The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (10 page)

“You have shown me what I needed to see,” I said. “I know now what I needed to know. Please help me get out of here.
Please.
”

I stayed for mass, then drove back north, toward home. I stopped off in Starhill to see Ruthie. I let myself in the front door and called her name. “I’m back here,” she answered. She and the baby were still in bed.

I sat down on the bed next to where my sister cuddled with Hannah, and told her about my conversation with Paw. And then I broke down in tears, telling her that I was afraid I had thrown away my big chance to make it as a journalist, chasing a dream of family harmony that could never be. I cried hard. When I wiped my eyes, she was crying too.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. And that was all she could say. It was all she needed to say.

I prayed a lot that December, especially my rosary. During two especially cold days I worked in Paw’s barn painting a wooden high chair for Hannah to use when she was older. I decorated it with stars,
planets, cats, and squiggly lines of color that looked like confetti. On Christmas morning I gave the chair to Baby Hannah, and wondered if I would be around to see her use it for the first time.

Early in the new year I received a letter from the managing editor of
The Washington Times
, my old employer. They were creating a position for a culture beat reporter, she said; would I be interested in returning to the paper? Please let me know by the last Friday in January, she said.

The easy thing to do, the most rational thing to do, would be to call the editor and say, “Yes! How soon do you want me?” Hadn’t I prayed for a way out? Yes, but somehow I believed that God was going to send me an unmistakable sign confirming that I should return to DC. I had three weeks in which to make up my mind about the job. I prayed my rosary and waited on God.

During this time I heard an awful tale about the parish’s Rosedown Plantation, one of Louisiana’s most beautiful antebellum houses and gardens—a story that had the town buzzing. The new owner of Rosedown, an investor from Dallas, had announced plans to make a housing development out of a large portion of the two thousand acres attached to the big house. As part of his scheme he ordered the congregation of the Rosedown Baptist Church to leave the premises. Folks were scandalized.

The Rosedown Baptist Church congregation had been present continuously on the plantation since the slaves were first evangelized in the early nineteenth century. The current congregation was composed mostly of descendants of the original slave families who founded it. Their modest brick church on the plantation grounds’ edge was not historically significant, but the congregation was. Besides it was their church. They did not, however, own the land on which it sat.

The congregation was small, it was poor, and it had no one to help them. Like everyone else in St. Francisville, I was outraged. I started making phone calls. A few days later, the Baton Rouge
Advocate
published
on its front page my freelance story reporting on the controversy. A local movement to save the church grew. Days later, CNN sent a crew to town to report on the congregation’s fight. The
New York Times
did a story. There were rumors that Oprah Winfrey was coming to town with her program.

Finally the beleaguered plantation owner relented. The church, a community institution for almost two hundred years, was saved. My mother and father told me how proud they were of what I had done for the cause. They saw how passionate I was about this story, and how much good I could do with my journalism.

“Son,” said Paw, “if you want to go back to Washington, go with our blessing.”

The easy thing to do, the rational thing to do, would be to take my parents’ unexpected benediction as the extraordinary sign from God I was waiting for. But that wasn’t my way. I still had a few days before I had to let
The Washington Times
know of my decision. Maybe God had something else to show me.

On Friday morning I was at home at Weyanoke, and received my college friend Kim, up from Baton Rouge for a weekend in the country. She was going through a tough divorce, and needed to get away from things. We sat in the kitchen, lingering over lunch, talking about how hard things were, and where God was in all this.

“Oh, Kim, look,” I said, pointing to the clock. “I have to make a phone call to Washington. End of business today is the deadline for this job offer, and they’re an hour ahead on the East Coast.”

“Are you going to take it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was hoping for a sign from God, but I didn’t get one. I think it’s the right thing to do, though.”

I excused myself and went into the hallway where the phone was. I called Washington, accepted the job, and told them I’d report in two weeks. So it was done. I was going back. I nearly wept with relief.

I took my rosary, slipped into the nearby downstairs bedroom, and
shut the doors so Kim wouldn’t see me. I sat on a chair next to the four-poster antique bed and prepared to say my beads. But first a word with the Blessed Mother.

“Mary,” I said, “I didn’t get the sign I was hoping for, but I know you were praying for me all along. I know God helped me make this decision through your prayers. I want to offer this rosary in thanksgiving. And you see how much Kim is suffering; please hold her hand through this divorce.”

I began to pray the beads. When I rubbed the bead between my right thumb and forefinger, starting the second decade, the room, which had been gloomy in the overcast January gray, suddenly filled with sunlight—and the aroma of roses. What was this? I slowed my prayers to a crawl, and began inhaling in deep drafts through my nose. This cold bedroom, in the dead of winter, smelled like a rose garden in full bloom. I eked out the prayers of those ten beads, savoring the intense rose aroma for as long as I could, then said the “Glory Be,” ending the decade. At that moment the clouds returned, and the rose scent faded away.

I hurried through the last three decades of the rosary, then searched the bedroom for clues. There were no flowers in that room. There was no perfume, no scented soap. There was nothing that could have produced what just happened.

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 e-mailed 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.