Diary of a Misfit, page 17
I shook my head as if the pastor were making perfect sense. I could think of lots of things that aren’t in the Bible that they’d used in church that Sunday, but I had nothing to gain by bringing up microphones or electric lights. Instead, I asked Ann and the preacher if they remembered where Roy sat when he came to church. They pointed to the back of the room, to the row where we’d sat during the sermon.
“Very last pew,” Pastor Burgess said.
“Right on the corner,” Ann added.
Ann said Roy spent most of the services writing. He kept a book in the pew next to his hymnal, and every Sunday, he listed everyone who’d attended and everyone who’d been baptized. He took notes on the sermons, too, Ann thought, but the book had disappeared long ago, and Ann wasn’t sure how to find it. As Ann talked, we all looked to the back pew, and I wondered if everyone was imagining Roy hunched over a little book, scribbling notes.
“Pastor,” I said, “you were talking in today’s sermon about ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is my place in this world?’ If someone asked you that about Roy—who was Roy, what was Roy’s place—do you have any idea?”
“Oh yeah,” Pastor Burgess answered. “She was a sister in Christ.”
My pulse jumped. Everyone in Delhi called Roy “she,” so I was used to that, but “sister” was a new one. Had this pastor called Roy “sister” when they talked? Did Roy mind that honorific? I still wasn’t sure which pronoun Roy would have wanted me to use, but something—maybe it was my gut, or maybe it was my grandma’s lead—told me to think of Roy as he, a brother in Christ.
“Everyone here stood ready to help her,” the pastor continued. “She wasn’t very talkative, but people were aware that she needed help. People at the church, I think, treated her extremely well. I think they tried to. I think Roy could have had a whole lot more fellowship with us. She wouldn’t hang around and talk, and that probably had to do with her upbringing. But I never knew of anyone who said anything negative about her, and that’s one of the things that’s great about this church. It’s very peaceful, not a lot of gossip.”
As the preacher talked, I realized that he might have been the one to speak at Roy’s funeral. Roy’s obituary hadn’t listed any survivors, but I’d seen his tombstone. It was nice, a marble slab engraved with flowers and praying hands. I asked if they knew who’d made that headstone.
“Well, she had a plot,” Ann said. “It was by her mother and dad over there, the Ellises. When she passed away, we didn’t know if she had enough money to buy a headstone, so I called the funeral home and said we’re going to take care of it. I knew she liked pants and a shirt, so that’s what I went and bought. That’s what she was buried in.”
“I did a graveside service,” Pastor Burgess said. “It was brief. It was about Roy’s faithfulness, always attending, a good person, a kind person. I believe the weather wasn’t too nice. If it had been here at the church, I’d have lengthened it out a little bit.”
I asked how many people came, and the pastor shook his head and said not many. “The weather was bad.”
Later, I looked up the newspaper from the day of Roy’s funeral and I found that the pastor had been right: It had rained the day they buried Roy. I don’t know why I didn’t ask then why the church didn’t move Roy’s funeral inside, and I never got a chance to ask later because I never saw the preacher again. His wife died a few months after the interview, and Pastor Burgess left the Church of Christ. He died, too, in 2014. Almost everyone I interviewed during those first few trips died before I could see them again. Dorothy the historian died less than a year after we interviewed her, and Rufus the police chief died in 2012. Mary Rundell died, and Lynda Best died, and so did several members of my family. But that Sunday, I was naive enough to think that everyone would live at least until I finished the movie, so I shook the pastor’s hand and told him we’d come back the next time we were in town.
Ann started to walk us out, but she remembered, as we pushed through the double doors into the fellowship hall, that she had a picture of Roy somewhere, so she led us to an office supply closet. Ann pulled down rolls of paper towels and calendars for long-gone years. She looked into a plastic bag. She moved aside Christmas decorations, and I spotted a photo album, a red one with gold lettering. Ann licked her index finger, then used it to flip through the album’s pages. Most of the pictures were old family portraits, groups of three or four posed in front of a white wall. There were a few solo shots, but no one looked like Roy.
