Diary of a Misfit, page 41
Over the years, people had repeatedly told me that Roy dressed like a man because Jewel and John forced him to as a child. My grandma said Jewel wanted to hide Roy’s identity. Other people told me John wanted a son. When my grandma first told me this story, I’d accepted her explanation, but as I met more transgender people, I’d changed my mind. I thought people in Delhi were just uncomfortable with the idea that maybe Roy was trans. But reading Roy’s diaries left me even more unsure. Did “raised up confused” mean Jewel and John forced him into an identity he might not have sought on his own? Or did this paragraph mean Roy had known since he was young that “female” didn’t fit him?
I snapped a picture of the page, then I closed the journal. The entry didn’t solve my mystery, and it deepened a suspicion that had long nagged at me. If I’d come to Delhi when my grandmother first told me about Roy, I could have met him. And if I’d met Roy, it’s possible he wouldn’t have liked me. He complained often in his journal that the country was drowning in sin, and as far as I could tell, he never reached any kind of peace with his identity. I certainly couldn’t imagine him stuffing Pam’s pink unicorn into the basket on his tricycle. In April 1984, on what he believed was his fifty-ninth birthday, Roy noted that the only things he hated were sin and “maybe myself because I am like I am and I can’t seem to do anything about it.” If Roy hated himself, would he have hated me? Would he have hated Pam? Would he have shooed us off his porch if we’d come a decade earlier with our questions and short haircuts?
I couldn’t bear to consider that possibility further, not on the night I’d long waited for, so I reopened the 1979 journal and read from the beginning. In January, Roy wrote that he was thinking about going back to the Pentecostal church. He wanted to stop smoking, and he’d gone to the altar at the Church of Christ, but praying there hadn’t worked. He was still smoking. Later that month, Roy wrote that Ann McVay had had her phone taken out.
I guess she’ll be moving soon. I won’t have anybody to talk to. She don’t come around much anymore, but when something unusual happened and she heard about it, she usually called and told me, and I’d do the same with her. It was just having someone to share with once in a while.
Ann had told me back in 2009 that she stopped talking to Roy because his pets made his house smell bad, but I ached in a new way, reading Roy’s account of the end of their friendship. Ann had told me the story in a matter-of-fact tone I’d found cold. Roy didn’t write particularly anguished sentences—even when he was depressed, his writing was spare—but I could feel how lonely he must have been. His best friend had stopped visiting him, and all he had left to hang on to was the occasional phone call. Then Ann had taken those away, too.
Mark and I looked through the journals for another half hour, occasionally reading a few lines out loud to each other. All told, the Kings spent four hours in the cabin that day. None of us ate dinner, but when I asked if they were hungry, they shook their heads no. Maybe they felt the way I did, too moved to eat.
After I finished 1979, I moved on to the avocado-green 1987 edition. Just as I opened it, Mark closed the notebook he’d been reading, and my heartbeat sped up. I was running out of time. Soon, I figured, Mark would want to go home. I didn’t want him to see that I’d noticed him closing his journals, so I bent my head deeper into the notebook, then skipped forward to the paragraph Roy wrote on his sixty-second birthday.
I went to church today like always. I got three birthday cards from church today. Mrs. Alred give me one, and Carolyn Perry sent me one. She wasn’t at church today. She’s sick with a cold, and Ann Russell give me one tonight with 10 dollars in it. And she bought me supper tonight. I didn’t want her to spend lots of money on me, so I got a small hamburger. That was nice of them to think about me like that. And Jo called me this morning and sung happy birthday to me. I wish I had a car and a driver’s license. I could drive out to see them because I’ve been here nearly all my life, and I’m afraid I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else. But I’m sure not happy here anymore.
