The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (7 page)

When Claire turned thirteen she and Hannah fought over fashion. Hannah needled Claire about her disinterest in trendy clothes and cosmetics; Claire, who felt most comfortable in a T-shirt and blue jeans, and who thought it was ridiculous to cover her glowing skin with makeup, pushed back, and pushed back hard. Rebekah was the peacemaker between her sisters. Though she shared her father’s taciturnity, at least around people she didn’t know well, she was in truth a merry trickster.

Bekah, as they called her, inherited both her mom’s and her dad’s talent for athletics, playing team softball in the summer and cartwheeling across the lawn and down the hallway at home all year round. Like her mom and Claire, Bekah loved nature and going barefoot outside, but she hated the idea of hunting. “Why would anybody want to be so mean to animals?” she asked Claire one day. Claire has long suspected her younger sister will grow up to be a veterinarian.

In 1999, when Claire was born, Mike was working full-time for the Louisiana National Guard. He also served as a volunteer firefighter for the Starhill squad, which was founded in 1988, with Paw as its chief. Now people in Starhill wouldn’t have to wait for fire trucks to come all the way from St. Francisville—but only if enough men in the community agreed to give time and labor to fighting fires. Paw asked Mike, who was Ruthie’s boyfriend at the time, to consider joining the crew. Mike agreed, because doing something hard like this to take care of the community seemed like the manly thing to do.

One hot and humid summer day the Starhill Volunteer Fire Department received its first-ever call: a house on Paper Mill Road was burning down. Like the other Starhill men Mike converged on the burning
house in his pickup. He saw flames roaring from the windows and doors of the wooden house, and felt a shot of adrenaline course through his body. He didn’t have time to think about fear. The fire was burning wildly, consuming a family’s home. He quickly dressed out in his firefighting gear and presented himself to Paw, the fire chief, for duty.

“Put this air pack on,” one of the men told Mike. “We’re going in.”

Carrying hoses gushing water from the pumper truck, Mike and the others forged ahead into the burning house. The blasts from the firehose knocked the flames off the walls. In minutes the fire was out. Mike was awestruck by the power of the men of the community, working together, to bring that raging fire under control.

Hot, sooty, and exhausted the Starhill men took off their gear, stood in the yard by their trucks, and talked about what had just happened. They had heard the alarm and dropped everything to run into a burning building on a scorching day, risking their lives to save the house of a family from the community. They didn’t do it for money; they were volunteers. They did it because this is what a man does.

Mike walked away from the charred and smoldering house a changed man. In the flames and amid the camaraderie, he had seen a vision that would guide the rest of his life. “For me,” he would say later, “there was no turning back.”

Mike started thinking about firefighting as a vocation. In 1990 he took the test to become a Baton Rouge firefighter. He aced it, but couldn’t get hired. He took the test three more times in ten years, scored one hundred percent each time, but he wasn’t called. He decided that it just wasn’t meant to be.

In 2000 Mike was out of town on National Guard business when Ruthie phoned him to say she had just watched a TV news report saying the Baton Rouge Fire Department was starting a new recruiting drive. She thought he should take the test again. By department rules no rookies over age thirty-five were allowed, and Mike was getting close to the line. He wasn’t sure he should bother.

Besides, because he was at Fort Polk, the US Army base in north Louisiana, Mike couldn’t get the job application. Ruthie drove down to Baton Rouge and filled it out on his behalf. She knew how important the dream of being a firefighter was to Mike. This time Mike got the call. With the firefighting job, the hours would be irregular, the commute from Starhill longer. Worse, the cut in pay over his Guard job would be steep: he would lose over one-third of his annual salary, a big blow to their family. Could Ruthie stand to tighten their belts even more?

“She didn’t hesitate one bit,” Mike says. Ruthie’s willingness to support her husband’s vocation was a gift. She gave Mike a second family, for he would grow inextricably close to his fellow firefighters over the next few years. While on duty the men lived with each other in the firehouse, which usually meant hours spent together, just talking. Firefighter families would come by the station to visit during downtime, allowing the men to get to know each other as more than work colleagues. Weekend camping trips knitted the ties among the men and made their families even closer.

