When I was a kid, there was this old farmer that lived outside of town, on Route 571. His name was Roy Purcell, but everybody called him “Eleven Part Roy.” All us kids had various theories about why people called him that, and so did the people who called him Eleven Part Roy. Nobody seemed to really know for sure.
Dotty, the donut lady at the local bakery where he’d come in on Sundays, once told me that it was because whenever he greeted a lady, he’d take off his hat, a big yellow stetson, and bow forward just enough so that you could see the top of his head. She said that every single time he did this, his hair was parted completely differently from the time before.
He used to ride into town on his tractor; if you saw him, and he saw you, you could always count on a big wide smile and a friendly, equally wide wave, even if you didn’t really know each other. Everybody knew he had a big primer-white Ford 150 truck, probably from the early 1970s, because you could see it from the road, sitting in the yard in front of his old house. It never seemed to move, which is probably why Barney the gunsmith used to say that every time he tried to fix the thing, he’d take it apart and put it together again only to find that he had several parts left over.
I remember when I was very small, and my mother and I were uptown doing some shopping. We ran into him in front of the hardware store, and she and he exchanged pleasantries. As my mom turned to go into the store, I recall piping up and asking him in my awkward little kid way, “where are you from?” He told me that he was from Decatur, Georgia. I remember because Decatur sounded like a funny name to me then. It still kind of does today, come to think of it. Later, my mom asked me what we were talking about when she went inside. She’d assumed I was following her, and I got scolded, coolly but gently, once she turned around and saw me coming in several paces late. I told her what he’d said, and she looked at me like she didn’t understand what I’d said. I repeated myself, but she caught me, telling me, “that’s funny! He told me once that he was from Killeen, Texas. And he told your father that he was from Michigan!” Sometimes, you’d see him on the street, idly chatting to other townsfolk, and once in a while someone would ask him. “Say: what parts you from, Roy?” and he’d answer, always a different town, a different state. But nobody seemed to mind, and never even seemed suspicious of his odd answers. For a long time, I thought he was on the run from the law for some reason, but Mister Cranshaw, a sheriff’s deputy, once told me that he checked out just fine. Apparently the only thing he’d ever done wrong was when he crashed his former truck, a 1955 Ford, while driving drunk. Deputy Cranshaw was the one who’d arrested him that night.
It was well known, or at least well talked about, among certain knitting circles, that when Roy was younger, he’d went to New York City for three years, and was hanging around with bohemians there, which I guess would put him at about 70 years old or so, since that was the 1950s. It was also well known that he wrote the occasional poem and knew every word of Shakespeare; he was a literary man. A friend of ours who was friends with one of his own friends told us that he’d written a play, or a one-man show, during his brief tenure as complicated cityfolk, and acted out the whole thing himself. Our friend said he thought the play had eleven parts in it. This might well have been true enough, because the only time I’d ever been in his house, I noticed a newspaper article with his picture in it, in a frame on his wall, right next to a plaque of some kind. I didn’t actually read them, but I suppose it could’ve been a minor award of some kind, and a show review. I did ask about them, but all he’d say was that he’d once tried out a different life, but that it didn’t quite fit him, so he’d gone back to farming. In my ten year-old mind, that made enough sense as it was, and I didn’t ask him any further questions.
Eloise was our next-door neighbor, and she’d ostensibly confirmed this last bit, although her claim was that Roy actually was a man of many parts, being a poet, a playwright, an actor, a mechanic, a farmer, a soldier (he allegedly did a tour of duty in Korea), a painter (I never heard anyone else who’d ever claimed to have seen one of his paintings), a novellist (she claimed he’d been working on writing his novel for decades), a musician (this was true, he did play a mean fiddle down at the corner saloon!), and a couple other things I’ve forgotten over time. But I happened to know that Eloise was a hopeless romantic who’d fancied him even more than the other women of the town did, even the other single ones, all of whom had a crush on him at some point in their lives.
Once, when his band rented some audio equipment for a while, they recorded some rehearsals together. Pete Jeffers, the barber up on Main Street, told me that several times one or more of the other players had to stay home, or work late, and that he’d sit in on organ, drums, bass, guitar, mandolin, piano, harmonica, and various other instruments. He said that he thought there was probably eleven parts that Roy’d played by himself on the whole of that recording. I did hear it once, that time when I was over at his house. My father had brought him the family station wagon, a ’73 Pontiac Vista Cruiser, to fix. It just sounded like country music to me at the time. I couldn’t tell who played what, so who knows?
I am 34 now, and a mortician. Roy just died last week. Heart failure, probably brought on by years of alcohol abuse. When somebody passes away, you learn things about them that you never knew about. All kinds of things. You meet relatives you never knew they had, and you hear stories you’d never heard previously. I can tell you now, without a shadow of a doubt, that I know for a fact why they call him Eleven Part Roy. Which brings me to the final theory, the one that panned out. The one, in fact, that nobody knew about, except for me now, and a scant few others.
Roy had been married. Probably nobody in town ever even remembered that he’d been married once, for it was pretty long ago. It was 1958. Her name was Helen, and I met her at the funeral. That’s not entirely how I know, however; in fact she said hardly a thing about it. What I know was pieced together from little bits of conversation I overheard at the funeral, mostly from Sherriff Hanoran and his boys. What happened was that Roy, who was no stranger to the bottle, had gotten drunk down at the Pony Express saloon, the one where he and his band performed once in a while. He had let a barmaid take him home, supposedly because he was too drunk to drive himself home. But they had apparently slept together that night. When his wife found out about it, nearly six months later, she went bezerk and cut him into eleven pieces. I’ve seen the scars. It wasn’t very pretty, but then again, the truth rarely ever is.