Theodore

Theodore, also known as Flapjack, is Roy’s long-term companion, a wheelchair user and guitarist whose performances help the pair make a living on the road. His deteriorating health increasingly limits their work and travel; when he dies beneath a stand of magnolia trees, Roy’s life as a fugitive begins to seem less necessary than the chance to see his daughter again.

Identity and Partnership

Theodore and Roy travel together for years after leaving West Virginia, bound by a practical partnership as well as companionship. Roy pushes Theodore’s wheelchair over long distances and estimates that their travels have carried them perhaps a million miles. Theodore’s guitar supplies music for their performances, while Roy preaches and finds work. Their routines depend on one another, even as Theodore’s condition makes the arrangement harder to sustain.

Theodore also draws a boundary around their life together. When Roy raises the question of how the Lord might judge their conduct, Theodore rejects the intrusion and argues that he and Flapjack are harming no one. His response puts the pair’s private understanding of themselves against Roy’s uncertainty about religious rules and sin.

Performance and Loss of Work

Under the banner “THE PROPHET AND THE PICKER,” Roy presents a frightening account of the End Times while Theodore provides the musical accompaniment. To attract paying customers, Roy adds insect-eating to the sermon. They give four or five shows on some evenings, alternating with the Flamingo Lady’s act; afterward, Roy goes behind the tent to recover, and Theodore follows in his wheelchair. Their work is both a performance and a means of survival, sustained by an audience willing to treat religion as entertainment.

The pair’s carnival employment ends after a young boy wanders into the back of the tent while Roy is outside soliciting customers. Theodore claims the boy asked him for help with his clothes, but Roy does not believe the explanation. Billy Bradford’s outfit leaves them in the countryside, and their unsuccessful attempts to join other carnival companies are further thwarted by the story spreading among carnival owners. Theodore’s loss of work is therefore tied not only to his physical dependence but also to the conduct that makes their already fragile livelihood untenable.

Decline and Daily Life

When work is scarce or the law presses too closely, Roy heads inland to pick fruit while Theodore waits in a grove or beneath bushes. Theodore’s body grows weaker: he passes out, suffers recurring pain and chest heaviness, and cannot play as he once did. Roy leaves him wine each morning, and Theodore still tries to make music in the evenings, though his fingers no longer cooperate reliably. The effort to keep performing persists after the capacity that once supported it has begun to disappear.

Their hopes remain modest and provisional. After three weeks of steady orange picking, Roy earns thirteen dollars in a day and learns that the job may last only four or five more days. The pair have saved almost a hundred dollars in a month and plan to buy secondhand suits and preach again. Roy knows Theodore’s guitar playing has diminished, but believes they can manage. The plan to return to the road together makes Theodore’s death the abrupt end of a future they had only just begun to imagine.

Death and Consequence

Roy returns to their campsite beneath stunted magnolias and finds Theodore beside his wheelchair and guitar. After realizing Theodore is dead, Roy tries for fifteen minutes to get him back into the chair, then starts toward the highway before stopping. He fears the questions authorities would ask and decides that the grove, where Theodore had been waiting while Roy worked, is as much a home as they have had since their days with Billy Bradford Family Amusements.

Roy stays beside Theodore and prays for his soul, recalling that the two of them had done many bad things. As evening comes, he eats only part of a sandwich and gradually recognizes that he no longer has to keep running. He considers returning home and turning himself in, if doing so might let him see Lenora Laferty once more. Theodore had never understood how Roy could miss a daughter he barely remembered; in death, Theodore’s absence nevertheless leaves Roy alone with that longing and with the possibility of going back.