I had, of course, been searching for answers to the big mysteries my grandma posed back in 2002, but as I read Roy’s words, I realized that what kept me going was a desire to answer the questions I often asked myself. Will I ever be fully happy outside of Louisiana? Would Roy have been happier somewhere else? He never made the leap that I did. As far as I could tell, he never got his driver’s license. He never drove to visit Jo or anyone else, so he never tested his own hypotheses. If he’d left, maybe he would have found happiness, but maybe it would have been the kind of incomplete happiness I experienced, a rootless good marked by the kind of yearning that can never be quelled as long as home is a place you’ve fled. Somehow, even without traveling, Roy seemed to already know what I’d learned in the world beyond—for misfits, no place is ever right.
I closed his journal with a big sigh. Years ago, maybe the first time I went down with Aubree and Aaron to film, my grandma told me that she’d been surprised by how interested I became in Roy’s story. “It was like it burnt a hole in you,” she told me. It was still burning a hole in me, even as I held the thing I’d so desperately wanted. I read, but I didn’t feel sated. I told myself I’d search later for Mrs. Alred or Carolyn Perry. I wondered if Ann Russell knew anything more than Roy’s journals revealed. I was grateful for the big thing Mark and Cheryl had done for me. They’d braved the curse, and they’d packed up Roy’s journals and brought them to me. But I knew I’d never feel satisfied with only one reading. I set 1987 down, and I told myself that I had to find a way to come back and read it again.
Roy had written far more than I had anticipated about his clothes and his appearance, but I didn’t find nearly as many entries as I’d hoped to about Jewel. I suppose it made sense. I only wrote about my mother when things were really bad between us, and even then, I jotted just a few lines. Roy’s journals only offered the vaguest hints about the woman who raised him. Once, in February 1978, he noted that it was the anniversary of her death, and in 1979, after he’d attended one of the McVays’ funerals, he wrote that the ceremony reminded him of his mother’s.
They buried Mr. McVay today. I went to the funeral. There really was that many people there. I rode onto the graveyard with Ann’s brother. He went by his self, or he would have been, but he let me ride with him. I guess I’ll go to church tonight. I don’t really feel like going. All the funeral and things took me back so long ago when mama died. The memory come back to me so clear. We didn’t have a lots of kin folks like the McVays did. There was only my step-father and his brother and family and mama’s four nephews. They all left right after the funeral, and my step-father’s brother took him home with them for a week, and for the first time in my life, I was left completely alone at night. I was 32 years old, but I really was like about a 12 year old child. I had to grow up all at once. I don’t know how I made it.
How many times had I thought about Jewel dying? I’d pictured the scene in my head dozens of times, but I’d never imagined what Roy felt like. I’d always assumed he was an adult when she died, so I’d believed he hadn’t suffered that much. Maybe I couldn’t have pictured it before my own mom died, but now I read his words, and I thought about the night I flew back to Columbia after my mother died. I had crawled into my sofa bed and played every recorded voicemail my mother had ever left me. None of them were particularly interesting. Mostly she just asked why I never called her back. She sang “My Special Angel” into my voicemail a few times, and once, the year I turned thirty-three, she sang “Happy Birthday.”
I was thirty-four when my mother died, two years older than Roy had been when he lost Jewel. I suppose I was an adult, but my age hadn’t mitigated anything. My mother’s death obliterated me. It knocked me off my axis, and even now, more than three years later, I cry at least once a week, missing her. Of course Roy suffered, I know now. How had I ever assumed he hadn’t?
* * *
—
I READ THE ENTRY a second time, and something dawned on me. Roy didn’t mention my great-grandmother Rita Mae. He didn’t describe a bathtub full of alcohol or the storm Rita Mae had supposedly braved when she darted across the street to hear Jewel’s last confession. Rita Mae wasn’t even listed among the funeral attendees.