“Being a fireman, you knew you were going to put yourself in harm’s way, and take more of a risk than in any other job,” he said. “I enjoy serving. I guess it’s just something innate. I try to help somebody out when they’re down, or at their worst. It feels good to at least try.”

Fresh out of rookie school Mike met a firefighter who would become one of his, and his family’s, closest friends: Steve Shelton, a tall, burly man with a chiseled jaw, a laidback demeanor, and eyes that sparked with merriment. Everybody called Steve “Big Show,” a nickname he earned in a charity boxing tournament in 1998. It was a cops versus firefighters contest billed as Guns and Hoses. Each boxer had to pick a stage name; someone stole the moniker of a professional wrestler and christened Steve “The Big Show.”

The nickname might not have survived the day if not for a startling turn of affairs. Steve is a big man, but he was puny compared to
the muscle-bound behemoth of a Louisiana state trooper they pitted him against. Not too long after the first bell, Steve somehow connected with the big bruiser’s jaw, cleanly cold-cocking him. Down went the giant for the TKO!

Steve has been Big Show ever since.

After they became close Mike invited Show to come up to Starhill from his home in the nearby town of Zachary and hunt deer on Paw’s place. Show readily accepted, and quickly fell in love with Mam and Paw. When Mike had to leave town for an extended period of Guard training, Show started helping Paw, who had an ailing back, take care of his land. This is how he became tight with the Starhill crew.

“Your mom and dad never meet a stranger,” he said. “Once they get to know you, you become family right off, especially if you help them with something. Whatever’s theirs is yours.”

Whatever’s theirs is yours.
That’s the first thing John Bickham noticed about Mam and Paw when he moved with his wife and two girls to Starhill. John, a trim, unassuming man of average height and build, and thinning salt-and-pepper hair, does not stand out in a crowd. He doesn’t speak loudly or forcefully, but when he does you realize that he sees a lot more through his wise, observant eyes than you might have thought. John Bickham—or J.B., as Paw calls him—is intensely conscientious, and never talks about or draws attention to himself. He works as an operations controller at the ExxonMobil Refinery in Baton Rouge, one of the largest petrochemical complexes in the world. He sits at a bank of computer screens all day keeping things moving in the synthetic rubber unit. When you find out from someone (never J.B.) how much responsibility for the life-and-death safety of refinery workers rests on his shoulders, you think, “Of course; that’s the quiet man you would absolutely trust with your life.”

Growing up in Baton Rouge John had always longed for country life. In 1990 he and a pal bought a piece of land in Starhill, split it between them, built houses there, and moved north out of the city with
their families. John’s father had always wanted to live in the country too, and his son talked his folks into making plans to move to Starhill with them.

Within a month of John’s relocating to West Feliciana, his father died. His mother chose to remain in Baton Rouge to be close to her church. At the time John, who worked with the fire department at the Exxon refinery in north Baton Rouge, also served on the Starhill Volunteer Fire Department. That’s how he got to know Paw. In his grief over his father’s loss, John drew close to the older man.

John saw that keeping up Paw’s barn, mowing the grass around the pond and Paw’s pastures, and maintaining the tractors, was too much work for Mike to handle alone. So he pitched in. Besides John enjoyed working alongside Paw, even as age and infirmity diminished Paw’s ability to do for himself.

As Big Show and John, both deer hunters, found out, to be part of Mam and Paw’s circle is to gain access to good hunting grounds on Paw’s fifty acres. It also meant access to the bass, bream, and catfish in the pond. Hunting and fishing in “the Back,” as we called it in our family, was a passion for Ruthie that lasted past childhood.

“She always wanted to go fishing,” Mike says. “She would go buy crickets, or she liked to use a plastic worm. She’d fix lunch, and drinks, and we’d just go to the pond. Because she loved hunting and fishing so much, she never begrudged me a chance to go off somewhere with my friends to do it.”

It’s not uncommon for women raised in West Feliciana to accustom themselves to their husbands’ hunting and fishing habits. It is less common for them to share those interests. And then there was the way Ruthie did it.

When Mike killed a deer, Ruthie dashed to the skinning rack in Paw’s barn to clean the deer herself. She wasn’t content simply to slice the hide off the deer’s carcass and butcher it. She approached the task like an amateur forensic scientist, examining the deer’s entrails for clues.

