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

by Rod Dreher

  “I thought I would come here and never want to go home,” Hannah said. “I found out, though, that I miss my family a lot more than I thought I would. I don’t ever want to live too far from them. And I need to be closer to the country than I thought. Are you disappointed?”

  “Hannah, that’s great,” I said. “No way am I disappointed. That surprises me too, but see, Paris showed you something important about yourself.”

  “I’m afraid I disappointed you,” she said, as we crossed the street. “I think you wanted me to have this big intellectual experience. To me it was just a great vacation. I’ve been so sad since Mama died, and it was so much fun to leave all that behind, and just enjoy myself.”

  “I’m sorry if I made you feel that way. Paris gave you what you needed now. You can always come back for the rest, if you want. My Paris isn’t your Paris, and that’s okay.”

  We turned onto Rue Montfaucon and stepped into a petite oyster bar, clean, bright, and crisp as freshly starched tablecloths, and took a table at the far wall. Philippe had introduced me to raw French oysters on Sunday night, at a place in the Marais, and I had been knocked flat by their intense flavor. They were grenades of the sea, exploding with salt, iodine, and the taste of the ocean—and they had instantly made of me a traitor to my beloved Louisiana oysters. It turned out that Huitrerie Regis, one of the best oyster bars in the entire city, was there in our neighborhood. This was my second visit there on this vacation.

  We ordered our oysters—exquisite fines de claires— and two glasses of Sancerre. Soon the server returned with a platter of glistening oysters on the half shell, resting on a bed of crushed ice beribboned with seaweed. I plucked a shell out with my left hand, gently loosened the oyster from its shell with my fork, and slurped it down.

  I sipped my wine, then began subjecting my poor niece to an achingly sincere and Sancerre-addled oration about how the deliciousness of oysters tells us something about the nature of God. Hannah listened to a few minutes of this pretentious codswallop. Finally she couldn’t take a second more.

  “Uncle Rod, you’re too intense!” she spat. “Remember, Mama made fun of you and your friend in college, sitting there talking about philosophy? She was happier than you, and she had a good life. Why shouldn’t I live that way?”

  That stung. As we made our way through the oysters, I conceded that yes, my weakness was to overintellectualize everything, but that she had no way of knowing that her mother was happier than I. If happiness means the absence of internal conflict, then yes, Ruthie was happier.

  “She kept that up by refusing to think about anything that upset her settled opinions,” I said. “That’s not going to work for you. You are too curious! If you decide you have to hide from the big questions to be happy, you are going to spend your whole life running faster and faster to stay ahead of them. You can’t live that way. It’s always better to live in the truth, as hard as it is, than to live a happy lie.”

  We paid our bill and stepped stiff-legged and nervous out into the cool night air. It began to rain softly. We walked back down the boulevard, toward Rue du Bac, looking for a place to have dinner after our oyster appetizer. The evening seemed to be listing beyond my control.

  “Uncle Rod, I need to tell you something,” Hannah said, her voice rising. “I really think you and Aunt Julie should stop trying so hard to get close to Claire and Rebekah. It’s not going to work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we were raised in a house where our Mama a lot of times had a bad opinion of you,” she said. “She never talked bad about you to us, but we could tell that she didn’t like the way you lived. We could hear the things she said, and Paw too. I had a bad opinion of you myself, until I started coming to visit y’all, and I saw how wrong they were.

  “I was fifteen the first time I did that,” she continued. “My sisters are still young. They don’t know any different. All they know is how we were raised. It makes me sad to see you and Aunt Julie trying so hard, me knowing you’re not going to get anywhere. I don’t want y’all to be hurt.”

  I was hurt. And furious because Hannah told me that her mother’s criticism carried on beyond that moment on Ruthie’s front porch the week of her diagnosis, when I thought everything was made right between us. Things were fine, Ruthie had said, but in truth they weren’t fine. With this sudden revelation, I felt trapped by my family’s legacy—and unable to do anything about it. How could I compete with the lasting power of Ruthie’s judgment—and, to a lesser extent, Paw’s? I wanted to be a different man, a better man, but in that emotionally charged moment it looked like Ruthie had closed the minds of her children to the possibility that I had anything worthwhile to offer them.

