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

by Rod Dreher

  And yet there was no getting around Ruthie’s cognitive dissonance—that is, the difficulty in squaring her confident faith in God’s providence with her white-knuckled refusal to admit any facts that stood to undermine her hope. I finally reconciled it, at least in my mind, by considering two things. First, while my nature was contemplative, Ruthie’s was active. Second, that nature served her moral commitment to duty, even to the point of self-sacrifice—the bedrock of Ruthie’s character.

  Survival for the sake of Mike and the kids became the absolute focus of her life. It had always been hard to convince Ruthie to do things for herself, but if she came to believe it was for the sake of others, there was nothing she wouldn’t attempt. Ruthie found the thought that she wouldn’t be around to care for her family intolerable. By force of will she pushed aside anything that she reckoned would compromise her commitment to them. Contemplating the philosophical aspects of her situation was an indulgence she could not afford.

  There was no real contradiction between believing that her fate was ultimately in God’s hands, but also doing all that she could to cooperate with His will—which she believed could and indeed would include a complete physical healing. Miracles, after all, do happen. If there was a miracle in store for her, Ruthie believed she had to be open to receiving it, or it might pass her by.

  Still I worried about the effect of Ruthie’s strategy on her children. She never leveled with them about her condition, never convened a family discussion to talk about the possibility that she might not survive. “I’ll never lie to you,” she told the girls, and she made good on that promise. But she didn’t tell them that there was a chance cancer could win, and that they should prepare for that possibility.

  Here too, Ruthie understood her children well. She grasped that if the girls admitted to themselves that their mother might die, they would fall apart. Whatever time Ruthie had left would be spent not living with joy and light, but rather trying to hold her frightened, shattered children together as they waited for the end. So she told her girls when the news from the doctor was good, and she told them when it was bad, but she kept the discussion vague and general. “Girls, I’ll answer any questions you have,” she said. They never had any questions. They didn’t really want to know.

  It was easy for Claire and Rebekah, who were still young, to accept on faith that there would be a happy ending to their mother’s story. As old as they were at the time—Claire was eleven, Rebekah, eight—they still possessed a remarkable capacity for childlike belief. Besides their mother had raised them to be reticent about asking questions. It was much more difficult for Hannah, who was not only temperamentally more inquisitive than her sisters, but also had turned seventeen only three months after her mother’s diagnosis.

  Hannah had always played the part of the Golden Girl. Straight A’s. Involved in every club, academic and social. Cheerleader. Churchgoer. Obedient. And then, after doing everything right, she woke up to find that her mother had lung cancer. She rebelled. She stayed out of the house as much as she could, because that’s where the cancer was. When nobody was around Hannah threw things, and tore her clothes. Sometimes she would climb aboard the four-wheeler, motor to Paw’s pond, and, far from anyone’s ears, scream as loud as she could. She wanted to yell at her mother, too. In her heart she screamed, “Stop having cancer! Be our mama again!”

  Some of this was no doubt standard teenage rebellion. Even before Ruthie got sick, she and Hannah fought. Hannah was tired of living in that boring old town, and couldn’t understand why her mother was so happy there. Nothing ever happened, nothing ever changed, and nobody ever talked about anything other than what other people were up to. As Hannah saw it, her mother had settled; that was something she had no intention of doing. She didn’t know what she wanted out of life, but Hannah was certain she wasn’t going to find it in St. Francisville—and she thought less of her mother for her contentment with such a dull way of life.

  Ruthie was not prepared for this, and came down hard on her daughter. In fairness to Ruthie, Hannah was behaving selfishly, and had been since before the cancer. And she had resolved that her mother would never understand her, so she had stopped trying to explain herself, leaving Ruthie in a difficult position. Nevertheless Mam and Paw warned Ruthie to be patient, not to make the same mistakes as Paw had done with me. Ruthie was immune to their advice, or so it seemed to them. Nobody knew. Ruthie kept these things within her own family.

