Prison - "Sprout" by Dale Peck. Part 6

by Clytemnestra

Community

(This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday, Jul. 05, 2025 Saturday, Jul. 05, 2025 at 9:00:06am PDT

Part of the cover of 'Sprout' by Dale Peck — Cover of the LGBTQ coming of age book "Sprout" by Dale Peck Lambda Literary Award for 2010

Trigger Warning: This diary in all its parts, deals with child abuse and a malignant narcissist.

ALL the names in this diary have been changed, to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

All boxed quotes in Part 6 are from the letters I wrote to Ty.

Part 6

Ty shot and killed his tormentor. A.K.A his “father.”

A few months, maybe a year after Ty was remanded to Kansas Corrections I emailed June and asked for Ty’s prison number so I could write to him. I didn’t get anything back and I dropped it, thinking she was dealing with her own issues over all of this. But I kept searching the web for it and I finally found it in May of 2019, beginning another chapter.

It took me less than 10 minutes to act on this new found information. He was housed at Lansing Correctional Facility. I checked to see which facility the notorious serial killer BTK (Dennis Rader) was/is in for my own peace of mind. BTK is in Eldorado Correctional Facility.

I went to Amazon and ordered two single issue Nat Geo magazines; Your Brain Revised & Updated: A User’s Guide – 100 Things You Never Knew and Wonders of the World: Earth's Most Awesome Places. I used the gift option to include a little note: “Ty, I’m your cousin Clytemnestra, uncle Lincoln’s daughter (your dad’s brother). I’ve been thinking about you.”

I found out later that that simple action had far reaching effects.

I sent him two more Nat Geo single issue magazines, plus a book on the Atchison,, Topeka and Sante Fe railroad, because our Grandpa worked on the ATSF as a boilermaker, and Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.”

I hadn’t given him any way to contact me, so he called June and asked for my address. June didn’t have it, only my email so she wrote to me and asked me to send him my address so he could write to me.

I was waiting on getting a post office box before I wrote to him. On 24 Sept 2019 I typed out the first letter:

Dear Ty,

How are you doing? I hope okay. I have often imagined your surprise at getting books out of the blue. Long ago I emailed June and asked her for your address, and KDOC number, but she must have not gotten that email, I never heard back. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to pester her. I have been occasionally looking on the web to see what’s going on with you. I’d see the facility you were in, but not your number. Then about 10 minutes before I ordered the first books for you I did a search and there was your KDOC number. Viola!

I told him about happenings within the family, thinking he remembered them. I told him about our cousins Ellen and Karen and my brother Mark.

The first letter I received from him I got a feeling that I couldn’t explain. I held the unopened letter in my hand and for some reason verbally uttered the name my other cousin, the one I was close to in my tweenage and teenage years. The one who had completed a suicide.

It was as if my deceased cousin was telling me to pay attention, to write often and be the friend to Ty that I had been to him. (He and I often said "friends forever." And I "reminded" him of that when I stood over his casket). I read the letter in my car in the Post Office parking lot.

After a few exchanges of letters he called me out on my P.O. Box and why I had it. I explained that I hadn’t interacted with him for years so I didn’t know what he’d be like. It was a layer of protection for me.

So since I didn’t really know what you’d be like, I opted for a p.o.box to begin writing to you because like a cell phone, a p.o.box I can walk easily away from it. A home address is much, much harder, to impossible. I just didn’t know if you were a wacko. You’re not and pretty much the writing of where I was going to go with this was on the wall when I gave you my cell number . . . I knew I was going to give you my home address before I was going to have to pay for the p.o.box again. Your letter just pushed that up a few weeks.

I’m just thankful that you want to write to me and did not tell me to fuck off.

I gave him my home address. I told him about visiting Pakistan

[My husband] is from Pakistan. I’ve been there twice, it’s an amazing country. I even had an amazing Brahma bull encounter on the side of a mountain in the Hindu Kush mountains. My husband and I were slowly coming down the mountain (everyone else had beaten us down) looking at and recording all the interesting animals and plants we saw (like purple and yellow slugs as long and fat as your middle finger) when this Brahma bull who was walking up the mountain walked up to me.

