The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (37 page)

His chin trembled, he wrung his hands together, he looked me straight in the eye, and then my father said: “That I’m a sorrier man than you.”

Sorrier.
It means having regret. But in Southern parlance, it also means morally less worthy.

“But Daddy I hope you understand that I really do want to be back here,” I said. “Because I went away all those years ago, I could come back not out of guilt, but out of love, of my own free choice.”

“I know, son,” he said. “I know. And I appreciate it. What I want to say to you, though, is that I don’t want you to feel trapped by this place. When I’m gone, half of it is going to be yours, and the other half will go to Ruthie’s children. I want you to do whatever you want with it. Did you know it’s the last piece of the old Benjamin Plantation that’s still owned by someone in the family? If you want to keep it up, you have my blessing. If you want to sell it, you also have my blessing. You’re free.”

This conversation was the most graceful thing I have ever experienced. My father, in the twilight of his long life, gave me the greatest gift he could give.

At home that afternoon I told Julie everything that had happened.
She was as stunned as I had been. For myself I had seen the errors one can fall into by placing too much emphasis on career and individual desire at the expense of family and place. But what Paw had done, in part, was to reveal the catastrophic mistake one can make if one makes a false god of family and place.

There has to be balance. Not everyone is meant to stay—or to stay away—forever. There are seasons in the lives of persons and of families. Our responsibility, both to ourselves and to each other, is to seek harmony within the limits of what we are given—and to give each other grace.

“You know,” Julie told me later, “you could not have had that conversation with him if we hadn’t moved back here.”

She was right—and this was an important lesson. Though I talked every day to my mother and father throughout Ruthie’s illness, this was not a truth that could have been revealed over the phone. Nor could it have emerged on one of our short fly-in, fly-out visits. It had to work its way to the surface over time, with patience, and, above all, with presence.

I was now at peace with my father. On the matter of my sister I still did not have peace, and despaired that I ever would.

The breakthrough happened on a hot Sunday afternoon—once again on Mam and Paw’s back porch, after the meal. Matthew provoked a hellacious fight with Lucas, one that ended with us loading the kids into the car and driving home. Back at the house Julie and I stood in the kitchen and laid into Matthew for his constant teasing.

“You can’t see this, son, but you are training your little brother to react that way,” Julie chastised. “He loves you more than you understand, but you keep picking on him. You’ve always treated him like this. That’s why he blows up at you. That’s why he doesn’t trust you.

“If you keep this up,” she pleaded, “the day is going to come when
you’re not going to be able to make it right. He’s going to remember the way you treated him all those years, and he might not have it in him to believe you when you say you’re sorry.”

In a flash it became clear. In some sense I must have trained Ruthie to distrust me and my motives. Because I’ve raised these boys of mine, I knew well how stout and pure Lucas’s heart was, and how fiercely he loves his brother. But I also knew well how much Matthew takes that for granted, because of his nature. Both my sons are smart, but Matthew is also clever, in an intellectual and ironic, even sarcastic, way that makes straightforward Lucas feel confused and taken advantage of.

I phoned Mam and Paw later that afternoon to tell them about our disciplinary conversation with Matthew, and how, to our great frustration, Julie and I have been going at this with our older son for years.

“Did you ever have those talks with me about Ruthie?” I asked.

“
Did
we?!” Paw exclaimed. “All the time! You never learned. It broke our hearts to see what was happening between y’all. And you kept on.”

“It was just like your uncle Murphy did your daddy,” Mam added. “The way he saw it, he was just playing, but it hurt your daddy more than Murphy understood.”

That night at bedtime, with the house dark and quiet, Matthew found me sitting in my leather armchair, working. He inclined and gave me a hug.

“Dad, I’m really sorry for what I did to Lucas today,” he said, and sounded like he meant it.

“Thank you for saying that, baby,” I said. “I need you to think about what Mom said today, about how you’re training Lucas to distrust you. The way you are to Lucas, that was the way I was to Aunt Ruthie. I didn’t think much of it. I wasn’t trying to be mean. But I was mean. Mam and Paw tried to set me straight, but I guess I didn’t take them seriously.

“Aunt Ruthie had a lot of trouble understanding me,” I continued. “You’ve heard me talking to Mom. You know how much this bothers me. Watching you and your brother today, I finally understood that a lot of that is on me.”

“What do you mean?” my son said.

“You know when Mom told you that the day was going to come when it might be impossible for you to make things right? At some point in our relationship, that’s what happened to Aunt Ruthie and me. I can’t say for sure when things went bad, or why, but I’ve got to face the fact that a lot of this is my own doing.”

Matthew looked down, his eyes in shadow.

“Honey, Aunt Ruthie is gone, and I can’t make it right with her,” I said, taking his hand. “She had a chip on her shoulder about me, and she was wrong about that. But your daddy had a lot more to do with putting it there than he realized. Please don’t end up like me, with your brother in the grave and you not able to do a thing except feel bad about what you did, and what you didn’t do.”

“Okay, Dad. Goodnight.” He kissed me on the top of the head, and padded off down the hall to bed. I don’t know if my words will have done any more good than Mam and Paw’s did to me at the same age.