  In fact it felt like 1994 all over again: the same feeling I had the night Paw told me that he was glad I had come home because it meant I accepted that he had been right. That ghost found me all these years later, on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Once again it frightened and humiliated me, but this time it was even scarier. In ninety-four I was the only victim of my bad judgment. Now I had uprooted my wife and children because of what now looked like my foolish belief that our family could change, and that we could live in peace and mutual acceptance. As I stalked up the boulevard with Hannah, my heart pounded less from our pace and more from a crushing feeling of betrayal and self-loathing. I had been seduced by my own chronic yearning to return to a sense of unity with my family and my home, and, in the high emotion following Ruthie’s death, had allowed myself to be seduced.

  My stomach knotted and my throat tightened.

  “Let me tell you something,” I growled. “Sometimes your mother and your grandfather could be ignorant and mean. They had no idea what they were talking about. They just judged. Why do you think I had to get out of there? I couldn’t take it! Do you understand that Julie and I uprooted our family and moved to Louisiana, mostly for your sisters? And now you’re telling me that Ruthie poisoned the well for them.”

  I regretted these words as soon as I said them. My temper had gotten the best of me, and I had spoken out of hurt and fear, piercing my niece’s heart with the sharpness of my words. She had no way to comprehend the long and difficult family history that provoked a reaction in me that must have seemed wildly disproportionate. The kid did not deserve this.

  Hannah started to cry. “I wish I had never told you!”

  “No,” I said. “No. I’m glad you told me. Didn’t I just tell you it’s always better to live in truth than to live a lie? You did the right thing. Honest, you did.”

  “But now you’re mad.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  We walked on. I felt like an angry teenager again as we turned the corner and walked south down Rue du Bac. The initial rush of hot anger subsided, giving way to a sense of overwhelming sadness.

  “It was such a waste,” I said, fighting back tears. “Ruthie and I could have had so many good years together. She wouldn’t let it happen.”

  “Mama wasn’t a bad person!” Hannah said, defensively. “She loved you.”

  “I know!” I shot back. “I think she was a saint. It makes no sense. That’s why this is driving me so crazy. I know she loved me. It would be a lot easier to figure out if I believed she didn’t.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Hannah asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We signed a two-year lease on the house. I’ll stay until that’s up at least, and probably until Mam and Paw die. Then we’ll see. What I’m not going to do is keep fighting this same stupid battle for another generation. I don’t have it in me.”

  “Uncle Rod, you can’t leave!”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “No! I need you! Please, don’t go.” She grabbed my arm. I thought about how when she was just a baby, this girl, this Hannah, had the power to pull me from the press gallery in Congress to a barn in rural Louisiana, where I spent cold, wet winter days in Paw’s barn, painting a high chair and a footstool for her in bright, festive colors. I poured m
y desire for this baby’s happiness and aesthetic delight in the world into my work on those objects. I had come from the Starhill barn to the streets of Paris out of the same love for her, and the longing to give her my best.

  And now I was giving her my sorrow. It was wrong. She had far too much to bear as it was.

  That took the fight out of me. I don’t have any right to put all this on this kid, I thought. Her mother is dead. Just let it go.

  “We’ll see, baby. It’s just hard, you know? Family is so damn complicated.”

  “I know. Uncle Rod, can we please change the subject? It’s our last night in Paris. Let’s go to this place on Rue de Lille I found last night. I had a kir royale there. They were really nice.”

  “Sounds good. Lead the way.”

  Back in my hotel room that night I was too rattled by Hannah’s revelation to sleep. I did not doubt that Ruthie loved me, and was a deeply good woman. But I could not easily reconcile that thought with the way she thought about me, and treated me.

