Little Sister Death Read online

  Praise for William Gay

  The Long Home

  “A writer of remarkable talent and promise…eminently worth talking about.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Gay has created a novel of great emotional power.” —Denver Post

  “It’ll leave you breathless…” —Rocky Mountain News

  Provinces of Night

  “Earthily idiosyncratic, spookily Gothic…an author with a powerful vision.” —The New York Times

  “An extremely seductive read.” —Washington Post Book World

  “Southern writing at its very finest, soaked through with the words and images of rural Tennessee, packed full of that which really matters, the problems of the human heart.” —Booklist

  “A writer of striking talent.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Almost a personal revival of handwork in fiction—superb—must be listened to and felt.” —Barry Hannah, award-winning author of Geronimo Rex and Airships

  “This is a novel from the old school. The characters are truly characters. The prose is Gothic. And the charm is big.” —The San Diego Union Tribune

  “Writers like Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner would welcome Gay as their peer for getting characters so entangled in the roots of a family tree.” —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  “[A novel] about the preciousness of hope, the fragility of dreams, interwoven with a good-sized dollop of Biblical justice and the belief that a Southern family can be cursed.” —The Miami Herald

  “Plumbs the larger things in life… The epic and the personal unite seamlessly.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “An old-fashioned barrel-aged shot of Tennessee storytelling. Gay’s tale of ancient wrongs and men with guns is high-proof stuff” —Elwood Reid, author of Midnight Sun and What Salmon Know

  “A finely wrought, moving story with a plot as old as Homer. Sometimes the old ones are the best ones.” —The Atlanta Journal Constitution

  “William Gay is the big new name to include in the storied annals of Southern lit.” —Esquire

  “A plot so gripping that the reader wants to fly through the pages to reach the conclusion.but the beauty and richness of Gay’s language exerts a contrary pull, making the reader want to linger over every word.” —Rocky Mountain News

  “Gay is a terrific writer.” —The Plain Dealer

  I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down

  “William Gay is richly gifted: a seemingly effortless storyteller…a writer of prose that’s fiercely wrought, pungent in detail yet poetic in the most welcome sense.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “One perfect tale follows another, leaving you in little doubt that Gay is a genuine poet of the ornery, the estranged, the disenfranchised, crafting stories built to last.” —Seattle Times

  “A writer of striking talent.” —Chicago Tribune

  “Gay confirms his place in the Southern fiction pantheon.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Every story is a masterpiece…in the Southern tradition of Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner.” —USA Today

  “As charming as it is wise. Hellfire—in all the right ways.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “[Gay] brings to these stories the same astounding talent that earned his two novels…a devoted following.” —Booklist

  “Supple and beautifully told tales…saturated with an intense sense of place, their vividness and authenticity are impossible to fake.” —The San Diego Union Tribune

  “Gay writes about old folks marvelously… [His] words ring like crystal…” —Washington Post Book World

  “As always, Gay’s description and dialogue are amazing…. Writing like this keeps you reading.” —Orlando Sentinel

  “After two stunning novels that combined the esoteric language of Cormac McCarthy with the subtle humor of Larry Brown, Gay delivers concise craft work in his first short story collection…Much in the same way Erskine Caldwell created slice-of-life Southern stories that were full of humor, conflict, and even forbidden sensuality many years ago, so now does William Gay.” —The Oregonian

  “[Gay’s] strong words never fail to paint a precise picture.… Fans of his novels will find lots of meaty reading here.” —Chattanooga Times

  “Gay’s characters come right up and bite you…. [His] well-chosen words propel the reader straight through his 13 stories.” —Denver Post

  “Even Faulkner would have been proud to call these words his own.” —The Atlanta Journal Constitution

  “Gay captivates with bristling tales of old men, bootleggers, and wife-beaters in rural Tennessee…. his prose is as natural and pure as it comes.” —Newsweek

  “This book will have you laughing, fearful, and utterly filled with suspense—often all within the same well-crafted story.” —SouthernLiving

  “A literary country music song…. With deft and lyrical prose [Gay] captures the poignancy of loss, isolation, and double-fisted grief, of disappointment, rage, jealousy, violence, and heartbreak.” —GoMemphis.com

  Twilight

  “Think No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and Deliverance by James Dickey….then double the impact.” —Stephen King

  “There is much to admire here: breathtaking, evocative writing and a dark, sardonic humor.” —USA Today

  “William Gay brings the daring of Flannery O’Connor and William Gaddis to his lush and violent surrealist yarns.” —The Irish Times

  “This is Southern Gothic of the very darkest hue, dripping with atmosphere, sparkling with loquacity, and with occasional gleams of horrible humor. To be read in the broadest daylight.” —The Times

  Little Sister Death

  Also by William Gay

  The Long Home

  Provinces of Night

  I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down

  Wittgenstein’s Lolita/The Iceman

  Twilight

  Time Done Been Won’t Be No More

  Little Sister Death

  William Gay

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  LITTLE SISTER DEATH. Copyright © 2015, text by William Gay. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  “A Fire Burning: An Introduction by Tom Franklin” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Oxford American under the title “William Gay: 1941-2012.”

  “Queen of the Haunted Dell” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Oxford American under the same title.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gay, William.

  Little sister death / by William Gay.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-938103-13-1

  1. Authors—Fiction. 2. Fairies—Fiction. 3. Folklore—Tennessee—Fiction. 4. Legends—Tennessee—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.A985L58 2015

  813’.54--dc23

  2015008018

  First US edition: September 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-938103-13-1

  Book design by Michelle Dotter

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  A Fire Burning: An Introduction by Tom Franklin

  Little Sister Death

  Queen of the Haunted Dell

  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 movi
e.

  “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.”