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

by Rod Dreher

  “It’s like this,” Julie said. “We have the chance to do something really good and meaningful. How often does this happen in life? I don’t think we should pass it up.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Let’s. And let’s not wait around, either.”

  On our last morning in St. Francisville Julie had to go by the school board office in town with paperwork for Ruthie’s estate. I rode with her. While Julie was in a back office taking care of business, I caught up with Al Lemoine, a former teacher of mine. He’s now a West Feliciana schools official.

  “When are y’all heading back to Philly?” Al asked.

  “Tomorrow morning,” I said. “But you never know. We might move back. Julie and I were looking online last night for rental housing here, but there’s such a bad housing shortage I don’t know what we’d do.”

  “You know, that Bankston house just down the street came on the market a couple of days ago,” Al said. “You ought to go look at it.”

  What?!

  “When Julie comes out, tell her where I’ve gone,” I said, and shot out the door.

  Two blocks away, at the other end of Fidelity Street, stood a stately old house with a deep front porch and a big, shady beech tree in the front yard. It was magnificent. I called the number on the “For Rent” sign and talked to Kathy Bankston, who managed the house with her husband, Davis. They raised their kids there, but had recently moved out to another family house in Starhill.

  “Give me ten minutes and I’ll be there,” she said.

  By the time Kathy arrived Julie had made her way down Fidelity. Kathy showed us the house and disclosed the rental terms. The house belonged to her father-in-law and mother-in-law, Walter and Puddin Bankston, who live on the same block. Walter and Puddin are old friends of my father’s.

  While Kathy waited outside Julie and I stood in the kitchen and talked. This house, smack in the middle of the historic district, was perfect—just the right size for our family. And it had a front porch where I could imagine myself sipping bourbon and putting the world to rights.

  “I think we should do this,” I said.

  “I think we should too,” Julie replied.

  We both felt the grace around us, pushing us forward.

  We stepped back out onto the front porch and told Kathy we would like to start a conversation about renting the house. She said she was going to have to talk to Walter, and we said we had to see about tying up some loose ends in Philadelphia before we could commit. But things looked promising. She would be in touch.

  On the drive back to Starhill Julie and I, dazed but giddy, kept asking ourselves, How did that happen?

  A week later we talked to Walter, settled the terms, and officially rented the house on Fidelity Street. Walter was incredibly gracious, saying it was good to know the house would have people in it from a good family.

  “Your daddy and my wife, Puddin, were classmates all through school,” he told me. “He raised her 4-H Club hog for her when they were children, and she won first place.”

  I had interviewed Puddin for a newspaper article years earlier about the time she spent as a child in The Myrtles, a plantation house in town said to be one of America’s most haunted houses. Puddin, whose given name is Alice, is the daughter of the late Davis Folkes, a Louisiana state senator and dear friend of my late grandfather Murphy Dreher Sr., whom he called “Mercy” because he couldn’t quite say the name right. The old gents spent their last years sitting together every day on a bench outside a real estate office downtown, talking, listening, watching, and being with each other in the town they had shared all their long lives.

  When we returned to Philadelphia we broke the news to our friends that we were moving to Louisiana. We made sure to explain that we weren’t moving away from something bad—we loved them, and we loved our Philly life—but toward something good. We expected a lot of Green Acres jokes and bourgeois-bohemian ribbing about how hard it would be to live in a town without a Thai restaurant and an organic market, but the reactions were not at all what I expected. Our decision occasioned a number of e-mails and personal conversations, some of which were startlingly intimate, even painful.

  Some told me stories about how isolated they felt, even in the city, and how lonely they are for community. Others talked about how much they envy me having a place like St. Francisville to go back home to; their families moved around so much that there’s no anchorage in which they can find safe harbor. Still others expressed sorrow at how much they want what the people in St. Francisville have, but how very far they are from being able to get it. One friend living in Washington, DC, said that despite his broad social network, he couldn’t think of a single person he’d trust enough to authorize to pick his kid up from day care in the event of an emergency. Another friend spoke to me with disarming bluntness about the loneliness and helplessness he and his wife are going through.

