The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (9 page)

“We were like,
Lord
!” Abby snorted. “After that we would all say, ‘We
love
us some Ruthie Leming.’ ”

Until a few years ago you had to take a car ferry to cross the Mississippi River between St. Francisville and the town of New Roads. Once Jennifer Bickham complained to Ruthie that she had missed the ferry returning to St. Francisville and had to wait for it to slowpoke back across the river.

“Ruthie said that if she had been delayed like that, she would have used that time to make out with her husband,” Jennifer says, laughing. “That changed my perspective on being delayed.”

Even though she was a stickler for rules—she once chastised Ashley for opening a beer in the car within sight of their Florida beach hotel—there was one phrase that could make Ruthie, as long as she was with Abby, defy convention:
I double-dog dare you.

Down on the Starhill Riviera a sixty-foot sand bluff overlooks the water and the sandbars of Thompson Creek. At the top big trees with exposed roots from erosion perch precariously on the edge, one heavy rainstorm away from losing their grip and plunging into the bottom below.

“I threatened all the kids, and the parents too, that I damn sure didn’t want to see anybody climbing that bluff. It was just sand,” says Ronnie Morgan, the host of those creek party weekends.

“I went to the camp to get some more beer, and when I got back, there’s Ruthie and Abby about twenty feet from the top. Somebody had made the mistake of double-dog daring them to climb up and touch the roots. I told them to get their asses on down, or I’d whip ’em both,” he recalls, laughing. “You get Ruthie and Abby together, no telling what would happen.”

One year the Women’s Service League, the parish’s most socially prestigious philanthropic organization, held its annual gala at a large, historic home. Everyone came in formal attire. The house was old and peculiar, and had tunnels honeycombing it. Abby; her father, Tom; Mike; and another partygoer decided to explore one of the tunnels. They got on their hands and knees, and crawled through, single file, with Tom bringing up the rear.

“The tunnel came out in a bedroom,” Abby says. “We saw a woman and two men in the bed!”

They skittered out backward. It was that kind of night.

At the end of the party Abby, who is in the Women’s Service League, was supposed to help clean up.

“My sister Amanda was ticked at me because I was drunk, and was supposed to be helping,” she says. “It was cold, but somebody double-dog dared me to jump into the swimming pool. I was in my nice dress, but I looked at Ruthie and said, ‘Come on.’ ”

“She took her shoes off, and in we jumped. Next thing you know, here comes Mike and my date, right behind us.”

That was Ruthie Leming: good, but not goody-goody.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost

I have not always been a tourist in my sister’s life. Once, while I was still a young man and wrestling with some big questions, I considered returning home to Louisiana for good. Though I had been living and working in Washington for only a year when my niece Hannah was born, I wanted to be a part of this new family that Ruthie and Mike were creating. I also wanted to be at peace with my father.

My life in Washington was, for Paw, the ultimate expression of rejection, for if I loved him, surely I would want to stay near him. He couldn’t credit the legitimacy of my professional ambition and personal desire to experience the world beyond our place. Nor could he understand my need to test myself and my abilities as a writer in ways that I could not if I stayed close to home. Rather he saw my decision to leave for the East Coast as a decisive statement that I loved myself more than I loved him and the land and the patrimony he had reserved for his children. What he could not see, what he would not see, was that he could, at times, be so overbearing in his expectations that he made it difficult for me to live around him without feeling crushed.

In 1993, when Ruthie and Mike had Hannah, I lay awake in my Capitol Hill bed at night and reconsidered my position. Maybe Paw had a point about the importance of family. I certainly had not expected to feel the gravity of that newborn babe, pulling me out of my comfortable faraway orbit. I hoped that maybe my absence had made him reconsider his relationship with me, and what he would be willing to concede, so we could live together peaceably. Surely.

Our arguments had started comically small. When I was a teenager he liked to rib me about my music.

Paw: “Why do they call ’em the Thompson Twins if there’s three of ’em?”