[Husband] was far enough away that he couldn’t get to me. He already had the video camera running so he said as quietly as he could, “Don’t move!” I replied to him, standing as still as I could, “Don’t worry,” because I wasn’t planning on moving as I looked at the long horns. The bull and I just looked at each other for a while. He seemed to be curious because I guess I wasn’t reacting the way he expected. I stood there in awe and respect and eventually he moved on up the mountain. A little while later [husband] and I heard these 2 women who had walked past us, screaming and calling for their husbands to come help them. The bull had blocked them, just like he had done to me, and this was apparently the response he was expecting.

He spoke of his low self esteem and how his acne scars didn’t help that. I told him about Danny Trejo.

Your handwriting is beautiful by the way.

In one of my conversations with Dale, he told me how Ty seemed to be able to work magic as an electrician and how in awe of him he was. In a return letter Ty spoke about how smart Dale is and how he always admired him. Ty regarded Dale as his only real friend growing up.

Just a little word about something Dale said to me, when I told him all this . He said your are a genius electrician. That’s wonderful, but it’s also from Victor - I don’t believe you had much of a choice but to apprentice to him. You need YOUR OWN win.

Ty sort dismissed what Dale had said, but I wouldn’t let him.

By the way don’t gloss over this -> Dale thinks you are a genius in something, despite what you feel about the subject. That fact alone should help you combat some of your insecurities and lack of self esteem. Don’t toss it off as nothing, or that it couldn’t possibly be true. He’s in awe of something you can do and something you know.

I told him how I felt that his intellectual side had been starved and neglected, that he was smart and that I could see it in his writing.

Ty and I wrote about a lot of things. Finding out that he didn’t really know much about his extended family, I told him, even sending him the “fact” pages of that part of the family tree I have on Ancestry. His daughters didn’t know any other extended family except Victor and their aunt June, so I sent them these fact pages too.

When I told him that Margaret and I wondered how and why he came up with the name “Roy,” he wrote me an explanation. I also had directions to send a copy of what he wrote to each of his daughters, my parents and my sister.

He wrote about the last beating he experienced at Victor’s hands which I wrote about in part 4. It was what happened in the aftermath that made him change what people knew him as.

The first foster home he went to that night another boy asked what his name was. Now Ty’s actual name is different, unique and for some people it may be difficult. Ty said his name twice and the boy didn’t understand. But he responded with, “You look like a Roy, so that’s what I’m going to call you.”

When Ty went to his second foster home the boy who was there asked what his name was. Ty said his actual name and it was the same response he had gotten from the first boy, so Ty quickly covered himself and said “Roy. My name is Roy.” Roy was born, and he went by that until I began writing to him. His adult daughters didn’t know him by any other name.

Reading what Ty had written, my Mom became very upset. At one point I had come down very hard on them for leaving Ty behind. I was especially hard on Dad, not knowing how bad he felt about that. Margaret stepped in to call me out and off.

I sent him a bunch of books to find out what he was interested in. He was only allowed to keep 10 books at a time in his cell. There were three constant books in his cell, a Bible and another religious book both of which June had sent him and a dictionary that I sent him. Well over time he had two dictionaries one a Merriam Webster and the other an Oxford dictionary, both of which I sent him. He needed the Oxford dictionary because some of the books I sent him had English spellings and English words for things. He needed to look them up to find out what they were.

I sent several single edition Nat Geo magazines, And:

The Greatest Stories Never Told: 100 Tales from History to Astonish, Bewilder, and Stupefy, by Rick Beyer
History of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, by Keith L. Bryant Jr.
Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem and the Birth of the Indy 500, by Charles Leershen
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Robert Asprin's Myth-Adventures Vol.1
The Lost Army of Cambyses by Peter Sussman
Just One Damned Thing After Another: The Chronicles of St. Mary's Book One by Jodi Taylor
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
Life with a Fire-Breathing Girlfriend by Bryan Fields
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by S. Junger
book 1 of His Dark Materials trilogy by by Philip Pullman Ty liked it so much I sent him the other two books almost immediately
Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell , Jeffrey Kluger
PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival, and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy by William Doyle
Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 and Voyage of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, the Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America's First Humanitarian Mission both by Stephen Puleo
My Antonia by Willa Cather

And many, many more

The books I sent, according to Kansas Department of Corrections had to be new, sent directly from the store (in my case, Amazon) , had to be paperback, and had to be approved by them.

