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

by Rod Dreher

  The preacher turned to his mother’s body, lying in the open casket on his left, and his voice began to crack.

  “If my mama could give me that bouille one more time. If she could give me that bouille one more time. I wouldn’t frown up. I wouldn’t frown up. I would eat that bouille just like I ate that couche-couche. I would sacrifice my feelings. I would sacrifice my pride, if she could just give me that bouille one more time.”

  I glanced at Mam, who was crying. Paw grimaced and held on to his cane.

  “Let me tell you, you got family members and friends who ain’t treating you right,” James said, pointing at the congregation. “Listen to me! Sacrifice! Sacrifice!—when they givin’ you that bouille. Eat that bouille with a smile. Take what they givin’ you with a smile. That’s what Jesus did. He took that bouille when they was throwing it at him, when they was spittin’ at him, he took it. He sacrificed.

  “My mother didn’t have much education, but she knew how to sacrifice. She knew that in the middle of the sacrifice, you smile. You smile.”

  The evangelist looked once more at his mother’s body and said, in a voice filled with sweet yearning, “Mama, I wish you could give me that bouille one more time.”

  James stepped away, yielding the lectern to the hospice chaplain, who gave a more theologically conventional sermon. Truth to tell, I didn’t listen closely. The power and the depth of what I had just heard from that Starhill country preacher, James Toney, and the lesson his mother’s life left to those who knew her, stunned me. And it made me think of Ruthie, who lived and died as Miss Clophine had done: taking the bouille and giving, and smiling, all for love.

  This was true religion. James showed me that. The most gifted preacher who ever stood in the pulpit at Chartres could not have spoken the Gospel any more purely.

  The funeral director invited the congregation to come forward and say our last good-byes to Miss Clophine before driving out to the cemetery. I walked forward with my arm around Mam’s shoulder. We stood together at Miss Clo’s side. Her body was scrawny and withered, and it was clad in white pajamas, a new set, with pink stripes. I felt Mam tremble beneath my arm. She drew her fingers to her lips, kissed them, and touched them to Miss Clophine’s forehead.

  James buried Miss Clophine at the family cemetery, on a hill overlooking Thompson Creek, in the same graveyard where Roy Dale Craven, who played baseball with James and me, lies. Thousands of cars pass by on Highway 61 every day, and the people inside never know what treasures lay buried on the hilltop, just beyond the trees. Those people have somewhere to get to, and speed along, unaware.

  One morning that spring a friend texted me from the Bird Man coffee shop: “The Blue Horse is on fire!” Lucas was sitting in the living room watching TV.

  “Come on, Luke, there’s a fire downtown,” I said. “Let’s go watch the firefighters put it out.”

  We motored down Ferdinand Street and parked outside the Ford garage to watch the action. Smoke billowed from the tavern’s roof. A group of firefighters crawled up a ladder leaned against the facade, axes in hand, intending to chop a hole in the roof to let smoke out.

  “You think Uncle Mike is in there?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. In fact Mike was with a group of firefighters that had gone in the other side of the building, attacking the flames with hoses.

  After a minute or two Lucas and I noticed people rushing into the antique store next to the tavern and hauling furniture, glassware, and paintings out to the parking lot. They were afraid the flames would leap the alley and set the antique store ablaze. Without giving it a second thought, we hustled across the street and into the store, joining the crowd of neighbors helping the shop owner save her inventory.

  In the end firefighters extinguished the blaze before it jumped the alley and ignited the antique store, but the tavern and a neighboring gift shop, where the fire started, were total losses. I found Mike standing under an oak tree, covered with sweat. He had been inside the burning tavern when the ceiling collapsed on him and the others. It had been a close call. When I found Lucas and told him that I had seen his uncle, and what his uncle had done to put out the fire, he beamed, and looked as if his heart was going to burst out of his chest.

