballpark was the stage for other childhood dramas. One night, after a Babe Ruth game, Mam was helping a friend close the concession stand at the big field. “You kids were out on the field there running,” she says. “Remember, Ruthie was competitive with you, but she wouldn’t let anybody say or do anything to her brother. So we were in there packing up chips, and Gerald Bates said, ‘Oh my God, y’all, look.’ These two boys had jumped on you. Ruthie was a feisty little thing. She ran through the gate, grabbed one of those boys by the neck, and started whipping him while you turned to the other boy.”

  For all our sibling rivalry Ruthie and I got along most of the time and enjoyed growing up together in Starhill. We played ball together in the yard, often with some permutation of neighborhood kids: the Wilsons, the Morgans, the Rettigs, and the Shipps. We fished, worked in the garden, rode our go-cart and Paw’s Honda three-wheeler,
and swam in the town pool while everybody’s mom sat under the shaded benches, smoking and chatting away in the heat of the day. Sometimes the grown-ups would load a mess of kids into the back of somebody’s pickup, and off we’d go to the creek.

  We had cats and dogs and chickens, and cows for a time, and horses too. We even spent a weekend one chilly autumn with a blind calf bedded down by our fireplace. Mam took in every stray animal she could, including a baby owl she and Paw found abandoned in the swamp during the flood of 1973. When she was in elementary school, Ruthie doted on Little Bit, an ugly little mutt that looked like a bleached haggis with legs and a splotch of brown gravy. As far as I was concerned, Little Bit existed to give me the opportunity to tease Ruthie.

  Somehow I discovered that Little Bit hated it when anyone sang “Happy Birthday.” It made her howl. “Happy birthday to you-u-u,” I sang, and the pitiful creature would sit on her haunches, throw her head back, and bay.

  “Dad-dee!” Ruthie yelled.

  “Happy birthday to you-u-u!”

  “Owoooooooooo! Owooooooo!”

  “Dad-DEE!”

  “Happy birthday dear Li-i-ittle Bi-i-i-it—”

  “Owooooooo!”

  “You stupid idiot!” she would say, and then her fat little fists flew.

  This script played itself out a lot, only varying when she skipped the appeal to parental authority, and went straight for the pummeling.

  Little Bit loved to follow the big dogs from the neighborhood when they tracked deer through the woods. But she was so short and stumpy that she couldn’t keep up with them. Once she failed to return from running deer. Ruthie couldn’t stop crying over it. Late one chilly night Paw and Mam put us into the cab of his pickup and we rode to the back end of the place to see if we could find her. Paw heard the dog howling in a creek bottom. While we waited in the truck with Mam, he went into the dark, rattlesnake-infested woods, climbed down a steep, twenty-foot embankment into the creek bed, picked up the cold, frightened, lost dog, and brought her in.

  Ruthie was overjoyed. Little Bit almost certainly wouldn’t have survived the night if Paw hadn’t done that. She would have died of exposure, or more likely a coyote would have killed and eaten her.

  Our family’s social life revolved around neighborhood fish fries, crawfish boils, and barbecues. Our fathers hunted and fished together; our mothers traded stories as they made potato salad for the barbecues and fish fries. There was something particular about Mam and Paw that made our house a center of the community. They didn’t have a lot of money, but there was always room for more at our table. People dropped by constantly, and stayed for dinner—and sometimes late into the night, even during the week. They wanted to be around Mam and Paw, who were boundlessly hospitable.

  Our family was happy and secure. In the winter months Paw got up before sunrise to build a roaring fire in the living room fireplace. He went out and warmed Mam’s school bus up, then came inside, unwrapped store-bought honey buns, topped them with a generous pat of butter, and slid them into the toaster oven. Ruthie and I would come in for breakfast to those gooey treats. Most nights when we were small, we crawled into Paw’s lap, him sitting in his big recliner, each of us nestling into a crook of his arm. He smelled like tobacco and bourbon, if he’d had a drink before dinner. Mam brought him a cup of hot black coffee and we would lie there in his arms, talking about our day. I never saw any of my friends do that with their dads.

  Ruthie and I knew we were in a special family. Paw was a strict disciplinarian, but he didn’t have to do it often because we had such respect for him and for Mam. He was the kind of man you wanted to please because he seemed so strong, so wise, and so good. It seemed to us that there was nothing he couldn’t do, or didn’t know.

  We hero-worshipped him, Ruthie and I did. And this became a problem for me when everything in my life fell apart in the summer of 1981, not long after I turned fourteen. A group of kids from our school, including Ruthie and me, took a trip to the beach. Before this vacation I had been one of the most popular kids in my class, from the time I started school until then. But for some reason, a handful of kids a year older than me decided that I was going to be the mark on this trip.