“She didn’t like to get her picture made too much,” Ann said.
Ann flipped another few pages, past snapshots of what looked like a beach vacation. She lingered for a moment on a page that showed the congregation standing in front of the pews, but she couldn’t find Roy in the back row. She flipped slow, then fast, and finally, two pages from the end of the album, I spotted a person who looked like Roy. I pointed to the picture.
“Is that…” I asked Ann.
“Yeah, that’s her, right there,” she said. “At one of our fellowships.”
In the picture, Roy was wearing a flower-print button-down with suspenders fastened over it. He had on black, plastic-frame glasses, and he was holding a paper plate that was mostly cut off by the picture’s frame. Behind him, people were digging into plastic Tupperware bowls filled with macaroni or potato salad.
“I like that shirt,” I said.
Ann looked closer at the photo, then she turned to me.
“Do you?” she asked. Her tone suggested she did not.
She kept searching. She pulled down boxes and other photo albums, but she couldn’t find any other pictures of Roy. After a while, Ann’s husband appeared and asked if we knew anything about Roy’s music.
“She wrote a bunch of songs,” he said. “She had a whole book full. Don’t know where the book ended up, but she wrote songs and sent them to Nashville to different people.”
Ann put the photos down and shook her head in agreement. “I don’t know whatever happened to all of that stuff.”
They were quiet, and we were quiet, but in my mind, I was thinking I knew what had happened to Roy’s songs. His old neighbor, Mark King, probably had them.
Ann shut off the lights, and Aubree and Aaron filmed the hallway as we walked down it. We were just a few steps from the side door, a few seconds from leaving, but suddenly, I didn’t feel ready to go. I sneaked back into the sanctuary. I sat in the back pew. I reached for one of the Bibles wedged between the hymnals, and I opened it to Leviticus, chapter 19. “Abomination,” it said.
Chapter Nine
(April–May 2011)
THE DAY WAS MORE than half over by the time we left Delhi for the interstate. The sky went pink at the edges, and the evening bugs came to splattery ends on my windshield as I drove toward West Monroe. Ten miles in, my phone buzzed with a message.
“Change of plans,” my mom wrote. “Yr interviewing Jennifer. She worked at Delhi nursing home when Roy was there.”
Jennifer was my cousin. She was only four years older than I was, but we hadn’t spoken in years, maybe even a decade by then. We weren’t Facebook friends, and I didn’t have her phone number. I knew she’d had her first child when she was fifteen, and I’d heard that her son’s father had promised, before they had sex, that he couldn’t get her pregnant because he’d once peed on an electric fence. But I didn’t know what Jennifer liked to do or what kind of music she liked, and I wasn’t sure whose fault that was. Had she ever wanted to be close to me? Her mom, my aunt Cindy, talked to my mom every day, but I never asked for updates about Jennifer or her brother, Joey. I’d heard, in college maybe, that Jennifer was addicted to drugs—just “drugs,” not a specific one—and I suppose I had stopped talking to her then. Or maybe I distanced myself years before that. I’d told myself that Jennifer and I were different, and that had seemed excuse enough to me once.
My mom sent an address and something like directions, and as I drove, I pressed myself to conjure any other memories. I could hear Jennifer’s voice in my head. It was high-pitched and twangy. And I remembered that when we were kids Jennifer and Joey always opened their presents on Christmas Eve. They had a white-flocked tree, but I don’t remember any of the presents they ever opened. Once, the year before Jennifer got pregnant, my aunt Cindy took her to the mall to have Glamour Shots made. When the prints came back, my mother gave me one and asked if I wanted to have ours done. I stared at the eight-by-ten and tried to cook up a response. The photo made Jennifer and my aunt look like characters from the TV show Dallas. They wore earrings the size of fists, and their hair was teased toward heaven. Jennifer’s dress was made out of what appeared to be a red feather boa. My aunt wore matching red gloves. I looked as long as I dared, then I laughed, handed the photo back to my mom, and told her I’d rather die than let someone do that to my hair. My grandma kept one of the Glamour Shots framed on the wall in her bedroom, and because that was the only photo I’d seen of Jennifer in years, I half imagined she’d answer the door wearing that feather boa dress.