  Back at home I thought about how for the first time in a long time, I had been a participant, not an observer. I had gone downtown to watch the fire and write about it, and ended by doing my part to help a neighbor in distress. For once I was not content to be abstract, analytical, and contemplative. Doing good things instead of thinking good thoughts—that was new to me, and it felt right.

  About a month after Paw and Julie had that difficult conversation, he and I sat in the shade of his back porch after Sunday dinner, talking about nothing in particular. He had been going through a rough time. One afternoon I found him in his chair, looking at a framed photo of Ruthie he kept on the side table. He was crying.

  “It’s so hard,” he said. “I got her over here, in a picture. And I talk to her two or three times a day. I just tell her what I’m doing, what’s on my mind. What my troubles are.”

  “Do you think she hears you?” I asked.

  “I hope she does. I hope she does.” He wiped his tears with his hand.

  “Do you ask her to help you?”

  “Yes,” he said, struggling to find his voice. “I ask her to speak to God for me.”

  He couldn’t say anything more. He needed to be alone. I left him there in his chair, talking to his lost little girl, staring at her image, as if it were an icon.

  On this Sunday afternoon, though, Paw was in a happier frame of mind. Because he had a cardiologist’s appointment later in the week, I had been thinking about his frail health, and pondering big questions about the life he had lived.

  “Daddy, you know how Ruthie wouldn’t let me record an interview with her when she was sick?” I said. “I hate that, because we don’t have anything on video of her talking about her life.”

  “Yeah, that’s a shame,” he said.

  “I’m wondering if you and Mama would be willing to sit for me interviewing you,” I said. “It wouldn’t be anything fancy, just me with my iPad camera, having a conversation.”

  “Well, I reckon we could do that.”

  I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and told him that I wanted to do a test question, to show him how easy it would be. I figured this would take about three minutes. Sitting in the chair across from him, I pressed the red button to start recording, then asked: “You have any big regrets in life?”

  Paw sat for a moment, rocking in the porch swing, then said yes, he did.

  “I should have never gone to college,” he said. “I was good with my hands, and wanted to work outside. I should have gone to trade school, or into some kind of technical training. My mother wouldn’t have it. Aunt Hilda harassed her constantly about how I should get a college education. So I did. I was the first one in our family to finish college. I did it all for my mother and my family. It was a mistake I have always regretted.”

  He told me about an agricultural device he invented when he was in college, an innovative plow. Paw shared the idea with an LSU classmate, who drew up the plan and, with his permission, turned it in as a class assignment. The professor took Paw’s idea, patented it, and sold the patent to a manufacturer. A couple of years later Paw saw his invention for sale in farm equipment stores.

  I knew this story had to be true. When I was a child Paw got tired of swinging an axe to chop firewood, and invented and built a hydraulic woodsplitter. Forty years later the original device still works. He never patented it. I took Paw not so much to be complaining about the unfairness of the world as to be saying that he had a gift for mechanical creativity, but he had been so eager to please his family that he never sought the training that would have allowed him to fully develop his talents.

  “There’s something I regret even more, he carried on. “I can see now, at the end of my life, that it would have been better if af
ter your Mama and I got married, we had packed up and left here.”

  I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what I said: we should have left this place.”

  And then Paw told me how he had spent his entire life sacrificing for his mother, his father, his brother, his aunts, and his cousins—all of whom, in his recollection, worked him like a dog and never gave him a moment’s thanks. They could always count on Ray to fix anything, to do any job they asked of him, to give up his free time and spend his own money, to help them. They used him up.

  “I was a sucker,” he said, the bitterness heavy in his voice. “Aunt Lois was the only one of the whole bunch who was ever straight with me. But there was only one of her.”

  Paw told a jaw-dropping story about the time many years earlier when Aunt Hilda had broken the law to steal land Aunt Lois had promised to sell to him, and instead to convey it under false pretenses to the scoundrel cousin she favored. Paw discovered the ruse, which involved Hilda forging Lois’s signature, in courthouse filings long after both the great-aunts were dead. I later confirmed this with someone who had been present when the deed happened.

