The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (29 page)

When we walked into the oncology unit, Buffy, one of the nurses at the front desk, embraced Mike and gave him a poem she had written in Ruthie’s memory. Buffy had a habit of bursting into song whenever Ruthie walked in for her treatments. That sweet, silly gesture meant a lot to my sister. While Mike received condolences from the other ladies on staff, Buffy fetched Dr. Miletello from his office.

I watched as Dr. Miletello strode down the hall and embraced my brother-in-law. “She loved you,” Mike told him.

“It’s a good thing that we don’t treat more people like Ruthie,” he said. “It would be too hard. She was so humble. That’s what you noticed about her. She never, ever complained about being sick. Never.”

“She was an angel,” he added.

We spent a few more minutes talking with the oncologist, then shook hands and headed back to the parking lot.

As we were pulling away, someone called Mike’s cell phone to check on him. “We’re leaning,” he said, “but we’re leaning on each other.”

That line stayed with me all day. I thought about it when John Bickham, standing in Mam and Paw’s yard, said to me, “What you’ve seen here is because of who your sister was, but it’s also because of who your mama and daddy are.”

He was right. The love that had sustained Ruthie through her cancer, and that now surrounded and upheld her family, came from somewhere. Like Ruthie, my mother and father had cultivated it, in this little patch of ground, all their lives. They had no grand gestures of philanthropy or goodness to their name, but rather they were always faithful in small things. When Paw was the parish sanitarian, he helped impoverished people, mostly poor black folks, bring running water and sewerage into their houses. These people didn’t have the money to pay for the job themselves, so he showed them how to do it right, and never asked for a penny in compensation. He did it because he was their neighbor. You live in one place long enough, and live that way, the interest on your good deeds will add up.

I did not live that way. I never stayed in one place long enough to develop that kind of relationship with my community. Nobody ever told me in New York, in Dallas, in Philly, or anywhere else that I was not allowed to serve others in the community, or work to root myself, a transplant, in new ground. It was so easy, though, to live inside one’s bubble, and not see your neighbors in the way West Feliciana people saw their neighbors. Bowling alone, so to speak, was the way so many in my circles rolled.

Not long after Ruthie’s passing, I received a letter from Christian Daniel Tregle, a woman who grew up down the road from me. Her brother was Robert Edward Daniel, who died from leukemia (their mother Jane was Mam’s first visitor the morning after Ruthie died). Christian was much younger than I, which meant that I didn’t know her in our childhood. Christian said that as a teenager she was just like me in that she wanted to escape the boredom and the claustrophobia of our small town. At LSU her mother would pass on news from home,
including good deeds and acts of kindness, but they didn’t mean much to the undergraduate.

But as she grew older it dawned on her that the everyday goodness of the people back home was a lot more significant than she realized. There was a poor, hard-working family from Starhill who lived down the road from both our families. Christian’s father, a game warden, knew that family hardly had a pot to pee in. Whenever the wardens confiscated game from poachers, Christian’s dad would take it by this family’s house so they would have meat on the table.

One day the daddy and sole breadwinner in that family was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Though he would be treated in the state’s public hospital system, he was nevertheless so poor that he couldn’t afford to quit his job during his treatments. So Christian’s mother took the sick man’s family groceries every week during his treatment. The man survived, and his family stayed together.

Christian learned that this kind of thing happens in our hometown all the time. You’re going through a divorce, and things are hard for you, and you’ll come home to find your overgrown yard, which you hadn’t had time to mow, has been cut by a stranger. A hurricane will blow through town and the power won’t come back on for a week or longer—but you don’t lose all the food in your freezer because your neighbor down the street ran an extension cord across three yards to share his generator power with you. You are pregnant and on emergency bed rest, and a professional maid shows up at your door, having been hired by an anonymous person, who knew that you couldn’t clean your house in your condition.

That sort of thing. All the time.

Julie and I had some long, emotional talks that week in Starhill. How do you live through a week like that—indeed, how do you live through
the previous nineteen months with Ruthie—and remain unaffected? Ruthie and I were so very much unalike; as much as I admired her, it never occurred to me to shape my own life after her example. In the days following her death, it was easier, I found, to think of how I could be more like the people she inspired to works of love. Which is to say, I found in my heart an emerging desire to be like my brother-in-law Mike, to be like Big Show, to be like Mel Percy. I wanted to be more like Abby Temple, and John Bickham, and all the people in our town and less like the kid who sat inside watching MTV while his dad waited for the grass to be mowed.

Was God calling me to a new life? Maybe. Ruthie and I were both practicing Christians, yet we were utterly different in our approaches to God. Ruthie didn’t have much of a theology. That’s not how her mind worked. She believed that God existed and that He loved her. She believed Jesus Christ was His son and died for humanity’s sins. She believed the Bible and, that whatever happened to her, that God was in it, and that He would never abandon her. That was the sum total of Ruthie Leming’s theology.

