The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (12 page)

One night, as Matthew lay sleeping next to me, I wondered where his life’s journey would take him.
Please God
, I prayed,
never let him live too far from his daddy. Please let me be a part of his life.
Then it hit me: that has been my father’s prayer every night since I had left home for school eighteen years ago.

Like many other New Yorkers, we were deeply affected by the 9/11 attacks. On that September morning, Julie stood in front of our apartment holding Matthew in her arms, watching the smoke billow over Brooklyn from the World Trade Center. “Get back in the house with that kid! You don’t know what’s in that smoke!” a doctor yelled at Julie as he ran down the sidewalk to the nearby hospital.

I was on the Brooklyn Bridge that morning, running toward the disaster, gathering copy for my
New York Post
column. “I’m going to get as close as I can,” I had told Julie before rushing out the door. When the first tower collapsed I had had plenty of time to make it into lower Manhattan on foot. My mobile phone did not work, so I couldn’t let Julie know I was okay, that I had stopped to interview people fleeing
the fire, and was still on the Brooklyn Bridge. My wife had no way to know if I was alive or dead.

Back in our Brooklyn waterfront apartment, Julie fielded frantic phone calls from family down South. She put on her most artificially cheerful Dallas-girl voice to assure Mam that I was on my way home, and would be back any minute. In truth Julie struggled to stifle the fear that she was a widow at the age of twenty-six.

Meanwhile, in Ruthie’s middle-school classroom, the phone on her desk rang. It was Paw, calling to tell her what was going on in New York.

“We turned on the TV. I remember the expression on her face when we first heard it. I cannot express to you the fear I saw in her face,” says Karen Barron, the teacher who was with Ruthie at that moment. “That fear never left her face until she finally heard that y’all were okay.”

When the first tower collapsed I knew I had to make a decision in an instant. The massive cloud of smoke and pulverized glass rolled through the canyons of downtown Manhattan, and would momentarily reach the foot of the bridge. Police would close it to incoming foot traffic any second. If I was going to be there for the most important story of my career, I needed to run forward, and I needed to run forward now, while the bridge was still open.

Go!
said my journalist’s instinct. Hadn’t I always wanted to be at the center of the world? Here I was. I did not know exactly what had happened that morning, but I knew that this was probably the most important story of my career. I was a witness. All I had to do was make a short run for it, and I could be physically present, notebook and tape recorder in hand, at what I figured would be a turning point of world history. Moments like this are what every journalist lives for. All I had to do was run three hundred feet, past the end of the bridge, and into the electrifying chaos and terror of lower Manhattan.

But then I thought about Julie and Matthew back home in Brooklyn. I had not believed either tower would fall, but I had been wrong
once. If the other one collapsed, would it pancake, or would it topple over like a falling tree? Did I have the right to risk my life for the sake of a story? How could I leave my wife a widow and my son fatherless because I found the danger exciting and wanted to write a better column for the next day’s paper?

It came down to this: is it more important to be a journalist, or Julie’s husband and Matthew’s daddy?

The massive white cloud was now at the foot of the bridge, moving toward me. The path into Manhattan was still open. I turned my back to it and walked back to Brooklyn, and my family.

I made it home with only a dusting of ash on my clothes. My mobile phone finally rang only steps away from my front door on Hicks Street. When I said hello, Julie screamed, then opened the front door. There I stood, wondering what the fuss was about. I was in a mild state of shock, and was carrying a croissant from a Brooklyn Heights bakery; I had stopped to get Julie breakfast. Back inside the apartment, before filing my column, I sat down at my desk in the basement, and wrote the following e-mail to friends and family, including Ruthie:

I’m not going to tie up the phone lines long, but I wanted to tell you that we’re okay. My dad phoned this morning to say, “The World Trade Center is on fire. Go look out your front door.” You can see them clearly across the harbor from our front door.

“Oh my God! Julie, come see!” I said.

I ran down to grab my reporter’s bag, knowing I’d have to go over to the fire. At that point, we didn’t know what caused the fire. Then, while downstairs, I heard a tremendous explosion and screams.

I ran out to the street. “A plane just hit the second tower!” a man screamed.

I knew the subways would be out, so I decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to get to the scene. There was a steady stream of
people sobbing, coming out of downtown over the bridge boardwalk. I interviewed several of them. They told absolutely horrifying stories of seeing people jump out of windows from high floors, their ties and coats flailing as they plunged to their deaths. One woman’s knees were bleeding from having been pushed down by the terrified crowd.

“The Pentagon has been bombed!” a man screamed.

I made it to the last pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge before going into downtown. I ran into a colleague of mine. She said, “We better not go over there. Those towers are going to blow up.”

One minute later, the south tower fell in on itself. I nearly fainted. It… well, I can’t describe it now. I’m too shaken. Everybody on the bridge screamed. Some collapsed in tears. A woman started to vomit. My knees went weak, and a huge plume of soot and smoke barreled toward us. I decided to turn around and go home.

A stout black woman, covered with sweat, screamed to no one in particular, “Every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess! It ain’t over, people!”

An F-16 fighter flew overhead. The cloud of soot reached us, and it was like being in a volcanic eruption. Everybody had to breathe through their shirts. Cell phones didn’t work. I rushed home to see Julie. When I opened the door, she was sobbing and shaking.

Now I’m learning that the second tower has collapsed, and the Pentagon has been bombed. The sky outside is black with soot and smoke.

There is no World Trade Center anymore. I can’t believe we’re seeing this.

It’s war, you know.

