The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (3 page)

That funeral was the first time most of us kids had seen death up close. At some point before the service started, one of the Angels found the courage to step into the aisle at the funeral home chapel, and go forward to pay respects to our teammate. A gaggle of six- to nine-year-old boys walked forward and saw that beautiful kid, Roy Dale, dead in his coffin. They buried that Starhill boy with his glove on his hand and his uniform on his back. This may have been the nicest set of clothes Roy Dale owned. That night I heard Paw and his friend Pat Rettig, the other coach, out on our back porch, talking. I stood by the screen door to listen, and realized these grown men were weeping in the dark. I didn’t know how to take it, and went away.

The baseball seasons came, and the baseball seasons went, and the ballpark was the stage for other childhood dramas. One night, after a Babe Ruth game, Mam was helping a friend close the concession stand at the big field. “You kids were out on the field there running,” she says. “Remember, Ruthie was competitive with you, but she wouldn’t let anybody say or do anything to her brother. So we were in there
packing up chips, and Gerald Bates said, ‘Oh my God, y’all, look.’ These two boys had jumped on you. Ruthie was a feisty little thing. She ran through the gate, grabbed one of those boys by the neck, and started whipping him while you turned to the other boy.”

For all our sibling rivalry Ruthie and I got along most of the time and enjoyed growing up together in Starhill. We played ball together in the yard, often with some permutation of neighborhood kids: the Wilsons, the Morgans, the Rettigs, and the Shipps. We fished, worked in the garden, rode our go-cart and Paw’s Honda three-wheeler, and swam in the town pool while everybody’s mom sat under the shaded benches, smoking and chatting away in the heat of the day. Sometimes the grown-ups would load a mess of kids into the back of somebody’s pickup, and off we’d go to the creek.

We had cats and dogs and chickens, and cows for a time, and horses too. We even spent a weekend one chilly autumn with a blind calf bedded down by our fireplace. Mam took in every stray animal she could, including a baby owl she and Paw found abandoned in the swamp during the flood of 1973. When she was in elementary school, Ruthie doted on Little Bit, an ugly little mutt that looked like a bleached haggis with legs and a splotch of brown gravy. As far as I was concerned, Little Bit existed to give me the opportunity to tease Ruthie.

Somehow I discovered that Little Bit hated it when anyone sang “Happy Birthday.” It made her howl. “Happy birthday to you-u-u,” I sang, and the pitiful creature would sit on her haunches, throw her head back, and bay.

“Dad-dee!” Ruthie yelled.

“Happy birthday to you-u-u!”

“Owoooooooooo! Owooooooo!”

“Dad-DEE!”

“Happy birthday dear Li-i-ittle Bi-i-i-it—”

“Owooooooo!”

“You stupid idiot!” she would say, and then her fat little fists flew.

This script played itself out a lot, only varying when she skipped the appeal to parental authority, and went straight for the pummeling.

Little Bit loved to follow the big dogs from the neighborhood when they tracked deer through the woods. But she was so short and stumpy that she couldn’t keep up with them. Once she failed to return from running deer. Ruthie couldn’t stop crying over it. Late one chilly night Paw and Mam put us into the cab of his pickup and we rode to the back end of the place to see if we could find her. Paw heard the dog howling in a creek bottom. While we waited in the truck with Mam, he went into the dark, rattlesnake-infested woods, climbed down a steep, twenty-foot embankment into the creek bed, picked up the cold, frightened, lost dog, and brought her in.

Ruthie was overjoyed. Little Bit almost certainly wouldn’t have survived the night if Paw hadn’t done that. She would have died of exposure, or more likely a coyote would have killed and eaten her.

Our family’s social life revolved around neighborhood fish fries, crawfish boils, and barbecues. Our fathers hunted and fished together; our mothers traded stories as they made potato salad for the barbecues and fish fries. There was something particular about Mam and Paw that made our house a center of the community. They didn’t have a lot of money, but there was always room for more at our table. People dropped by constantly, and stayed for dinner—and sometimes late into the night, even during the week. They wanted to be around Mam and Paw, who were boundlessly hospitable.

