The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (30 page)

What did this mean for my kids and me, so far from our family, our people, and the South?

There are so many opportunities for them in the North
said the voice in my head. And that is true. What I could see now was the deeper, unquantifiable cost of these opportunities to my children and myself. Thanks to Ruthie, I now saw that I had the opportunity to be a part of something extraordinary. I had the opportunity to raise my children around their extended family and among the people who loved Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Mike, and Mam and Paw. I had the opportunity to serve my family, and to serve the people who served my family in their time of need. I had the chance to help Hannah with her French, and could give my Lucas the opportunity to take to the woods with Uncle Mike. (“Daddy, if we ever lived here, I would want to go deer hunting with Uncle Mike,” Lucas had said that week. “I think he would like that because he likes me.”) Two weeks before Ruthie died I left the Templeton Foundation to sign on as a senior editor with
The American Conservative
magazine. I could work from wherever there was high-speed Internet access and a nearby airport.

A new life opened itself up before Julie and me. But we had to choose.

Julie and I had been talking around this topic all week, and when we had a moment alone at Mam’s kitchen table, I said it out loud to her: “Are we really thinking of moving to St. Francisville?”

“We really are,” she said, and grinned nervously.

“Do you think we should?” I asked.

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I do. Mike and those girls need us.”

“Mam and Paw need us,” I said.

“They do. It just doesn’t seem right, honey, for us to go back up there and leave all these people hurting.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

I told Julie I couldn’t imagine the kind of life in which I called Mam and Paw to see how everybody was doing, and being so far away and unable to help. It was hard enough to do when Ruthie was sick, but I had no choice then. My job was in Philly. Thanks to the magazine, I had a choice now.

“But what about you and the homeschool co-op?” I added.

“Well, it won’t be easy,” she said. “I love teaching, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’m never going to be able to find friends like those women in the co-op. I feel like I’ve helped build something up, and now we’re going to pull out again. And the kids are going to miss their friends.”

My face fell. Here I go again. The guy who uproots his wife and kids for the second time in two years.

“But think of what we would be moving to,” Julie said. “Our kids would get to know their grandparents. We don’t know how long Mam and Paw have. Any time with them is a gift for our kids, and a gift to them, too. We can be there to help Mike, and to get to know Claire and Rebekah. Besides I love these people here. They’ve been so good to us.”

“I know,” I said. “They make me want to be better. We’ve never lived anywhere but a big city, though. Do you think we can make it here?”

“I think we’ve had a chance to see what matters in life,” Julie said. “I don’t know about you, but the way I’m thinking right now, the question
is not, ‘Should we move to St. Francisville?’ but ‘Why shouldn’t we move to St. Francisville?’ ”

I looked at my wife with wide eyes, and a “you’re-so-crazy” smile. Little more than a week earlier, when we were swanning around the grounds of that gorgeous Bucks County farmhouse, this idea would have struck us as ridiculous. But now it was the sanest thing in the world.

We talked about it a bit more, and were both struck that this potential move felt not like a burden we would take up in noble self-sacrifice, but as a blessing, even a privilege. It wasn’t our duty to move South; it was an opportunity.

“It’s like this,” Julie said. “We have the chance to do something really good and meaningful. How often does this happen in life? I don’t think we should pass it up.”

“Me neither,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

“Let’s. And let’s not wait around, either.”

On our last morning in St. Francisville Julie had to go by the school board office in town with paperwork for Ruthie’s estate. I rode with her. While Julie was in a back office taking care of business, I caught up with Al Lemoine, a former teacher of mine. He’s now a West Feliciana schools official.

“When are y’all heading back to Philly?” Al asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “But you never know. We might move back. Julie and I were looking online last night for rental housing here, but there’s such a bad housing shortage I don’t know what we’d do.”

“You know, that Bankston house just down the street came on the market a couple of days ago,” Al said. “You ought to go look at it.”

What?!

“When Julie comes out, tell her where I’ve gone,” I said, and shot out the door.

Two blocks away, at the other end of Fidelity Street, stood a stately
old house with a deep front porch and a big, shady beech tree in the front yard. It was magnificent. I called the number on the “For Rent” sign and talked to Kathy Bankston, who managed the house with her husband, Davis. They raised their kids there, but had recently moved out to another family house in Starhill.

“Give me ten minutes and I’ll be there,” she said.

By the time Kathy arrived Julie had made her way down Fidelity. Kathy showed us the house and disclosed the rental terms. The house belonged to her father-in-law and mother-in-law, Walter and Puddin Bankston, who live on the same block. Walter and Puddin are old friends of my father’s.

While Kathy waited outside Julie and I stood in the kitchen and talked. This house, smack in the middle of the historic district, was perfect—just the right size for our family. And it had a front porch where I could imagine myself sipping bourbon and putting the world to rights.

“I think we should do this,” I said.

“I think we should too,” Julie replied.

We both felt the grace around us, pushing us forward.

