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Laissez les bon temps rouler

One great thing about my sister Ruthie is that she loved to laugh. Tonight, we were all tired of being so sad, so we ended up laughing, and laughing hard. A bunch of us were around Ruthie and Mike’s kitchen table, drinking beer and whiskey, and telling stories. I haven’t laughed like this in forever. […]

One great thing about my sister Ruthie is that she loved to laugh. Tonight, we were all tired of being so sad, so we ended up laughing, and laughing hard. A bunch of us were around Ruthie and Mike’s kitchen table, drinking beer and whiskey, and telling stories. I haven’t laughed like this in forever. Most of these stories I can’t repeat here, but I can tell you that one of them involved firefighters responding to a 911 call from an obese naked woman who had eaten jalapeno peppers and gotten sexually excited, another one involved a blind hound dog who wandered into a pond and drowned today, and a third caused the following phrase to be uttered unironically: “You know his momma lost all her teeth, right?”

After one of the gentlemen present delivered a spectacularly blue rant against local political ineptitude, a friend leaned over and whispered to me, “If he runs for office and gets elected, this is going to be on cable access every week.”

She said it in the same way that a real estate agent would say, “And with this model, you have unobstructed beachfront views.” That is, the implication was, “How could you bear to miss this?” Well, yeah, how could you? It was wonderful, all of it. Mike was laughing uproariously through it all, as were the lot. Ruthie would absolutely have been in the middle of it. The kitchen counter was groaning with barbecued ribs and all kinds of food folks had brought, and Ruthie’s house was filled the people who loved her and Mike, and who wanted to be there.

What a relief to laugh. That’s how people are here — they cry hard, but they laugh harder. I wonder if it’s a south Louisiana thing, or if it’s a West Feliciana Parish thing. One of the men there tonight told me he was recently talking with someone from another parish about a fundraiser folks here were doing for a local paralytic. Since the town came together for Ruthie’s big fundraising concert in April of 2010, they’ve done two or three more for local folks who were hurting. They discovered how much good they could do for people in desperate medical straits, and how much fun they could have doing it. Off they’ve went. My friend tonight told me the man from the other parish said it was amazing how West Feliciana folks pulled off this sort of thing.

But you know, it’s the kind of thing West Feliciana folks do. I walked back to my mom and dad’s tonight across the field from Mike and Ruthie’s, and saw the deer run in the moonlight, and surprised a possum eating cat food outside my dad’s workshop, and I thought about what a great place this parish is. I always thought Ruthie would be the anchor here. After our mom and dad passed, she would be the Dreher from our side of the family who stayed on the place and was the matriarch we all came home to be around on the holidays. That will not happen now.

What will happen? Mama and Daddy aren’t young. I have lived for decades now away from this place, telling fond stories of the creative Southern lunacy here, much of it involving the crackpot schemes of my late Uncle Murphy. As one of my friends tonight put it, “It’s always something.” And it really is. It’s like living inside the Florida Parishes version of  “A Confederacy of Dunces,” which as all people of taste and discernment know is the Fifth Gospel.

Here I am a writer. Why don’t I live here? Or if I did, would I spend more time being part of the story than writing it? I don’t know. What I do know is that in this patch of God’s green earth, somebody’s momma done lost all her teeth, the blind dog is drownded in the pond, and we’re going to put Ruthie Leming in the ground on Monday. Ruthie’s going to be there in the Starhill Cemetery not far from Uncle Murphy, whose epitaph reads, “This ain’t bad, once you get used to it.” She’ll be in great company.

UPDATE: Overheard just now: “Did y’all know they have a one-legged stripper at that bar up in Woodville?” Somehow, this must be investigated! If we do have such an artiste in our midst, she must be identified and given an NEA grant. I hope she has a parrot too!

UPDATE.2: It’s true! I have just seen a photograph of La Belle Dame Sans Jambe. She was rocking that one good leg on a pole. I kid you not! One of the fellows said, “She usually wears a prosthetic, but she’ll take it off if you want.

Another said, “The slogan of that bar is: ‘We put the wood in Woodville.'” No way, said I. It’s true, two others assured me. And I realized I have been away from the South way too long.

I walked back over to Daddy’s house and told him the rumors were true. An older man who’s a friend of the family said, “Yeah, I’d heard about her. Ol’ [name] went up there one time and asked for a lap dance. Her leg came off. He was kind of surprised by that.”

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