The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (5 page)

During her junior year Ruthie’s crowd began hanging out at the river, where they could build bonfires and drink beer without adults hassling them. But Mam and Paw had forbidden Ruthie to spend time there. After a local boy died in a drunk-driving crash, parents were scared. They had reason to be. Still, if you weren’t a social outcast, and you wanted to be with your friends from school on the weekends, you went to the river. Mam and Paw, however, would not yield on their conviction that it was no place for a girl to be.

After a while some of Ruthie’s friends began taunting her for her absence at the river. You think you’re better than us, they said. That got to Ruthie, who hated elitism above all else.

One night Mam and Paw went to a ball game in town. As they left the stands Mam told Paw she had a strange feeling Ruthie was down at the river. They drove to the ferry landing, took a left, and motored in the darkness to the bonfire site. And there was Ruthie. She had come there with Mike.

Furious and hurt Mam parted the crowd and took her startled daughter by the arm.

“Sister, I can’t let you come down here,” Mam said. Ruthie knew instantly that she had been caught, and that she was in the wrong. She put her head down and, through scalding, humiliating tears, let her mother lead her away. She wept and didn’t say a word all the way home. Mam was crying. Paw was crying. It was the worst thing they had ever had to do to their daughter.

Ruthie went silent around our parents for several months—not from anger, as they suspected, but from shame that she had hurt them. “It just about killed her that she had caused them pain,” Mike says. “She had this deep sense of not wanting to hurt other people, not to be a burden to them.”

My sister’s sensitivity and her loyalty to our parents only strengthened her bond with Mike. Mike was a deeply shy, introverted young man whose upbringing had been difficult, in part because of family finances, in part because his workaholic father was so emotionally and physically remote. Ruthie’s love built his confidence. “I knew I could trust her. She was so loyal. How can a person do that, especially at such a young age? But that was the kind of heart she had. Pure. It didn’t really matter if I saw her talking to another guy. It never bothered me, because I knew she was loyal to me. I never had to worry.”

This purity of my sister’s heart gave Mike peace of mind when he joined the National Guard as a senior and, after finishing high school, shipped out to boot camp in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for four months of training. She wrote him every single day to encourage him,
to tell him how much she loved him, and to keep him up on news from home.

Ruthie spent that lonely summer working in our cousin’s law office in St. Francisville. “I’m making seven hundred dollars a month!” she told Mike. “Can you believe it? That’s a lot of money.”

By that time I was between my freshman and sophomore semesters at LSU in Baton Rouge, and was home working a summer gig at the nuclear plant. There was no place I wanted to be less than stuck in Starhill. So I checked out. I’d come home from my nine-to-five job, make myself a tall glass of Tanqueray gin, grapefruit juice, and soda, and retire to my room to drink, read Hemingway, listen to ska, and marinate in self-doubt. To the rest of my family I looked like a self-centered, uppity layabout. There was no doubt some truth to that, but it was also the case that I was confused and drifting.

Ruthie, though, may have been lonely, but she was rarely bored, and she doubted nothing about life. Everything she had, or could have, sufficed. She was the kind of person who would never grow up to write a memoir about her life because she was too happy and involved in living it. I didn’t want what Ruthie had, but I was jealous of the way she had it. How did she do it? She made everything look so effortless. On some mornings she would wake up at daylight and get a couple of hours in fishing for bass and bream on the pond before she went to the law office. On weekends she played golf with her and Mike’s buddies, babysat for extra money (she was already saving for her and Mike’s future), or went bowling with friends. She went to parties every now and then, but it didn’t feel right without Mike there.

Ruthie and I got along surprisingly well that summer, no doubt because I stayed out of her way. One Saturday afternoon we drove into Baton Rouge to go shopping, and I told her about the dream I had the night before.

“I dreamed that you and Mike got married,” I said. “Is that weird? Are y’all thinking about it?”

“We’ve talked about it,” she said nervously, “but I think we’re going to wait until we get a few years of college behind us.”

“Did I tell him the right thing?” she later asked Mike in a letter. “That’s one dream that I wish would come true! What I want most in life is to spend it with you. I love you more than anything in the world. I always daydream about what we’re gonna do on our honeymoon and what our house is gonna be like. I sure hope we can make my dreams come true…. I’m ready to start school and get it over with so we can hurry up and start our life together. It is gonna be a damn good one too! I can’t wait!”

Though Daddy’s little girl had lost her heart to Mike, Ruthie and Paw grew even closer that summer. They spent many afternoons on the pond together after work, casting for bream. On Father’s Day weekend Ruthie washed and cleaned out the inside of Paw’s Bronco, as his gift. Meanwhile I had promised to mow the grass for Paw that day, but instead holed up inside the house watching the live MTV broadcast of the eleven-hour Amnesty International benefit concert from Giants Stadium, starring the Police, U2, and Peter Gabriel.

“Rod says it’s great music, but I don’t know,” Paw wrote to Mike. “That still don’t get the grass cut. Maybe tomorrow.”

I had no interest in going fishing with Ruthie, so she often went up to the pond with Billy Lawton, a neighbor kid. One afternoon Billy and Ruthie floated in the middle of the pond in Paw’s aluminum boat, their lines dangling in the water.

“Ruthie, look!” Billy whispered.

Billy thought he was looking at a cow standing at the water’s edge at the pond’s other end.

“Billy, that’s a buck!” Ruthie gasped.

The big deer, antlers coated in velvet, studied them closely. A fish took Billy’s cork under and ran with the line, but Ruthie quietly ordered him to ignore it. She was afraid he would scare the deer away.

The buck dipped his head to drink, then raising it, concluded that
the people in the boat were no threat. He ambled down the raised levee that was the pond’s west bank, marching toward them. No fear. He finally found his way into the cornfield, and was gone.