Our family was happy and secure. In the winter months Paw got up before sunrise to build a roaring fire in the living room fireplace. He went out and warmed Mam’s school bus up, then came inside, unwrapped store-bought honey buns, topped them with a generous pat of butter, and slid them into the toaster oven. Ruthie and I would come in for breakfast to those gooey treats. Most nights when we were small,
we crawled into Paw’s lap, him sitting in his big recliner, each of us nestling into a crook of his arm. He smelled like tobacco and bourbon, if he’d had a drink before dinner. Mam brought him a cup of hot black coffee and we would lie there in his arms, talking about our day. I never saw any of my friends do that with their dads.

Ruthie and I knew we were in a special family. Paw was a strict disciplinarian, but he didn’t have to do it often because we had such respect for him and for Mam. He was the kind of man you wanted to please because he seemed so strong, so wise, and so good. It seemed to us that there was nothing he couldn’t do, or didn’t know.

We hero-worshipped him, Ruthie and I did. And this became a problem for me when everything in my life fell apart in the summer of 1981, not long after I turned fourteen. A group of kids from our school, including Ruthie and me, took a trip to the beach. Before this vacation I had been one of the most popular kids in my class, from the time I started school until then. But for some reason, a handful of kids a year older than me decided that I was going to be the mark on this trip.

I wandered one afternoon into a hotel room where the kids were hanging out with two of our adult chaperones. Before I knew what was happening, several of the older boys, including football players, had me down on the hotel room floor, threatening to take my pants off in front of the girls standing on the beds giggling. The girls, especially two popular ones at the center of the preppy clique, egged them on. I thrashed and flailed and begged them to let me go. I called out to the chaperones, the mothers of classmates, and begged them to help me.

They stepped over me, lying pinned to the floor, and left the room.

The gang let me go without stripping me naked—they probably only intended to give me a good scare—and I fled down the hall, into my room. I wanted to catch the next flight out, but had to endure the next few days, hoping that it wouldn’t happen again. Ruthie, who had been off at the beach with one of her friends, never knew what had happened, and wouldn’t have understood what it meant to me
if I had told her. I made it home without further incident, but the world looked very different to me after that. To this day my mother remembers a sea change: “I knew something had happened on that trip. I didn’t know what, because you wouldn’t tell me. It was in your eyes.”

When school started that fall, word had spread that I was now untouchable. Boys who had been my friends since elementary school now wouldn’t talk to me in the hallway. Older boys shoved me on occasion. The preppy queen bees made a point of insulting me every day. By no means was I the only one they treated like this. There was nothing that anybody could do about it, or so it seemed. The thing that killed me, though, was how my best friends literally dropped me overnight. Cutting a boy who had been their close pal most of their lives was the price required to join the cool kids’ club, and gain access to their booze, cigarettes, and social status. It felt like the end of the world to me. I doubt it troubled them one bit.

School became little more than a daily opportunity to confront what a piece of stinking garbage I was, and how powerless I was to make any of it stop. The misery continued throughout my tenth-grade year. None of this made sense.

During this time I fought often with my father. I honestly can’t remember what we argued over, but I remember him being frustrated with my outcast status. Both he and my mother worried about me, but they didn’t know what to do, and panicked. It was especially hard for my strong-willed father, who could not empathize with a son whose way of seeing the world was increasingly alien to his own. In one of our yelling matches Paw accused me of bringing all this on myself for being so obstinately strange. And that’s when I knew how alone I was.