  I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point well before Ruthie got sick, I began to sense a yearning in Hannah for something she couldn’t define, but that was beyond her experience in West Feliciana. I knew that she was going to face a personal crisis over this issue before she did; I had been there myself, and knew how it would be for a teenager like her in a family like ours. Over the years my bond with Hannah thickened as I saw her sensibilities and eccentricities resemble my own as a child. Now, having noticed that she was a dedicated reader, I thought about what escapist literature appealed to me at her age, when I was bored, sullen, and eager to leave. That’s why I sent Hannah a copy of A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his years in 1920s Paris.

  It was just the thing. After reading the book, and rereading it, Hannah, at fifteen and sixteen, would lie in bed at night, imagining herself in Paris, sitting in a café all day, talking to strangers, adoring beauty, cultivating passion, being cosmopolitan. This is how my niece became a nascent Francophile, something she revealed to me that first cancer summer, as she planned to fly to Philadelphia to visit us. Julie and I offered to take her anywhere she wanted to have a big dinner.

  She chose Parc, an upscale French brasserie on Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia. Reading about it online Parc struck her as the Frenchiest place in town, the kind of restaurant that would provide a real Boulevard Saint-Germain thrill. As soon as the three of us stepped inside the restaurant that warm Philly evening, I knew she was right. The gleaming zinc bar, the leather banquettes, the tile work, the sepia walls, waiters in white aprons striding by bearing trays laden with crocks of onion soup smothered in gooey Gruyère. Hannah had chosen well: this was as close to Paris as you were going to get this side of the Atlantic. In a giddy fugue she had that night her first taste of champagne, her first raw oysters, her first boeuf bourguignon. Hannah’s conversation bubbled with enthusiasm about why beauty is so important in life, and how she wanted to fall in love with a man who could appreciate a restaurant like this one.

  “Just make sure he’s a man who will be just as comfortable at Mam and Paw’s table in Starhill as he is at this one,” Julie cautioned. Exactly right, I thought.

  Late in the evening Hannah swooned, “Aaaaah, this is like a movie. This is how I want to live my life.”

  She was coming to the conclusion, she confided, that happiness matters more than being dutiful. “Why not be happy?” she said. “Why be satisfied with the same old thing? I know life can’t always be about pleasure, but what is wrong with looking for pleasure?”

  I knew those thoughts and feelings well. They had been mine when I was her age, rebelling against Paw’s rigid, small-town expectations for me. I had felt guilty enough about my rebellion then, knowing that there was nothing wrong with my contrarian thoughts, but also ashamed that I was disappointing my father, and in turn ashamed for being ashamed. What would it have been like for me if my father, the man against whose granitelike, immovable character the teenage Rod was sharpening himself, had been stricken with terminal cancer? Chances are I would have been as fraught with self-doubt and anxiety as Hannah was.

  On that visit to Philadelphia I tried to talk with her about her mom’s disease, to find out what she knew, and what she thought about it. Very little, as it happened. She made it bluntly clear that she neither wanted to think about it nor talk about it. That’s how Hannah and her sisters wanted it. That’s how Ruthie wanted it. That’s how it was going to be, Uncle Rod.

  The girls were sheltered, but Mam and Paw were not. They k
new the odds. They had to watch their only daughter waste away, knowing that she didn’t grasp the full measure of the danger she was in. They were not children. They believed in miracles too, but they also knew, in a way Ruthie, Mike, and their children did not, how badly their daughter needed one.

  Cancer is a family disease, and after the diagnosis the pain spread beyond the Leming household. Night after night Paw sat in his armchair praying for the child who, as a little girl, would fix fences with him in the morning and sit in his lap and snuggle with him before her bedtime. He tried to bargain with God for Ruthie’s life. One night Mam heard him in the living room crying, “Just take me, make me sick, make me go, not my little girl.” He never quit trying to strike this deal.