And yet Ruthie, in her simplicity, was an extraordinarily accomplished theologian—if, that is, a theologian is not one who knows
about
God, but one who knows God. The ordinary Christianity she lived out among her family, her neighbors, her students, and all who came into her life, made her a Christian soldier and me an armchair Christian theoretician. As anyone who has sat through a bridesmaid reading Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians knows, “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

For most of my life as a believing Christian, I read I Corinthians, and I thought I understood it. I did not understand it, not until Ruthie became ill. For many years I had lived in a fairly specialized world of elite journalism and traveled among groups of people who shared my
intellectual interests, advancing my career, enjoying my life, and collecting experiences. But what, in the end, did it amount to? What did I have to show for it?

“If I woke up one day and found out I had terminal cancer, what would happen to me?” I said to Julie. “What would happen to you and the kids?”

“We have good friends in Philly,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “But we don’t have a deep bench.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we haven’t been there long enough. We don’t know enough people. If you think about it, we haven’t lived anywhere long enough to put down the kind of roots that Ruthie and Mike have.”

Nearly everybody in West Feliciana knew Mike and Ruthie, or at least knew Mam and Paw, I explained to Julie, who grew up in a Dallas suburb and knew no neighbors other than the people on either side of her house. Some relationships between families in West Feliciana go back for generations. My folks have a good name in the parish, and that means something there. People in West Feliciana remember these things, and the mutual obligation these communal memories impose.

I once asked Paw why, given that he was feeling sick that day, he was planning to go to the funeral of an old woman he didn’t know well.

“Respect,” he said to me, slightly annoyed that he had to explain the obvious. “That family has lived around here for a long time.”

It’s hard to know these things, much less find the wherewithal to behave this way, if you haven’t lived in a place for years and come to make its stories part of yourself. Absence has consequences.

“When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another,” writes the agrarian essayist Wendell Berry. “How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not
trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another. And this is our predicament now.”

Those of us who have moved away are not necessarily callow and ungrateful people. We live in a time and place in which we are conditioned to leave our hometowns. Our schools tell our young people to follow their professional bliss, wherever it takes them. Our economy rewards companies and people who have no loyalty to place. The stories that shape the moral imagination of our young, chiefly by film and television, are told by outsiders who were dissatisfied and lit out for elsewhere to find happiness and good fortune.

During the decade leading up to Ruthie’s death, I had spent my professional life writing newspaper columns, blog posts, and even a book, lamenting the loss of community and traditions in American life. I had a reputation as a pop theoretician of cultural decline, but in truth I was long on words, short on deeds. I did not like the fact that I saw my Louisiana family only three times a year, for a week at a time, if we were lucky. But that was the way of the world, right? Almost everyone I knew was in the same position. My friends and I talked a lot about the fragmentation of the modern family, about the deracinating effects of late capitalism, about mass media and the erosion of localist consciousness, about the consumerization of religion and the leviathan state and every other thing under the sun that undermines our sense of home and permanence.

The one thing none of us did was what Ruthie did: Stay.

Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you—and it will—you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want—no, you
need
—to be able to say, as Mike did, “We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other.”

I deeply believed then, and believe today, that one day I will be
asked to give an account of my life to my Maker. That fateful week in Louisiana I wondered: When I meet the Lord, will I be able to say that my life had been about giving, not just taking? Would being able to discern the difference between a Bordeaux and a Burgundy bring me any closer to tasting the cup of salvation?

In short: Did I have love?

Ruthie did, and she brought it out and passed it on to everyone who knew her. Me, it was hard to escape the unsettling conclusion that I was awfully close to being what St. Paul called a resounding gong. To be sure, I was a nice enough guy, in the way that most people are nice enough. But when you see in a life like Ruthie’s what loving people beyond the ordinary can do for others, and for yourself, it makes you aware of your own lack—and, if your heart is in the right place, determined to do something about it.

I had to change my life. But how? Should I once again try the geographical cure for my restlessness, and hope this time that it worked?

That week, in the midst of marveling about the goodness of the townspeople, Julie and I wondered if we were romanticizing St. Francisville. After all this was at the end of one of the most emotional weeks of our lives. A local friend had said to me, “You have seen the town at its very best. You know, it’s not always like this.”

I knew St. Francisville’s shortcomings. There is poverty. There is brokenness. There is drunkenness, and there are drugs. There is meanness, and conformity, and lack of professional opportunity. Of all the things that made me run from this place nearly three decades ago, most of them remain.

But Ruthie transfigured this town in my eyes. Her suffering and death made me see the good that I couldn’t see before. The same communal bonds that appeared to me as chains all those years ago had become my Louisiana family’s lifelines. What I once saw through the melodramatic eyes of a teenager as prison bars were in fact the pillars that held my family up when it had no strength left to stand.

We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other.

Over the years I had leaned on Ruthie in ways I hadn’t grasped. Truth was I had always been a free rider on Ruthie’s faithfulness and rootedness. Without realizing what I was doing, I had given myself permission to live a life of restlessness and liberty because Ruthie chose to live within the limits imposed by life in a small town. I had just witnessed the harvest Ruthie and her family reaped as a consequence of the limits she embraced. She pruned her vines, but I let mine grow wild and scattered. Now the fruits her children would enjoy were sweeter and more intense than what I was growing for my own.