Ruthie attempted to read that e-mail aloud at a school assembly to memorialize the dead. She broke down before she finished, and asked a principal to complete the recitation. My sister printed a copy of that
e-mail and kept it in a safe at home. Every year on September 11, she would take it out and read it to her class. She never told me this.

In the days and weeks that followed, Julie and I—indeed, the entire world—learned about the extraordinary heroism of the New York City Fire Department on that day. We saw the selflessness of those men, their sacrifices, and the sacrifices of those they left behind, and the solidarity of a grateful city rallying around the bravest in their grief. I covered a funeral in Brooklyn Heights for one of the men from the local station. I stood outside silently watching the man’s wife and small children leave the church, say their good-byes, and walk back to their minivan at the end of the street to drive back to the rest of their lives.

That fall Julie and I thought a lot about what our brother-in-law did for a living. And we were so proud, and grateful. The September 11 catastrophe also made us think about being closer to family, especially now that we wanted more kids. Besides, we couldn’t afford New York much longer. Walking home from dinner on Smith Street one night, Julie observed, “New York is a lot like Disneyworld. Everything is much more intense than normal, and it costs five times as much.” True. New York was the best time in our life, but we couldn’t pull it off any longer.

We eventually moved to Dallas, Julie’s hometown and driving distance from St. Francisville. I started a job as a writer and editor at
The Dallas Morning News.
Everybody in Starhill was thrilled. We were back in the South, more or less, and now lived an eight-hour car drive from Starhill. They all thought—Ruthie foremost among them—that Starhill was the only truly safe place in the world. We could all be together there, with our family, and our community, at home. Starhill meant comfort. Starhill meant security. You knew folks, and were known by them. You could count on people, and you could count on things never changing much. Seen from this place, the
world was ordered, fixed, still. The world made sense. History, suffering, tragedy—these things happened to people in lower Manhattan, in New Orleans, and other faraway places where people were strangers. The sooner Rod understood this, they thought, the better off he’ll be.

Or as Paw so eloquently put it, “Son, you’re finally moving in the right direction!”

CHAPTER SIX

The Peppers

Everybody agrees it started with the jalapeños. In the late summer of 2009 Paw brought Ruthie some freshly picked jalapeño peppers. As she stood in her kitchen chopping them, she inhaled the vapors, and began coughing violently. She never really stopped.

Throughout the fall Ruthie coughed. She described its genesis as a perpetual tickle in her throat. My family and I drove down from Dallas in October for a visit, during which Ruthie hacked constantly, and seemed slightly short of breath. “You should get that checked out,” I said. So did everybody else.

She dismissed our concern. Said not to worry, that her doctor in Zachary was on top of it.

Julie, the kids, and I were back in Starhill after Christmas, for what we knew would be our last long visit for a while. I had taken an editorial job at the John Templeton Foundation, a Philadelphia-based philanthropy, and we would be moving there from Dallas in mid-January. It was a sad time because everyone knew family visits would be less frequent, given the great distance and the cost of air travel. Mam and Paw told me how worried they were about Ruthie’s cough, and how stubborn she was about her condition. They were frustrated with her doctor, who, in their view, wasn’t taking Ruthie’s sickness seriously
enough. He thought it might be asthma, and gave her an inhaler, which did no good. A chronic cough lasting four months isn’t normal. Besides Ruthie’s hip had begun to hurt.

As the fall semester at the middle school wore on, Ruthie’s struggle to breathe normally became critical. Teachers were not supposed to leave their cars in the parking lot next to the school building but were told rather to park in a lot farther away—a rule that was commonly flouted. Not by Ruthie. It wouldn’t be fair for her to take what she considered to be a privilege, she reasoned. Coughing the whole way, she would walk the extra distance to the school building. By the time she reached her classroom upstairs, she would have stopped several times to catch her breath. And she would be exhausted.

To be fair Ruthie made it easy to believe that her illness was no big deal. She never slowed down. Ruthie’s big black Ford Excursion rolled up and down the streets of West Feliciana constantly, ferrying the girls to school, music lessons, ball games, and social events.

Still her friends grew increasingly worried. By year’s end they frantically tried to shake Ruthie out of her complacency. She had been hacking steadily since August, and had been to see her Zachary doctor only twice. Ruthie simply didn’t want to be a bother to the man.

Finally Abby snapped. “Look, Ruthie, this is not getting better,” she said. “You have got to take care of this.”

Abby kept pushing, but got nowhere. Ruthie grew irritated and impatient. Her friends insisted that she get a second opinion, but Ruthie said that she didn’t want to hurt her doctor’s feelings by appearing to second-guess him. Besides, she argued, going to see a brand-new doctor would just be a big inconvenience for everybody.

Ruthie finally hit the wall, literally, when school reconvened in January after the Christmas break. By that point in her career Ruthie had left the sixth-grade classroom and started teaching eighth grade. Both Rae Lynne and Abby were also eighth-grade teachers, with classrooms directly across the hall from Ruthie’s. The three teachers stood in the
sunlit corridor talking to each other as eighth graders swirled and eddied around them, headed to their next class. Ruthie began coughing again, but this time her back hurt so bad that she had to press against the wall to ease the pain.

Abby had seen enough. She could not imagine what was wrong with Ruthie, but she couldn’t take Ruthie’s passivity any longer. She was tired of seeing Ruthie so exhausted, and of hearing her say she couldn’t go for margaritas with the teachers because she wasn’t feeling well.

Abby wanted the old Ruthie back. Maybe Tim Lindsey, the young family physician in town who had been so good to her dying grandmother, would be more engaged with Ruthie’s case than this clueless Zachary doctor. She felt the blood rush to her face, and took charge.