The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (2 page)

In that cabin I would sit with the two aged aunts, thin and frail as dried kindling, on their red leather couch and look through canvas-backed photo albums of their war years. There was the time, Lois said, when General “Black Jack” Pershing showed up at the canteen late one night and nobody could find the key to the kitchenware cabinet. Lois had to strain the general’s tea through her petticoat. Hilda told of being in Dijon on the day the Armistice was announced, and slapping a giddy Frenchman when he seized her on the street, shouted,
“La guerre est finie!”
and tried to kiss her. She pretended to be scandalized by this, but what I heard was the excitement of someone who had had a grand adventure in a part of the world unlike our own, where nothing ever happened. Sitting on the couch beneath three rare Audubon prints, the sisters told me of their travels through Provence, the Côte d’Azur, Toulouse, and Paris, beautiful Paris. We tracked their route on the pages of a vintage Rand McNally atlas splayed on our laps.

Sometimes I would sit in Loisie’s lap in the kitchen, not much bigger than a closet, and stir her pecan cookie batter by hand. We would pull sheets of those cookies out of the oven, each one buttery and crisp and about the size of a quarter, and eat them with cold milk on the front porch (or “gallery,” as the old aunts called it, in the antique
usage). Often we would sit by the fire and read the newspaper together. I loved the look and sound of those exotic words in the headlines.
Kissinger. Moscow. Watergate.
I could only intuit it at the time, but these elderly ladies, spending their final years in rural exile, were among the worldliest people I’d ever meet. Hilda, an eccentric Episcopalian, taught herself palm-reading. Scratching her bony finger across my soft pink palm one day, she said, “See this line? You’ll travel far in life.” I hoped it was true.

Lois was an accomplished amateur horticulturalist, and took me with her on strolls in her gardens. There was a large
Magnolia fuscata
tree in her front yard, with its pale yellow blossoms that smelled of banana. Loisie and I would walk, me holding her hand, past her camellia bushes, the stands of spidery red lycoris, King Alfred daffodils, and jonquils. There was a pear tree, a chestnut, cedars, live oaks, flowering dogwoods, and, towering over the backyard, an old Chinese rain tree, its podlike blossoms puffed like a thousand and one pink lanterns.

There was a king snake that lived in the bushes under the huge magnolia tree in Loisie and Mossie’s yard. Loisie taught me that the old snake was our friend. If he was there, she said, he would keep rattlesnakes away. One day when I was eight, I walked with a friend to the aunts’ cottage, and there was the king snake, black as night and marked by pale yellow runes, stretched across the pea gravel, sunning itself. My friend was paralyzed by fear, but I stepped right over the snake without bothering him. Loisie had said he was our friend, hadn’t she, and inasmuch as she was the happy genius of this grove, who was I to doubt her?

This was my haven as a boy, a house and a garden a three-minute walk from my house, where I learned things that would shape the course of my life. But it was foreign territory to my sister. “Aunt Hilda turned Ruthie aside,” is how Paw remembers it. “She was one of those women who dotes on boys. And she favored intellectual-type things. You were reading at three and a half. Ruthie wasn’t. You liked books. Ruthie liked outdoor things. You were so interested in the lives those
ladies had lived, and the places they had been. Ruthie wasn’t, but it still hurt Ruthie badly that she would never be included.”

Ruthie would have been bored stiff by parlor conversation and strolls through cultivated gardens. She wanted the woods, rough as it came. She loved it when she could prevail upon Paw to take her down to the hunting camp in Fancy Point swamp. I spent a fair amount of time there too, though the last place I wanted to be on a wet, frozen Saturday morning was standing in the woods with a shotgun—I was too young to handle a rifle—looking for a deer to shoot. For me the best part of those mornings was being with my dad and his friends in the warmth of the camp kitchen, drinking hot, sweet Community coffee, eating jelly cake, and listening to the crazy talk from Oliver “Preacher” McNabb, the old black cook who had once been in Angola State Penitentiary for murder. And then I had to go pretend to enjoy stalking deer, when I really wanted to be inside, cooking with Preacher and listening to his stories. Deer-stalking is what our culture told us young boys were supposed to love above all things.