Jennifer lived in a generic, just-off-the-highway apartment in a two-story complex that looked more like a motel than a forever home. It was income-restricted, meaning everyone who lived there was poor, but the wooden sign out front said old oak estates, as if it were an acres-big property where rich people dwelled. I looked around as I stepped out of the car. I didn’t see oak trees, only pines. Jennifer’s two-bedroom was on the top floor, and as we climbed the metal steps, I recognized her eleven-year-old daughter, Olivia, blowing bubbles off the shared walkway. I’d never met Olivia, but my mom sometimes texted me pictures of her. Olivia smiled when she saw us, then she drew in a deep breath and pushed out a perfect bubble. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and her glasses were so thick, her eyes looked huge behind them. I’d never wanted to be a mother, but watching Olivia, something new and unexpectedly maternal ached in me.
A cat, I told myself. I could adopt a cat.
The apartments were brick and white vinyl with teal doors, and Jennifer had draped what looked to be parts of a Christmas garland around the threshold, even though it was spring. She was expecting us, so her door was cracked open. I pushed inside. She was not wearing the feather boa, but I barely had time to notice her white T-shirt and jeans, because she rushed to hug me as if we were the kind of relatives who knew each other. When I pulled away, Jennifer waved a hand around the empty living room. She’d hung crosses on the walls, but she didn’t have a couch or a coffee table.
“The carpet’s clean, I think,” she said. “I just moved in.”
We sat down, cross-legged and facing each other, and I eyed Jennifer as Aubree angled a fancy video light toward her. Jennifer’s hair was blond and shoulder length. She wore mascara and a lot of eyeliner, and the dark makeup made her blue eyes look bluer. She was thirty-two, and she looked exactly that age, I thought, still young, but a little wrinkled around the eyes.
“She rode in my car,” Jennifer said suddenly.
“Who did?” I asked.
“Roy. She got food stamps, and she liked these lemon-lime sodas. It was like a throw-off Sprite.”
Jennifer started to say more, but she stuttered and covered the wireless microphone Aaron had clipped to her scoop-neck tee. She leaned sideways and whispered to me.
“I don’t know whether to call him a he or a she. I’m torn.”
If I were doing this now, I would tell Jennifer to say “he.” All the evidence I had suggested Roy would have felt more comfortable with male pronouns, but back then, in early May 2011, I was insecure and finding my way. People didn’t talk as much about pronouns then, and I wasn’t brave enough to be the person who went around Louisiana educating interviewees on the ways a pronoun can either empower or belittle someone. That wasn’t my role as a journalist, I thought. And so, Jennifer gave me an opening, but I didn’t take it. I’ve watched most of the video footage half a dozen times or more, and I always feel disappointed in myself. I watch and I knot my fingers together, hoping, somehow, miraculously, this time I will tell Jennifer to say “he,” but I never do. After Jennifer told me she was torn, I waved away her worries and told her to use whichever pronoun she preferred. Jennifer nodded, then leaned back into the video frame. She said she’d worked in accounts payable at the nursing home when Roy arrived in 2003.
“Whenever he first got there, they tried to put him in a dress. Put her in a dress, I mean. I guess they thought that that would be normal because everybody knew Roy was really not a man.”
Jennifer said the activities director, a woman named Maxine, put Roy in the dress, then painted his fingernails pink. Afterward, Roy refused to leave his room. He didn’t move or talk or eat for two days.
“He was not a woman,” Jennifer said. “That’s like taking me and putting me in a pair of overalls and a hat and telling me I can’t wear heels again. I am a woman. That’s what I want to wear. Roy wanted to live as a man. He wanted a red flannel shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. A trucker hat, that’s what he always wore. It was blue and had a long bill, and he wore these cop glasses like the Unabomber.”
