Roy Watzka

Roy Watzka is Delphine’s alcoholic father, a bereaved romantic whose life moves between self-destruction and unexpected acts of labor and care. His attachment to Minnie, the mother Delphine lost as an infant, outlasts her presence and becomes the story Roy tells about his drinking; his concealed knowledge of the Chavers family’s deaths makes that drinking a way to evade an unbearable past. Yet after Eva’s death he achieves a sustained sobriety, tends his own house, and helps Delphine. His later relapse, arrest for stealing morphine, confession, and death with Minnie’s photographs before him leave him neither redeemed nor reduced to his addiction: he remains a damaged father capable of love, work, and remorse.

Identity and Background

Delphine was only three or four months old when her mother died. Roy raised her in a precarious household on a small wedge of land that might have been lost if the farmer leasing it had not refused to buy it outright and secured the arrangement by contract. The resulting monthly income, meager as it was, usually went to liquor unless Delphine managed to take it first. She sewed bright clothes, rehearsed tragic heroines’ speeches, and joined local dramatic productions partly to escape the misery at home. Her affection for her father was intense, but it was not reliably returned in the form of protection or stability; she remained vulnerable to his self-pity and drinking.

Roy’s public disorder does not exhaust his character. Townspeople know him as a heavy drinker, but they do not simply despise him. His decline is understood as following a loss, and his account of having loved Minnie to the point of self-destruction encourages people to pity him. During rare sober intervals he can work with extraordinary energy at the farm tasks he knows best, including milking, cleaning stalls, and stacking hay. He sometimes works without pay, partly to secure a future source of liquor and partly out of a rough, genuine generosity. His capacity for hard work and his capacity for self-neglect coexist without resolving into a simple moral lesson.

Roy’s love for Minnie survives chiefly in stories and photographs. People in town hear about her from him and come to know her through those accounts, although the surviving pictures do not plainly confirm the romantic ideal he describes. One photograph shows her turned partly away, her mouth set; another leaves her character equally difficult to read. The discrepancy matters: Roy’s devotion is unmistakable, but Minnie remains partly unknowable, present to the community through his telling rather than through a fully recovered life of her own.

Fatherhood, Care, and Domestic Life

When Delphine and Cyprian return to the house, Roy is leaving as they arrive. Seeing his daughter, he pulls off his slouch hat, covers his face with it, and sobs so dramatically that Cyprian is horrified and sits with him on the porch. Delphine goes inside and finds a home overwhelmed by accumulated waste: spoiled food, clothing, animal remains, and other refuse have decomposed together. She believes Roy has made the mess to demonstrate how helpless he is without her. The scene defines a recurring pattern in their relationship: Roy’s distress is real, but Delphine is left to face its practical consequences.

His drinking is not merely a matter of appetite. During an earlier withdrawal episode in a sanitarium, staff wrapped him tightly in a cold, wet sheet as part of his treatment. Roy recalls the isolation and terrifying visions he experienced there, including spiders seeming to emerge from the walls and lice beneath his skin. He says that the experience drove him back to alcohol, and he never again seriously considered quitting. The account presents his drinking as a destructive response to fear as well as a source of further harm: his own mind, in his view, has become something he cannot safely endure unaided.

Roy also knows how to respond when care becomes concrete. In the account of Delphine’s infancy, Step-and-a-Half arrives at his house with the living baby, and Roy follows instructions to stoke the fire and milk his goat for milk. While Step-and-a-Half sterilizes a rag, warms water, feeds and cleans the child, and wraps her in a torn pillowcase, Roy holds the baby in a rocking chair. He first struggles to arrange himself to support her, then settles into the task as the chair creaks beneath him. Step-and-a-Half returns to the child over the years, sometimes bringing money and tending her in awkward, limited ways, but Roy becomes the person who remains responsible for her. The episode shows his capacity for tenderness before the later father-daughter bond with Delphine comes into view.

That bond is marked by Delphine’s repeated efforts to keep Roy alive and by his intermittent ability to care for her in return. When she must search urgently for help and medicine, she spends hours trying to find Old Doctor Heech and Sal Birdy, the druggist, without success. She drives back, weeping, and sees her father stumbling along the road. Later, when Delphine is occupied with the Waldvogel boys after Eva’s death, Roy’s sober presence surprises her: he paints and repairs his own house, fills the cellar more thoroughly, and sometimes prepares breakfast for her. The change is practical rather than grand. A hot bowl of oatmeal waiting in the morning becomes evidence that the father who so often required care can also offer it.

The Chavers Secret and Sobriety

The Chavers family’s deaths bind Roy’s drinking to a secret he has concealed. When he speaks of Sheriff Hock’s search of the house, he recalls that Hock had been investigating Clarisse and then used a warrant to search the property; Roy indicates that people now suspect she killed the Chavers family as well. Roy’s own knowledge is more direct. Late in his life, he tells Delphine that he had sent someone down to the cellar to look for ginger beer and the good liquor, with candles to read the French labels. He suggests that the missing wine may have been what old Chavers was seeking. Roy then reveals that he returned himself to get liquor, went into the cellar, and found the family. Afterward, he stayed drunk until Delphine and Cyprian came to him.

The confession clarifies the history behind the haunting but does not convert it into a neat explanation or absolution. For years, the dead Chavers appear in Roy’s bouts of delirium: in his visions they come for him, their hands reaching as they draw him toward the earth. When Eva dies, the visions become unbearable. Roy enters an unprecedented stretch of sobriety, lasting from dry days into weeks. The immediate cause is the starkness of Eva’s death, but the return of what happened in the cellar also contributes; for the first time, he finds a horror that seems worse than withdrawal. The sobriety is therefore neither a sudden cure nor a simple triumph of will. It arises when the pain he had tried to bury with alcohol becomes more frightening than facing it.