I’d spent my career trying to hew as close as possible to the truth of things, but that night in the cabin, I began to accept that there were some answers I’d never have. Maybe the story my grandma passed down wasn’t the right one, but it had been the one I needed to hear. I’d felt so relieved, sitting at her wobbly kitchen table that Fourth of July. I’d been so sure that the rest of my life would be lonely, but then my grandma had spun this tale, and I began to imagine the tiniest shimmer of light stretched out before me. I’d chased that feeling. I’d chased it for so many years that, over time, what I was looking for began to change. Did it matter why or how Roy wound up in Delhi? In the end, what I really wanted to know is how he felt once he got there. The diaries offered ample evidence.
I closed the 1979 journal. None of us spoke for a minute or two. Outside, the wind was whipping the lake into makeshift waves, and I listened to the water slosh against the deck as I searched for another good entry.
“Wait a minute now,” Mark said. “Roy wrote in print there. Boy, that’s really good print, look at that.”
He handed me the journal he’d been reading. I didn’t understand what Mark’s fascination with cursive and print writing was, but I prepared myself to seem shocked by Roy’s sudden shift to print as I crawled toward Mark. Once I inched close enough, I saw that the page Mark had been reading was brown and half-covered by another piece of paper Roy had affixed with about twenty pieces of tape. I creeped closer. At the top of the page, I saw, Roy had written a title: “The Town Misfit.”
“I think it’s a poem,” I said.
Mark stood. I was still on my hands and knees, hovering to the side of the notebook, but I read the poem out loud.
The Town Misfit
I’m the town misfit, and I live here all alone
I’ve got no friends or family, nothing to call my own
I’m always broke and hungry, and lonely as can be
I’m the town misfit, nobody cares for me
I’ve went to different churches, and I tried to fit in
I’ve searched this whole town over, trying to find a friend
I’ve tried all their parties, but I couldn’t fit in you see
I’m the town misfit, nobody cares for me
I’ve worked in the cotton fields, and I drove a big old truck
I tried for country music, but I didn’t have much luck
I scrubbed floors for rich folks, cut grass till I couldn’t see
I’m the town misfit, nobody cares for me
I’ve eat at rich folk’s table, and also with the poor
I’ve walked the streets of Delhi till I couldn’t walk no more
There’s not much in this town that I haven’t tried you see
I’m the town misfit, nobody cares for me
When my life on earth is over, and it’s time for me to die,
No one here will miss me. There will be no one to cry.
If I make it up to heaven, will I then find a friend?
Or will I still be a misfit, with no place to fit in?
I finished reading, but I waited a beat before looking up. Everything people had told me was here. The preachers, the cotton fields, the country music career that never took off.
I turned back to the journal. All the tape had gone yellow, and black mold crept up the center of the page. I read the last stanza again. “No one here will miss me.” I touched the blue ink, believing somehow that doing so would bring me closer to Roy, then I jerked my head up.
“Roy was wrong,” I said.
People missed him. My grandma had missed Roy her whole life. Archie Lee Harrell missed him, and so did Lou Henry and the McVays, and I knew Mark and Cheryl must have, too. Otherwise, why would they have held on to Roy’s things? He’d been dead nearly thirteen years, and here the four of us were, still remembering him, missing him in our own ways.
“You know,” Mark said, “one thing about Royce, the way she was treated by some people and the way her life went, society was robbed of potential. How many potentials does our society rob by bullying and treating people like Royce was treated? Royce could have been a nurse. She could have been, for all I know, a journalist because of the way she loved to write. That’s sad, isn’t it?”
Mark pointed at me when he said “journalist,” and I suspected he understood why I’d been knocking on his door for so many years. He seemed to be saying that if things had broken a different way, Roy might have had the life I had. I nodded in affirmation. I don’t know how, but everyone suddenly seemed to understand that the night was nearing its end. Cheryl stood. She grabbed the trash bags and reached for the journals. I asked if she wanted help putting them away, but she shook her head no. Mark stood, so I stood, then he turned to me.
“Well,” he said, “if I move, I plan on burying these in that yard. But I’m not going to tell whoever buys the place where they are. I’m going to put them in a good, strong, plastic box and bury them kind of deep.”