Ruthie, she really did love all of it—especially the hunting. As soon as she was big enough to carry a shotgun, she did. When a hunter brought down a buck, the men took the carcass back to the camp to skin it. If I got too close, I would start to gag. Ruthie was right in the middle of it all, and in time, learned to skin a buck herself. “One time when she was a teenager, she and I went down on the edge of the swamp, down by Ed Shields’s house,” Paw says. “I put Ruthie on one hill, and I got up on the next one. After we sat there a while, we heard the dogs barking and coming. There were lots of leaves on the ground, and it was dry. We could hear the deer running in the leaves.

“As they got close, I heard Ruthie shoot that rifle of mine. I hollered, ‘Ruthie, did you get him?’ Her answer was, ‘Hell yeah, I did!’ That deer was running wide open, and that baby had hit him square in the neck. That was a difference between y’all. That time you killed
that big thirteen-point in the swamp, you were torn up about it. But she was on top of the world.”

Our family spent a lot of time outdoors, which was a normal thing around West Feliciana back then. In the spring, summer, and early fall, we fished in rivers, creeks, and ponds. When Ruthie and I were small, our dad had a pond built on his land and stocked it with bass, bream, and catfish. Fishing on that pond was what we did. It was great fun, especially when Paw gave us mini-cast rods and reels, which made pulling in those auburn-breasted bream, only the size of a man’s hand, like landing a trophy bass. Fishing was our family’s thing, and Paw’s pond was our family’s place. Though I was no fan of the outdoors, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.

But I would also be lying if I said I wouldn’t rather have been in the city, at the movies, or better yet, at a bookstore. I loved science fiction, and novels, and books about space, and comics from
Richie Rich
to
Archie
to the
Green Lantern
. And best of all, there was
Mad
magazine, with its smarty-pants humor, and its snappy Yiddishisms. Nobody around here talked like that. I wanted to be where people talked like that.

“You were our dreamer,” Mam says. “Ruthie wasn’t. She was satisfied with what she had in front of her. You had your head in books all the time. She loved nature, and being outside.”

If that’s what you love, there is no better place to be on earth than West Feliciana. But if not, well, you’ve got problems, or at least you did if you were growing up in our house. I think the incomprehensible strangeness of her older brother brought out Ruthie’s competitive nature, which manifested itself at an early age. She figured out soon enough that she was far more athletic than I, and that she could best me in most any physical contest.

She was a tough little strawberry blonde, barrel-chested like our father, with our mother’s deep brown eyes. I was pudgy, weak, and
embarrassingly uncoordinated. In third grade the playground fad was a toy called the Lemon Twist. It was a plastic lemon connected to a strip of flexible plastic rope, with a loop around the opposite end. You slipped the loop over your foot, and let it rest around your ankle. Then you spun the lemon around, leaping over it with your free foot. You might as well have asked me to dance the tarantella. My little sister was an instant ace on the Lemon Twist.

For me this was humiliating. It was a pattern that would repeat itself. Once Paw mounted a campaign to encourage me to build my upper body strength. I was on the floor in the living room, struggling to heave out a pitiful few push-ups. Paw tried to keep Ruthie out of the house when this was going on, because he knew she couldn’t resist trying to outdo me.

“There she came up the hall, saw you on the floor, then flopped down and started pumping them out,” he recalls. “That was the end of that ring-dang-doo. You just quit.”

Ruthie was always a fighter. After we were both in school our mother took up driving a school bus. The drivers would line up outside the elementary school in the afternoon, chatting with each other until the final bell rang, letting the kids out.

“One day,” Mam recalls, “Ruthie was probably third grade, I remember Clyde Morgan, one of the other drivers, sitting there with us saying, ‘That boy better watch out.’ Your sister was coming across the way to the bus, with her lunch box in one hand, and her book sack in the other. This little boy kept running by her, hitting her on the head. We watched her weigh the book sack in one hand, and the lunch box in the other. Clyde said, ‘Look, she’s choosing her weapon.’ She picked up that book sack, and when he made the next round, she whacked him with the book sack, knocked that boy on the ground. Calmly picked up her book sack and got on the bus. Never said another word about it.”

Ruthie was a hard little nut. But if that were all she was, she wouldn’t have had so many friends, and no enemies. She was one of
those rare people who had a natural talent for nurturing friendships with both boys and girls. And though sports, hunting, and fishing were her passions, she could be as feminine as she needed to be when the occasion called for it. Ruthie was probably our town’s only homecoming queen who really did know how to skin a buck and run a trot line.

