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

by Rod Dreher

  This purity of my sister’s heart gave Mike peace of mind when he joined the National Guard as a senior and, after finishing high school, shipped out to boot camp in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for four months of training. She wrote him every single day to encourage him, to tell him how much she loved him, and to keep him up on news from home.

  Ruthie spent that lonely summer working in our cousin’s law office in St. Francisville. “I’m making seven hundred dollars a month!” she told Mike. “Can you believe it? That’s a lot of money.”

  By that time I was between my freshman and sophomore semesters at LSU in Baton Rouge, and was home working a summer gig at the nuclear plant. There was no place I wanted to be less than stuck in Starhill. So I checked out. I’d come home from my nine-to-five job, make myself a tall glass of Tanqueray gin, grapefruit juice, and soda, and retire to my room to drink, read Hemingway, listen to ska, and marinate in self-doubt. To the rest of my family I looked like a self-centered, uppity layabout. There was no doubt some truth to that, but it was also the case that I was confused and drifting.

  Ruthie, though, may have been lonely, but she was rarely bored, and she doubted nothing about life. Everything she had, or could have, sufficed. She was the kind of person who would never grow up to write a memoir about her life because she was too happy and involved in living it. I didn’t want what Ruthie had, but I was jealous of the way she had it. How did she do it? She made everything look so effortless. On some mornings she would wake up at daylight and get a couple of hours in fishing for bass and bream on the pond before she went to the law office. On weekends she played golf with her and Mike’s buddies, babysat for extra money (she was already saving for her and Mike’s future), or went bowling with friends. She went to parties every now and then, but it didn’t feel right without Mike there.

  Ruthie and I got along surprisingly well that summer, no doubt because I stayed out of her way. One Saturday afternoon we drove into Baton Rouge to go shopping, and I told her about the dream I had the night before.

  “I dreamed that you and Mike got married,” I said. “Is that weird? Are y’all thinking about it?”

  “We’ve talked about it,” she said nervously, “but I think we’re going to wait until we get a few years of college behind us.”

  “Did I tell him the right thing?” she later asked Mike in a letter. “That’s one dream that I wish would come true! What I want most in life is to spend it with you. I love you more than anything in the world. I always daydream about what we’re gonna do on our honeymoon and what our house is gonna be like. I sure hope we can make my dreams come true…. I’m ready to start school and get it over with so we can hurry up and start our life together. It is gonna be a damn good one too! I can’t wait!”

  Though Daddy’s little girl had lost her heart to Mike, Ruthie and Paw grew even closer that summer. They spent many afternoons on the pond together after work, casting for bream. On Father’s Day weekend Ruthie washed and cleaned out the inside of Paw’s Bronco, as his gift. Meanwhile I had promised to mow the grass for Paw that day, but instead holed up inside the house watching the live MTV broadcast of the eleven-hour Amnesty International benefit concert from Giants Stadium, starring the Police, U2, and Peter Gabriel.

  “Rod says it’s great music, but I don’t know,” Paw wrote to Mike. “That still don’t get the grass cut. Maybe tomorrow.”

  I had no interest in going fishing with Ruthie, so she often went up to the pond with Billy Lawton, a neighbor kid. One afternoon Billy and Ruthie floated in the middle of the pond in Paw’s aluminum boat, their lines dangling in the water.

  “Ruthie, look!” Billy whispered.

  Billy thought he was looking at a cow standing at the water’s edge at the pond’s other end.

  “Billy, that’s a buck!” Ruthie gasped.

  The big deer, antlers coated in velvet, studied them closely. A fish took Billy’s cork under and ran with the line, but Ruthie quietly ordered him to ignore it. She was afraid he would scare the deer away.

  The buck dipped his head to drink, then raising it, concluded that the people in the boat were no threat. He ambled down the raised levee that was the pond’s west bank, marching toward them. No fear. He finally found his way into the cornfield, and was gone.

  “All I could think about was how you would have fainted,” Ruthie told Mike, in a letter. “Maybe you can get him this winter. I can’t wait!”