Me: (Silence. Slow burn.)

Paw: “Why’s that one call himself Boy George? Duddn’t look like a boy to me.”

Me: (Silence.)

Paw: “What the hell’s a Talking Head, anyway?”

By college, the subject matter and the temperature of our disagreements had escalated. One night we had a bitter argument about something, probably a political matter; politics had been an especially sore spot since I came home in the spring of my freshman year and said, nitwittishly and with the kind of smug ardor only undergraduates can muster, “Daddy, I think you should know that I’m a socialist.”

Yes, I said that.

Anyway the key part of that night’s argument went something like this:

Me: “I don’t agree with you.”

Paw: “Are you calling me a liar?”

Me: “No, I’m just saying that I don’t think you’re right about this.”

Paw: “But I’m telling you the truth!”

Me: “It’s not a matter of factual truth. You are giving me your opinion. I don’t share it.”

Paw: “Do you think your own father would lie to you?”

I well remember the confusion and anger on his face that night, and my despair at the conclusion that there really was no way to bridge this gap. My father is one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever known, but this wasn’t a matter of intellection. This was emotional. To my father for me to disagree with him on important matters was not simply to be mistaken. It was to reject him and what he stood for. You can imagine the hurt he suffered. You can imagine the frustration I endured.

And yet the only way for me not to hurt him would be for me to yield to his unreasonable demands. Hadn’t he sacrificed his own wishes, and his own vocation, out of an overwhelming sense of duty to his mother and father? Paw had not wanted to go to college; he thought he belonged at trade school, where he could improve his mechanical skills, which were his passion. More than that, though, he didn’t want to disappoint his family. They came first, and to live otherwise would be an abdication of duty, a vice. In his mind that was the way things ought to be.

So in the autumn of 1993 I quit my job and moved back to St. Francisville, and house-sat for my old teacher Nora Marsh in Weyanoke, her antebellum house, far out in the West Feliciana countryside. The plan was that I would live off my savings, spend time with my family, read, and look into applying to graduate school. I was looking forward to living alone in the big old house, with no television, no newspaper, and no neighbors, as the setup would afford me long stretches of silence and contemplation and prayer. I was in a far more spiritual state of mind in those days than I had ever been. I had recently completed a
period of spiritual exploration that had led me from the Methodist faith of my father to Roman Catholicism.

Three weeks before Hannah was born I had been formally received into the Roman Catholic Church, completing a journey of conversion that began nine years earlier. You could say that my mother inadvertently put me on the road to Rome. Back when I was seventeen years old and happily ensconced in boarding school in Natchitoches, Mam phoned my dorm to give me spectacular news: I was going to Europe that summer! She split the cost of a raffle ticket with a friend, and won the grand prize: a trip for two to Europe. I was to take Mam’s seat on the tour bus.

This is how I put my feet on the Champs-Élysées for the first time, with Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda in my heart. Believe it or not, though, that is not what stayed with me about this holiday. On the way to Paris from London, the coach stopped in a town around sixty miles southwest of the French capital. Our group was going to see a famous Gothic church, they told us. Fine by me. By then I had shed the small-town faith in which I had been raised. Being a seventeen-year-old man of the world, I was fairly confident that God did not exist, but I was pleased, of course, to look at beautiful churches.

This is the untutored boy from the sticks who ambled unaware into Chartres Cathedral, one of the great architectural treasures of Western civilization. The complexity, the beauty, the sheer genius of the thing staggered me. I moved past the huge statues of biblical patriarchs, carved into the jamb of the west portal door, and into the narthex, staring gape-mouthed at the soaring arches in the church vault. Who had built this? How had they done it? And in the thirteenth century! It looked like those thin ribs held aloft tons of limestone, and, miraculously, those vast stained-glass windows, great sheets of reds, greens, blues, and golds, glowing in the sunlight like rubies, emeralds, and sapphires in the firmament, forming portraits of Jesus, His mother, the
prophets, and the saints. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the glory of this building, and the overwhelming scale and intensity of its beauty.