  Then I realized that like Ruthie’s death, this wasn’t a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. Ruthie’s tenacious simplicity caused her to make unfair judgments of those she considered privileged or sophisticated, but it also allowed her to empathize more than most with the poor. Her fierce unwillingness to consider ideas and information that challenged what she preferred to believe cloistered her fine mind from the complexity and beauty of the whole wide world, but it also confirmed her in her trust of God amid a terrible trial, and it also likely gave her a year or more of life that she wouldn’t have otherwise had if she had chosen to know the full truth about her condition. And Ruthie loved her family with such self-sacrificial purity that anything less than utter commitment to it struck her as a very personal kind of treachery.

  Which was the real Ruthie?

  The question was absurd: it was the Ruthie who loved, however imperfectly. It was the Ruthie who threw herself across the bed and begged for the spanking I deserved for treating her so cruelly. That was the Ruthie I believed had now been completed in heaven and given perfect vision. This would be the Ruthie I would have to choose to see. This wasn’t a comforting lie. This was the difficult truth.

  But I couldn’t do it. Not yet. That moment of reckoning lay ahead.

  Back home in St. Francisville I avoided calling Mam and Paw to tell them about my trip. I was roiling with emotion from the news that my father and my sister saw me as a charlatan. I was unsure how to act. Julie saw me tailspinning and drove to Starhill one morning to talk to Paw.

  She sat with him on his back porch, side by side in the swing, took his hand in hers, and said, “I need your help.”

  “What is it, baby?” he said tenderly.

  “Hannah and Rod had a conversation their last night in Paris and she said some things to him that broke his heart,” Julie began. Then she told Paw the whole story, including the parts where Hannah had seen and heard him colluding with her mother in making unkind judgments about me.

  Paw took all this in, and fought to suppress his emotions. He said he wouldn’t have said or thought those things about his own son, and that he wanted to do what he needed to do to make things right.

  Julie returned to town and told me about their conversation.

  “He says he wouldn’t have said those things?” I sputtered. “That’s not true! The words Hannah heard him say about me, I’ve heard him use about other people.”

  “Okay, but look, he’s hurting, and he wants to see you,” Julie said. “Go out there and talk to him.”

  It took me another day to work up the nerve to drive to Starhill. I was nervous, partly because I hate confrontation and partly because, with his cane leaning against his chair, and with his left hand trembling, he looked so weak and breakable.

  I told him that I knew Julie and he had talked, and that I didn’t want to go over all that again, but that he had to know how hurt I was by it all. Even to the very last, when I was telling everybody I knew how great my sister was, and how much I admired her heroism, she was tearing me down behind my back, to her children.

  Paw shook his head from side to side. His chin trembled, and tears ran down his cheeks.

  “I’m so sorry,” he rasped. “And now that poor baby is dead in the ground, and she can’t make it right.”

  Suddenly I felt ashamed. This old, sick man buried his daughter. Who am I to inflict my drama on him? Who am I to hold on to this hurt? On the other hand, isn’t that part of our family’s problem—that we defer difficult conversations out of fear and anxiety, and an unwillingness to risk hurting someone’s feelings?

  Whatever the truth I lost my stomach for confrontation over his part in this mess. Maybe there would be another day.

  After a while I went inside to see Mam. I found her at her sink, and kissed her on the cheek. We made small talk, and then she said, as she had ten thousand times before, how happy she was that we had moved to Louisiana.

  “You know,” Mam said, “not long before Ruthie died, she said to me, ‘Mama, if I don’t make it, I believe Rod’s going to move home to take care of you and Daddy.’ ”

  I froze.

  “She said that?”

  “Yes, sitting right there with me on the back porch.”

  “She really believed I was going to move home?”

  Mam looked at me strangely. “Yes. Is something wrong?”

  “No. No. Listen, I need to get back to town.”

  At home on Fidelity Street I motioned for Julie to follow me to our bedroom so we could talk privately.

  “So how’d that go with Paw?”