  My parents needed help; John Bickham and his wife, Sandy, stepped up. John took over more caretaking duties around the Dreher place. Sandy, appreciating the magnitude of Mam’s and Paw’s need, accepted with a generous heart that she was going to see a lot less of her husband for the duration of Ruthie’s health crisis. John mostly served by being present, and listening patiently to Mam and Paw talk about Ruthie. He focused on Paw, working to keep the old man from sitting in his armchair, brooding. John had lost his brother to cancer. He knew from experience what it felt like to be powerless to help your loved one. Over and over he’d tell Paw, “Look, we can’t fix this, all we can do is keep putting one foot in front of another.”

  John spent countless hours simply being there, hearing the same things, and saying the same things. It was a kind of ritual. This meant the world to Mam and Paw.

  It meant a lot to me too. There was very little I could do for my family from so far away, but I did telephone Mam and Paw every morning and every evening, to check on them. They hurt, and they hurt bad. It seemed that every time I called, John Bickham was there with them, or John Bickham had just left, or John Bickham had just called to say he was coming by. In short John was the son they needed at that excruciating time in their lives, but didn’t have.

  The way John figures it, all the Starhill people who came by to see Mam and Paw, and sit with them on the front porch, were a big part of what kept them going. For the most part, though, Ruthie kept them calm, focused, and hopeful. She wouldn’t tolerate their depression, and did everything she could to put on a brave face to lift their spirits.

  Big Show often drove up from Zachary to do chores for Paw around the place. He never came to Starhill without stopping in to check on Ruthie. As her cancer progressed Ruthie had fewer visitors. Many people were afraid to stop by. With her muscles wasting away, she began to appear more skeletal. This frightened people. They didn’t know if she was too sick to see them. Some didn’t trust themselves not to cry in front of her. (Even Paw couldn’t stand to see his child in this condition without crying, which made Ruthie feel bad for causing him sorrow.) Others, perhaps, were afraid seeing their friend like this would remind them of their own mortality.

  Yet Ruthie was lonely. Big Show saw that side of her suffering, and did his best to take it away.

  “She just wanted somebody to talk to,” he says. “We’d talk about our kids, how hardheaded our kids were. I’d try to keep her spirits up, joke around with her. But I’d feel bad because if she’d laugh too much, she’d start coughing. I just wanted to spend time with her, because I knew how much she was hurting for company.”

  In one visit Show confessed that he was furious with God for allowing her cancer.

  “You can’t be!” she said. “I’m not giving up hope. He has a plan for me.”

  Big Show would listen politely, and he’d try to believe. He really would. Yet he invariably drove away from Starhill mad, and stayed mad all the way home to Zachary.

  If her old friends had trouble keeping faith, Ruthie drew closer to two new confidantes in the chemo room, fellow cancer patients who knew exactly what she was going through. She became especially close to Stephanie Lemoine, a Baton Rouge mom. An elderly woman they knew as Miss Joyce completed their trio.

  “We called our times together a chemo party,” Stephanie remembers. “Miss Joyce was so cute, in her little wig. We laughed and talked, and had a good time together. Whenever we had chemo we would always hold seats for each other, so we all three could sit together. We just loved being together.”

  Stephanie began going to the chemo room after her diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She saw Ruthie walking around the room, and because Ruthie was so young Stephanie figured her for a breast cancer patient. One Wednesday they sat next to each other as they waited for blood work.

  Stephanie smiled at her. “I guess you’re a Wednesday girl too, huh?” she said.

  “Sure am!” said Ruthie, grinning. And off they went, into their friendship.

  When Ruthie came home from the hospital that afternoon, she told Hannah it had been a great day. “I’m so happy,” she said. “I made the best friend at chemo today. She’s just like me.”

  They really did have a lot in common, Ruthie and Stephanie. They were both in their early forties. Both married their high school sweethearts. Both had three kids. And both were fighting for their lives.

  Stephanie was struck by Ruthie’s simplicity and purity of heart. “Ruthie and I knew that we had it all,” she remembers. “All we ever really wanted was our families. We talked about everyday things a lot, because that’s all we wanted: everyday life with our husbands and our kids.”