  “Everything I’ve done has been for career advancement. Go for the money, the good jobs. And we have done well. But we are alone in the world,” he said. “Almost everybody we know is like that. My family is all over the country. My kids only call if they want something. People like us, when we get old, our kids can’t move back to care for us if they wanted to because we all go off to some golf resort to retire. This is the world we have made for ourselves. I envy you that you get to escape it.”

  Our friend Edie Varnado, who lives in the country outside of McComb, Mississippi, and makes soap for a living, wrote to encourage Julie and me. She told us that she and her husband stayed in Mississippi in part to be close to her folks. Her brother moved to New York City. One night, over dinner, Edie’s father said to her, “Even with everything you have, or will have, to deal with, you have the better part.”

  She laughed gently at that, but her father looked at her seriously and said, “You really have.” As the years went by she saw her father was right. Her brother carries with him his own mythology of all the hurts he experienced as a child. Edie had the time and the luxury to become reacquainted with her parents as adults, as real people, for better and for worse. Edie was able to be with both her mother and father when they died, holding their hands and reading the Psalms.

  “It’s hard, big, real, and dirty,” Edie wrote of what lay before Julie and me.

  And by Christmas it would be ours.

  When we told the children that we were moving to Louisiana in December, that they would have Christmas with Mam and Paw, and Uncle Mike, and the cousins, Lucas pumped his fist in the air and yelled, “Boo-yah!” There would be Mam and Paw in my children’s future, and Uncle Mike, and cousins. There would be crawfish, and jambalaya, and deer hunting, and LSU football, and all the good things that I had growing up (and, I hoped, fewer of the bad things).

  Late one night this e-mail landed in my in-box:

  I just wanted to tell you how happy your mother and I are to know that you and your family are coming home.

  I have prayed for this to happen for years. Now it is finally happening. I realize that it could not happen before, but now my prayers are being answered. We love you and your family, son, and welcome home.

  Love, Daddy.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Narrow Path

  There are better ways to see America than from the cab of a twenty-six-foot Penske rig, but that’s how I rolled home the week before Christmas. Julie and the kids corkscrewed themselves into her jam-packed minivan, while our dog Roscoe and I commandeered the big truck. The last time I’d driven a truck between the Atlantic seaboard and St. Francisville I was twenty years younger. By the time we crossed the Maryland state line, my back could tell the difference.

  I hadn’t been sleeping well in the nights leading up to the move. One night, just before dawn, I dreamed that I was standing in the living room of our Philadelphia apartment, surrounded by boxes, wrapping paper, and all the accoutrements of our impending move. I heard the door open downstairs and someone walking up the stairs
. It was Ruthie. She was wearing a white sweater with a collar gathered close around her neck, and carrying a tin of muffins.

  “I thought you were dead!” I said.

  “Oh, I am,” she said sweetly. “I just wanted to tell you that everything is going to be all right.”

  “Thank you for saying that. Will you stay for a while?”

  “No, I need to get on back.”

  Then I woke up. The dream had been unusually vivid, far more intense than usual. When I woke up I wasn’t sure if I was still inside the dream or not.

  At breakfast I told Julie about the dream. “Of course she brought muffins,” Julie said. “That’s just like Ruthie.”

  “Maybe it really was her,” I said. “But I know how much I need to believe everything is going to be okay down there. I might have imagined it. I probably imagined it.”

  Matthew stumbled out of his room and trudged to the kitchen for breakfast in his groggy morning manner. When he heard us talking about a dream, he said, “The weirdest thing happened in my room last night. I woke up and felt someone in the room with me, sitting in the chair next to my bed.”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I was facing the wall, and was too scared to turn over and see.”

  “Did the presence feel threatening?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “It was just watching me.”

  “I think that was Aunt Ruthie, checking on you,” I said, and told him what had happened to me during the night.