  I wandered one afternoon into a hotel room where the kids were hanging out with two of our adult chaperones. Before I knew what was happening, several of the older boys, including football players, had me down on the hotel room floor, threatening to take my pants off in front of the girls standing on the beds giggling. The girls, especially two popular ones at the center of the preppy clique, egged them on. I thrashed and flailed and begged them to let me go. I called out to the chaperones, the mothers of classmates, and begged them to help me.

  They stepped over me, lying pinned to the floor, and left the room.

  The gang let me go without stripping me naked—they probably only intended to give me a good scare—and I fled down the hall, into my room. I wanted to catch the next flight out, but had to endure the next few days, hoping that it wouldn’t happen again. Ruthie, who had been off at the beach with one of her friends, never knew what had happened, and wouldn’t have understood what it meant to me if I had told her. I made it home without further incident, but the world looked very different to me after that. To this day my mother remembers a sea change: “I knew something had happened on that trip. I didn’t know what, because you wouldn’t tell me. It was in your eyes.”

  When school started that fall, word had spread that I was now untouchable. Boys who had been my friends since elementary school now wouldn’t talk to me in the hallway. Older boys shoved me on occasion. The preppy queen bees made a point of insulting me every day. By no means was I the only one they treated like this. There was nothing that anybody could do about it, or so it seemed. The thing that killed me, though, was how my best friends literally dropped me overnight. Cutting a boy who had been their close pal most of their lives was the price required to join the cool kids’ club, and gain access to their booze, cigarettes, and social status. It felt like the end of the world to me. I doubt it troubled them one bit.

  School became little more than a daily opportunity to confront what a piece of stinking garbage I was, and how powerless I was to make any of it stop. The misery continued throughout my tenth-grade year. None of this made sense.

  During this time I fought often with my father. I honestly can’t remember what we argued over, but I remember him being frustrated with my outcast status. Both he and my mother worried about me, but they didn’t know what to do, and panicked. It was especially hard for my strong-willed father, who could not empathize with a son whose way of seeing the world was increasingly alien to his own. In one of our yelling matches Paw accused me of bringing all this on myself for being so obstinately strange. And that’s when I knew how alone I was.

  I turned at the time to the woman who had been my ninth-grade English teacher, Nora Marsh. With her tightly braided curly red hair, her Yankee accent, and fondness for rock and roll, Nora stood out among the teachers. Descended from an old West Feliciana family, she had grown up in Chicago but moved to the parish to live in and care for Weyanoke, her family’s antebellum plantation house, and spend weekends at her place in New Orleans. She was fun, smart, and—catnip to a teenager like me—had a “Question Authority” bumper sticker on her Chevy Citation. She became a mentor to several of us bookish outcasts. Nora knew how hard we had it in school, and served as a cheerleader for us, and a messenger of hope. What she told us, mostly by her example, was that we were okay, that we were normal, that loving books and ideas was nothing to be ashamed of, and that, honest to God, things weren’t always going to be like this.

  One Friday in the autumn of 1982 several of us were hovering around Nora, waiting to go to a pep rally when we heard an announcement on the school intercom. Representatives from a new residential high school for juniors and seniors were going to be in a particular classroom if anybody wanted to meet them. What was this? We had to check it out.

  The
idea behind the new Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts was to bring academically gifted juniors to a refurbished high school in Natchitoches, a town in north-central Louisiana, put us up in unused college dorms, and teach us college-level courses. It was to be a state-funded public boarding school for Louisiana gifted and talented students. An escape! Only two could be accepted from West Feliciana; three of us wanted to go. Nora helped us all take the tests and gather our transcripts and recommendations. As exciting as the academics were, I wanted more than anything to leave, to get out, to put as much distance between my hometown and myself as I could.

  One day, near the end of the spring semester, I stopped by the post office in my old blue Chevy pickup before heading to my after-school job at the grocery store. I went in, opened the box, and there it was: a fat letter from the Louisiana School. I took it back outside, sat in my truck, and trembling, opened the envelope to learn my fate.

  I was in.

  Paw was against my going. I had no business leaving home at sixteen, he thought, and God knows what kind of nonsense I could get into up there. There was nothing wrong with me that more effective discipline couldn’t fix. Mam did not want me to go away so early either. But she could also see how broken I was, how lost, and how miserable. She fought with Paw for his permission to let me go. She finally got it.

  And so, in August, the day finally came for me to leave home. With our pickup full of my worldly goods, we met my old friend Jason McCrory, the other kid from our school to win a slot in the inaugural LSMSA class, and boarded the car ferry across the Mississippi together. Jason and I stood on the bow of the boat, saying nothing. I thought about what I was leaving behind. The intolerance, the social conformity, the cliquishness, the bullying. At sixteen this is what I thought small-town life was and always would be. There, on the far side of the river, was the rest of my life, straight ahead. I had no intention of looking back.