Our parents hadn’t let Ruthie go to kindergarten, so when she started first grade, all the other children had already hived off into groups. Ruthie was left out. That was the year Mam started driving the school bus. Ruthie’s first-grade class would be on the playground when Mam drove up for the afternoon bus run.

“I would see Ruthie sitting by the tree alone, with nobody to play with. It would break my heart, but she’d never complain about it. She never forced herself on anybody,” Mam says. “I’d try to suggest to her ways of making friends, but she’d say, ‘I’m okay, Mama; I’m watching them play.’ After that first semester she was in the middle of everything. She was just kind of magical. She saw something good in everybody, even as a child.”

In the summertime we’d all spend two or three nights each week in the baseball park in town, with either Ruthie or me playing on a team, or watching players from the older leagues compete. There were two ballparks—a little one and a big one—at Vinci Field, which had been carved out of the woods atop a hill near downtown.

The ballpark was the center of social life for us. Moms and dads whose kids played on the peewee teams would back their pickups against the chain-link fence at the little field and drink beer while their kids faced off under the lights. After the peewee games, most folks moved over to the big Babe Ruth League field nearby to watch teenaged boys play serious baseball. Whether you watched the game or not, whether you played the game or not, the ballparks at Vinci Field were where you saw your friends and neighbors, made plans for weekend cookouts and fishing trips. You squared off on the diamond against boys named Tater, Booger, Sammy, and Allen Ray, and you hoped your
umpire that night would be Tut Dawson, thin and tough as a razor strop, because he had an unerring eye for strikes and called them true.

For my 1970s generation of West Feliciana kids, summer smelled like neat’s-foot oil, light beer in a can (you’d sneak a sip when your dad asked you to fetch him a fresh one out of the cooler), Off! mosquito repellent, the decaying wood of the big green Babe Ruth bleachers, and the smoke from our folks’ Marlboro Reds. You’d go home at night worn out, sunburned, with a thin film of dirt covering your body, scratching fresh mosquito bites with filthy fingernails. Your belly was full of Cherry’s Potato Chips and fountain Coke—free if you recovered and turned in a foul ball—and you’d barely be able to keep your eyes open long enough to take your shower.

The ballpark was also the place where many of us were touched by tragedy for the first time. In the summer of 1974, on my first team, the John Fudge Auto Parts Angels, a towheaded Starhill kid named Roy Dale Craven was the star pitcher. That might not have meant much in a league where the oldest players were, like Roy Dale, nine years old, but Roy Dale was a real phenom.

He was also a poor country boy with a million-dollar smile. His mother, Evelyn Dedon, and his father had divorced when he was very young. She raised Roy Dale and his brothers in a little brick house on the side of Highway 61, on the outskirts of Starhill. Roy Dale invited his father up from Baton Rouge one afternoon to watch him play his first game. The dad must have seen what a raggedy mitt his kid was playing with, and bought the boy a new glove. A week later that glove was as floppy and dirty and broken in as if Roy Dale had used it all season long.

Roy Dale and his glove were inseparable. One day Paw drove home to Starhill for lunch and saw Roy Dale and his brothers headed across a bottom for Grant’s Bayou, carrying fishing poles. Roy Dale also had his glove. There was no one else to play with, but he couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Paw, who was one of the team’s coaches, remembers that Roy Dale was so passionate about baseball because he had so little,
and grasped at every opportunity offered him. He was a sweet kid. The game was his life.

One night the coaches pulled Roy Dale from the mound after he completed the second inning because he vomited up his supper in the dugout. All he’d had to eat before the game was pickles. No one knew if he had eaten so badly because he had chosen to, or because that was all the food his family had in the house that day. No one wanted to ask.

On July 15, late in the afternoon, Roy Dale lit out from his yard to his cousin Allen Ray’s, across Highway 61, hoping to catch a ride to the ballpark. He did not see the northbound car, which struck and killed him. The driver was not charged. I found out about the tragedy sitting in the back of Paw’s pickup, headed to the game, when we were stuck in traffic backed up from the accident scene. Paw said later it was just like Roy Dale to be so excited about playing ball that night that he didn’t pay attention to anything else.