The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (27 page)

Back home in the country I found my parents wrestling with a problem. The phone had been ringing with people asking if Mike had set up an education fund for his and Ruthie’s children. They wanted a way to donate more than flowers. It hadn’t occurred to any of us to do that sort of thing. I called Bess Kelley from the Bank of St. Francisville to ask her what information I would need on Monday morning to set the account up for the children.

“Why don’t we do it today?” she said.

“Well, it’s Sunday. The bank is closed.”

“I’ll meet you there in an hour.” Bess gave an hour and a half of her Sunday afternoon to make sure people coming to Ruthie’s wake that night at the Methodist church would have a place to donate for the children.

That evening, as a warm rain fell, the doors of the Methodist church opened onto Royal Street for mourners to pay their respects. For hours they came, standing in the rain and amid the mosquitoes swarming in the muggy interludes between showers; white and black, children and old folks, people who had known Ruthie since childhood, people who had known her only the year she had taught them, and even people who only knew my mother and father, but came because they loved and respected them and knew they were hurting.

The church’s bell tower stretches into the limbs of the live oak trees shading the structure, built on this patch of ground in 1896, when the congregation at the Bayou Sara church under the bluff grew weary of routine Mississippi River flooding. Built of wood and painted a chaste white, the Methodist church is as modest as the brick neo-Gothic Episcopal church across the way is grand, but no less dignified. The church is small, its interior unadorned, the pale abstractions of the stained-glass windows its only ornamentation. There are dark wooden pews, a dark wooden communion rail, and dark wooden trim around the arched windows. It is a plain country church for plain country Christians. Five generations of my family have gathered there to pray, to sing, and to consecrate the milestones—births, marriages, deaths—of our lives.

This little church had not been enough to hold me as a teenager, nor to reclaim my loyalty as a young man stumbling back toward the Christian faith. Today, though, I felt gratitude for this place. No European cathedral would have done Ruthie’s memory justice like this Methodist chapel under the live oak trees. This church was who my sister was, and if I could no longer share the form of faith proclaimed
and taught from its pulpit, I could love it all the same, if only because Ruthie, like so many of our ancestors, did.

Paw was not strong enough to be on his feet and settled into the second pew on the left—the Dreher pew—to receive friends. The rest of us stood in the front of the church, next to Ruthie’s body in the open casket, which sat on the same place where she and Mike stood all those years ago and promised to be together until death.

Mam and I flitted around the church, greeting people in line, checking on Paw, and returning occasionally to our perch in the front. Mike and the girls, though, stayed in place, receiving mourners for four hours. Late in the evening Claire and Rebekah took off their shoes. They did it because their feet hurt from standing, but then thought it would be a fitting tribute to their mother, who was famously a fan of going barefoot. Few of those filling the church that night knew that Mike was in intense physical pain. He had injured his back trying to save Ruthie.

The line unspooled down the street and far around the block. A police officer told me the only wake she had seen as big as this one was General Robert H. Barrow’s. General Barrow was a scion of an old West Feliciana family, a World War II hero who went on to become commandant of the US Marine Corps. He had turned down President Ronald Reagan’s invitation to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the grounds that the armed services were not ready for a Marine in that role. Before retiring to his farm in the Feliciana hills, General Barrow was one of the most powerful men in America. It impressed me that, to judge by the police officer’s comment, folks here had the same degree of love and respect for a humble schoolteacher known to virtually no one beyond the parish’s borders.

At one point in the evening I left Mike and the girls and slipped through the back door into the church hall for a cup of coffee. Julie, who was talking to folks on the sidewalk out front, sent me a text. “Check your e-mail,” it read.

There was a letter to us from the owners of that beautiful eighteenth-century farmhouse in Bucks County we had toured the day before Ruthie died. In the confusion after her sudden passing, we had not had time to work out the details on the lease before leaving for Louisiana.

Now the landlords had written to say they really needed to get this house leased before they departed for California. They were sorry, but they had decided to rent it to another family.

I dashed to the front of the church, expecting to find Julie in tears. We had lost our dream house! But when I found her she looked strangely serene.

Feeling bold, I confessed, “I have to tell you that I’m actually kind of relieved.”

Her eyes registered surprise. “Me, too!”

Something was going on with us.

Just past nine that night the church had emptied except for a handful of friends, most of them schoolteachers who had worked with Ruthie. They planned to hold an all-night vigil with her body. Nobody could recall the last time anybody had done something like this for the dead in West Feliciana. But for Ruthie? Her friends figured it wouldn’t be right to leave her there all by herself.

It began informally, with a reading by Nora Marsh, who by now had retired from the classroom. She was working as a school librarian in New Orleans, but drove up to the country for the wake. She had not only taught me, but Ruthie too. Nora recited the George Eliot poem “The Choir Invisible.” “It made me think of Ruthie,” she said. I understood what Nora meant when her recitation concluded with these lines:

… May I reach

That purest heaven,—be to other souls

The cup of strength in some great agony,

Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,

Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,

Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,

And in diffusion ever more intense!

So shall I join the choir invisible

Whose music is the gladness of the world.

