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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

A Country Girl in Full

An excerpt from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming
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From The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming:

Ruthie would have been bored stiff by parlor conversation and strolls through cultivated gardens. She wanted the woods, rough as it came. She loved it when she could prevail upon Paw to take her down to the hunting camp in Fancy Point swamp. I spent a fair amount of time there too, though the last place I wanted to be on a wet, frozen Saturday morning was standing in the woods with a shotgun—I was too young to handle a rifle—looking for a deer to shoot. For me the best part of those mornings was being with my dad and his friends in the warmth of the camp kitchen, drinking hot, sweet Community coffee, eating jelly cake, and listening to the crazy talk from Oliver “Preacher” McNabb, the old black cook who had once been in Angola State Penitentiary for murder. And then I had to go pretend to enjoy stalking deer, when I really wanted to be inside, cooking with Preacher and listening to his stories. Deer-stalking is what our culture told us young boys were supposed to love above all things.

Ruthie, she really did love all of it—especially the hunting. As soon as she was big enough to carry a shotgun, she did. When a hunter brought down a buck, the men took the carcass back to the camp to skin it. If I got too close, I would start to gag. Ruthie was right in the middle of it all, and in time, learned to skin a buck herself. “One time when she was a teenager, she and I went down on the edge of the swamp, down by Ed Shields’s house,” Paw says. “I put Ruthie on one hill, and I got up on the next one. After we sat there a while, we heard the dogs barking and coming. There were lots of leaves on the ground, and it was dry. We could hear the deer running in the leaves.

“As they got close, I heard Ruthie shoot that rifle of mine. I hollered, ‘Ruthie, did you get him?’ Her answer was, ‘Hell yeah, I did!’ That deer was running wide open, and that baby had hit him square in the neck. That was a difference between y’all. That time you killed that big thirteen-point in the swamp, you were torn up about it. But she was on top of the world.”

She could skin a buck (see above), and she could run a trotline too. No joke. Bocephus was her co-pilot. She was also 1987’s homecoming queen. About the bare feet, that was Ruthie’s signature. In my family, we think that photo is pretty funny: Ruthie skinned that deer wearing plastic gloves for hygiene, but stood in the blood with no shoes on. On Facebook, one of Ruthie’s high school friends writes this morning:

I have such fond memories of Ruthie from high school. Once we were working on posters, in the commissary, for an upcoming football game. We had both taken our shoes off and Mr Wells had come up the stairs and commented, “You girls know what they say about barefoot girls?” I asked him what would that be and he replied, “They never leave far from home.” Ruthie piped up, “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.” She was correct too, it’s not a bad thing at all.

Go to the Rod Dreher Facebook fan page to read the entire chapter from which this passage was taken, and to pre-order the book. If you give me a “like,” you can keep up with all things Ruthie Leming through the book’s April 9 release, and immediately after.

Readers, I’ll be away from the keys on business for most of today, but will update comments as often as I can.

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