  “How do you think that made me feel, after all I had done for Aunt Hilda?” Paw said. “That right there was a bad woman.”

  How could I disagree? The hurt in Paw’s heart was so raw. It was as if it had all happened yesterday.

  “I loved my own mother more than life itself, but she was terrible to your mother,” he continued. “She and her sisters, Rita and Ann, they treated your mama like dirt. They thought I had married beneath myself. Aunt Rita disowned me for marrying your mother. But you know Dorothy took it all from them. She served them like a dog, and nobody would help her.

  “I should have taken her away from here,” he said. “But I was so caught up in my family, and in trying to do the right thing for them. And I was tied down by this place. I was twelve years old when I bought that Farmall Cub tractor with my own money and started planting. Farming was my dream. Aunt Lois saw that, and she helped me. She paid for me to go to Chicago to show my 4-H Club steer. She drove me herself to the State Fair in Shreveport. I bought this place over here from Aunt Em”—Loisie’s sister-in-law—“and put cows on it. When I married your mother, I had so much going on here I didn’t think I was free to leave.”

  I sat there across from my father picturing him as a stout boy of twelve, riding high on his little tractor, a shock of fiery orange, cowlicked hair jammed under a straw cowboy hat, dragging a plow across a Starhill field, laying the groundwork for what he thought would be an empire of his own. He would have his family and he would be loved and respected by them all, and everything would work out the way it was supposed to because that’s how things turn out for good men who do right, stay loyal, and follow the rules.

  Paw’s face was tense and pale as he continued to unburden himself. My three-minute interview had turned into half an hour.

  “The day finally came when I stood up to my parents,” he continued. “I was working in my shop over there behind Daddy’s place. A piece of my equipment had broken, and it was a complicated weld to fix it. I had spent four hours that afternoon, working out there in the heat, setting that weld up. Everything was in place, when here comes Daddy out the back door to see what I was doing.

  “He always had to have his hands all over whatever I was up to. Lord have mercy, I can’t tell you the number of times I would be working on an electrical box, and I would have to slap his hand away—I’m talking about literally slap his hand—because he was about to touch a hot wire and electrocute himself. That’s how he was. He thought he knew everything.”

  Paw said his father ambled over to the weld, tried to pick it up, and caused the three pieces of metal to fall to the ground, destroying an entire afternoon’s work. The old man meant no harm; it was only that as usual, he did not understand his son’s vision, and when to leave it alone. That afternoon, Paw did what he had never had the courage to do before: tell his father to get the hell out of his business, and stay out. When dark came Paw went into the house to tell his father good-bye and found the old man sitting on the front porch, in good spirits.

  “That settled everything. We never had another problem after that,” Paw said. “I should have said something like that to him and my mother a long time before. But I didn’t, and by then, I was about fifty years old. It was too late for me.”

  I was speechless. He kept talking.

  “Your sister, she was right to stand up to me over marrying Mike,” Paw continued. “And so were you, when you went back to Washington to be a writer. I was too strong-willed and stubborn back then. I regret that very much.”

  We sat in silence for a moment.

  “Daddy, I have to tell you, I don’t know what to think about all this,” I said. “Here I am, a man who turned his life upside down to move back here for the family, and because of the land. And now here you are telling me that you made an idol of family and place, and that you wish you had left it all behind when you were young, just like I did. What am I supposed to make of that?”

  His chin trembled, he wrung his hands together, he looked me straight in the eye, and then my father said: “That I’m a sorrier man than you.”

  Sorrier. It means having regret. But in Southern parlance, it also means morally less worthy.

  “But Daddy I hope you understand that I really do want to be back here,” I said. “Because I went away all those years ago, I could come back not out of guilt, but out of love, of my own free choice.”

