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

by Rod Dreher

  Finally, after I had made the decision, I had my sign.

  Kim wasn’t in the house when I emerged. In a daze I went upstairs to make up the beds. As I pulled the covers up over my bed, I heard the thwack of the screen door downstairs, and the padding of Kim’s feet up the stairs. She hurried through the door holding her right hand out, palm up, her eyes wide.

  “Smell this!” she said.

  Her hand smelled like roses.

  “Did you put perfume on?”

  “No.”

  “Did you wash your hand with soap?”

  “No! I was just outside walking around. When I came in, I came up the stairs to get something out of my room. I rubbed my nose, and for some reason, my hand smells like roses.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “Oh my God, this is amazing,” I said. “I was downstairs a few minutes ago praying the rosary. In the middle of it the room filled with sunlight and the aroma of roses. There’s no way to explain it. There’s nothing in that room that smells of roses.

  “Kim, here’s the thing: when I started my prayer, I asked the Virgin Mary to hold your hand through this trial you’re going through.”

  Her jaw dropped. The rose scent vanished.

  Two weeks later I entrusted all my belongings to UPS, and on my twenty-seventh birthday, I flew north toward what I was certain would be my everlasting home. A couple of weeks later I had dinner with a wise old Catholic priest, the man who had prepared me to be received into the Catholic Church, to tell him the rose story. He said that mystical literature is full of similar accounts of the Virgin announcing her presence with the aroma of roses. She had given me a gift that day in Louisiana, he said. She had confirmed the decision I had made to return to Washington, and showed me by her timing that I didn’t need an obvious sign to trust in the leading of the Holy Spirit. Be less skeptical, she seemed to say. Have more faith.

  Even though our lives were moving in different directions, Ruthie and I shared a spiritual side. Prayer came naturally to her. When she prayed, she prayed silently. Many times she would write things down, things that would happen during the day, or during the week. She’d have her little notes—it could be a scrap of paper—where she’d written down who to pray for, or what to pray for. People that she knew, if they were in need. Kids in her class that she knew were struggling.

  For Ruthie a plain, abiding faith sufficed. You experienced God by doing godly things, she believed, and anything beyond that is frivolous. For me, the self-tormented Platonist, I couldn’t make a single move without having a theory. If we were each given a chocolate ice cream cone, Ruthie would say thank you and eat it happily. I would say thank you, then lose myself in contemplating the ontology of ice cream, the geometric properties of the cone, the relative merits of chocolate versus other potential flavors, and, if it hadn’t melted by then, I would eat it happily, then spend twice as long contemplating having done so. As with Häagen-Dazs, so with Almighty God.

  Despite these very different approaches to faith, we had independently developed interests in the patterns that God uses when He communicates to us. We both believed strongly in meaningful coincidences, which the psychiatrist Carl Jung called “synchronicities.” Ruthie called them “seven-oh-nines,” after a remarkable set of coincidences that happened to her after Mike went off to war, an event that tested Ruthie’s faith.

  After the war in Iraq started in 2003 all Louisiana National Guard soldiers and their families prepared for the day when they would get the call to deploy. It worried Ruthie and Mike for years. Mike was in the 769th Engineering Battalion. If they received orders, it would not be for combat duty, but rather construction and logistics. Still they would work in a combat zone. Mike was concerned about having to leave his family to spend a year in such a place, but he loved his Guard work, and advanced to the rank of warrant officer.

  In 2007 Mike was installing a gate for someone in Zachary when one of his sergeants buzzed his mobile phone to give him the official word: the 769th was headed to Iraq in September.

  Mike waited till he made it home that day to tell Ruthie, but she knew it was coming. It was hard breaking it to the girls that their father was going to war for four hundred days, especially because Hannah would be starting high school and was more aware of the kinds of things that can happen to soldiers in a combat zone.

  As his battalion’s movement officer Mike had to track the unit’s equipment from Baton Rouge to Camp Victory in Baghdad. He left for training in April. When he returned home, he and Ruthie made plans for paying the bills and taking care of household responsibilities. John Bickham and other Starhill neighbors joined Big Show and Mike’s firefighter buddies in promising him he wouldn’t have to worry about his family while he was in Iraq. They had his back.