In the Orthodox Christian tradition, mourners keeping an all-night vigil read the entire Psalter over the body of the dead. I had planned to stay there until I had prayed aloud all 150 psalms over my sister, but her friends said they wanted to take part too. After Psalm 25, I handed my Psalter to someone else, and sat down. When I left at midnight, one of Ruthie’s oldest friends, Sarah Marquette Fudge, held Ruthie’s casket with one hand and the Psalter in the other, and prayed over the body of a woman with whom she had played dolls as a little girl.

Ruthie’s colleagues, most of whom I was just getting to know, wanted me to appreciate what kind of teacher she was. That night was the first I had heard of Lyric Haynes, the child whose mother was in prison, and who had read the speech about Ruthie at the school assembly.

When Ruthie died the teachers worried that Lyric, now in high school, would lash out at others and find herself back in the principal’s office for fighting. In fact she only asked that someone take her back to the middle school where Ruthie had taught her. She told them that she remembered the middle school as the place where teachers loved her. And she told them that she was going to do whatever she could to honor Mrs. Leming’s memory.

“If you really want to honor Mrs. Leming,” one teacher told her, “you will be good and study hard, and go to college to learn how to be a teacher. Then you can come back here to work, and help other kids the way Mrs. Leming helped you.”

“I’ll do it,” Lyric said.

I had seen Lyric hours earlier at the wake, in the line passing by
Ruthie’s coffin. I only figured her as one of the many former Ruthie students moving through the church that night. Until Ruthie’s teacher friends told me, I had no idea, no idea at all, of the drama of this child’s life, and the part my sister played in giving her love, and hope.

As I drove back to Starhill, worn out, I thought once again about how little I really knew about Ruthie’s life, and how I understood even less. I had somehow come to think of her living in a small town as equivalent to her living a small life. That was fine by me, if it made her content, but there was about it the air of settling. Or so I thought. What I had seen and heard these last few days showed me how wrong I had been. When I got to my parents’ house in Starhill I found Mam at the kitchen table, eyes puffy, drinking a Coke. I told her the Lyric story. She said Lyric must have been the little black girl who spoke to her in line at the wake. “She told me, ‘Mrs. Leming is dead. Who is going to love me now?’ I’ll never forget that.”

I said goodnight, brushed my teeth, and crawled into bed with Julie, who had picked the kids up at our cousin’s house after the wake and gone back to Mam and Paw’s to put them to bed. I told her all the things I had seen and heard since we last spoke.

“It’s strange,” I said. “I find myself crying not so much because of Ruthie, but because of all the goodness of these people. It’s so…
pure
that it hurts.”

Back at the church the party was just getting started. Ruthie’s teacher friends—Abby Temple, Rae Lynne Thomas, Jodi Knight, Karen Barron, Jennifer Bickham, Ashley Harvey, and others—gave her the send-off she deserved. Why? As Rae Lynne wisecracked, “Because we’re the funnest people we know.”

They set up lawn chairs in front of the open coffin, just like at Ruthie’s beloved creek, and sprinkled creek sand onto Ruthie’s body. Ashley loves sparkles, and brought glitter to scatter on Ruthie, as a blessing. She even rubbed some on Ronnie Morgan’s bald head when he dropped by. They painted Ruthie’s fingernails so she would look
good for her funeral. Emily Branton came by with her guitar. They all sang hymns, and “Brown Eyed Girl.” Karen danced for Ruthie.

“It’s exactly the kind of thing Ruthie would have loved: laughing with her, crying with her, singing and dancing,” Abby remembers. “That is what Ruthie loved most: being around her friends and family, in her kitchen, and in her church. You just knew she was there with us that night, and loving it.”

On the day of Ruthie’s funeral a man walked into the St. Francisville post office. “Sure are a lot of cars in town today,” a woman said. The man told her they were going to bury Ruthie Leming this morning.

“Oh, that lady died?” the woman said. “I saw her in here just last week. I said to her, ‘Baby, you don’t look like you feel too good.’ She said, ‘No, ma’am, I don’t. But I’m gonna be good real soon.’ ”

The line of mourners passing by Ruthie’s coffin for final good-byes started at ten. By early afternoon all the pews were filled, all the room to stand was taken, the church had folding chairs in the aisles, and still mourners massed on the lawn and the sidewalk out front.

As the time for the services drew closer Abby felt numb. She had seen this day coming for a long time, and thought about what she would say to eulogize her best friend. But she didn’t put her thoughts together until a couple of hours before the funeral started.

Five minutes before the opening prayer she told Karen Barron she didn’t think she could do it. She worried about what she would say. She worried about Mike and the girls. She worried how all this was going to play out for that family.

She worried.

“No, you can,” Karen said. “Just look at me when you speak, Abby. It’s going to be okay.”

Mike, his children, and Mam and Paw sat on the front row. Ashley Jones, who had driven seventeen hours straight from Nebraska to
get to her former teacher’s funeral, squeezed into a space along the wall. Stephanie Lemoine came up from Baton Rouge, hoping to claim a seat in the back. She had arrived early, to have a word with Mike as he stood once again by Ruthie’s coffin. Because her cancer was in remission, Stephanie, with her survivor’s guilt, worried about how she would be received, but as soon as Mike saw her, he broke into a fresh round of tears, looked directly into her eyes, and said the only word he could muster in the moment: “You.”