  She was overcome by excitement at the buck spotting. Me, I would have had to see Elvis Costello in the car next to me at the Sonic to have registered similar glee. No surprise then that I declined to accompany Paw, Mam, and Ruthie on a weekend trip to Holly Beach, a rustic Cajun coastal community in southwest Louisiana, near the Texas border. Some family friends had a camp in the remote and fairly desolate stretch of sand and invited them to make the four-hour drive down. Mosquitoes, alligators, heat, humidity, and no girls? Could there be a more dismal way to spend a weekend? I chose to take my chances at home with gin, air-conditioning, and the English Beat.

  Ruthie had a blast. She fished, sunbathed, and learned how to use a throw net to catch crabs in the surf. They ate a fish stew called court bouillon over rice, crawfish crepes, boiled crabs, T-bones, and leg of lamb. She took a drive with Mam and Paw down the Holly Beach main drag to eyeball the gators living in the ditches on either side of the road. She was shocked to see a pickup passing the other way nearly run over a four-foot gator on the asphalt. Paw stopped the Bronco to see if the gator would move. Ruthie leaped out and chased the big lizard out of the road.

  “Ruthie!” Paw said when she climbed back in. “You would have died if that thing had started chasing you!”

  “I didn’t think about that, Daddy,” she said. “I was just worried that somebody was going to run over the poor little thing.”

  On the long drive home that Sunday, Ruthie wrote to Mike to tell him about the glories of Holly Beach. “That place would make a great honeymoon spot, hint hint,” she said. “It was so relaxing and romantic.”

  Paw and Mike also grew closer that summer, despite the distance. Mike wrote a couple of letters that grabbed the older man’s heart. Mike told Paw that he was a good man, and a special one who had been like a father to him. Ruthie wrote Mike to praise him for his sincerity and thoughtfulness.

  “You couldn’t have gotten to his heart in a better way than this,” she said. “You really let your feelings flow and it really made him feel good cause he feels the same way. He loves you like a son. After he read it, he got up and went to the back because we had company and he had to go wipe the tears off his face.”

  Paw wrote Mike too, addressing him as “Trapper,” and tried to keep his spirits up amid the rigors of basic training.

  “There is nothing they can do to you that you can’t take. Just keep your mind in order, your spirits up as well as your strength,” Paw counseled. “Do not be misled by those who don’t care, and be the best damn soldier possible. You will end up the winner, and a better man for it. We are all mighty proud of you and what you are doing.”

  In late July Ruthie rode to South Carolina with Mike’s parents for his graduation from basic training. She would have only a day or two with him before he began advanced training. They didn’t have much time together, but for Ruthie it was the highlight of her summer. She and Mr. and Mrs. Leming had not even checked out of the Fort Jackson–area hotel that Sunday when Ruthie put pen to La Quinta Inn telephone pad notepaper and began her next letter.

  “I just thought I’d write you before we left here so you would get this quick,” she wrote. “I want you to know how proud I am of you. I can’t wait to get home and brag on you. You just look so sharp and handsome in your uniform. It just made me want to cry every time I looked at you. You make me feel so good inside when you compliment me and look at me with those beautiful eyes.

  “I’m sorry I cried so much today, but I just couldn’t help it,” she continued. “I didn’t want to embarrass you but I just love you
so much and you make me so proud that I have to cry. It felt so good being in your arms and kissing you. You make me feel so secure. You have really matured and are a man now! I love your muscles—they’re so sexy.”

  She ended by assuring him, as she often did, that she was his girl, “forever and a day.”

  “I can’t wait to get our life started,” Ruthie wrote. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  In the fall of 1986 Ruthie began her senior year of high school. Mike came home later that autumn and prepared himself to start classes at LSU that spring. It didn’t take long for Mike to discover that college wasn’t for him. After a difficult semester he went to work at the local paper mill.

  Ruthie was the class of 1987 valedictorian and left her graduation ceremony that night with her college education already paid for with scholarships and awards. Nearly all of the ninety-three graduates in her class announced plans that night to go to college, or to some form of career training. At the end of her freshman fall semester, Ruthie phoned Mam and Paw from her dorm at LSU, and told them she had something to tell them when she came home for Sunday dinner that weekend. They were afraid of what she would say, guessing she was planning to break the news that she and Mike had eloped.