Why did this epiphany about my own culpability in the fate of my relationship with my sister give me so much peace? Because I began life with a sister who loved me so much that she was willing to take the punishment I deserved for being cruel to her. How might things have been different between us if I had been more decent to her when we were children?

I was not an unkind brother in adulthood, but I wasn’t around much either to show my sister how I had matured. As our father did, Ruthie saw the world through fixed ideas; once she convinced herself she had someone figured out, she was not open to revising her judgment. With regard to her brother, this was her tragedy.

And with regard to my sister, here is mine: the first fourteen years
of her life she spent shared with me, during which time I provided her with ample evidence to justify her verdict on my character. And my decades-long absence allowed that childhood narrative to cloud her judgment and harden her heart.

I spoke to Ruthie in my prayers that evening, confessing my sorrow over the way I treated her as a child, and asking her forgiveness. I have faith that from her place in heaven, with her nature perfected by the love of our merciful God, she gave it to me. And so, I was finally at peace.

One day in May the mobile phone in Mike’s pocket buzzed. It was the monument company, telling them they were going to deliver Ruthie’s headstone the next morning, May 15. It was fitting; had Ruthie lived, that would have been her forty-third birthday.

The two men showed up just before ten a.m., as planned. I drove up right behind them and saw Mike standing in the shade—it was a hot morning—in a T-shirt and jeans, watching the pair turn the earth at the head of his wife’s grave, preparing it for the dark granite stone. I walked down the hill toward Mike, careful not to step in one of the fire ant mounds dotting the neatly trimmed grass lawn. The subtropical sun was already so fierce that I broke a sweat in the half a minute it took me to reach Mike.

“Mike, if you’d rather be alone, tell me,” I said. “I just didn’t want you to be by yourself this morning.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

Mam and Johnette Rettig drove up and joined us, and then Paw stopped by in his pickup, on the way home from his doctor. He stood at the top of the hill, leaning on his cane, and said he didn’t think he could stay. We waved him off. Johnette said good-bye as well, leaving just Mam, Mike, and myself, and the workmen.

The two workmen, the younger one black, the older one white,
were soaked with sweat by the time they heaved the headstone into place. They wiped their faces, then stood by us at the foot of Ruthie’s grave. The monument read:

LEMING

“Ruthie”

LOIS RUTH DREHER

MAY 15, 1969

SEPTEMBER 15, 2011

BELOVED DAUGHTER, SISTER, FRIEND WIFE, TEACHER, MOTHER

“Today was her birthday,” said the young black man. “That’s something, ain’t it? Sound like she was a good woman.”

“She was,” said Mike.

I looked at the black man. He was crying. Mike thanked them for their work, they said good-bye, and drove away.

Mike, Mam, and I stood alone at the foot of Ruthie’s grave. Then I recited the Lord’s Prayer, and Psalm 23. We remained there quietly for a moment, then Mam tapped me to indicate that we should leave.

“I love you, buddy,” Mam said to Mike. “Thank you for making her life so happy.”

We walked up the hill, got into my car, and drove away, leaving Mike there alone with his grief and loss. By then there was no shade left in the cemetery. How long he remained in the scorching sun that morning before going home, I don’t know. For eight months Mike had been in the fire, unreachable. But it had not consumed him. Quietly, faithfully, he endured. Ruthie, who knew what this man was made of better than anyone, would not have been surprised.

Never would I have imagined that I would spend the morning of my little sister’s forty-third birthday in the graveyard, watching workmen heave her tombstone into place. But nobody ever thinks about
these things when they’re young. Nobody thinks about limits, and how much we need each other. But if you live long enough, you see suffering. It comes close to you. It shatters the illusion, so dear to us, of self-sufficiency, of autonomy, of control.
Look, a wife and mother, a good woman in the prime of her life, dying from cancer.
It doesn’t just happen to other people. It happens to your family. What do you do then?

The insurance company, if you’re lucky enough to have insurance, pays your doctors and pharmacists, but it will not cook for you when you are too sick to cook for yourself and your kids. Nor will it clean your house, pick your kids up from school, or take them shopping when you are too weak to get out of bed. A bureaucrat from the state or the insurance company won’t come sit with you, and pray with you, and tell you she loves you. It won’t be the government or your insurer who allows you to die in peace, if it comes to that, because it can assure you that your spouse and children will not be left behind to face the world alone.

Only your family and your community can do that.

Because of our own mutual brokenness, the considerable affection Ruthie and I had for each other did not penetrate either of our hearts as it ought to have done. But through Abby, Tim, Laura, Big Show, John Bickham, the barefoot pallbearers, and everyone else in the town who held our family close, and held us up when we couldn’t stand on our own two feet, I was able to see the effect of Ruthie’s love, given and returned, in steadfast acts of ordinary faith, hope, and charity. The little way of Ruthie Leming is the plainest thing in the world, something any of us could choose. And yet so few of us do.

In the way Ruthie embraced her suffering, and through the compassion of the good people who carried her to the end, I was able to feel for the first time in nearly thirty years a profound and overwhelming affection for this place, and gratitude for what the people who stayed behind held in trust for me. In the quiet drama of my little sister’s life
and death in a sleepy river town, I experienced the power of love to make the entire world new.