  As the date of Mike’s departure approached, John Bickham worked harder around Paw’s place to stay on top of chores, trying to give Mike more free time to spend with Ruthie and the kids. “Any hour he could get before he left, that’s what we tried to give him,” John says.

  Mike’s friends and neighbors, including David Morgan and his band, honored him with a farewell community dance called the Starhill Stomp before he left. Then the dreaded day finally came. After a prayer service the Louisiana soldiers told their loved ones good-bye at the Baton Rouge airport, and boarded their transport plane for Baghdad.

  Communication between Starhill and Camp Victory was spotty. Mike and Ruthie emailed or spoke by phone once or twice each week, and Skyped later in his deployment, when the service became available on base. He didn’t have much time to talk anyway. His job was maintaining construction equipment for a company of soldiers. The sand and blistering heat of Iraq, to say nothing of the IEDs (which killed one of Mike’s battalion members), made for an exhausting deployment.

  Ruthie began training for the Reindeer Run, a 5K foot race held during the Christmas season. Though she had never been a runner, Ruthie wanted to lose weight before Mike came home. Jennifer Bickham, another running rookie, joined her, as did Abby.

  “We were training three days a week for that. Ruthie and I didn’t run very fast, but we ran. Ruthie didn’t have any quit in her, but I wasn’t like that,” Jennifer says.

  “In the race, we get on the last stretch, and it’s about four blocks long. It’s a straightaway. My ankle hit the uneven concrete, and I hit the ground. I thought screw it, I’m done. She was like, ‘Jen, get up. I’m going to finish this race with you. You’ve worked too hard.’ ”

  Ruthie and Jennifer limped across the finish line together. She would not let her friend give up.

  An eerie thing happened in that race. Ruthie ran wearing Mike’s 769th Battalion T-shirt and his dog tags. Her official race number, printed on her paper bib, was 709.

  Months later Mike learned he would be sent home for an R&R break at Easter. He sat at the kitchen table in Starhill unpacking the small bag he had brought with him on the plane and took out the bib numbers he had saved from the 5Ks he ran in Iraq.

  “Ruthie said, ‘What are you doing with my number?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about,” says Mike. “She said, ‘That’s mine.’ I said no, I just took it out of my backpack. She took off running to the back of the house, and came back with hers. They were exactly alike, with the number 709.”

  She thought these kinds of things were like God winking at us, letting us know that there is a hidden order running deeply beneath the surface of the world.

  “My car died after Mike went back,” Abby says. “I had to buy a new vehicle so she let me borrow Mike’s truck while I was shopping. I was headed out to her house one day and she was headed into town. We passed each other going opposite directions. In front of me was a van from the penitentiary with the number 709 on the grille.”

  Adds Mike, “The weird thing was that my rotation in Iraq was officially called OIF—for Operation Iraqi Freedom—07-09. In her mind, that meant something. And believe it or not, I just happened to arrive back home in the US from Kuwait on J
uly 9—another 07-09.”

  After a few days of demobilization Mike and his men made the last leg of their journey home, to the Baton Rouge airport. Dignitaries and the media awaited them on the tarmac, but more important, so did their families. A photographer from the Advocate shot the moment Ruthie and the girls embraced Mike. It would be on the front page of the next day’s newspaper.

  Because Mike was an officer the Lemings lingered at the airport for an hour, until he had seen all his men off safely home. Meanwhile Abby was frantic. They had planned a surprise party for Mike in Starhill, but Abby’s flight home from a Florida vacation had been delayed into New Orleans. She threw her luggage into her car and flew north, hoping to beat the Lemings to Starhill.

  As Abby sped past the on ramp near the airport, Mike and his family were at that moment pulling onto the interstate.

  “That’s a 709 moment right there,” Mike said. Then they looked at the truck’s digital clock.

  It read 7:09.

