The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life
Authors: Rod Dreher
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Women, #General
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To Hannah, Claire, and Rebekah
This is your mother; these are your people
What matters in life are not great deeds, but great love.
—ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
Here’s the thing I want you to know about my sister.
A long time ago—I must have been about seven years old, which would have made Ruthie five—I did something rotten to her. What it was, I can’t remember. I teased her all the time, and she spent much of her childhood whaling the tar out of me for it. Whatever happened that time, though, must have been awful, because our father told me to go lie down on my bed and wait for him. That could mean only one thing: that he was going to deliver one of his rare but highly effective spankings, with his belt.
I cannot recall what my offense was, but I well remember walking down the hallway and climbing onto the bed, knowing full well that I deserved it. I always did. Nothing to be done but to stretch out, facedown, and take what I had coming.
And then it happened. Ruthie ran into the bedroom just ahead of Paw and, sobbing, threw herself across me.
“Whip me!” she cried. “Daddy, whip me!”
Paw gave no spankings that day. He turned and walked away. Ruthie left too. There I sat, on the bed, wondering what had just happened.
Forty years later, I still do.
Ruthie would grow up to be a schoolteacher, a friend, a neighbor, and quite possibly the kindest person many people in our Louisiana parish had ever met. But our little town, St. Francisville, suffers no lack of kind people. There was something different about Ruthie, though. I didn’t always see that, of course—and I didn’t really see it until the end. Ruthie had always been my little sister, which, in our family, meant my frequent foil.
My little sister was born on May 15, 1969. My parents named her Lois Ruth Dreher, accomplishing the neat trick of honoring four elderly female relatives with only two names. As far as I was concerned at the time, the kid ruined my life as a two-year-old prince of the realm. When Mam and Paw brought her home from the hospital to our house in the country, I was appalled. Ruthie had a crib in her own room, across the hall from mine. That was too close.
When she had been home from the hospital for about two weeks, I told my parents, “I don’t want her.”
“Okay, we’ll take her back,” replied Mam. She loaded Ruthie in the car after making a show of packing up a little suitcase. Then Mam put me in the car and started to drive, wondering how far we’d have to go before I gave in. We got all the way to Highway 61 before I started crying and said that I wanted her. “My baby, my baby,” I cried. Crisis averted, Mam turned the car around and headed for home. But I was still jealous and would remain so for some time.
This scenario or some variation of it should be familiar to anyone who has been a sibling or raised siblings. But as time went on—and not much time, either—it became clear that Ruthie and I were so different it was hard to imagine that we came from the same family.
The Drehers were country people. We lived in Starhill, a rural community six miles south of St. Francisville, a town of two thousand souls and the county seat of West Feliciana Parish. Though our
little red brick house wouldn’t have been out of place anywhere in late 1960s suburban America, it had the intimidating distinction of being smack in the middle of plantation country, a land of magnolias, Spanish moss, and architectural grandeur. West Feliciana is in English Louisiana, a southeastern region settled by people of Anglo descent, some of them Tories escaping the American Revolution. They built magnificent cotton plantations, and sold their goods at Bayou Sara, a trading port on the Mississippi, just below the bluffs on which the town of St. Francisville was built.
Growing up in St. Francisville you can’t escape history. Every schoolchild goes on a field trip to Grace Episcopal Church, and stands under the moss-strewn oaks to hear the story of the time a cannonball from a Union gunboat on the river struck the church’s bell tower. Our ancestor Columbus Simmons fought as a Confederate sniper in the battle of Port Hudson. For eleven days, he lived in a hollow tree, eating grubs, his legs peppered by shrapnel, until his capture. After the battle the Yankees let their prisoners go, and he limped back to his home in Osyka, Mississippi, and rejoined the Rebel army. Later Columbus migrated to West Feliciana, bought land in Starhill, and raised his family there. His children were George; Clint; my great-grandmother, Bernice; and her two younger sisters, Lois and Hilda. My sister and I learned about Columbus as a small boy at Lois’s and Hilda’s ancient knees. That’s how close history was to Ruthie and me.