  I kept the dream front to mind as we completed packing. Ruthie’s consoling message remained with me as I bucketed southward, through Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Meridian. I was excited about the new adventure, but also anxious about the challenges. Would we be able to give Mike and the girls what they needed? Would Mam and Paw, reeling from the loss of their daughter, expect more from their son than he could give? Would my children become the collateral damage from my putting romantic notions about community to the test?

  Matthew, our eldest, was about to become a teenager, and though he and I are so much alike, our relationship wasn’t what it needed to be. Though I had struggled through my early teen years with my father’s impatience and disapproval, I was on track to repeat some of his mistakes with my son. Matthew is very bright and generally cheerful, but has a slight case of Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder at the mildest end of the autism spectrum. Though he strikes most people who meet him as an intelligent, polite boy, Matt’s Asperger’s tends to make him rigid and inflexible—a quality that can at times come across as headstrong, petulant, and defiant. Though I was far more tolerant of his eccentricities than Paw was of mine, I still found myself quick to lose patience with him.

  “Ruthie always thought you were too hard on Matthew,” Julie had reminded me as we were packing boxes one day. “I need you to be careful about that. This move is going to be especially hard on him.”

  “I know,” I said. “I ask her all the time to pray for me, to help me be patient with him.”

  What Julie had in mind was how Matt’s condition makes him especially dependent on stability and continuity to maintain emotional balance. Plus Aspies typically lack a sense of emotional subtlety, which means they struggle with social interaction. Matt had finally found a good friend in our Philly neighborhood and now had to tell him good-bye. Moreover he was moving to a town where his father, who was geeky but far more socially adept than he, had left as a teenager because he couldn’t stand the conformity, the intolerance, and the bullying.

  Lucas? He would be fine. At seven it was hard on him to leave his Philly friends, but he was keen to live in West Feliciana, around family and the outdoors. Nora was more difficult to read. She turned five a month after Ruthie died. She didn’t seem to understand what leaving Philadelphia for St. Francisville would mean. All she could think about was how she would get to see her grandparents all the time, and now, finally, she would have girl cousins to play with whenever she liked.

  Julie’s was a harder case. She agreed to marry me for better or worse, and my career peregrinations had usually been a winning proposition for her. Leaving Dallas, our church community, and her backyard garden had been punishing, but she landed on her feet in Philly, and threw herself into working with and teaching in the classical homeschool co-op. Julie discovered that she had a real gift, indeed a passion, for teaching grammar. She was so good at it, in fact, that the national classical homeschooling organization with which our co-op was affiliated asked her to travel around Pennsylvania conducting workshops for homeschool teachers. This gratified Julie immensely, and gave her a sense of self-confidence that she had never had.

  Now I was asking her to put all that aside and move to my hometown, where all my difficult emotional baggage was stored. Visiting St. Francisville over the years, whenever something about the place would bother either of us, we could always count on the fact that we would be leaving shortly (and truth to tell, our relatives there counted on that too when we got on their nerves). There would be no place to run away to now if things got hard. What’s more Julie had no idea how Claire and Rebekah, who were dealing with the loss of their mother, were going to take the presence of their aunt. Tim Lindsey had warned us, “Lots of times people in grief need to be angry at somebody, and you need to be ready for that somebody to be you.”

  What if it was us? Julie was scared of hurting them, and being hurt by them. And yet she wanted to move to Louisiana as much as I did. She loved my family and wanted to serve. She reminded me several times that autumn, as we packed our things, that no matter how hard we feared it would be for us in St. Francisville, it would be harder to stay away from our family when they needed us most.

  On the third day of the thirteen-hundred-mile drive we stopped for gas just south of Jackson, Mississippi. I had a Moon Pie for breakfast. It seemed like the thing to do now that we were well and truly back in the South. The big truck lumbered toward Starhill, minivan bringing up the rear, until finally, at half past noon, I juddered to a stop in Mam and Paw’s yard. Lucas made Julie stop the minivan at the end of the driveway so he could run the final hundred yards and leap into the arms of Mam and Paw, who stood outside waiting. I let the dog out, then walked over to embrace my father, who was crying.