When Mike came in from a fishing trip, Ruthie instructed him to leave the stringer of slimy fish in the kitchen sink for her to take care of. She would whip out her electric knife, gut the fish, debone them, and freeze the fillets or prepare them straightaway for dinner. If the girls were around, she would enlist their help, and take the opportunity to give them a biology lesson about fish anatomy. Mike’s buddies found it hard to believe that his wife not only gave him no guff for stinking up her kitchen with fish, but that she also demanded to process them herself.

In fact it’s hard to overestimate the part fishing, especially on Paw’s pond, played in the Leming family’s life. “When did we start going to the pond? Well, how old are you when you start walking?” Claire Leming, now a teenager, asks rhetorically.

Fun for the Lemings often meant summer afternoons down at Thompson Creek, near Ronnie Morgan’s camp. They call it the Starhill Riviera. Ronnie is a longtime neighbor and contemporary of my parents, but perpetually youthful in his crackpot joie de vivre. With a heart as big as his head is bald, Ronnie is the kind of good ol’ boy who lives perpetually poised between his third beer and the question, “Hell, what could it hurt?” As Starhill’s version of Jimmy Buffett by way of Hunter S. Thompson, he would get the Margaritaville vibe going down at his camp in the late afternoon. Ronnie cooked potluck—gumbo, jambalaya—and all you had to bring was cold beer, a bottle of whiskey, and, if you liked, something to put in the pot. In cool weather, folks would build a bonfire. David Morgan, Ronnie’s son and a country singer and guitarist, would play solo, or sometimes get his band together. Starhill danced. That was a Louisiana Saturday night.

“All the kids would be playing outside, and nobody would care,” Hannah says. “It was a carefree life. Nothing but good times and good friends.” The sisters remembered too how affectionate their mother and father were with each other. When Mike would work an overnight
shift at the fire station, Ruthie would stay up late talking to him by phone. “Like a couple of teenagers!” says Hannah. “I would be like, ‘Mom, come on!’

“They were so silly and sweet,” Hannah says. “It was cool to me that they always seemed to fall more in love with each other each day. Some married couples, you can tell that they just get to this point where they’re done with love. It wasn’t that way with them. And their love radiated to us. What they loved they wanted us to love too.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Sweet Babies

When Shannon Nixon Morell met my sister, she was eleven years old and one of eight African American children living in a troubled home. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother worked three, sometimes four, jobs to keep the family fed. There was intense poverty, and chaos. Shannon never told her new sixth-grade teacher about what was going on in her house, but Ruthie knew. Shannon was ashamed of her circumstances, and felt trapped and angry.

Ruthie smiled at her and said her name. That was enough for Shannon, who came from a home where nobody smiled, or seemed to care what happened to her. Ruthie saw promise in Shannon, and would sometimes spend their lunch hour in a field next to Bains Elementary, trying out strategies to help the struggling girl master her schoolwork.

“Shannon,” Ruthie would say, “your life is hard, but you can do better than this. I can’t let you feel sorry for yourself. If you feel sorry for yourself, you’re going to give up.”

Shannon liked that. It made her believe that she had within her the power to change her life.

One day she said to Ruthie, “Mrs. Leming, I want to be a psychologist when I grow up.”

“Why not?” Ruthie said. “If that’s what you want to be, go for it!
You can do it, baby. Just put your mind to it, and don’t let go of your dream.”

After finishing sixth grade Shannon moved up to the nearby high school building, but she kept in touch with Ruthie. When she was old enough for the cheerleading squad, she told Ruthie she wanted to try out, but wasn’t sure that she was good enough.

“Shannon, you’re awesome at this,” said Ruthie, who had been on the pep squad in high school. “You have the talent. I know you can do it. Believe in yourself. Don’t ever settle for being just okay when you know you have it in you to do better.”

Because Ruthie believed in her, Shannon started to believe in herself. She tried out for cheerleader, and made the squad. This caused some of her black girlfriends who hadn’t made the cut to turn on Shannon, accusing her of trying to be white. Shannon couldn’t talk about this with her family, who shared those racist views. So she went to Ruthie.