Little Sister Death

A Fire Burning: An Introduction by Tom Franklin

He cut his own hair. In warm weather he’d bathe in the creek behind his house. He hunted ginseng in the woods when the season was right. He tended a vegetable garden that grew tomatoes, squash, okra, carrots, and onions. He smoked Marlboros. He sometimes wrote in a tree house on his property. Women loved him. They wanted to take care of him, to fatten him up. In his later years he never drove. He wrote. He wrote in pencil on yellow legal tablets, one stacked on another when the first was filled. His favorite restaurant was Waffle House. In the sixties he heard Janis Joplin play in Greenwich Village, and when he requested a Bob Dylan song, she snapped, “We don’t do covers, sir.” He loved him some Dylan. He loved David Letterman, too, and the Cubs. He loved Seinfeld, Deadwood, William Faulkner, Bill Clinton, AC/DC. His dogs. He loved movies, though he didn’t go to theaters. Most of all he loved his children, and his grandchildren.

He had high Cherokee cheekbones and small brown eyes that got lost when he smiled. The skin of his face had deep lines in it that seemed to hint at hard living. When the writer Janisse Ray met him, at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, she said, “You look like a man who’s been shot at.” And he did, he looked like a man who’d been shot at. There’d be weeks he wouldn’t answer his phone. It might be disconnected, or it might just ring. If this went on too long, we’d start worrying, his friends, calling each other. Have you talked to William? Have you talked to William?

I met William Gay in July of 1999 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Sewanee, Tennessee. My first book, a collection called Poachers, had just been published, and I was a fellow at the conference, thrilled to be there with my wife, Beth Ann, who was a scholar. Among the writers loitering about the various events was a man I noticed, often with an attractive younger woman. This man was older but it was hard to tell how much, maybe forty-five, maybe sixty. He looked grizzled. At readings, panels, and parties, he always stood on the fringe, alone or with the woman (his agent, Amy Williams, I’d later learn), and always smoking a Marlboro. If it was noon or later, he’d have a Budweiser.

A few days into the conference, I attended a presentation by Knopf editor Gary Fisketjon. At the end of the talk, I got in line to ask him a question. Waiting, I turned around at one point and there stood the grizzled man himself. He wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt and a navy corduroy sports jacket. We introduced ourselves and I was proud when he told me he’d just gotten my book. He’d seen an ad in the Oxford American. He and I began to talk as the line inched along and were still talking when we realized Fisketjon was watching us. William stuck out his hand and said, “I just wanted to meet the man with the balls to edit Cormac McCarthy.”

That night, after dinner, I joined William at Rebel’s Rest, the house where the afterparties were. We sat in rocking chairs on the porch, me with my Bud Light and him with his Bud Heavy, and he asked my favorite McCarthy novel.

“Suttree” I said.

“Mine too,” he said, obviously pleased that I hadn’t chosen one of the more popular ones, Blood Meridian or All the Pretty Horses.

“I love how that book starts,” William said of Suttree, and then he began to quote the opening paragraph, Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours...and when he stopped I kept going.

Yet it would be months — which was characteristic for William Gay, a man I never once heard brag — before he told me of his own history with Cormac McCarthy.

In the early 1970s, he’d plucked an early McCarthy novel, Outer Dark, from a drugstore paperback rack because the guy who’d written it lived in Tennessee, too. William loved the book so much he decided to look up the author in the Knoxville phonebook and was stunned when Cormac McCarthy actually answered. It was awkward at first, and McCarthy wouldn’t talk about his own work, but perked up when William mentioned Flannery O’Connor. And then they were off. They spoke intermittently on the phone over the next year, developing enough of a friendship that McCarthy sent William a manuscript copy of Suttree before the book was published. It arrived in the mail, coffee-stained, and William read it, then his brother read it, then William read it again and sent it back. This is before one could Xerox, and that copy had been one of the only two. “Or maybe the only one,” William said. He also told me that the manuscript contained a scene that was later edited from the novel, a bar fight re-described. McCarthy’s marginal note was, “Why re-fight the fight?” William never went to college (out of high school he volunteered for the Navy, figuring the view from Vietnam would be safer from the deck of a ship), so books were his teachers, books and Cormac McCarthy.