“All I could think about was how you would have fainted,” Ruthie told Mike, in a letter. “Maybe you can get him this winter. I can’t wait!”

She was overcome by excitement at the buck spotting. Me, I would have had to see Elvis Costello in the car next to me at the Sonic to have registered similar glee. No surprise then that I declined to accompany Paw, Mam, and Ruthie on a weekend trip to Holly Beach, a rustic Cajun coastal community in southwest Louisiana, near the Texas border. Some family friends had a camp in the remote and fairly desolate stretch of sand and invited them to make the four-hour drive down. Mosquitoes, alligators, heat, humidity, and no girls? Could there be a more dismal way to spend a weekend? I chose to take my chances at home with gin, air-conditioning, and the English Beat.

Ruthie had a blast. She fished, sunbathed, and learned how to use a throw net to catch crabs in the surf. They ate a fish stew called court bouillon over rice, crawfish crepes, boiled crabs, T-bones, and leg of lamb. She took a drive with Mam and Paw down the Holly Beach main drag to eyeball the gators living in the ditches on either side of the road. She was shocked to see a pickup passing the other way nearly run over a four-foot gator on the asphalt. Paw stopped the Bronco to see if the gator would move. Ruthie leaped out and chased the big lizard out of the road.

“Ruthie!” Paw said when she climbed back in. “You would have
died
if that thing had started chasing you!”

“I didn’t think about that, Daddy,” she said. “I was just worried that somebody was going to run over the poor little thing.”

On the long drive home that Sunday, Ruthie wrote to Mike to tell him about the glories of Holly Beach. “That place would make a great honeymoon spot, hint hint,” she said. “It was so relaxing and romantic.”

Paw and Mike also grew closer that summer, despite the distance. Mike wrote a couple of letters that grabbed the older man’s heart. Mike told Paw that he was a good man, and a special one who had been like a father to him. Ruthie wrote Mike to praise him for his sincerity and thoughtfulness.

“You couldn’t have gotten to his heart in a better way than this,” she said. “You really let your feelings flow and it really made him feel good cause he feels the same way. He loves you like a son. After he read it, he got up and went to the back because we had company and he had to go wipe the tears off his face.”

Paw wrote Mike too, addressing him as “Trapper,” and tried to keep his spirits up amid the rigors of basic training.

“There is nothing they can do to you that you can’t take. Just keep your mind in order, your spirits up as well as your strength,” Paw counseled. “Do not be misled by those who don’t care, and be the best damn soldier possible. You will end up the winner, and a better man for it. We are all mighty proud of you and what you are doing.”

In late July Ruthie rode to South Carolina with Mike’s parents for his graduation from basic training. She would have only a day or two with him before he began advanced training. They didn’t have much time together, but for Ruthie it was the highlight of her summer. She and Mr. and Mrs. Leming had not even checked out of the Fort Jackson–area hotel that Sunday when Ruthie put pen to La Quinta Inn telephone pad notepaper and began her next letter.

“I just thought I’d write you before we left here so you would get this quick,” she wrote. “I want you to know how proud I am of you. I can’t wait to get home and brag on you. You just look so sharp and handsome in your uniform. It just made me want to cry every time I looked at you. You make me feel so good inside when you compliment me and look at me with those beautiful eyes.

“I’m sorry I cried so much today, but I just couldn’t help it,” she continued. “I didn’t want to embarrass you but I just love you so much
and you make me so proud that I have to cry. It felt so good being in your arms and kissing you. You make me feel so secure. You have really matured and are a man now! I love your muscles—they’re so sexy.”

She ended by assuring him, as she often did, that she was his girl, “forever and a day.”

“I can’t wait to get our life started,” Ruthie wrote. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

In the fall of 1986 Ruthie began her senior year of high school. Mike came home later that autumn and prepared himself to start classes at LSU that spring. It didn’t take long for Mike to discover that college wasn’t for him. After a difficult semester he went to work at the local paper mill.

Ruthie was the class of 1987 valedictorian and left her graduation ceremony that night with her college education already paid for with scholarships and awards. Nearly all of the ninety-three graduates in her class announced plans that night to go to college, or to some form of career training. At the end of her freshman fall semester, Ruthie phoned Mam and Paw from her dorm at LSU, and told them she had something to tell them when she came home for Sunday dinner that weekend. They were afraid of what she would say, guessing she was planning to break the news that she and Mike had eloped.

That Sunday, after Paw said grace, Ruthie declared: “I’ve got something I want to say. That group that I graduated with? Only three of us are left in school now. And I want to thank y’all for what you did for me. I know it wasn’t easy to be tough.”

Recalls Mam, “You can’t imagine what hearing that meant to us.”

When Ruthie started LSU that fall to work on an education degree, she lived in the dorm next to mine. I was a junior. We saw each other only in the cafeteria behind our residence halls. During the week she
stayed buried in her books, worked hard, and made perfect grades. I was studying journalism, philosophy, political science, and considered long, beery arguments over existentialism with my fellow young scholars to be time well spent. My college transcript, while respectable, does not support this generous interpretation.

At LSU Ruthie thought I was getting away with something, and not only because I managed to ace tests even though I had stayed out late drinking beer and barely studied. She may have experienced on campus the same frustration and envy I felt when Ruthie triumphed on every front back home with so little effort. Worse, Ruthie could not understand what I studied, and what engaged me intellectually, and therefore she regarded it with suspicion, even loathing.

One evening she shared a table in the cafeteria with my best friend Paul and me. Paul, a political theory major, and I, minoring in philosophy and political science, loved to talk about big ideas. That evening we got off on something about Nietzsche and the death of God. Ruthie listened patiently, but finally lost her cool. She told us she thought that was the “stupidest bunch of you-know-what” that she had ever heard.