  “Not bad, but we didn’t have any breakthroughs,” I said. “He’s so emotional right now. It’s too hard to talk to him about this. I think I’m just going to have to let it go. But Mam said something that threw me for a loop.”

  I told Julie about Ruthie’s prophecy. She drew her hand to her mouth. She knew exactly what this meant.

  “Family was the most important thing to Ruthie,” I said. “This means Ruthie thought that if it came down to it, I would do right by the family. If they needed me, I would sacrifice anything to take care of Mam and Paw.”

  Julie embraced me.

  “It means that deep down my sister believed that I was good.” I took my glasses off to wipe away my tears.

  That revelation didn’t fix everything. But it was a sign, it was a mercy, it was a start. And not long after that things improved between Hannah’s sisters and their aunt and uncle.

  Miss Clophine Toney, whose son I had played Little League with, died in hospice care that spring. She was eighty-two. On the day of her burial I picked Mam and Paw up and we drove to the funeral home in Zachary. James, her son, eulogized his mother. I knew my old friend had become a part-time evangelist, but I had never heard him preach. He stayed up all night praying for the right words to say. He stood behind the lectern next to his mother’s open casket, flexed his arms under his gray suit and black shirt, then turned the Spirit loose on the forty or so mourners in the room.

  “During the fall, my mother would go out and pick up pecans,” he began, in his husky voice. “She wasn’t very well educated. Today they tryin’ to educate us in everything. Gotta stay with the next game, gotta make sure we go to college. We can’t get too far behind, because we might not make enough money, and that would make our lives miserable. My God, we gettin’ educated in everything, but we not gettin’ educated in morals. We not gettin’ educated in sacrifice.”

  James said his mother was poor and uneducated, but during pecan season, she worked hard gathering nuts from under every tree she could find.

  “She was carryin’ a cross,” he said. “Because let me tell you something, if you don’t sacrifice for your brother, if you don’t sacrifice for your neighbor, you not carrying your cross.”

  Miss Clophine, James reminded us, took the money she made selling pecans and went to the dollar store in St. Francisville, where, despite her own great need, she spent it on presents
for friends and family. I thought of the tube socks and other small gifts that Miss Clo gave Ruthie and me every Christmas.

  “Aunt Grace told me the other day that of all the presents she got from everybody, those meant the most,” James said. “Why? Because there was so much sacrifice. She sacrificed everything she made, just to give.”

  James pointed to Mam and Paw, sitting in the congregation.

  “She used to give Mr. Ray and Miss Dorothy presents. And I’ll say this about Mr. Ray and Miss Dorothy Dreher, they were so close to my mother and my father. They sacrificed every year, whether my mother and father had enough to give them a gift or not. They gave. We talkin’ about sacrifice. We talkin’ about whether you’re carryin’ your cross today.”

  As a child, James said, he would cross the river into Cajun country to stay with his Grandma Mose, Clophine’s mother. There he would eat a traditional dish called couche-couche, an old-timey Cajun version of fried cornmeal mush. Grandma Mose served couche-couche and milk nearly every morning, and little James loved it.

  “But every now and then,” he continued, stretching his words for effect, “we wouldn’t eat couche-couche and milk. We’d eat something called bouille.”

  Bouille, pronounced “boo-yee,” is cornmeal porridge, what the poorest of the Cajun poor ate.

  “I didn’t like bouille. I frowned up. Mama made me that bouille sometime. Bouille tasted bad. It wasn’t good,” he said. “But let me tell you something: you may have family members, and you may have friends, that will feed you some bouille. It may not be food. They may not be treating you the way you think you ought to be treated. They may be doing this or doing that. You may be giving them a frown. But we may be talking about real sacrifice.”

  James’s voice rose, and his arms began flying. This man was under conviction. He told the congregation that if a man lives long enough, he’s going to see his family, friends, and neighbors die, and no matter what their sins and failings, the day will come when we wish we had them back, flaws and all.