Shining Ruby Through A Lifetime Of Struggle, Ruby Lafleur Is A Survivor In Every Sense Of The Word

The answering machine picks up on the fourth ring.

“Hello. I’m not home right now. No. No, you don’t have to tell me who is calling. I know. I’m the world’s greatest psychic. No. No, you don’t have to leave a number. I know where you are.

“I’ll call you.”

There is always a laugh on Ruby LaFleur’s answering machine. Callers telephone just to hear the latest greeting, which - like her wardrobe - changes often.

Laughter follows her to her home in Peaceful Valley where a rescued dog naps near rescued cats, tom turkeys, guinea hens and emus. It follows her to the yard where she brings her veterinarian and neighbors together for low-cost pet clinics. Laughter follows her to the Spokane Food Bank where she pulls in every Friday, a one-woman social service network delivering food to poor working neighbors, shut-ins and strays. She watches as a friend packs the last possible box of food that will fit into LaFleur’s bright green 1979 Toyota Celica she calls the Pickle.

“It’s a Vlasic,” she says as they heave the door shut. The friend laughs. LaFleur laughs. Even a guy loading the next truck over laughs.

Which begs the next question.

Ruby LaFleur is chronically ill, disabled and poor, so why is she so happy?

Hard Times

For much of her life, Ruby LaFleur felt like a rock tossed in a tumbler, buffeted and bucked, cracked and ground down.

She started life as Cathy Walker in Spokane in 1943 and came naturally to things that set her apart: She was short, left-handed and African American growing up on the North Side. Only two other African Americans attended her neighborhood schools. She felt different.

Her dad had come to Spokane to work for the Pullman Company, a Mississippian who wanted to earn a living wage and live where the prejudice was less obvious - if not exactly less.

It took LaFleur years to understand the impact of her frustrated and sometimes angry father and an alcoholic mother. She dropped out of Shadle Park High School and became a teenage mother. But she also earned her diploma at Jantsch and began working as one of the first African American woman technicians at a Spokane television station while raising two children. She raised Jamora, 38, and Julian, 34, and cared for the children of absentee parents, too.

Eventually, she became the first female African American Burlington Northern railroad engineer in Spokane. It was the best job she could envision, different every day. Then, more than a dozen years ago, she was injured when railcars struck the engine she was working on. The damage to her neck and back become a chronic source of pain and fatigue that eventually caused her to leave work.

Her personal life had been absorbing its own life-altering hits, blows from drug using or abusive husbands. By the time she landed in a domestic violence counselor crisis office she had been married eight times, had osteoarthritis and was ill with Hepatitis C.

“I was trying to fix myself by finding someone else who was broken” she says. “It never worked.”

She underwent intense counseling, at one point spending time in a women’s mental hospital on the West Side. She learned to be alone and, eventually, to heal.

The transformation began with her move to Peaceful Valley eight years ago. She used the last of her savings to turn a dusty rented lot overrun with broken bottles, used syringes, trash and weeds to a home that she has cultivated into an oasis where neighbors needing bread come, where animals who have been abandoned live until she takes them to shelters or finds them homes. And where friends sit in the shade and just talk.

In the process, she changed her name, taking her dad’s middle name and a first name that held the promise of a broken rock finally ground smooth and whole. Ruby.

“It was like being brand new, or reborn. I learned to like myself. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”

Gleaning the Good Life

Ring

“Awww. I went and missed your call. But if you have a garden and it’s not doing too well, put some of this message on it and it will grow like crazy. Don’t forget to use lots of water.”

Another greeting, another laugh. A friend who is going through a divorce calls and needs cheering up. Another friend has a dog with porcupine quills in his face. And what about the six peacocks that need a home? Ruby knows someone who knows someone…

LaFleur has been taking care of neighbors, the two-and four-legged variety, practically since she moved in. Through an arrangement with the Peaceful Valley Community Center and Spokane Food Bank, LaFleur delivers food that supports nearly 20 people who are poor, disabled or children. She also drops off doughnuts for volunteers at Cancer Patient Care and often greets her garbage hauler with a snack.