We stepped back out onto the front porch and told Kathy we would like to start a conversation about renting the house. She said she was going to have to talk to Walter, and we said we had to see about tying up some loose ends in Philadelphia before we could commit. But things looked promising. She would be in touch.

On the drive back to Starhill Julie and I, dazed but giddy, kept asking ourselves,
How did that happen?

A week later we talked to Walter, settled the terms, and officially rented the house on Fidelity Street. Walter was incredibly gracious, saying it was good to know the house would have people in it from a good family.

“Your daddy and my wife, Puddin, were classmates all through
school,” he told me. “He raised her 4-H Club hog for her when they were children, and she won first place.”

I had interviewed Puddin for a newspaper article years earlier about the time she spent as a child in The Myrtles, a plantation house in town said to be one of America’s most haunted houses. Puddin, whose given name is Alice, is the daughter of the late Davis Folkes, a Louisiana state senator and dear friend of my late grandfather Murphy Dreher Sr., whom he called “Mercy” because he couldn’t quite say the name right. The old gents spent their last years sitting together every day on a bench outside a real estate office downtown, talking, listening, watching, and being with each other in the town they had shared all their long lives.

When we returned to Philadelphia we broke the news to our friends that we were moving to Louisiana. We made sure to explain that we weren’t moving away from something bad—we loved them, and we loved our Philly life—but toward something good. We expected a lot of
Green Acres
jokes and bourgeois-bohemian ribbing about how hard it would be to live in a town without a Thai restaurant and an organic market, but the reactions were not at all what I expected. Our decision occasioned a number of e-mails and personal conversations, some of which were startlingly intimate, even painful.

Some told me stories about how isolated they felt, even in the city, and how lonely they are for community. Others talked about how much they envy me having a place like St. Francisville to go back home to; their families moved around so much that there’s no anchorage in which they can find safe harbor. Still others expressed sorrow at how much they want what the people in St. Francisville have, but how very far they are from being able to get it. One friend living in Washington, DC, said that despite his broad social network, he couldn’t think of a
single person he’d trust enough to authorize to pick his kid up from day care in the event of an emergency. Another friend spoke to me with disarming bluntness about the loneliness and helplessness he and his wife are going through.

“Everything I’ve done has been for career advancement. Go for the money, the good jobs. And we have done well. But we are alone in the world,” he said. “Almost everybody we know is like that. My family is all over the country. My kids only call if they want something. People like us, when we get old, our kids can’t move back to care for us if they wanted to because we all go off to some golf resort to retire. This is the world we have made for ourselves. I envy you that you get to escape it.”

Our friend Edie Varnado, who lives in the country outside of McComb, Mississippi, and makes soap for a living, wrote to encourage Julie and me. She told us that she and her husband stayed in Mississippi in part to be close to her folks. Her brother moved to New York City. One night, over dinner, Edie’s father said to her, “Even with everything you have, or will have, to deal with, you have the better part.”

She laughed gently at that, but her father looked at her seriously and said, “You really have.” As the years went by she saw her father was right. Her brother carries with him his own mythology of all the hurts he experienced as a child. Edie had the time and the luxury to become reacquainted with her parents as adults, as real people, for better and for worse. Edie was able to be with both her mother and father when they died, holding their hands and reading the Psalms.

“It’s hard, big, real, and dirty,” Edie wrote of what lay before Julie and me.

And by Christmas it would be ours.

When we told the children that we were moving to Louisiana in December, that they would have Christmas with Mam and Paw, and Uncle Mike, and the cousins, Lucas pumped his fist in the air and yelled, “Boo-yah!” There would be Mam and Paw in my children’s future, and Uncle Mike, and cousins. There would be crawfish, and
jambalaya, and deer hunting, and LSU football, and all the good things that I had growing up (and, I hoped, fewer of the bad things).

Late one night this e-mail landed in my in-box:

I just wanted to tell you how happy your mother and I are to know that you and your family are coming home.

I have prayed for this to happen for years. Now it is finally happening. I realize that it could not happen before, but now my prayers are being answered. We love you and your family, son, and welcome home.

Love, Daddy.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Narrow Path

There are better ways to see America than from the cab of a twenty-six-foot Penske rig, but that’s how I rolled home the week before Christmas. Julie and the kids corkscrewed themselves into her jam-packed minivan, while our dog Roscoe and I commandeered the big truck. The last time I’d driven a truck between the Atlantic seaboard and St. Francisville I was twenty years younger. By the time we crossed the Maryland state line, my back could tell the difference.

I hadn’t been sleeping well in the nights leading up to the move. One night, just before dawn, I dreamed that I was standing in the living room of our Philadelphia apartment, surrounded by boxes, wrapping paper, and all the accoutrements of our impending move. I heard the door open downstairs and someone walking up the stairs. It was Ruthie. She was wearing a white sweater with a collar gathered close around her neck, and carrying a tin of muffins.

“I thought you were dead!” I said.

“Oh, I am,” she said sweetly. “I just wanted to tell you that everything is going to be all right.”