The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (21 page)

She was coming to the conclusion, she confided, that happiness matters more than being dutiful. “Why not be happy?” she said. “Why be satisfied with the same old thing? I know life can’t always be about pleasure, but what is wrong with looking for pleasure?”

I knew those thoughts and feelings well. They had been mine when I was her age, rebelling against Paw’s rigid, small-town expectations for me. I had felt guilty enough about my rebellion then, knowing that there was nothing wrong with my contrarian thoughts, but also ashamed that I was disappointing my father, and in turn ashamed for being ashamed. What would it have been like for me if my father, the man against whose granitelike, immovable character the teenage Rod was sharpening himself, had been stricken with terminal cancer? Chances are I would have been as fraught with self-doubt and anxiety as Hannah was.

On that visit to Philadelphia I tried to talk with her about her mom’s disease, to find out what she knew, and what she thought about it. Very little, as it happened. She made it bluntly clear that she neither wanted to think about it nor talk about it. That’s how Hannah and her sisters
wanted it. That’s how Ruthie wanted it. That’s how it was going to be, Uncle Rod.

The girls were sheltered, but Mam and Paw were not. They knew the odds. They had to watch their only daughter waste away, knowing that she didn’t grasp the full measure of the danger she was in. They were not children. They believed in miracles too, but they also knew, in a way Ruthie, Mike, and their children did not, how badly their daughter needed one.

Cancer is a family disease, and after the diagnosis the pain spread beyond the Leming household. Night after night Paw sat in his armchair praying for the child who, as a little girl, would fix fences with him in the morning and sit in his lap and snuggle with him before her bedtime. He tried to bargain with God for Ruthie’s life. One night Mam heard him in the living room crying, “Just take me, make me sick, make me go, not my little girl.” He never quit trying to strike this deal.

My parents needed help; John Bickham and his wife, Sandy, stepped up. John took over more caretaking duties around the Dreher place. Sandy, appreciating the magnitude of Mam’s and Paw’s need, accepted with a generous heart that she was going to see a lot less of her husband for the duration of Ruthie’s health crisis. John mostly served by being present, and listening patiently to Mam and Paw talk about Ruthie. He focused on Paw, working to keep the old man from sitting in his armchair, brooding. John had lost his brother to cancer. He knew from experience what it felt like to be powerless to help your loved one. Over and over he’d tell Paw, “Look, we can’t fix this, all we can do is keep putting one foot in front of another.”

John spent countless hours simply being there, hearing the same things, and saying the same things. It was a kind of ritual. This meant the world to Mam and Paw.

It meant a lot to me too. There was very little I could do for my family from so far away, but I did telephone Mam and Paw every morning and every evening, to check on them. They hurt, and they hurt bad. It seemed that every time I called, John Bickham was there with them, or John Bickham had just left, or John Bickham had just called to say he was coming by. In short John was the son they needed at that excruciating time in their lives, but didn’t have.

The way John figures it, all the Starhill people who came by to see Mam and Paw, and sit with them on the front porch, were a big part of what kept them going. For the most part, though, Ruthie kept them calm, focused, and hopeful. She wouldn’t tolerate their depression, and did everything she could to put on a brave face to lift their spirits.

Big Show often drove up from Zachary to do chores for Paw around the place. He never came to Starhill without stopping in to check on Ruthie. As her cancer progressed Ruthie had fewer visitors. Many people were afraid to stop by. With her muscles wasting away, she began to appear more skeletal. This frightened people. They didn’t know if she was too sick to see them. Some didn’t trust themselves not to cry in front of her. (Even Paw couldn’t stand to see his child in this condition without crying, which made Ruthie feel bad for causing him sorrow.) Others, perhaps, were afraid seeing their friend like this would remind them of their own mortality.

Yet Ruthie was lonely. Big Show saw that side of her suffering, and did his best to take it away.

“She just wanted somebody to talk to,” he says. “We’d talk about our kids, how hardheaded our kids were. I’d try to keep her spirits up, joke around with her. But I’d feel bad because if she’d laugh too much, she’d start coughing. I just wanted to spend time with her, because I knew how much she was hurting for company.”

In one visit Show confessed that he was furious with God for allowing her cancer.

“You can’t be!” she said. “I’m not giving up hope. He has a plan for me.”

Big Show would listen politely, and he’d try to believe. He really would. Yet he invariably drove away from Starhill mad, and stayed mad all the way home to Zachary.

If her old friends had trouble keeping faith, Ruthie drew closer to two new confidantes in the chemo room, fellow cancer patients who knew exactly what she was going through. She became especially close to Stephanie Lemoine, a Baton Rouge mom. An elderly woman they knew as Miss Joyce completed their trio.

“We called our times together a chemo party,” Stephanie remembers. “Miss Joyce was so cute, in her little wig. We laughed and talked, and had a good time together. Whenever we had chemo we would always hold seats for each other, so we all three could sit together. We just loved being together.”

Stephanie began going to the chemo room after her diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She saw Ruthie walking around the room, and because Ruthie was so young Stephanie figured her for a breast cancer patient. One Wednesday they sat next to each other as they waited for blood work.

Stephanie smiled at her. “I guess you’re a Wednesday girl too, huh?” she said.

“Sure am!” said Ruthie, grinning. And off they went, into their friendship.

When Ruthie came home from the hospital that afternoon, she told Hannah it had been a great day. “I’m so happy,” she said. “I made the best friend at chemo today. She’s just like me.”