  As the Lemings reached Starhill, Mike beheld yellow ribbons tied to trees lining the country road on the last mile home. A sheriff’s deputy had parked his car at the top of the gravel driveway, which struck Mike as odd. Seconds later Mike saw a pair of fire trucks on either side of the driveway, firing their deck guns to create a triumphal water arch for their returning hero—Mike had been awarded the Bronze Star for “exceptional meritorious service”—to pass under in his glory.

  “The whole community was in the yard, waiting for us to get home,” Mike recalls. “They took time to come out for me and my family. It gave me an incredible feeling.”

  Mike made it home in time for a serious community crisis, but one that, by Ruthie’s lights, turned into an unexpected blessing. On September 1 Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Louisiana. New Orleans was not hard hit, but the Baton Rouge area, which had come through Katrina without big problems, was devastated. In Starhill the power went out for days. Everyone pulled together to help each other remove fallen trees and make food, ice, and gas runs into Mississippi.

  Naturally everyone got together on those hot nights at Mam and Paw’s.

  “They had two generators going, and the fans were blowing at your mom and dad’s house,” John Bickham remembers. “Good company and moving air, let’s go. It was a good time. There was no TV. Nothing to do but sit in the dark with everybody else. We all just focused on each other. When you take distractions away, you realize that other people, that’s what’s important. It’s not what you have in life, it’s who you have.”

  About two grueling weeks later the lights came back on in Starhill. When she called me to tell me the power was back, Ruthie confessed that she was almost sorry to see it happen. “It was so nice to be with each other every night, just sitting around the grill, drinking beer and telling stories, just being together. Now we’re all back in our houses, watching TV. It’s kind of too bad.”

  My return to DC, the city I thought would be my new home, did not last. I moved again, in 1995, to Fort Lauderdale, to take a job as a film critic with the South Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper. The job was great, the people wonderful, but my romantic life was a desert. One autumn weekend in 1996 I flew to Austin to meet my writer friend Frederica Mathewes-Green, who had just published a book about her conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy, and was giving a couple of talks in the Texas capital. My friend Jason McCrory, whom I’d grown up with and then gone to boarding school with, lived there as well.

  That Friday night, at the Logos Bookstore in northwest Austin, Jason introduced me to an undergraduate journalism student who had come out to hear Frederica speak. Her name was Julie Harris. She had read and admired Frederica’s writing, and considered her a professional role model.

  The college girl Jason escorted over had large, lively eyes, high cheekbones, impossibly full lips, and thick brown hair cut in a stylish bob. There I stood, wearing faded olive chinos, a Trainspotting T-shirt, and scuffed combat boots, suddenly feeling like the biggest fake hipster nerd in Austin.

  After the reading Julie and I had dinner with Frederica and a group from the bookstore. Funnily enough Julie paid no attention to her journalism idol, only to the gabby Florida journalist on her left hand. The next night, a Saturday, we met with Frederica under the live oak tree at the Shady Grove restaurant. On Sunday, after church, Julie and I met again, and spent the afternoon together before my flight back to Florida. In the parking lot of Waterloo Records, I kissed Julie Harris, and we fell in love. On Monday, halfway across the country from each other, we were trading delirious e-mails. Four months, several visits, and countless letters later, I flew to Austin with a ring in my pocket and proposed. We decided to marry that December in New Orleans, after her college graduation.

  Julie and I met in Louisiana one weekend that spring and spent a day driving around the city looking for a Catholic parish to book for our December wedding. We finally found one at the far end of Esplanade Avenue, near City Park. As soon as we walked in, we knew in our bones that this must be the place. It was free on the day we needed it, so we made our reservation. Four-year-old Hannah would be our flower girl.

  Shortly after we returned to Florida to begin our lives as husband and wife, the New York Post offered me a job as its chief film critic. In the spring of 1998 we moved to Manhattan and became New Yorkers.