After a while, as their phone conversations continued, McCarthy said he gathered that William was a writer. When William confessed he was, McCarthy offered to read his stories. He’d mark the manuscripts and send them back. When I asked William what his edits were like, he said, “I used to like the word ‘moon’ a lot. I used it four times on one page, and he underlined the first one one time, the second one twice, the third one three times, and by the fourth one he wrote something like, ‘Too many goddamn moons.’” From that William learned to intend one’s repetition, otherwise it’s just clumsy, lazy.

He told me this story late one night in the fall of 1999. I was living in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a very lonely Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. I talked to Beth Ann, who was back in Illinois, on the phone each night before she went to bed, and after that I called William, or he’d call me. He’d given me his galley — his only copy of his first galley — of The Long Home, and I’d found it amazing, a Tennessee noir (which William pronounced “nar”) where the worst sort of character comes to town. As we talked, night after night, he told me about a new novel he was writing, Provinces of Night. He sent me the book in manuscript and, as I read it, I realized it was even better than his first.

I was trying to begin my own first novel then, that’s why I was at Bucknell in the first place, but I wasn’t having any luck. I had a few bad pages. I had a looming deadline. I was growing desperate, and one night told that to William. I said I didn’t know if I even had a novel in me.

He didn’t say anything for a while, and I opened another beer. Then he told me a story he heard growing up, of a man who tried to steal a ham on Christmas so he could feed his family, and the man he was stealing from shot and killed him. Then the fellow brought the dead man back to his family in a wagon. He pulled him off and laid him on the ground. But he gave them the ham.

I didn’t know what to say. The long distance buzzed between us.

“I just thought maybe you could put that in there somewhere,” William said.

I don’t remember how I responded, but after I hung up, that very night, I wrote six pages, that scene, woman and child waiting and her husband being brought back, shot dead. Along with a ham. As I read over the pages, I realized I had my novel’s tone. What I’d just written, I knew, would become the background for one of the characters. And it gave me a foothold. I knew something about her I hadn’t before. From there I began, slowly, to write.

Years later, the novel finished at last, William read it for me. He called and said I needed to work on one part. I asked where. He told me the page number. I had one of my poorer sharecroppers in too much misery, William told me. It was the only time I ever offended him, though he never said that. “No matter how hard he got worked,” he said, “he’d still want to set on the porch with his kids in the evening. Maybe play a guitar or banjo.”

What did I learn? That no character should be a one-note character.

He would say “Really?” a lot, his italics, always fascinated or amused by something or other, and it was here his dialect stood out the most. Say the word “Israeli” and take off the “is.” That’s how he said it.

My wife and I invited him to visit us one of the years we lived in Galesburg, Illinois, and he read “The Paperhanger” at Knox College, where we taught. After he finished, the room packed with students and teachers was quiet. There was a token question, an awkward silence, and so we dismissed. Later, I heard that none of those Midwesterners had been able to understand him, his accent was too thick.

Mostly when we talked we talked late at night. He’d be watching Letterman or a movie.

“Hey, Thomas,” he’d say, the only person who used that version of my name.

If you called him in the middle of the day and let the phone ring and ring, he’d sometimes answer, breathless from having run in from picking tomatoes. But mostly it just rang.

I visited when I could. His son Chris made the best beef stew I’ve ever eaten. Full of fat carrots and potatoes and onions from the garden. Sitting in their living room, a fire in the woodstove, talking politics or Larry Brown. The Cubs on or, in deference to me, the Braves.

We’d sit on the back porch in summer and look out over Little Swan Creek, which ran behind his house, William scratching the dog’s ears, the dog changing as the years passed, first Gus, named for Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove, and then, after he died, Jude, a sweet pit bull.

In the later years of his life, I’d take my kids to visit William and we’d stand on the bank of the creek, me with a beer, him coffee, and watch as his grandkids joined my children catching small fish on the poles we’d brought, or on their knees in the water after minnows or crawfish or bullfrogs. Jude there, supervising. On those nights Chris would cook for everyone and all the kids, six or seven by now, would fall asleep watching a movie and William and Chris and I would go outside on the porch where Chris would strum his guitar and we’d talk or, later still, watch Apocalypse Now again, a film William thought perfectly mimicked in structure the Vietnam War itself, a questionable mission going more and more crazy.

