The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (26 page)

After several hours at Ruthie’s bedside, Mike had had enough. It was time to go home. Everyone stood around Ruthie’s bed, holding hands, just like at Sunday dinner. Mike and Mam each had a free hand on Ruthie’s body, completing the circle. They said the Lord’s Prayer together. And then Mike and the girls left for Starhill. Mam refused to go until after doctors had harvested Ruthie’s eyes.

Jan Curwick, the new Methodist pastor in town, said, “Miss Dot, you need to go home. You can’t be here for this.”

“Jan, I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving my child.”

“Miss Dot, I promise you I will stay with her,” Jan said. “I will
never leave her side, and I will escort her to the hearse. I promise you that.”

Mam meditated on it for a few minutes and agreed to trust Jan to stand in her place until the last. “She stood there for me,” Mam later said. “That’s love.”

When Ruthie’s family made it home, they found that their house had been cleaned and that the tables and counters sat piled high with food delivered by the townspeople, who streamed in and out the rest of the day. There, under the oak trees in the front yard, sat Hannah’s Jeep. When the men at a Starhill garage heard about Ruthie’s death, and Hannah’s car trouble, they drove toward Baton Rouge, searching the shoulders until they found the broken-down Jeep. They towed it to their repair shop, installed a new radiator, and delivered it to the Leming place while everyone was still at the hospital.

John Bickham didn’t get word of Ruthie’s death until later in the day. It was a busy time for him at the Exxon refinery. He was in a control room, outside of mobile phone range, and missed Paw’s call. When he finally heard the message he told his boss he needed to go. He wasn’t sure how this would be received. According to the plant’s strict regulations, an employee can’t leave under those circumstances unless the dead person was an immediate family member.

“Look, I need to go. This is family to me,” John told his supervisor. He was prepared to throw his badge down and quit on the spot if the answer was no. But John’s boss told him to hit the road, that he would take care of John’s work that day. John Bickham drove straight to Starhill, where he found Paw alone at home, grieving.

As the long afternoon dwindled down into evening, friends told Mike to take a break, but he refused. Hannah wanted to be alone, wanted everyone to get out of her mama’s house. But she saw that her father needed their friends around him, that he drew strength from their presence. Abby would later reflect that she had never seen anything
like this. People weren’t coming by with grim faces to pay their dutiful respects. They were so strangely, unaccountably happy. And they didn’t do the usual thing, which is stay for what seems like a decent interval before slouching home from the scene of heartbreak and grief. They stayed. They laughed. They told stories about Ruthie.

God,
thought Abby,
would Ruthie love this.

In late afternoon, when Tim finished with his schedule of patients, he drove out to Starhill to check on everybody.

Tim too was struck by merriment abounding. Yes, the Lemings’ was a house in mourning, but everyone there—Ruthie’s family and her circle of friends—were living in the bright sadness they had first seen around Ruthie when she met her cancer diagnosis with such hope and gratitude.

“It was just friends and family loving on one another, and rejoicing for Ruthie’s life,” Tim told Laura later that night. “It was like a celebration. They were laughing and crying, eating food, drinking beer. It was a celebration.”

What had happened that day was too much for one person to bear alone, Tim thought. But they were all holding each other up.

Hannah did not realize until then how her mother had been the animating spirit of every party at their house.
She made everything so fun,
Hannah thought.
Why can’t she be here with us, having fun now?

When I made it to Starhill that night from the airport, I sat with my father at his house, trying to work up the courage to walk across the field and see Mike. Mam walked in from Mike’s place, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “You can feel Ruthie’s spirit strong over there.” I took a deep breath, and headed out into the warm autumn evening.

Opening the door I found Abby and Mike sitting together at the kitchen table, mulling over the remains of the day. Strangely enough, in Ruthie’s kitchen that night, it felt like every other night. There should have been no peace there, but there was peace, an overwhelming
peace. There was pain and there was exhaustion, but above all, there was peace. Mam was right: Ruthie’s spirit was there. The most terrible thing had happened, God knows, but somehow there was a sense of order, and purpose, and serenity. Just like Ruthie told us there would be.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“The Choir Invisible”

The sun came up for the first time on Starhill without Ruthie in it. And there, knocking on Mam’s back door that morning, was Jane Daniel.

Jane and her husband, Bobby, raised their family a mile up the road, just around the bend from the Starhill cemetery. Mam and Paw used to see their little boy Robert Edward—”Red” was his nickname—riding his bike on the blacktop road past our house. He was a sweet kid who became a good man. And then, in his twenties, five months after his wedding, Red died of leukemia.

Jane, who had been mourning her son for five years, knew what Mam was going through. That’s why she came that morning.

“Everyone’s heart was broken, but Jane knew exactly how my heart was broken,” Mam recalls. “I don’t remember what she said, but her presence was what really mattered. I knew what it took for her to come. I hope that if anybody else around here loses a child, that I will have the strength to do what Jane did for me that day.”

Across the field at the Leming house, things weren’t so somber. I dreaded walking back into the house where Ruthie had died not twenty-four hours before, to be around her shell-shocked widower and motherless children. It was startling, however, to find that Ruthie’s spirit still ruled over her household. I walked in and found several of
Ruthie’s friends in the kitchen with Mike, drinking coffee and sharing happy memories. After telling a tale of mischief at Thompson Creek, one of Ruthie’s friends slapped me on the back and said, “Your sister loved her cold beer, and she loved having a good time.”

That’s the Ruthie everybody gathered at the Leming house talked about in those days after her death. Day and night friends crowded into Ruthie’s kitchen, drinking beer, telling funny West Feliciana stories, and laughing hard. There was one account that featured the phrase, “You know his momma lost all her teeth, right?” There was a tale of Baton Rouge firefighters responding to a 911 call from an obese naked woman who had eaten jalapeño peppers and gotten aroused. An irate Mel Percy was wound up about how his blind dog got lost that morning and drowned in the pond out back. “You want to know which end of a dead dog floats?” groused Mel.