As she talked, I wondered why I’d gone so long without calling Jennifer. She seemed cool, curious, and open-minded. She said that a few days after Roy stopped eating, Maxine gave up. Maxine went into Roy’s room and removed the fingernail polish, then she brought Roy the flannel shirt and brown belt he’d been wearing when he arrived. The belt had his last name stamped into the leather, Jennifer said, and once Roy had it back, he left his room and said he wanted to go to the store.
“I took everybody everywhere,” Jennifer explained. “I’m real friendly, real bubbly, you know, so we went to Brookshire’s. And Roy wasn’t big enough to push the buggy, he was real short. He wanted lemon-lime sodas, Cheetos, Pringles, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and he had twenty-seven dollars. That’s what they gave him on his food stamps, twenty-seven dollars a month. Not just in the nursing home, either. That’s what they expected him to live on outside of the nursing home. That’s what the Louisiana government gave him to live on. Can you imagine? Twenty-seven dollars a month? That’s not enough money to feed nothing. And Roy had no taxable income because he just mowed yards and collected cans.”
At work, I’d been trying to learn about welfare and other social services, but Jennifer understood them in a way no website had ever made clear to me. She knew the income cutoffs for everything. She knew where to apply for Medicaid and who to call if a benefit didn’t come through, and she seemed to have memorized the entire flowchart of the state Department of Health and Hospitals. At one point, she recommended I call an ombudsman. She even recited the phone number.
Eventually, Jennifer leaned forward, conspiratorially. “About a week before Roy passed away, something happened in that nursing home. He fell out of the bed. Or he was pushed out of that bed.”
Jennifer raised her left eyebrow. She said Roy emerged from the room with “a giant hematoma” covering his face. As she talked, Jennifer used her hand to cover her own eyes, cheeks, and lips, to show me how much of Roy’s skin had turned black after the fall.
“They would not let him out of his room because he was that horrifying. They let him stay there seven days. Finally, they took him to the hospital, and he died the next day.”
Jennifer remembered the exact date—the right date, March 8—that Roy died, and she remembered helping file the incident report after he fell out of bed March 1. She said two state workers from the Department of Health and Hospitals came to the nursing home to investigate Roy’s death.
“Even if they don’t have findings, the whole investigation is public record,” she said. “You need to get it.”
I smiled. Why did everyone in my family sound like an amateur journalist? My mom had cajoled people on the first trip, now Jennifer was pushing me, talking tough the way good editors do. She was suspicious and direct, and as she talked, I thought I must be the least naturally qualified member of my family to be conducting this probe.
Jennifer rocked in excitement. Most of the people we’d interviewed so far had been old and low-key. They didn’t raise their voices or move around much as they reminisced, but Jennifer spoke with a buzzy energy. She talked fast. She waved her hands around, and she giggled after she revealed something interesting.
“I don’t think he fell,” she said again. “I think someone pushed him.”
What Jennifer was suggesting was huge. She was saying, on camera, that she believed someone in the nursing home might have killed Roy. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her. Everyone in my family has always been a legendary exaggerator. I never knew which parts of my mom’s and grandmother’s stories were real, and which were details they’d spun to make a tale bigger. My mom believed this was just a part of being Southern. Good Southern women added butter to their canned vegetables. They caked their faces with makeup, and they never told a story exactly as it happened. I found my mom’s tendency to fudge frustrating. How could I accept any of her stories, knowing some part of them was made up?
I felt sure Jennifer had inherited some of that tall-telling, but just in case she was talking to me straight, I asked why she thought someone might have pushed Roy out of the bed. She bit her lip.
“How do I put this without it coming off the wrong way?” she asked. “When you have someone that you know is one way, but they want to live another way, it might frustrate some people. If somebody’s incontinent and can’t hold their own bowels, and they’re not going to let somebody change their diaper, well, that would make some CNAs mad. But that’s not his fault. If he don’t want nobody down his pants, that’s his own business.”