  “I know, son,” he said. “I know. And I appreciate it. What I want to say to you, though, is that I don’t want you to feel trapped by this place. When I’m gone, half of it is going to be yours, and the other half will go to Ruthie’s children. I want you to do whatever you want with it. Did you know it’s the last piece of the old Benjamin Plantation that’s still owned by someone in the family? If you want to keep it up, you have my blessing. If you want to sell it, you also have my blessing. You’re free.”

  This conversation was the most graceful thing I have ever experienced. My father, in the twilight of his long life, gave me the greatest gift he could give.

  At home that afternoon I told Julie everything that had happened. She was as stunned as I had been. For myself I had seen the errors one can fall into by placing too much emphasis on career and individual desire at the expense of family and place. But what Paw had done, in part, was to reveal the catastrophic mistake one can make if one makes a false god of family and place.

  There has to be balance. Not everyone is meant to stay—or to stay away—forever. There are seasons in the lives of persons and of families. Our responsibility, both to ourselves and to each other, is to seek harmony within the limits of what we are given—and to give each other grace.

  “You know,” Julie told me later, “you could not have had that conversation with him if we hadn’t moved back here.”

  She was right—and this was an important lesson. Though I talked every day to my mother and father throughout Ruthie’s illness, this was not a truth that could have been revealed over the phone. Nor could it have emerged on one of our short fly-in, fly-out visits. It had to work its way to the surface over time, with patience, and, above all, with presence.

  I was now at peace with my father. On the matter of my sister I still did not have peace, and despaired that I ever would.

  The breakthrough happened on a hot Sunday afternoon—once again on Mam and Paw’s back porch, after the meal. Matthew provoked a hellacious fight with Lucas, one that ended with us loading the kids into the car and driving home. Back at the house Julie and I stood in the kitchen and laid into Matthew for his constant teasing.

  “You can’t see this, son, but you are training your little brother to react that way,” Julie chastised. “He loves you more than you understand, but you keep picking on him. You’ve always treated him like this. That’s why he blows up at you. Tha
t’s why he doesn’t trust you.

  “If you keep this up,” she pleaded, “the day is going to come when you’re not going to be able to make it right. He’s going to remember the way you treated him all those years, and he might not have it in him to believe you when you say you’re sorry.”

  In a flash it became clear. In some sense I must have trained Ruthie to distrust me and my motives. Because I’ve raised these boys of mine, I knew well how stout and pure Lucas’s heart was, and how fiercely he loves his brother. But I also knew well how much Matthew takes that for granted, because of his nature. Both my sons are smart, but Matthew is also clever, in an intellectual and ironic, even sarcastic, way that makes straightforward Lucas feel confused and taken advantage of.

  I phoned Mam and Paw later that afternoon to tell them about our disciplinary conversation with Matthew, and how, to our great frustration, Julie and I have been going at this with our older son for years.

  “Did you ever have those talks with me about Ruthie?” I asked.

  “Did we?!” Paw exclaimed. “All the time! You never learned. It broke our hearts to see what was happening between y’all. And you kept on.”

  “It was just like your uncle Murphy did your daddy,” Mam added. “The way he saw it, he was just playing, but it hurt your daddy more than Murphy understood.”

  That night at bedtime, with the house dark and quiet, Matthew found me sitting in my leather armchair, working. He inclined and gave me a hug.

  “Dad, I’m really sorry for what I did to Lucas today,” he said, and sounded like he meant it.

  “Thank you for saying that, baby,” I said. “I need you to think about what Mom said today, about how you’re training Lucas to distrust you. The way you are to Lucas, that was the way I was to Aunt Ruthie. I didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t trying to be mean. But I was mean. Mam and Paw tried to set me straight, but I guess I didn’t take them seriously.

  “Aunt Ruthie had a lot of trouble understanding me,” I continued. “You’ve heard me talking to Mom. You know how much this bothers me. Watching you and your brother today, I finally understood that a lot of that is on me.”