  “I’m so glad you’re back, baby,” he said and squeezed me tight. I could hear him softly sobbing on my shoulder. We were standing on exactly the spot where, twenty years ago, he told me good-bye before I drove the moving truck away to Washington, DC.

  We spent that night at Mam and Paw’s. The next morning we had our coffee and drove the final six miles into St. Francisville, to the house on Fidelity Street. Big Show turned up with a work crew to unload our stuff. John Bickham turned up too. Show’s crew was getting paid to work, but on his day off John gave his time and labor for free. He floated around the house, a benevolent caretaking presence making sure everything went well. By the afternoon we were all moved in. I returned the truck to the Home Depot in Zachary. Julie picked me up and we drove back to our new home.

  Christmas was coming in six days and we still had some presents to buy for the kids. To make matters more challenging Mam had said earlier in the month that she was too sad to make Christmas dinner this year, so Julie and I offered to host it at our place—this, even though we would be living out of boxes. We knew this first Christmas without Ruthie would be hard on her, especially given that Mam’s birthday is on Christmas Eve. We were eager to do whatever we could to ease her burden.

  This year Mam and Ruthie’s Christmas Eve tradition of lighting candles in the Starhill cemetery would, sadly, be broken. Neither Mam nor Hannah had it within herself to continue. Mam told me she and Paw were planning to go to services at the Methodist church, and home to bed early. They didn’t feel up to coming by the Dreher family Christmas gathering at my cousin Andy’s place. They wanted to be alone, and quiet, with their grief.

  Just after sunset, while Mam and Paw were at church, I drove out to their house to
pick up some presents I had stored in Paw’s barn. Passing the Starhill cemetery I saw hundreds of pinpricks flickering in the darkness, like stardust sprinkled on the thick blanket of night. I guessed that Mam found the strength to uphold the tradition after all.

  Half an hour later I was having a drink in Andy’s living room when my mobile phone rang. It was Mam. She sounded distraught.

  “Rod, did you see the cemetery?” she said.

  “Yes, it was beautiful,” I said. “You did a wonderful job.”

  “It wasn’t me, baby,” she said, choking through her tears. “I don’t know who did it. Some kind soul lit the candles tonight. Oh, baby, whoever that was, they’ll never know what they did for me tonight. They’ll never, ever know.”

  “My God, Mama, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Honey, find out who did that, would you? I have to thank them.”

  I told her I would do my best.

  A few minutes later Mam called back.

  “It was Susan Harvey,” she said. “You remember her? Mr. Buddy Harvey’s daughter? She’s Susan Wymore now. She was the one who did it. Susan. Susan Harvey, God bless her. She will never, ever know what a gift she gave me tonight.”

  In the years I had been away Susan would call Mam to ask if she would like some help with the candles, but Mam always declined, telling Susan that she and Ruthie, and Ruthie’s girls, had everything covered. This year when Susan called to offer her help, Paw told her that Mam was too down to do it this year.

  “I thought it was important to keep it going,” Susan told me when I called to thank her. Growing up Susan and her sisters lived two fields over from Paw’s parents, who would welcome the Harvey girls into their little white wooden cottage. My grandmother gave them cookies and seeds to feed the birds. The Harvey girls’ older kinfolks, Willis, Fletcher, and Romy, had helped my grandfather build that house by hand after the original cottage burned to the ground when Paw was a boy.

  “My twins are buried in that cemetery,” Susan said. “The first year your Mom and Ruthie did this, they also put out little crosses made of antique nails. They put two crosses there for the twins, one for each one of them, even though they share a grave. The twins were stillborn, and a lot of people don’t know how to act around that. But your Mama and Ruthie, they put two crosses there. To me that acknowledged that the twins were people. I never forgot what your mom did for me.”