They really did have a lot in common, Ruthie and Stephanie. They were both in their early forties. Both married their high school sweethearts. Both had three kids. And both were fighting for their lives.

Stephanie was struck by Ruthie’s simplicity and purity of heart. “Ruthie and I knew that we had it all,” she remembers. “All we ever
really wanted was our families. We talked about everyday things a lot, because that’s all we wanted: everyday life with our husbands and our kids.”

It was hard not to be friends with Ruthie. People who had just met her often recall having felt like they’d known her for all their lives. She was warm, open, and empathetic. I credit our mother teaching her children empathy by example. With Ruthie the lesson sank in. Mam’s tough rural childhood had given her a soft heart, especially for children who didn’t have much. She was that way with all underdogs and outcasts like Miss Clophine, the mom of James, one of my summer baseball league teammates.

Miss Clophine, as we knew her, was very poor and rough-hewn. She had been born into a Cajun farm family, and married to James’s father, Mr. Huey, at an early age. Hard fieldwork was all she knew. She worked their family’s melon and tomato patch in the hot Louisiana sun while Mr. Huey—“Salty,” as his family called him—was at his day job on the river ferry. She was skinny as a sugarcane stalk, her skin as brown and leathery as a battered saddlebag. Miss Clophine, who never learned how to read, gathered her wiry hair in crazily jutting pigtails. She spoke English with a muddy Cajun accent, peppered with profanity. A lot of better-off folks looked down on her, but to be fair it was hard to know how to take Miss Clo.

One night we were late getting to the ballpark. Mam arrived at the bleachers to find that the other women seated in the stands had formed a large circle around Miss Clophine, clearly not wanting to converse with her. When Miss Clo spotted my mother, she stood and announced, “Hey you bitches, here comes Miss Dorothy. She’ll sit wit’ me. She’s my friend.”

Mam was, and Mam did. That was her way. As she explained to us kids at the time, “You have to understand how much it hurts to be left out, and looked down on.”

Every Christmas we would exchange family presents with Miss
Clo. The Toneys had so little, and their need was so great. Miss Clo was our neighbor, though, not a charity case; she had dignity. She gave us kids presents too: one year, a pair of tube socks for me, and a comb for Ruthie. Miss Clo picked up pecans on her hands and knees throughout the fall to make enough money to buy Christmas gifts for those she loved. One autumn she called Mam and told her the pecan crop had been sparse that year; she worried that she wouldn’t have enough to buy Ruthie and me anything.

In the summer Miss Clophine and Mr. Huey would load watermelons from their field into the back of their old Chevy Nova, and deliver them to us. Mr. Huey would unpack them and lay them in the shade of the tallow tree in our yard. Sometimes Miss Clophine got out of the car, but other times she wouldn’t. Though they were invited inside, Mr. Huey felt they had no right to come into our house. Poor country people are like that sometimes.

In the summer of 2010 Julie and I flew with the kids to St. Francisville to see Ruthie and the family. Ruthie told me that my old teammate James Toney had been coming by to see her. After graduating high school James went to work at the war veterans’ home in a nearby town, had a religious conversion, and took up preaching to small country Pentecostal congregations. When he heard about Ruthie’s cancer he started driving over from time to time to pray with her and for her. He even raised three hundred dollars from his tiny rural congregation for Ruthie. Those folks didn’t have much, but they shared from their measure.

On Father’s Day I stood in Mam’s kitchen making deep-dish pies out of tomatoes, sliced onions, and pepper jack cheese. Through the back door of the kitchen came James. I hadn’t seen him in thirty years or longer. He looked and sounded great. Mr. Huey had died a few years back, and he had driven his mother out to visit the grave. Miss Clophine, as was her custom, remained outside in the car. While James
and I sat in the kitchen getting caught up, Mam went out to talk to Miss Clo.

After James and his mother left Mam sat with Julie and me at the kitchen table and cried. She explained that Miss Clophine was in a bad way. It hurt her to see her old friend so sick and broken from age, weariness, and dementia.

Mam said that out in the driveway Miss Clo was struggling through her sickness to talk. She kept patting the tops of her thighs, saying, “Christmas! Christmas!” Mam realized that she had given Miss Clophine those pants for Christmas one year. The poor woman was trying to let Mam know that she remembered.

“I kissed my fingers, then leaned into the car window and touched them to her forehead,” Mam told me. “I told her that I loved her. She kissed her fingers, reached through the window and touched my forehead, and said, ‘I love you, Miss Dorothy.’ ”

Mam broke up, and excused herself. I sat there with Julie, and told my wife, “That lady, Miss Clophine, has had an unbelievably hard life, and my mother is one of the only people in this world who treated her with dignity and compassion. That’s my Mama.”

I was so proud of her. Mam wouldn’t know how to be any other way. I shared that story with Ruthie the next morning. She told me that she learned from our mother the wisdom of refusing to return cruelty with meanness. “Don’t you remember, Rod, the stories about how Aunt Rita and Mullay”—Paw’s mother—“would be so nasty to Mama, trying to put her down and make her feel like dirt?” said Ruthie. “She never fought back, and she kept doing nice things for them when they needed it.”

That summer vacation in Louisiana was the first time our kids visited their aunt since her diagnosis. It was hard on them to see her without
hair. Her cancer was abstract to them until then. Though I was grateful for the week we spent with Ruthie, I worried about Lucas, my middle child. He was only six, and was by far the closest of my children to Aunt Ruthie.