Over the years, we talked. On the phone, on porches, in bars, walking in woods, side by side on literary panels or side by side signing books, in hotel rooms, on a plane, once in South Carolina, where we sat detained for hours because the man with the red Igloo cooler’s paperwork didn’t match the human organ he was transporting. When the plane finally landed, William, eager for a cigarette, leaned over and whispered, “This’ll be the last time you catch me in one of these cocksuckers.”

People loved to tell stories about William, and stories about the stories. Mostly they revolved around his being a famous drunk. The funny thing is this: he wasn’t a drunk. I’ve been around a few, and I would tell you if he was. It’s interesting that people convince themselves otherwise. As if the myth of desperate, outlandish boozing augmented his talent. Forget those mythologizers: his talent didn’t need augmentation. Or as if, by making him such a drunken buffoon, they could then pity him. Forget them all.

They saw him drink at conferences, and he drank at conferences because he was abysmal at small talk. He did not small talk. He did not “network” or schmooze. He was private and it was excruciating for him to stand in a cluster of strangers, even if they were complimenting him. Especially if they were complimenting him. Later, when he began to get famous, he attended a party where, he said, “They perched me on a sofa like a redneck savant. Every time I said anything they all hushed and looked at me. I felt like E. F. Hutton.”

He didn’t drink much at home. On our early phone calls he would always get a beer, but later it would be coffee. In the last few years of his life, he only drank booze when he went out, when he would get nervous again.

Once (this from writer George Singleton), William was on the schedule at a book festival. He was in the hotel bar, sitting with George. A woman walks up and introduces herself to William. “You have such fathomless eyes,” she tells him. When she leaves, William leans over to George and says, “You’d think, with such fathomless eyes, I’d get laid more.”

He had his first heart attack at another book festival, while sitting on a panel.

This from William, and from novelist Bev Marshall, who was there, and Sonny Brewer, William’s dear pal, who sat on the panel alongside William:

Someone, a woman, was in the midst of a long, heartfelt question to William, a “question with semicolons” he later told me, when he, William, started to feel shaky. He got cold and began to tremble, began to sweat. Meanwhile, the question was still going on, the woman looking up at the ceiling (I’m imagining now), carefully phrasing each word in the air with her hands while William’s heart is racing and he wonders if he’s going to pass out or vomit. Or worse.

About then the question ended and the woman sat down and waited for her answer.

William tried to even his breath. He cleared his throat, leaned into the mic, and said, “Sometimes,” and the room erupted into laughter.

Sonny, watching William, reported that he lost all color, just went gray. “He looked terrible,” Sonny said. “I mean, he always looks terrible, but now he looked even worse.”

When he had his second heart attack, the doctors told him he needed a pacemaker.

He said he didn’t want it.

“You’ll die without it,” they said.

“Magnetize that motherfucker,” he said.

They did, and it kept him around a while longer. When we’d talk after that, I’d call him an old cyborg and it made him snicker.

Back to Sewanee, 1999.

A bunch of us went skinny-dipping late one night in a pond on a farm somebody knew about. Twenty or so of us clambered into the moonlit water with our drinks, all except my new friend William, whose white shirt glowed on the bank. He paced back and forth, smoking. I’d been talking to Jennifer Haigh for a while when I turned, and there, naked, waist-deep in the moonlight, a Budweiser in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was William.

“I felt a little creepy,” he said, “just watching.”

Some of these stories have become legend.

How, as a poor kid desperate to write a story, he crushed walnut shells in water to make ink. And wrote the story.

How it got rejected from The Saturday Evening Post, a note that said, “We do not accept handwritten manuscripts.”

How, once he got famous, the woman he was dating asked to see something he’d written and he gave her “The Paperhanger.” He said she would read a while and then look up. Read a while and look up. When she finished it, she asked him, “How much of the paperhanger is you, and how much of you is the paperhanger?” William shrugged and said it was just a story. Made-up characters.

“I don’t think she believed me,” he said.

The romance ended shortly thereafter.