LaFleur brings bread to Laura Haynes, a single working mother, who runs short with four kids, ages 10 to 14. She calls LaFleur when she needs advice, too.

“She won’t let you wallow in your misery for more than half a minute,” Haynes says. “She’ll say, `I’m glad you called and told me how bad your day is so I can be so thankful for mine.’ “

“It snaps you back.”

LaFleur took her friend to thrift stores until Haynes found an outfit she could wear to work for $1.50. She herself never spends more than $1 on her colorful, interesting ensembles, which she gives away to charity or trades rather than launders. Her best finds are free or for 50 cents.

“Retail therapy” LaFleur calls it

“It’s more than bargain hunting,” Haynes says. “It’s knowing what you need and how to get it and pass on what you don’t need in order to get you something else in the future. It’s an art form.”

Typical is the time LaFleur inherited a bag of size of 10-1/2 shoes from one friend and immediately knew of another friend with exactly that shoe size. She passed them on.

“We have to be gleaners in life.”

LaFleur eats no red meat and doesn’t use tobacco, alcohol or drugs. Twice a week she attends a tai chi class that she can afford due to a low-income scholarship through the community colleges. The stretching, discipline and strengthening aspect of the program was so appealing she immediately got her 75-year-old aunt involved, then a neighbor and now her aunt’s choir director.

“It’s a mediation, a ballet, a dance, martial arts,” she raves.

Ruby in paradise

Since she carried her first pet - a hamster - to school in her pocket, LaFleur has cared for animals. She brought her cat to work on the railroad.

Even as an apartment dweller, she fostered a small menagerie. But it was not until she moved to Peaceful Valley that she began to sustain a group of animals, dozens of them abandoned or ill, which she ferries to shelters, finds homes for or simply cares for.

“It’s a safe way to nurture,” she admits.

Pigs, peacocks, even a possum have been left in her yard. Dozens of rabbits, cats and birds.

Some she kept. She has a dog named Maxey, named for the late Spokane attorney whose name she invoked to rescue him. He lies outside a yard where turkeys waddle and three emus strut around the grass and make low drumming sounds.

“Ruby in paradise,” she says with a sweep of her hand.

Dr. Colette Bergam, who runs Sparkle Veterinary Care on East Sprague, works with LaFleur in caring for most of the animals. She’s amazed at the variety that come through and how they all seem to get along.

“She has a pretty symbiotic working household,” Bergam said.

“This is the United Nations,” LaFleur says. “We’ve bonded into family.”

The two women met when Bergman was staff veterinarian at SpokAnimal. As a veterinarian, Bergam daily sees problems that are the result of pet owners’ lacking the money and education to provide good nutrition or care.

LaFleur has no savings and lives on public assistance, but Bergam said her animals are among the best cared for.

“She’s very resourceful,” Bergam says.

LaFleur has cleaned the back room at SpokAnimal to get free dog food. She raises rabbits for a pet store to trade for feed called turkey finisher.

She collects trunkloads of greens people toss out of their gardens and picks through bins of spoiled bread at the food bank for her birds.

After the two women talked about the number of poor and disabled people with pets in LaFleur’s neighborhood, they held a low-cost vaccine clinic in LaFleur’s yard. They gave distemper, rabies and feline leukemia shots.

The first clinic drew 17 low-income pet owners. The second, 20. They’re considering a third.

Last winter, going to her car to retrieve food bank items, LaFleur fell and broke her leg. That week, sitting in a donated wheelchair in the back yard, she began to cry, thinking, “I’m going to have to give all my animals away.”

She didn’t have to. The friends she had helped for years put together a network that stepped in until she recovered.

She sometimes wonders why so many people turn to her, someone who had such a difficult path to this place.

One said it was obvious:

“Because you came through it. And you’re still smiling.”