The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (31 page)

“Thank you for saying that. Will you stay for a while?”

“No, I need to get on back.”

Then I woke up. The dream had been unusually vivid, far more
intense than usual. When I woke up I wasn’t sure if I was still inside the dream or not.

At breakfast I told Julie about the dream. “Of course she brought muffins,” Julie said. “That’s just like Ruthie.”

“Maybe it really was her,” I said. “But I know how much I need to believe everything is going to be okay down there. I might have imagined it. I probably imagined it.”

Matthew stumbled out of his room and trudged to the kitchen for breakfast in his groggy morning manner. When he heard us talking about a dream, he said, “The weirdest thing happened in my room last night. I woke up and felt someone in the room with me, sitting in the chair next to my bed.”

“Who was it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I was facing the wall, and was too scared to turn over and see.”

“Did the presence feel threatening?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It was just watching me.”

“I think that was Aunt Ruthie, checking on you,” I said, and told him what had happened to me during the night.

I kept the dream front to mind as we completed packing. Ruthie’s consoling message remained with me as I bucketed southward, through Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Meridian. I was excited about the new adventure, but also anxious about the challenges. Would we be able to give Mike and the girls what they needed? Would Mam and Paw, reeling from the loss of their daughter, expect more from their son than he could give? Would my children become the collateral damage from my putting romantic notions about community to the test?

Matthew, our eldest, was about to become a teenager, and though he and I are so much alike, our relationship wasn’t what it needed to be. Though I had struggled through my early teen years with my father’s impatience and disapproval, I was on track to repeat some of his mistakes with my son. Matthew is very bright and generally cheerful, but
has a slight case of Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder at the mildest end of the autism spectrum. Though he strikes most people who meet him as an intelligent, polite boy, Matt’s Asperger’s tends to make him rigid and inflexible—a quality that can at times come across as headstrong, petulant, and defiant. Though I was far more tolerant of his eccentricities than Paw was of mine, I still found myself quick to lose patience with him.

“Ruthie always thought you were too hard on Matthew,” Julie had reminded me as we were packing boxes one day. “I need you to be careful about that. This move is going to be especially hard on him.”

“I know,” I said. “I ask her all the time to pray for me, to help me be patient with him.”

What Julie had in mind was how Matt’s condition makes him especially dependent on stability and continuity to maintain emotional balance. Plus Aspies typically lack a sense of emotional subtlety, which means they struggle with social interaction. Matt had finally found a good friend in our Philly neighborhood and now had to tell him good-bye. Moreover he was moving to a town where his father, who was geeky but far more socially adept than he, had left as a teenager because he couldn’t stand the conformity, the intolerance, and the bullying.

Lucas? He would be fine. At seven it was hard on him to leave his Philly friends, but he was keen to live in West Feliciana, around family and the outdoors. Nora was more difficult to read. She turned five a month after Ruthie died. She didn’t seem to understand what leaving Philadelphia for St. Francisville would mean. All she could think about was how she would get to see her grandparents all the time, and now, finally, she would have girl cousins to play with whenever she liked.

Julie’s was a harder case. She agreed to marry me for better or worse, and my career peregrinations had usually been a winning proposition for her. Leaving Dallas, our church community, and her
backyard garden had been punishing, but she landed on her feet in Philly, and threw herself into working with and teaching in the classical homeschool co-op. Julie discovered that she had a real gift, indeed a passion, for teaching grammar. She was so good at it, in fact, that the national classical homeschooling organization with which our co-op was affiliated asked her to travel around Pennsylvania conducting workshops for homeschool teachers. This gratified Julie immensely, and gave her a sense of self-confidence that she had never had.

Now I was asking her to put all that aside and move to my hometown, where all my difficult emotional baggage was stored. Visiting St. Francisville over the years, whenever something about the place would bother either of us, we could always count on the fact that we would be leaving shortly (and truth to tell, our relatives there counted on that too when we got on their nerves). There would be no place to run away to now if things got hard. What’s more Julie had no idea how Claire and Rebekah, who were dealing with the loss of their mother, were going to take the presence of their aunt. Tim Lindsey had warned us, “Lots of times people in grief need to be angry at somebody, and you need to be ready for that somebody to be you.”

What if it was us? Julie was scared of hurting them, and being hurt by them. And yet she wanted to move to Louisiana as much as I did. She loved my family and wanted to serve. She reminded me several times that autumn, as we packed our things, that no matter how hard we feared it would be for us in St. Francisville, it would be harder to stay away from our family when they needed us most.

On the third day of the thirteen-hundred-mile drive we stopped for gas just south of Jackson, Mississippi. I had a Moon Pie for breakfast. It seemed like the thing to do now that we were well and truly back in the South. The big truck lumbered toward Starhill, minivan bringing up the rear, until finally, at half past noon, I juddered to a stop in Mam and Paw’s yard. Lucas made Julie stop the minivan at the end of the driveway so he could run the final hundred yards and leap into the
arms of Mam and Paw, who stood outside waiting. I let the dog out, then walked over to embrace my father, who was crying.

“I’m so glad you’re back, baby,” he said and squeezed me tight. I could hear him softly sobbing on my shoulder. We were standing on exactly the spot where, twenty years ago, he told me good-bye before I drove the moving truck away to Washington, DC.