  It was hard not to be friends with Ruthie. People who had just met her often recall having felt like they’d known her for all their lives. She was warm, open, and empathetic. I credit our mother teaching her children empathy by example. With Ruthie the lesson sank in. Mam’s tough rural childhood had given her a soft heart, especially for children who didn’t have much. She was that way with all underdogs and outcasts like Miss Clophine, the mom of James, one of my summer baseball league teammates.

  Miss Clophine, as we knew her, was very poor and rough-hewn. She had been born into a Cajun farm family, and married to James’s father, Mr. Huey, at an early age. Hard fieldwork was all she knew. She worked their family’s melon and tomato patch in the hot Louisiana sun while Mr. Huey—“Salty,” as his family called him—was at his day job on the river ferry. She was skinny as a sugarcane stalk, her skin as brown and leathery as a battered saddlebag. Miss Clophine, who never learned how to read, gathered her wiry hair in crazily jutting pigtails. She spoke English with a muddy Cajun accent, peppered with profanity. A lot of better-off folks looked down on her, but to be fair it was hard to know how to take Miss Clo.

  One night we were late getting to the ballpark. Mam arrived at the bleachers to find that the other women seated in the stands had formed a large circle around Miss Clophine, clearly not wanting to converse with her. When Miss Clo spotted my mother, she stood and announced, “Hey you bitches, here comes Miss Dorothy. She’ll sit wit’ me. She’s my friend.”

  Mam was, and Mam did. That was her way. As she explained to us kids at the time, “You have to understand how much it hurts to be left out, and looked down on.”

  Every Christmas we would exchange family presents with Miss Clo. The Toneys had so little, and their need was so great. Miss Clo was our neighbor, though, not a charity case; she had dignity. She gave us kids presents too: one year, a pair of tube socks for me, and a comb for Ruthie. Miss Clo picked up pecans on her hands and knees throughout the fall to make enough money to buy Christmas gifts for those she loved. One autumn she called Mam and told her the pecan crop had been sparse that year; she worried that she wouldn’t have enough to buy Ruthie and me anything.

  In the summer Miss Clophine and Mr. Huey would load watermelons from their field into the back of their old Chevy Nova, and deliver them to us. Mr. Huey would unpack them and lay them in the shade of the tallow tree in our yard. Sometimes Miss Clophine got out of the car, but other times she wouldn’t. Though they were invited inside, Mr. Huey felt they had no right to come into our house. Poor country people are like that sometimes.

  In the summer o
f 2010 Julie and I flew with the kids to St. Francisville to see Ruthie and the family. Ruthie told me that my old teammate James Toney had been coming by to see her. After graduating high school James went to work at the war veterans’ home in a nearby town, had a religious conversion, and took up preaching to small country Pentecostal congregations. When he heard about Ruthie’s cancer he started driving over from time to time to pray with her and for her. He even raised three hundred dollars from his tiny rural congregation for Ruthie. Those folks didn’t have much, but they shared from their measure.

  On Father’s Day I stood in Mam’s kitchen making deep-dish pies out of tomatoes, sliced onions, and pepper jack cheese. Through the back door of the kitchen came James. I hadn’t seen him in thirty years or longer. He looked and sounded great. Mr. Huey had died a few years back, and he had driven his mother out to visit the grave. Miss Clophine, as was her custom, remained outside in the car. While James and I sat in the kitchen getting caught up, Mam went out to talk to Miss Clo.

  After James and his mother left Mam sat with Julie and me at the kitchen table and cried. She explained that Miss Clophine was in a bad way. It hurt her to see her old friend so sick and broken from age, weariness, and dementia.

  Mam said that out in the driveway Miss Clo was struggling through her sickness to talk. She kept patting the tops of her thighs, saying, “Christmas! Christmas!” Mam realized that she had given Miss Clophine those pants for Christmas one year. The poor woman was trying to let Mam know that she remembered.

  “I kissed my fingers, then leaned into the car window and touched them to her forehead,” Mam told me. “I told her that I loved her. She kissed her fingers, reached through the window and touched my forehead, and said, ‘I love you, Miss Dorothy.’ ”