  That Sunday, after Paw said grace, Ruthie declared: “I’ve got something I want to say. That group that I graduated with? Only three of us are left in school now. And I want to thank y’all for what you did for me. I know it wasn’t easy to be tough.”

  Recalls Mam, “You can’t imagine what hearing that meant to us.”

  When Ruthie started LSU that fall to work on an education degree, she lived in the dorm next to mine. I was a junior. We saw each other only in the cafeteria behind our residence halls. During the week she stayed buried in her books, worked hard, and made perfect grades. I was studying journalism, philosophy, political science, and considered long, beery arguments over existentialism with my fellow young scholars to be time well spent. My college transcript, while respectable, does not support this generous interpretation.

  At LSU Ruthie thought I was getting away with something, and not only because I managed to ace tests even though I had stayed out late drinking beer and barely studied. She may have experienced on campus the same frustration and envy I felt when Ruthie triumphed on every front back home with so little effort. Worse, Ruthie could not understand what I studied, and what engaged me intellectually, and therefore she regarded it with suspicion, even loathing.

  One evening she shared a table in the cafeteria with my best friend Paul and me. Paul, a political theory major, and I, minoring in philosophy and political science, loved to talk about big ideas. That evening we got off on something about Nietzsche and the death of God. Ruthie listened patiently, but finally lost her cool. She told us she thought that was the “stupidest bunch of you-know-what” that she had ever heard.

  “What is wrong with y’all?” she said. “Listen to you. You sit here for hours talking about this crap, and it doesn’t mean anything. You’re just talking; you’re not doing anything!”

  We thought she was putting us on, but Ruthie wasn’t joking.

  “I’m serious, y’all,” she said. “I don’t understand the two of you. I really don’t. What good is any of this y’all are talking about going to do anybody? Do you really think you’re going to support yourselves with this stuff? What does any of it mean in the real world?”

  She wouldn’t listen to anything either of us had to say in defense of philosophy or philosophizing. At the time I thought Ruthie’s prickly anti-intellectualism was funny. Ruthie wanted to get as far away from people like us as she could. As soon as she finished her student job on Friday afternoons she pointed her big blue Crown Victoria north, left campus, and lit out for Starhill.

  Halfway through her undergraduate career, Ruthie and Mike decided to marry. They had been together for over four years and did not want to wait until she finished her degree. Ruthie expected Mike to do the traditional thing and ask her father’s permission to marry his daughter. He sat down with Paw three days in a row, but couldn’t muster the courage to speak his mind.

  Ruthie finally lost her patience.

  “I’ve had enough!” she declared. “Daddy, Mike’s been coming over here because he wants to tell you that we want to get married. And he won’t do it!”

  Mike’s abashed cowardice amused Paw. That the high school sweethearts would one day marry was a foregone conclusion. Though he wasn’t happy with the idea of Ruthie marrying while still in college, Paw knew it was bound to happen. Ruthie had put him on notice earlier. Standing in his living room during her freshman year, Ruthie told Paw that she and Mike wanted to get married at some point between semesters.

  “Well, honey, your grades are good now, but do you think you’ll be able to keep that up if you’re married?” Paw said. He spitballed a number of rational arguments against early marriage at her.

  Ruthie leveled her gaze at her father, stepped to him, put her finger in his face, lowered her voice, and growled: “Daddy, don’t you make me choose, because you aren’t going to like the choice I make.”

  That was that. On the Mike question Paw knew better than to cross Ruthie.

  All her life Ruthie had trouble making decisions. Once she started pricing wedding packages, Paw saw the potential bill growing ever longer. Intending to cut his costs early, he gave Ruthie five thousand dollars to pay for her wedding, saying it was all he could afford, and told her she would have to work within that budget. What she didn’t spend, she could keep.

  Ruthie found that flummoxing. “But, Daddy,” she said, “when it was your money, it was different. Now that it’s my money, I don’t know what I’m going to do!”