There’s the one about where “The Paperhanger” came from: a plumber who worked a construction job with William when William was younger. The plumber told how he’d been doing a different job, under some rich lady’s sink, when her “lapdog” ran in and bit him on the ankle. Before he thought he’d whacked the little dog in the head with his pipe wrench and killed it. Here she comes, clicking through the house in her heels, and he takes the limp dog and lifts out the tray in his toolbox and drops in the dog and replaces the tray, finishes the job. Gets paid. Drives away, flings the dog out the window

The lesson here, I tell students, is that in “The Paperhanger,” William raises the stakes by changing the dog to a little girl. Makes a tragedy out of a comedy.

He loved his long titles, which he said hearkened to Flannery O’Connor. “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down,” “Those Deep Elm’s Brown Ferry Blues,” “Love and Closure on the Life’s Highway,” “Come Home, Come Home, It’s Suppertime,” “Charting the Territories of the Red,” “Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?” And even “The Paperhanger,” whose original title was, “The Paperhanger, the Doctor’s Wife, and the Child Who Went into the Abstract,” until, at Sewanee, in 1999, Barry Hannah told him what to call it.

A huge horror fan, William was pleased when one of his literary heroes, Stephen King, chose Twilight as the Best Book of 2007 for the magazine Entertainment Weekly. King was supposed to call him — William had become friends with King’s younger son, Owen, also a writer. The two talked Bob Dylan endlessly, William said. Then Owen told William his father was going to ring him up. For most of us writers, such an occasion would be a career high. Typical for him, William didn’t answer. Maybe in his garden.

William had written a short horror novel, he told me. Little Sister Death. He’d long been fascinated by the Bell Witch phenomenon in Tennessee, and even had his own encounter with, perhaps, an echo of the Bell Witch herself.

This novel is the most metafictional thing William ever wrote — it’s about a writer, obsessed with a haunting, who moves his family to the site. Parts of the book seem to be what Binder, the protagonist, is himself researching and, ultimately, writing. The dispassionate quality of these episodes is chilling. There are paragraphs that shine light into William’s own writing process as well: “Binder hated dances but privately he thought he might be able to use it for the book, and if not this one for another. When he was working he always felt hypersensitive to stimuli, to things he ordinarily wouldn’t even notice, and later in his manuscripts he would come across things that had brought back moments of remembering, bits of conversation he had overheard, or simply the way someone had looked.”

Little Sister Death is also about how a story can seize and absorb a writer and even transport him to dark, dangerous places. How the necessary obsessions of writing can cause its practitioners to risk alienating or losing not only their loved ones but (perhaps) their sanity as well. Many of Binder’s traits and much of his history matches William’s, who became a very different man from the one his wife married. He would work during the day, as expected, carpentering, painting, hanging drywall, and then go home not to give himself over to his wife. Instead, he’d lock himself in to his true work, writing stories and novels, his wife outside the literal and figurative door, a widow to his craft who left him once their four children were grown, saying she “didn’t sign on to be married to John-Boy Walton.”

The last time I saw William was in Clarksville, Tennessee, at a writing conference. We stayed up late in his hotel room and talked about the same things we always did. He looked older, frailer. His face was longer and he seemed to have lost weight, though there hadn’t been any weight to lose. Yet we laughed and he smoked and I drank my beer and he his coffee and at some point I got up and hugged him goodnight and crossed the street to my sleeping family.

The last time I spoke to him was the day before he died. I’d just put him on speakerphone to a class of beginning fiction writers at Ole Miss, where I teach. For half an hour he told them stories and answered questions. After the class, on the drive home, I called to thank him. I told him he’d been great. They’d loved him.

“Really?” he said.

Sonny Brewer told me this next part. William’s son Chris told him. That on the night of his death, William made a fire in his wood-burning stove. Then he went across the living room and into his bedroom. He shut the door. And died.

What I wonder is why he shut the door.

Perhaps to keep his beloved dog out. Perhaps because he was so private. What he had to do he had to do alone. He went in and closed the door and I imagine Jude outside it, whining, scratching at the wood. He worries something is wrong. And something is wrong. It will keep being wrong.

But I also think of this when I think of William Gay. He built us a fire, he left it burning.