I suppose all this merrymaking the day after Ruthie died might have struck some as being in poor taste. In fact there could not have been a greater tribute to the woman Ruthie was, and the effect she had on those who loved her, than their gathering in her kitchen to eat, drink, and comfort each other.

Late in the evening, folks began to peel away and go home, leaving Mike and his children alone with the embers of the day. After saying goodnight and taking my leave, I walked back to Mam and Paw’s across the field. I saw deer running in the moonlight and surprised a possum eating cat food outside Mam’s workshop.
How beautiful it is here in the country,
I thought. For many years now, I have lived away from this place, and dined out telling stories of Southern Gothic lunacy. Never making fun of this place, but celebrating its strangeness, its particularity, and its peculiar joie de vivre.

But there is something more here,
I thought. I had just spent the darkest day of the Dreher family’s life in the house where my sister had just died, and yet I felt unburdened by grief and anxiety. Those people,
Ruthie’s friends, had given that to me. All of us were in mourning, all of us worried about what the future would bring for Mike and the children. But everyone knew that they would go through it together, that they would carry each other.

Nobody had to say it; everyone could see it with their eyes and know it in their hearts. In a way all those afternoons down on the sandbar at Thompson Creek, late evenings of margaritas at Que Pasa, nights of pool parties and barn dances and Ronnie Morgan’s campfires followed by pancakes and kitchen camaraderie, and church on Sunday morning—these things were like a levee the people of Starhill had spent a lifetime building together. Now, facing a catastrophe that felt like it had the power to wash them away, the levee was holding.

This, it occurred to me, was the deeper meaning in the mournful merriment I had been part of that day. I stood at Mam’s sink before bedtime, filling an iced tea glass with water, and thinking that I had underestimated this place where I was born. I knew it was a good place to be from. I had no idea how great a place it was to be.

As word of Ruthie’s passing spread beyond West Feliciana, the family began to hear from faraway people to whom Ruthie meant something. Shannon Nixon Morell, who credited Ruthie with setting her on a path out of poverty and to professional success, wrote from San Diego to say that Ruthie had been an “angel” of rescue. Another of Ruthie’s former students, a woman who had become a teacher, wrote with a story of a moment in Ruthie’s classroom, seventeen years earlier, when Ruthie, in celebrating the straight A’s the student had made on her report card, made her, a girl who lacked confidence, feel her own worth and capability. That was the birth of her teaching vocation, the woman said, because that was her “first true moment of when I knew what I was supposed to do.”

Kendrick Mitchell, the child who had been a bullied sixth-grade outcast, called Mam from Houston to say that Mrs. Leming had been such an encouragement to him back then.

“You don’t know me, ma’am,” Kendrick said to my mother, “but I feel like I need to tell you this about your daughter. If she had not been there for me to encourage me and to let me know that things were going to get better, I might not be where I am today.

“Everything I am today,” he said, “I owe it all to Mrs. Leming.”

After Kendrick’s call Kay Graves took Mam out for a ride around town, to get away from the hubbub in Starhill. They stopped at the Sonic Drive-In for a Coke. The girl who brought their drinks to the car said, “Are you Mrs. Leming’s mom?”—and then started talking about how Ruthie had been her teacher, and all the wonderful things Ruthie had done for her. A man sitting in the car next to theirs, eating his burger, overheard this and said, “You’re Ruthie Leming’s mother? She taught my children.” And off he went, talking about what a difference Ruthie had made in his children’s lives.

The day after Ruthie died Mike’s cousins Josh and Karen Gott rolled in from north Texas and quietly took over running the house, freeing Mike to give his full attention to the task of burying his wife. Mam, Paw, Abby, and I accompanied Mike to Charlet Funeral Home to pick out the casket and make the arrangements. Jan Curwick, the Methodist pastor, met us there, and helped us through the process. Everyone in St. Francisville knew the Charlet family, which has for two generations buried the sons and daughters of West Feliciana. Just a day earlier Mike had been sitting with his wife drinking coffee. This morning he was choosing her casket.

Julie and our children arrived from Philadelphia on Saturday. That afternoon Tim and Laura Lindsey came out to Starhill to check on Mike and the girls. Tim took several of us aside and advised us about what we could do to help them deal with the reality of life without Ruthie. Later Julie and I watched Tim and Laura sitting in rocking
chairs on Ruthie’s front porch, flanking Hannah, talking to her about her grief, and helping her understand, both emotionally and theologically, what it meant to face death.

As I watched Hannah taking Tim’s message in, it struck me that although my sister was dead, and Tim’s service to her as a physician was over, he didn’t see it that way. There was still healing to be done in Ruthie’s family, the kind of healing that medicine, strictly speaking, could not effect. Because Tim approached his vocation as a work of love, he found the strength, the direction, and the inner resources to treat the Lemings in ways beyond the reach of standard medical practice. Here was a family doctor treating his patients like family.

Later that morning, I said to Julie, “You know, I’m sorry we live so far away. I wish we had Tim taking care of our family.”

Julie said, “I was thinking the same thing.”

My sister had died on a Thursday. On my first Sunday morning without her, I needed to be in church. I drove into Baton Rouge to the Orthodox liturgy at St. Matthew’s, a mission parish in a south Baton Rouge strip mall. At the end of the service Father Mark Christian announced that Ruthie Leming, who had been on the parish prayer list for the last year and a half, had just reposed. They sang “Memory Eternal” for my sister, whom none of them had ever met, but for whom they had been praying for these nineteen months. I was not expecting that, and had to fight back tears.