I turned at the time to the woman who had been my ninth-grade English teacher, Nora Marsh. With her tightly braided curly red hair, her Yankee accent, and fondness for rock and roll, Nora stood out among the teachers. Descended from an old West Feliciana family, she had grown up in Chicago but moved to the parish to live in and care for
Weyanoke, her family’s antebellum plantation house, and spend weekends at her place in New Orleans. She was fun, smart, and—catnip to a teenager like me—had a “Question Authority” bumper sticker on her Chevy Citation. She became a mentor to several of us bookish outcasts. Nora knew how hard we had it in school, and served as a cheerleader for us, and a messenger of hope. What she told us, mostly by her example, was that we were okay, that we were normal, that loving books and ideas was nothing to be ashamed of, and that, honest to God, things weren’t always going to be like this.

One Friday in the autumn of 1982 several of us were hovering around Nora, waiting to go to a pep rally when we heard an announcement on the school intercom. Representatives from a new residential high school for juniors and seniors were going to be in a particular classroom if anybody wanted to meet them. What was this? We had to check it out.

The idea behind the new Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts was to bring academically gifted juniors to a refurbished high school in Natchitoches, a town in north-central Louisiana, put us up in unused college dorms, and teach us college-level courses. It was to be a state-funded public boarding school for Louisiana gifted and talented students. An escape! Only two could be accepted from West Feliciana; three of us wanted to go. Nora helped us all take the tests and gather our transcripts and recommendations. As exciting as the academics were, I wanted more than anything to leave, to get out, to put as much distance between my hometown and myself as I could.

One day, near the end of the spring semester, I stopped by the post office in my old blue Chevy pickup before heading to my after-school job at the grocery store. I went in, opened the box, and there it was: a fat letter from the Louisiana School. I took it back outside, sat in my truck, and trembling, opened the envelope to learn my fate.

I was in.

Paw was against my going. I had no business leaving home at
sixteen, he thought, and God knows what kind of nonsense I could get into up there. There was nothing wrong with me that more effective discipline couldn’t fix. Mam did not want me to go away so early either. But she could also see how broken I was, how lost, and how miserable. She fought with Paw for his permission to let me go. She finally got it.

And so, in August, the day finally came for me to leave home. With our pickup full of my worldly goods, we met my old friend Jason McCrory, the other kid from our school to win a slot in the inaugural LSMSA class, and boarded the car ferry across the Mississippi together. Jason and I stood on the bow of the boat, saying nothing. I thought about what I was leaving behind. The intolerance, the social conformity, the cliquishness, the bullying. At sixteen this is what I thought small-town life was and always would be. There, on the far side of the river, was the rest of my life, straight ahead. I had no intention of looking back.

CHAPTER TWO

“Forever and a Day”

When I set out for Natchitoches, I left my little sister behind in St. Francisville. This was the fork in the road for us, the moment in our lives in which we diverged. Neither of us could have known it then, because each of us had begun a joyful new chapter of change that would determine the courses of our lives. I was finally among my tribe now in Natchitoches, and gaining the confidence that comes with knowing that one has a place in the world. For Ruthie the world brightened because of a boy from Texas they called Blue Eyes.

Mike Leming moved to town in 1980, when he was twelve. Ruthie, then a fifth grader, came home from school one day to say there was a new boy in school. Mike was a year older than Ruthie, which meant they didn’t see a lot of each other until they were in high school together. When we were growing up, kids in the first through sixth grades attended Bains Elementary, a flat-roofed, one-story red brick building on the Bains Road, three miles north of St. Francisville. It was one of those desultory 1970s modern schoolhouses that might have been designed by the architect dad on
The Brady Bunch
, and which looked like 1966’s idea of the future. Mike came to town the year West Feliciana High School opened just up the low, sloping hill from Bains. It too was a flat-roofed modern building, but it was built
into the side of a hill, and after Bains, this shiny new school imparted the approximate euphoria of new car smell. What’s more every single classroom was air-conditioned. Every one! No more scheming to get assigned to the desk that was closest to the classroom wall fan. In the West Feliciana school universe, this was what it meant to move up in the world.