  We were newlyweds in Manhattan during the city’s best decade of the twentieth century, and we were deliriously happy. I worked for a New York City tabloid, the most purely pleasurable newspaper job I ever held. There was the nutball editor Vinnie Musetto, author of the infamous “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline, three desks over. I could tipple with the tabloid god Steve Dunleavy at his perch at Langan’s, the Midtown bar across the street from the Post. Mafia goddess Victoria Gotti kept a desk at the paper, where she alighted once a week to write her column. Julie, meanwhile, worked as an editorial assistant at Commentary, a magazine she had read and admired in college. There she worked with a number of the leading intellectual polemicists and essayists of our time.

  Every week or two a cable news channel would phone asking me to be a guest. The phone rang off the hook in Starhill when that would happen. “Dorothy, Ray, turn on CNN, Rod’s on!” My new job took us both to premieres and film festivals, and to cocktail parties with movie stars. The film producer Ismail Merchant once taught us both how to cook shrimp in a mustard dill sauce, and invited us to his country house for the weekend (alas, we had other plans). Weekends meant dinner at trendy restaurants, drinks at cool bars, and wandering, hand in hand, around Central Park or wherever our curiosity took us. Once I spotted Woody Allen on the Upper West Side, and thought, well, there you go. This was the urban paradise a younger version of myself dreamed of finding.

  What I did not perceive was that something over that exciting year for me had taken root in Ruthie’s mind, a seed of resentment that I was unable to discern, much less fathom.

  The thing showed itself over the Christmas break in 1998, when Julie and I came south for our first holiday visit as husband and wife. Eager to do something nice for my family, and to show them that we had taught ourselves how to cook, like a responsible couple, we had asked if we could make them a bouillabaisse. It was simply a French-style seafood soup, something I figured they would appreciate as Louisianans. Had I called it a court bouillon, the Cajun version of bouillabaisse, maybe none of it would have happened.

  But it did happen. Julie and I spent all day buying various kinds of fish for the bouillabaisse, cooking it in the garlic, tomato, and herb broth, making the special red pepper sauce that goes on the baguette, and setting the table for a big family dinner. When the soup came to the table, no one reached for the ladle in the bowl.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked

  Nobody said a word. Finally Paw asked for a coffee cup, into which he ladled a taste of the soup, but only that. His bowl sat empty.

  Mam wouldn’t taste the stuff. Neither would Ruthie. This beautiful tureen of saffron-colored stew, fat with s
hrimp and chunks of halibut, catfish, and red snapper, sat untouched in the center of the table.

  “Mama, do you know who I ran into in town the other day?” Ruthie said, then mentioned the woman’s name. “She’s a good cook. A good country cook.”

  So that was it: we had insulted them by coming down with our New York attitudes and making some uppity French soup that they had never heard of. Never mind that it tasted exactly like the kinds of things people in south Louisiana eat all the time. Never mind that we had asked before we bought the first ingredient if they would be interested in having this for dinner. Never mind that they had let us work all afternoon on this dinner, knowing that they wouldn’t even taste it.

  It was rude and it was hurtful. It was also the first moment I became aware that something had gone seriously wrong between Ruthie and me. That kind of behavior was uncharacteristic of her. After the New Year we returned to Manhattan, angry and confused. What I only learned many years later, when Mam and Paw told me, was that Ruthie and Mike were struggling at tough jobs that didn’t pay much, while I was making twice their salary combined (at least on paper) to go see movies all day, write reviews, and sometimes get on national TV to talk about them. Ruthie had no idea how high taxes and the cost of living were in New York, and how I actually made less than it seemed. Nor did she have much understanding of or respect for the idea of being paid money to write.

  To her my New York adventure was the most galling instance yet of everything coming easily for Rod.

  I didn’t grasp any of that then, nor did Ruthie ever talk to me about her feelings. That wasn’t Ruthie’s way. I might have pushed harder to confront her on this, and to resolve our differences, had I known that some version of that bouillabaisse scene would play itself out on visits home for years to come. As it happened I contented myself with tolerating the tension on those short visits home, and never pressing too hard to resolve them, for fear of disturbing the peace on those brief interludes when we were all in the same geographical place as a family.