I walked out of that cathedral a different man, though I wouldn’t understand what Chartres had done for me until years later, when I completed a religious conversion that began the moment I first stood outside the west entrance and beheld the stone Christ Pantocrator, the Ruler of the Cosmos, blessing the pilgrims who passed beneath him through the doors of a kind of paradise. The bus drove on to Paris, but I recall not one thing about the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower, ate a real French baguette, or much else about my maiden voyage to this city that figured so prominently in my boyhood imagination. I only remember Chartres. It was, to me, a message from another time and place, and a mystery. I did not know what it said, not yet, but I wanted to find out. What kind of religious vision can inspire men to build a temple like that to their God? What is God saying about Himself through the stone and the glass of that cathedral? What is he saying to
me
?

To be sure I did not become more religiously observant on that trip, or back home for my senior year of high school. What happened was that Chartres put me onto something. I was still a teenage boy full of himself and longing to drink beer and chase girls, but in Chartres I had encountered something that for all its stony mass and solidity, seemed to me a thin veil over a higher reality. It sounds strange but I felt…
judged
by Chartres. I had seen it; I couldn’t unsee it. Chartres haunted me, principally because having been there, I could no longer say with any conviction that Christianity was nothing more than middle-class social conformity or a con game for nitwit followers of TV evangelists.

It took almost ten years of running away from Chartres—which is to say, of course, from God—and a prayer answered with such unusual precision and directness that I could not call it a coincidence, before
I accepted in full the call that had been placed on my life in Chartres. I began formal instruction in the Catholic faith during my last few months in Baton Rouge, but completed the process at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC. There Cardinal James Hickey received me into the Catholic faith on Easter Vigil, 1993. My parents, generously, did not mind; they were only happy that I was going to church.

A few months later, back in West Feliciana and living at Weyanoke, I said the rosary often, asking Mary to pray that I would know God’s will, and do it. Things were going well with my family too. I loved seeing them all again, and participating in the joy and togetherness the baby occasioned. As fall gave way to winter I spent evenings visiting with Ruthie and the baby, holding the next generation in my arms, listening to Ruthie’s dreams about motherhood, and resting in the warm glow of family togetherness. Hannah’s advent awakened in me a surprising longing for home, and a sense that I wasn’t fated to live far away, after all. Hope, it is said, is memory plus desire. If that’s true, then the nostalgia those nights at home with my sister and her child evoked for our own childhood, when we lived with a greater sense of harmony, and the yearning to recapture it, kindled a new hope within me—a hope that my wandering days were over.

And then one night in December Paw and I were riding down a country lane when he said something shocking, even life-changing. He said it casually, in no way triumphantly. Understand, his was an expression of gentle gratitude, not mockery: “I’m so glad you came back home, son. You realize now that I was right all along.”

I froze.
Nothing had changed after all.
I had given up a good job in Washington, and left behind a rich life with a community of friends who loved me, to return to a town and a family in which my duty was to know my place. The lesson my father had learned from the tumult of the last ten years was that I had finally surrendered. Maybe he didn’t mean that, exactly, but I was too shocked to ask, afraid that the bond of
peace we had known between us since I’d moved to Washington would be sundered.

That night I tossed in my bed, eaten alive by anxiety. To stay here, I now knew, would mean no peace absent constant surrender to him. Around two I gave up on trying to sleep, dressed myself, and drove my old blue truck into Baton Rouge. I sat in an all-night diner near the LSU campus drinking coffee until it was time for the first mass of the morning at St. Agnes Catholic Church downtown. It was December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, devoted to Mary. I slipped into the church in the darkness before dawn.

I could hear a priest moving around in the back, but otherwise I was the only one there. I slipped into a pew, folded down the kneeler, and began to pray. This wouldn’t do. I left the pew, walked up the center aisle as close to the altar as I could get, knelt at the marble communion rail, and once again prayed.