My father, Ray Dreher, was the first in our branch of the family to go to college, though against his will. He wanted to be outside, building things and working with his cows. But after returning from a stint in the US Coast Guard, my grandmother Lorena insisted that her son take advantage of the GI Bill and enter Louisiana State University. In 1958, while working on a degree in rural sociology, Paw bought sixty-seven acres in Starhill from his great-aunt Em—the asking price was forty dollars an acre—and began small-scale farming on part of the old Simmons place. He also started a job as the parish sanitarian,
which, in a rural parish like West Feliciana, meant he was not only the health inspector, but often the public official who helped impoverished families get basic plumbing into their houses. To look upon my father as a young man—freckled forearms, sun-scorched face, chest the size of an oak trunk, fiery orange cowlicks blazing atop his head—was to understand immediately that he was a man who had no business confined to a desk. It wasn’t in his nature.
Dorothy, Ruthie’s and my mother, moved to town with her family from Mississippi at age eleven, when her father took a job at a sweet potato canning plant. She was nine years younger than Ray. One day in 1962 Paw walked into Robb’s Drugstore, and was startled to learn that the beautiful young woman behind the counter, the one with the tender brown eyes, the sunshiny smile, and the way of speaking that made you feel like you had known her forever, was Dorothy Howard, all grown up. They began courting, and married in the summer of 1964.
Dorothy and Ray—Mam and Paw, as everyone calls them now—built their Starhill house when I was two years old. It sat in an open field at the edge of a pasture where Paw grazed his cattle herd. Paw would raise his children in the country, a mile as the crow flies from where he had grown up. His parents, Murphy and Lorena, still lived in the old cottage on Highway 61, and his brother, Murphy Jr., a real estate broker and world-class joker who once—no kidding—prank-called Ayatollah Khomeini, was raising his family across the road from them.
Starhill was where all the Drehers lived. There were fields and forests everywhere. For us, going to town meant driving the six miles north on Highway 61, in those days a two-lane blacktop, to St. Francisville. Baton Rouge, thirty miles in the other direction, was an exotic journey. New Orleans, an hour and a half farther downriver, might as well have been Paris.
From an early age Ruthie loved the country life. “Ruthie wanted to be with me whenever I was doing something outside,” Paw says. “I never will forget the time when Ruthie was in diapers, and taking a
bottle. I came in the house frustrated. It was in the wintertime, and I had planted sixty acres of rye grass back on the place. Old man John I. Daniel’s cows kept tearing down the fence. His cows were getting in there eating all the rye grass I had for my cows.
“Ruthie heard me telling Mother that I was going to be back there a while fixing fence. She told her Mama that she wanted to go with Daddy, and she wanted Mama to fix her a bottle. She went herself, got her two diapers under her arm, and got in the truck. This was eight thirty in the morning. I was back there till eleven o’clock. That baby never said one time that she wanted to go home. She would kneel at the window watching me, or take a nap on the seat, or call me if she needed a diaper change.”
Wherever Paw went in his pickup truck, Ruthie wanted to go too. Me? Not so much.
“If I didn’t take her, she’d be mad at me. You? You didn’t give a damn,” he says, laughing. “You were watching TV or reading. Me, the kind of man I was, I wanted you to be outside, with me.”
Most of all I preferred to be with Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda, technically my great-great-aunts and the last of the Simmonses. The sisters, born in the final decade of the nineteenth century, were in their seventies by the time I came along. They lived together in a tumbledown shack at the end of a gravel road that ran through a pecan orchard near our house. That tin-roofed wood cabin, framed by sweet olive trees and enclosed by groves and gardens, was, like C. S. Lewis’s enchanted wardrobe, a doorway into another world.
I now know that Lois and Hilda—whose father, recall, had fought in the Civil War—were the most extraordinary people I will probably ever meet. As a little boy, though, they were just Loisie—rhymes with “choicey”—and Mossie (Hilda married Ashton Moss, who died young). They had grown up in Starhill as strong-willed country girls who loved life on the farm, but who also yearned for adventure. When the United States entered the Great War, the sisters volunteered as Red
Cross nurses. They caught the train at the bottom of the hill near their family home and didn’t stop their journey until they arrived at the Red Cross canteen at Dijon, France.
On many mornings in my early childhood, after Buckskin Bill, the Captain Kangaroo of Baton Rouge, told his loyal TV viewers good-bye from Storyland Cabin, my mother would give me a couple of diapers and let me walk through the orchard to Loisie and Mossie’s place for the day. Sometimes I would stray from the pea-gravel path and walk under the pecan trees, with their faintly tangy musk. In the springtime a spray of white dogwood flowers hung high in a thick grove of trees opposite the pecans, a bunting celebrating the end of winter and marking the border of Loisie and Mossie’s yard.