Several things ran afoul of their rules. Most often they’d tell him why, but they didn’t send the book back. It got tossed

The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem by Stacy Schiff was rejected because they said it ‘promoted the mistreatment of women.
A paper map of New England. I sent it because I wanted him to see where the places I wrote about in my letters were. (He wanted to know how and why we moved from Denver to Massachusetts.) They rejected it because it was a map.
Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven - I don’t remember why it was rejected
Hoyle's Rules of Games: The Essential Family Guide to Card Games, Board Games, Parlor Games, New Poker Variations, and More by Albert H. Morehead, Geoffrey Mott-Smith, Philip D. Morehead . Rejected because they said it promoted gambling even though card decks were sold at the commissary and Ty thought that some of the rules that his cellies (cell mates) played by (especially with him) were suspect.

He was a voracious reader and I could scarce keep him in books (he had read through the prison library including the Harlequin romances). But I, being the daughter of a librarian, enjoyed doing it. All books he’d finish were donated to the prison library. At different times I’d pay for subscriptions to USA Today. Scientific American and Smithsonian (I was determined to feed his intellect) to give him more to read.

I sent him The Legend of Sleepy Hallow and Rip Van Winkle, by Washington Irving and the Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde for Halloween. I sent The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry and A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas for Christmas.

The two biggest items were games magazines because he loved Sudoku and coloring books for adults. I didn’t know he was an artist, but drawing things for other prisoners was how he kept himself safe. He also drew beautiful pictures for his daughters. I think all of them have a tattoo of a picture he drew for each them. The coloring books became a way to occupy himself and stay out of trouble. I think he said other inmates saw/heard about his coloring books and they began to request them from their people. Color pencils were sold at the commissary.

He asked for Sherlock Holmes stories so I sent him the entire collection and we discovered that he loved classics so I began to send him those. I also mused that he might be the only inmate in Kansas state prisons reading the classics.

Once we were discussing drugs and all the cannabis I’m doing now (Kansas STILL hasn’t legalized it) to deal with the pain I’m in and my fibromyalgia.

We talked about it both through snail mail (I had explained to him what I meant by that) and through email. One day after he was doing his prison job he came back to his cell and found that it had gotten tossed. They were looking for drugs and other contraband and I think our conversations triggered it

I’ve been thinking about your characterization of being drawn to cocaine (and other opioids, meth, etc.) like a woman you have a relationship with. I suddenly began to think of the whole thing as if “she” was a Siren in Greek mythology and felt that it was an appropo analogy.

“In Greek mythology, the Sirens were dangerous creatures, who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.” -wikipedia

Basically, using your analogy, she lulls people with the comfort she provides after drawing them in with her song all the while leading them to their ruin. I had the analogy more fleshed out early this morning but was too tired to write it. Now it’s just a shadow of the whole argument.

We discussed the meaning of “Idle hands, the devil’s play things. Idle minds the devil’s workshop.” he conceded that it seemed he’d get into trouble when he was bored. He did apply to get some prison jobs. One he was often successful in getting was electrician. When he had a job he didn’t read as much, so my frequency of sending books went down during that time.

He wanted photographs of the world, of landscapes, etc. but although there are a lot of books like that, they seemed to all be hardcover. I tried calendars and they were rejected as being too wide and outside the dimensions of acceptable.

I also sent him tons of pictures. If his daughters posted pictures on Facebook, I’d print out a few and send them to him.