Even then, after two hours of reading, I felt that familiar ache claw through me. Maybe I could wait until the Kings moved. Maybe I could buy their land or just sneak over and dig until I found the journals again. I knew how ridiculous this desire was, but nothing seemed to quell it. I thought of my grandmother again. It was like it burnt a hole in you.
I watched Mark and Cheryl slip each journal into a bag, then we all stood and lingered. Aubree stepped around the room, angling the camera to catch one last look at all of us. In the footage, we almost look like distant family members at the end of a holiday dinner, close somehow, but awkward. When Cheryl slid the last journal into a bag, I stepped toward the Kings, and my voice broke as I tried to say goodbye.
“I don’t even have the words to tell you what I feel. Thank you.”
“Well,” Mark said, laughing, “if Royce didn’t want us to see them, we may not live much longer.”
I didn’t believe in the curse, but still, I asked Mark if he would call me when he made it home. He laughed again, then he transferred the trash bags to his other hand.
“I kinda decided that since you’ve been so persistent on this, maybe Roy did want you to see ’em.”
I walked Mark and Cheryl to the cabin door. They disappeared down the boardwalk, and Roy’s diaries were gone. I cried for a while on the cabin floor. I so badly wished I could tell my mom and my grandma about the journals. I closed my eyes and imagined bringing pictures of Roy’s pages to the carport. I could almost hear my grandma say, “Those were Roy’s thoughts, honey.”
My grandma always believed that Roy was an earthly angel, and suddenly I hoped that she was right about the afterlife. Maybe Roy was in the heavenly band, playing songs for my grandmother again. Maybe my mom was there, too. Was she right? Were they all strangers in Heaven? I pushed the thought away. In my Promised Land they were all together, living side by side in mansions on a street more beautiful than Hell.
I opened my eyes. I texted my brother, and I called Frankie, but I didn’t feel as relieved as I’d thought I would. Eventually, I reached over and turned the camera off.
I know Aubree and I left town the next morning, but for the first time in years, I didn’t tape anything, so I don’t remember the details. That day, like most of the others the year my mom died, is lost to the black hole of grief. Maybe I drove through Delhi sure I’d move back to Louisiana. Maybe I felt at peace or maybe I didn’t. Whatever I felt leaving my mother’s hometown, it was just a blip, as gnawing and uncertain as all the other competing things I felt that year and the years after.
I had hoped reading Roy’s diaries would settle something inside me. If I could solve his mysteries, I thought, I would decipher my own. I would know where I belonged. But I understand now that most of what haunted me before might haunt me forever. I drove away from Louisiana, but I returned. I am still returning, even now.
Acknowledgments
I wish I could give every journalist a partner like Aubree Bernier-Clarke. They spent eleven years asking me questions and pushing me to make one more phone call. They sat in every awkward living room, and they slept on the world’s least comfortable bunk bed—all on their own dime—because they believed in this project long before anyone else did. Most of the time, I was pouty. I didn’t want to answer questions. I didn’t want to make hard phone calls. Aubree persisted. Thank you, buddy, for your relentless positivity and wild ideas. Thank you for collard greens, big salads, and chocolate-almond cold brew. You’re my family, by biscuits, if not blood.
Christopher, you make every moment bigger, better, and more fun. I’m so grateful for the easy way you talk to strangers. I’m thankful for your jokes, your songs, and sweet curiosity. Thank you for remembering with me.
Aunt Cindy, thank you for loving me unconditionally, and thank you for keeping everyone alive with the stories and pictures you’ve saved. I couldn’t have written this without your memories. When I think about what I’ve gained in doing this project, you’re always the first person I think of. Thank you for being as nosy and nostalgic as I am.
Dad, you’ve always made me feel like I could and should be a writer. Thank you for selling those comic books. Thank you for answering even the hardest questions. Michael, I love youuuuuuu.