We spent that night at Mam and Paw’s. The next morning we had our coffee and drove the final six miles into St. Francisville, to the house on Fidelity Street. Big Show turned up with a work crew to unload our stuff. John Bickham turned up too. Show’s crew was getting paid to work, but on his day off John gave his time and labor for free. He floated around the house, a benevolent caretaking presence making sure everything went well. By the afternoon we were all moved in. I returned the truck to the Home Depot in Zachary. Julie picked me up and we drove back to our new home.

Christmas was coming in six days and we still had some presents to buy for the kids. To make matters more challenging Mam had said earlier in the month that she was too sad to make Christmas dinner this year, so Julie and I offered to host it at our place—this, even though we would be living out of boxes. We knew this first Christmas without Ruthie would be hard on her, especially given that Mam’s birthday is on Christmas Eve. We were eager to do whatever we could to ease her burden.

This year Mam and Ruthie’s Christmas Eve tradition of lighting candles in the Starhill cemetery would, sadly, be broken. Neither Mam nor Hannah had it within herself to continue. Mam told me she and Paw were planning to go to services at the Methodist church, and home to bed early. They didn’t feel up to coming by the Dreher family Christmas gathering at my cousin Andy’s place. They wanted to be alone, and quiet, with their grief.

Just after sunset, while Mam and Paw were at church, I drove out to their house to pick up some presents I had stored in Paw’s barn.
Passing the Starhill cemetery I saw hundreds of pinpricks flickering in the darkness, like stardust sprinkled on the thick blanket of night. I guessed that Mam found the strength to uphold the tradition after all.

Half an hour later I was having a drink in Andy’s living room when my mobile phone rang. It was Mam. She sounded distraught.

“Rod, did you see the cemetery?” she said.

“Yes, it was beautiful,” I said. “You did a wonderful job.”

“It wasn’t me, baby,” she said, choking through her tears. “I don’t know who did it. Some kind soul lit the candles tonight. Oh, baby, whoever that was, they’ll never know what they did for me tonight. They’ll never, ever know.”

“My God, Mama, I don’t know what to say.”

“Honey, find out who did that, would you? I have to thank them.”

I told her I would do my best.

A few minutes later Mam called back.

“It was Susan Harvey,” she said. “You remember her? Mr. Buddy Harvey’s daughter? She’s Susan Wymore now. She was the one who did it. Susan. Susan Harvey, God bless her. She will never, ever know what a gift she gave me tonight.”

In the years I had been away Susan would call Mam to ask if she would like some help with the candles, but Mam always declined, telling Susan that she and Ruthie, and Ruthie’s girls, had everything covered. This year when Susan called to offer her help, Paw told her that Mam was too down to do it this year.

“I thought it was important to keep it going,” Susan told me when I called to thank her. Growing up Susan and her sisters lived two fields over from Paw’s parents, who would welcome the Harvey girls into their little white wooden cottage. My grandmother gave them cookies and seeds to feed the birds. The Harvey girls’ older kinfolks, Willis, Fletcher, and Romy, had helped my grandfather build that house by hand after the original cottage burned to the ground when Paw was a boy.

“My twins are buried in that cemetery,” Susan said. “The first year
your Mom and Ruthie did this, they also put out little crosses made of antique nails. They put two crosses there for the twins, one for each one of them, even though they share a grave. The twins were stillborn, and a lot of people don’t know how to act around that. But your Mama and Ruthie, they put two crosses there. To me that acknowledged that the twins were people. I never forgot what your mom did for me.”

“They’ve been dead twenty-one years,” Susan continued. “But you never know when you’re going to wake up one morning and it’ll feel like just yesterday.”

On Christmas Day the Starhill crew arrived at our house on Fidelity Street just after noon. After only six days somehow my tireless Julie had the house looking festive, warm, and welcoming. As Mam, Paw, Mike and his three girls sat down with us to feast on the turkey and ham, I popped the cork on a bottle of ice-cold Prosecco, and poured a glass for all the grown-ups. We lifted our glasses of bubbly wine and drank a toast. “To Ruthie Leming,” I said, and we clinked our glasses.

After dinner everyone migrated to the living room, where Matthew had warmed up the Beatles Rock Band game on the Wii. Our cousins Melanie and Bob Bare came over, along with our musician cousin Emily Branton and her little girl, Ava. The wine flowed generously. Even Mike, who had been so solemn throughout dinner, began to brighten, smile, and sing along with the kids. At one point I went to the kitchen to fetch another bottle of wine, and came back to see a room full of family, all singing the Beatles together.

“ ‘Here comes the sun,’ ” my family sang in unison. “ ‘It’s all ri-i-ight.’ ”

Coming home to the place where I grew up would not be easy, but if I was going to live more like Ruthie, I was obliged to stick it out, come
what may. In this my patron saint, Benedict of Nursia, came to my aid. St. Benedict was a fifth-century Italian monk who more or less founded monasticism in the West. In his famous rule Benedict required his monks take a vow of what he called “stability.” That means that the monastery in which Benedictine monks profess their vows will in most cases be their home for the rest of their lives. St. Benedict considered the kinds of monks who moved from place to place all the time to be the worst of all. They refused the discipline of place and community, and because of that, they could never know humility. Without humility they could never be happy.