  The girl was naturally, reflexively frugal. Ruthie found a less expensive dress than she would have chosen otherwise, and got on with it. By the time she and Mike married on December 30, 1989, Ruthie had the wedding paid for, and two thousand dollars in her purse to pay for the honeymoon. The weather was cold and wet in St. Francisville that day, but the rain stopped before the ceremony. Mike stood with the pastor at the front of the Methodist church, nervously glancing at the plain white walls and at friends and family gathered in the aged wooden pews. And then the music began, the old wooden French doors at the rear swung open, and there was his bride, luminous, on Paw’s arm. He thought: This is my life now. She chose me. How can I be so lucky?

  After a formal cake-and-punch reception in the church hall, the wedding party moved down the street to the Red Horse tavern, a saloon in an old two-story wooden building. Ruthie and Mike were having so much fun dancing—especially to Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” which was their song—and drinking beer under the neon lights with their friends that they were late leaving for their honeymoon.

  The newlyweds motored north in the Crown Vic to Natchez, Mississippi, to start their wedding trip. After a couple of days there they looked at each other and said, Where do you want to go? They took off driving west, not knowing where they were headed, and not caring. They were married, and that’s all that mattered. The dream had come true. Mike and Ruthie. Ruthie and Mike.

  Back home Ruthie moved into Mike’s trailer in Starhill, and got ready to start the spring semester at LSU. She also threw herself into being a housewife. Ruthie loved making food for her husband. She was already an accomplished Southern cook, laying a nightly feast for Mike of hearty country fare like pork chops, roast, rice and gravy, meat pies, snap beans, and corn on the cob. Mike felt cared for as he never had been.

  “Ruthie was always thinking about what she could do to help Mike. And he was all about, ‘What can I do to help Ruthie?’ Each one only thought about the other one. They were how marriage is supposed to be,” recalls Stephanie Toney Simpson, Ruthie’s childhood friend and a bridesmaid at her wedding.

  My sister graduated from LSU in 1991 and began teaching sixth grade in the West Feliciana public schools. Meanwhile my career was taking off. After graduation I landed an int
ern job on the Baton Rouge Advocate, covering the police beat and drinking after deadline at the Thirsty Tiger, a dive bar across the street from the paper’s downtown office. True, there was a sense that newspapering’s rascally glory days were behind it. Many of the older journos had been through alcohol rehab; an oft-repeated story from the Advocate newsroom concerned a photo lab technician who nearly drowned after passing out drunk in the darkroom sink. I had no doubt, though, that I had chosen the right line of work. This was fun.

  After three months the newspaper’s longtime film critic, a gifted writer whom I had grown up reading, resigned to move to New York. The paper offered me his job. I was an inexperienced writer and was terrified of the responsibility, but I didn’t dare turn down a break like that. In the spring of 1992, as Ruthie completed her first year leading a classroom as a teacher, I got another break: an offer from The Washington Times, DC’s conservative competitor to the Washington Post, to become its television critic.

  Washington! I had done a political consulting internship there during my junior year of college, and had fallen in love with politics and the city. Now, at the age of twenty-five, I would make my return. When I stood in Mam and Paw’s yard telling them good-bye, Paw’s face began to tremble all over, as if it were about to fly to pieces. He grabbed me hard and held me tight. This time I was going far away, and almost certainly for good.

  It nearly killed him to watch me go. But it felt to me like I was starting the life I had always wanted, answering the call I had been hearing since I crossed the Mississippi almost a decade earlier. I found a third-floor walk-up apartment on Capitol Hill, and jumped into my job and life in the city with both feet. On the morning Bill Clinton was first inaugurated, I watched the TV coverage of the ceremony from home. When the outgoing President George H. W. Bush stepped onto the military helicopter to fly away, I heard the rotors behind the Capitol a few blocks away. I heaved the window open and leaned out over East Capitol Street to watch the chopper rise over the Hill. I glanced back at the set, to see on network television the same scene I was watching from my window. As far as I was concerned, I was now living at the center of the world.