Ruth Drum

Quick Facts

A gifted singer and the complicated heart of her family, Ruth Drum is the wife of Nathan Drum and mother to Frank, Jake, and Ariel. First seen in the opening chapters in New Bremen, she directs church choirs and summer musicals while wrestling with the life she never wanted. Her story presses on the themes of Death and Grief, Faith, Doubt, and Spirituality, and Family Secrets and Bonds, and it’s knotted up with the return of her former fiancé, Emil Brandt.

Who They Are

Ruth is a woman of art living inside a life of duty. Strikingly beautiful—her auburn hair and Rita Hayworth aura are a running joke among her sons—she commands a room when she sings and chafes when she must sit quietly in a pew. She married for a future of law school and cities; she got a parsonage and a congregation’s watchful eyes. Ruth becomes the novel’s most human register of suffering: where Nathan intellectualizes faith, she feels its absence in her bones. As grief closes in, she embodies the force of doubt—angry, honest, and unwilling to accept easy consolation—until an “ordinary grace” breaks through.

Personality & Traits

Ruth’s temperament fuses artistic intensity with moral candor. She refuses to pretend piety she doesn’t feel, and she resists any narrative that asks her to accept loss as “God’s will.” Her talent makes her a pillar of the community; her honesty makes her its gadfly.

• Artistic authority: She runs choirs with an “iron fist” and stages ambitious summer productions, using music to command attention and create communal solace—most powerfully at Bobby Cole’s funeral.
• Resentment and thwarted ambition: She drinks martinis, smokes in private, and bristles at the life she “didn’t sign on for,” having dreamed of writing and believing she married a future lawyer.
• Skepticism shading into fury: Her doubts sharpen after Ariel’s death; she reads Nathan’s steadfast belief as betrayal—a loyalty to an absent God over his grieving family.
• Fierce protectiveness: She pours her unrealized hopes into Ariel and polices anything that might derail her daughter’s future, which fuels sharp confrontations (like with Julia Brandt) when she senses harm.
• Charisma with a cost: The same dramatic force that can lift a congregation can also scorch her family; her outbursts are the flip side of her capacity to move people to tears.

Character Journey

At first, Ruth balances bitterness and usefulness—directing choirs, mothering with uneven warmth, and needling her husband’s vocation without quite detonating the marriage. The summer’s cascade of deaths culminates in Ariel’s, and Ruth’s world implodes. She darkens the house, withdraws from her sons, and recoils from Nathan’s pastoral language, which now sounds like abandonment. Her private grief becomes public rupture at the funeral meal, where she begs for “an ordinary grace”—not a sermon, not doctrine—just human mercy. Jake’s stutter-free prayer answers that plea in the only currency she can accept: love without explanation. From there her healing is slow and incomplete. She returns to her family changed—still scarred, still skeptical—but reconnected, having learned that the only bearable grace may be the ordinary kind shared at a kitchen table.

Key Relationships

Nathan Drum: Their marriage is a proving ground for belief and love. Ruth loves Nathan but suspects his faith takes him away from her at the moments she needs him most. After Ariel’s death, her anger at God lands on Nathan’s shoulders, making their bond the crucible in which both conviction and doubt are tested.

Ariel Drum: Ariel is Ruth’s mirror and vessel—the imagined life of art and opportunity Ruth never lived. Ruth’s protectiveness becomes pressure when Ariel hesitates over Juilliard; after Ariel’s death, Ruth’s grief is not only maternal but existential, a collapse of the future she had dared to dream through her daughter.

Emil Brandt: A childhood love and artistic peer, Emil understands Ruth’s worldly hunger in ways Nathan cannot. Their shared musical language offers a refuge during Ruth’s darkest days, but that refuge crumbles when the truth of Emil’s connection to Ariel’s pregnancy surfaces, turning shared history into an unbearable reminder.

Frank and Jake Drum: Ruth often leaves the daily work of parenting her sons to Nathan, favoring Ariel’s promise. Yet when Ruth is unreachable, it’s Jake—quiet, anxious, and overlooked—whose halting voice suddenly flows in a clear prayer that reaches her. The boys witness, suffer under, and ultimately help soften Ruth’s grief-hardened shell.

Defining Moments

Ruth’s arc crystallizes in a handful of scenes where her artistry, fury, and need for human mercy intersect.

• Singing at Bobby Cole’s funeral: Her rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” transforms communal sorrow into consolation. Why it matters: It shows how Ruth’s art can offer faith’s effects—hope, tenderness—even when she herself struggles to believe.
• The Juilliard argument with Ariel: Ruth bristles when Ariel wavers, hearing in her daughter’s doubts an echo of her own compromises. Why it matters: Ruth’s fear of repetition reveals the depth of her regrets and how her love can become control.
• Withdrawal after Ariel’s death: She shuts drapes, abandons routines, and leaves the house rather than share rooms with a minister-husband she cannot bear. Why it matters: Grief turns theological debate into domestic exile, making her crisis embodied and undeniable.
• “An ordinary grace”: At the funeral meal, she rejects ritual in favor of plain mercy; Jake’s prayer answers her in human terms. Why it matters: This is the pivot from isolating anger to relational healing—the novel’s thesis that ordinary kindness can do what grand doctrine cannot.
• Confrontation with Julia Brandt: Ruth’s calm, cutting words strip away social pretenses after Karl’s confession. Why it matters: Her protective fire becomes moral clarity, exposing class hypocrisy and defending her daughter’s dignity.

Essential Quotes

When my mother sang I almost believed in heaven. It wasn’t just that she had a beautiful voice but also that she had a way of delivering a piece that pierced your heart. Oh when she sang she could make a fence post cry.

This is Ruth’s paradox: she produces the effects of belief in others even when she cannot access it herself. The metaphor of making “a fence post cry” shows her artistry moving even the inanimate—art as borrowed faith for a faithless heart.

She worries, Frankie, because she’s afraid I’ll end up like her.

The line distills Ruth’s deepest fear: that talent will be traded for small-town security and regret. It reframes Ruth’s intensity with Ariel not as vanity but as terror—love distorted by the memory of her own choices.

“If you mention God to me one more time, I’ll leave you, I swear I will.”

Ruth draws a boundary against theological consolation that feels like erasure of her pain. The threat to leave isn’t melodrama; it’s a demand that Nathan meet her in the human realm first, without retreating into doctrine.

“For God’s sake, Nathan, can’t you, just this once, offer an ordinary grace?”

This plea is the novel’s hinge. Ruth asks for a blessing stripped of explanation—bread before answers, presence before providence. It’s the moment she articulates what she needs and what the book argues grace most truly is.