During this period Roy turns his effort toward his own house rather than hiring out his wasted strength. He paints the walls sunny yellow, restores blue paint on the doors and windows, sands and varnishes the floors, and blackens the stove. He helps Delphine through the household demands following Eva’s death, sometimes setting out breakfast before she rises. These tasks give his sobriety visible form: instead of leaving disorder for his daughter to manage, he repairs, cleans, and feeds. The house does not erase the past, but his work briefly makes it a place where Delphine can be cared for.

Roy’s account of emptiness captures both his self-pity and Delphine’s resistance to it. He often explains his drinking as an attempt to fill the emptiness left by lost love. Delphine angrily answers that everyone does things to fill the emptiness. Roy takes her rebuke as a kind of instruction during his sober interval, but he still finds that nothing works for him as alcohol did. The exchange gives his recovery a limit: recognizing that loss is not uniquely his does not make him able to live with it indefinitely.

Relapse, Arrest, and Confession

The return to drinking becomes visible to Delphine only after she has missed its signs. When she realizes what has happened, she says that she knows she is hearing the truth, despite the words of denial that escape her. Her mood collapses as she considers her own failure to recognize the change. The episode reverses the earlier pattern in which Roy’s drinking leaves Delphine managing its consequences: now she understands that love and vigilance have not given her control over his choices.

Roy’s relapse culminates in a public episode in which Delphine sees him running naked through town in a disoriented state. He appears confused and unaware of his exposure, repeatedly falling and scrambling back up while trying to flee. Delphine recognizes him and runs toward him, but he recoils in alarm and continues to run. The incident makes the bodily and social cost of his addiction impossible to overlook, while his frightened response shows that Delphine’s presence does not automatically restore his sense of safety. Doctor Heech later describes the damage Roy has inflicted on his liver and prescribes prolonged rest.

Sheriff Hock arrests Roy for stealing morphine, although the theft had happened earlier and Fidelis had already explained the circumstances to the sheriff. Fidelis had been paying Sal Birdy a little at a time for the medicine, but Hock proceeds with the arrest as though the investigation has only just begun. Roy goes peacefully to the cell he had occupied many times while drunk. This time he is sober enough to register the room’s stained walls, blanket, and other indignities. Delphine visits him from a small chair outside the bars and has the floors, walls, and bed cleaned; she brings sheets. Roy remarks that at least the cell is clean.

Their conversation in jail brings out a painful difference between Delphine’s hope and Roy’s understanding. She tells him that he did not steal the morphine and promises to find a lawyer. Roy replies that he did it, that everyone knows they saw him, and that he had to. Delphine has already imagined a murder charge and the chain of a lawyer, trial, jury, and judge; when she learns the matter will be treated as a formality, her panic eases. She stays with him and listens as he explains the temperaments of his chickens, including which birds should be left alone and which rooster could take over with the larger hens. Even in confinement, he turns to ordinary knowledge and tries to prolong the visit rather than face its end.

In the year after his release, Roy grows thinner and slower. His hair becomes pale and wispy, his eyes blur, and the bold, talkative manner associated with drinking gives way to forgetfulness and an unsettlingly peaceful air. He continues to work: mornings at the shop, where he accepts ten cents and a slice of sausage, and afternoons alongside Step-and-a-Half, sorting and hauling the town’s discarded goods. He helps build her a cart from broken crates and bent hardware. Delphine is troubled by their conspicuous partnership and by her suspicion that Step-and-a-Half resents her for taking Eva’s place behind the counter. Roy’s industriousness persists, but his daughter cannot simply celebrate it without also confronting its social and emotional complications.

Death and Narrative Significance

As Roy’s health worsens, Doctor Heech prescribes rest to ease his liver and keep his cough from turning into pneumonia. Roy spends much of the day in bed near the stove, sleeping for long stretches and eating little. At first, he and Delphine treat each hour of sleep as a sign of healing. Delphine gradually sees it differently: his sleep seems like preparation for death. She fears that he will die while she is at work and touches his face when she returns each day and again when she rises in the morning. A few mouthfuls of soup are followed by his return to sleep.

Before he dies, Roy gives Delphine a fuller account of the cellar. He says that he went back looking for liquor, found the Chavers family there, and stayed drunk from then until she and Cyprian arrived. The confession joins the long history of his drinking to a specific hidden event, while leaving intact the earlier truth that he drank from grief for Minnie. His addiction has had more than one source: love and loss, terror, and the burden of what he saw all converge in the same habit.

A county visiting nurse finds Roy dead, sitting upright and gazing at Minnie’s photographs, which are arranged before him on the edge of a cupboard. She records the time and condition of the body, closes his eyes, lays him down, and calls Delphine. Before Delphine arrives, she telephones the news of Roy’s composed stare around town. His death becomes inseparable from the image of the lost woman he loved: the photographs, difficult to read in themselves, serve as the final focus of his attention and reinforce the local legend of his devotion.

The novel’s later recollection places Roy within the larger movement of Delphine’s life. She remembers the butcher Fidelis arriving with a suitcase she had imagined empty, later learning it held his knives; she recalls Eva’s death and the boy freed from the collapsed hill. Roy, too, returns in this sequence of memory, and Delphine is glad he took his pictures of Minnie to the grave so that nothing of Minnie would remain to walk the earth. The detail closes the circle between Roy’s private shrine, his stories, and Delphine’s complicated inheritance: she has spent much of her life trying to rescue her father from the emptiness he named, while also recognizing that his love for Minnie was a force she could not replace. Roy’s narrative role is not that of a recovered sinner or merely a comic drunk, but of a man whose tenderness and damage remain bound together until the end.