During covid I adopted a bonded pair of cats. A tabby named “Naomi” and a white and gunmetal gray cat named Smithers. I didn’t like either of the names. I don’t name any of my pets a name beginning with “N” because I want the “N” sound to be distinctive when I have to say “No.” I renamed her Jubilee (after the youngest Xman)

I kept the “sm” sound of Smithers for the other one but changed his name to Smudge, especially for the smudged beauty mark he had over his lip. Ty fell in love with Smudge and also asked about him, and I always sent pictures.

“I think Smudge is an adolescent,” I joked in one letter “He was in my way and wouldn’t move so I had to nudge him hard. He got up, stretched, and promptly plopped down on his other side.”

One day a guard at Lansing claimed that they were related. He wasn’t from our side, Ty asked me to check. But it was grounds for Ty to be moved to another prison.

Lansing had a public/private partnership with CoreCivic. They were building a new prison on the Lansing campus to replace the 150 year old prison my cousin was housed in. I worried that this meant they were going to be using CoreCivic guards too but Ty said the guards would still be employed through the state of Kansas. The new prison was of course late and over budget but the inmates were finally set to move in when Ty was moved to Hutchinson Correctional Facility.

I was worried that Hutchinson would be a trigger but Ty seemed to be alright. It didn’t seem to bother him, but he again had to find his place.

The summer of 2021 we were there in Kansas making a trip that we had planned for 2020 but covid canceled all that. We were there ostensibly to do two things; to bury my aunt and cousin’s ashes, and for Mom and Dad to pick out their burial plots. Dad had made it known that he didn’t want to be buried in any cemetery his brother was buried in.

My brother came up from Oklahoma to spend some time with Dad and his step mom (my Mom). They also went to visit Dad’s cousin as they were the last two living in their generation on that side, and to visit Mom’s two brothers.

My parents did accomplish those 4 things. The trip however was too stressful for my Dad. It had to be cut short to get him back home. My sister, Dad and Mom left the next morning. My cousins, brother, daughter, granddaughter and I buried our cousin and aunts ashes.

Before we flew back my granddaughter, and I drove up from Newton to Hutchinson so she could visit the Cosmosphere. Dad had wanted to go to the Strataca salt mine also in Hutchinson, but that of course didn’t happen. He was already back in Denver. While in Hutch I stopped at the prison to take a picture to show Ty I was there.

Dad died 5 weeks later.

At his memorial service all of the cousins from that side of the family (except Ty) were there. When the service was over they all gathered around June and asked her how Ty was doing. She told them to speak to me since I was now writing to him regularly. The way she said it bothered me slightly and I checked with her afterward to make sure she wasn’t angry with me or resentful. She said she was okay with it.

In 2022 Connie, Ty’s mother, died and it affected him. He was surprised by that as he never renewed a relationship with her.

My Mom also died in 2022, fourteen months after my Dad.

Our letter writing, emailing and calling slowed during that time. Emailing was left for small messages because despite getting 2000 characters, longer messages were not approved quickly and were truncated when they were approved. You could get the end of the message before getting the beginning or middle. So most of the messages were “Sorry I missed your call. I’ll be available at. . .” Of course I couldn’t call him and had to wait for him to call me. To aid in not missing his call I gave him his own ring tone. He thought it might be Bad Boys, but I had given him Jail House Rock instead.

One day Ty called and opened with “Guess where I’ve been?!”

It caught me off guard and I stammered “You’re, you’re in prison in Hutchinson.”

“Nope. I’ve been having joisting matches and sword fights,” he responded with the greatest amount of pleasure in his voice.

He had just finished reading Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott. His excitement was contagious.

He was now at the 5 year mark from his release and we started making plans. He did not know there is a town in coastal Maine that carries his same name. I sent him a book about it and one of the adventures we planned upon his release was to go there.

Early on I sent him the book Parenting From Prison: A Hands-on Guide for Incarcerated Parents, by James M. Birney. Having read it myself, I knew it’s points were adaptable to being a grandparent, supporting his daughters in their parenting and being there for his daughters. I encouraged him to use it. One of my constants was that he owed his daughters time, and as his release was coming into view he wanted to be there for them.

He once told me that the foster parents he got the most from was a farmer, and that he enjoyed life on the farm. I encouraged him to get into the Garden for Good program.