Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  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 laughe
d 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.

  Little Sister Death

  And Hunger and Pain drew subtly nearer, and there in the water was one all young and white, and with long shining hair like a column of fair sunny water…. And the tree covered with leaves of a thousand different colors spoke and all the leaves whirled up into the air and spun about it; and the tree was an old man with a shining white beard like a silver cuirass, and the leaves were birds.

  What sayest thou, good Saint Francis?

  “Little sister Death, “said the good Saint Francis.

  —William Faulkner, Mayday

  A Plantation in the Tennessee Country, c. 1785

  The wagon and team came jouncing and creaking around the foot of the hill and up the dry creek bed, but the portly man in the black broad-brimmed hat and the dark suit didn’t know that. He sat huddled in the corner of the wagonbed, blindfolded, arms clutching the sideboards in a vain effort to absorb the shock of the hard bouncing over the rocks, the wagon tilting up and then ascending the bank and him sliding against the tailgate and the black Mastiff growling at him deep in its throat and shifting position slightly on the jarring wagonbed, its chin laid between its paws, watching him.

  He had stopped wondering where he was. He knew from the crying of the whippoorwills that night had fallen. He knew that the ground was frozen, for he could hear the iron rims of the wagon wheels turning against earth frozen in icy whorls. He knew that he’d been in the woods; a branch had rapped him hard and cut his face, a trickle of blood had frozen, crusted like a scarlet slash from a solitary fingernail.

  The heavyset man, whose misfortune it was to be a doctor of medicine, was blindfolded with a winding of muslin that covered his face from the tip of his nose to the felt of his broad-brimmed hat; the hat itself jammed on his head misshapen, the brim uncurled and splayed out as if someone had laid a hand to each side of the hat and jerked down hard. Which was, in fact, what had actually happened. The white man with the muttonchop whiskers had leant toward him for a moment, stooping to attain eye level, then performing what the doctor saw as the final insult to his dignity (he had not known there was more still to come): grasping the hat and yanking it down until it seemed stopped only by the obstruction his ears formed, the whiskered man’s face showing all this time only a sardonic amusement.

  They were three in the wagon, not counting the Mastiff: the portly doctor, a rawboned man with muttonchop whiskers and a flatbrimmed countryman’s hat, and a gangling black who seemed to be dozing on the seat, slack lines paying out from his hands to the team of horses left to their own discretion, or perhaps following some nigh-invisible trail to a place they knew.

  The doctor, whose name was Mayfield, had stepped out of his office in Mossburg, Tennessee, at ten o’clock the morning before, and the black, who had been folded against the wall by the door, had arisen with an inherent gracelessness, like a carpenter’s rule unfolding itself. The Negro had on a dusty shapeless cap he did not doff, and when his eyes met the doctor’s, there was no deference in them. He said, Old Marster say he need to talk to you.

  Turning, the doctor saw for the first time the man in the flatbrimmed hat, his upper lip was shaven clean but he wore a neatly trimmed white beard and muttonchop sideburns on his florid face, and his silver hair curled out from beneath the brushed hat and obscured the collar of the broadcloth coat. The look of a gentleman or at least a country squire. The doctor nodded to him and started a smile but something in the man’s face precluded it. He saw immediately why a doctor was needed. There was something wrong with the man’s mouth. It seemed swollen from the inside, so grotesquely that the face seemed deformed. The purple tip of a swollen tongue protruded between his lips and the cheeks looked peculiarly distended like nothing so much, Mayfield thought, as if you had sharpened the ends of a stick four or five inches and jammed it into the man’s mouth and forced him to clamp it between his teeth.

  The man said something preemptory to him but Mayfield had not an inkling of what he had been told to do. Then the black took his elbow roughly and turned him toward a wagon hitched and waiting at the curb.

  Old Marster say you come on, he said.

  Mayfield knocked his hand away. Keep your hands to yourself, he said, but the Negro showed no offense. The black, shiny face was impassive save the yellow-looking eyes where glinted a detached light of amusement.

  He was being forced toward the wagon.

  Sick folks, the black man said. Sick folks need lookin after.

  Sick folks? Where? What the hell you after, anyway? Is it his face you want seen to?

  He was at the wagon, could smell the horses, a Mastiff across the straw-strewn bed, sleepyeyed yet watchful.

  Where are these sick folks?

  The white man nodded. Bout a day’s ride, the black man said.

  That’s out of the question. Get your own doctor. I have patients in Mossburg to attend to.

  No one said anything.

  Is it an emergency or what?

  The white man said something indecipherable and Mayfield looked at the black man’s face. The black was grinning, his crescent of yellow teeth like grains of corn. Mare foaling, he said.

  Mare? By God! I’m not a goddamned veterinarian, I’m a—

  The big white man had advanced and abruptly he shoved him, slamming Mayfield against the wagon, knocking his hat into the street. The horses stirred and subsided. He looked up. The man was standing over him, the broadcloth coat open. There was a pistol shoved into the waistband and his hand loosely clasped the grip.

  Mayfield got up. He looked up and down the street. It was ten o’clock on a Sunday morning and there was no soul about. He stooped and picked up the hat, brushed it off with his handkerchief. That was when the man had taken the hat and jammed it on his head.

  As they went past the city limits and into open country, the doctor said, Folks’ll be looking for me, you know

  The whiskered man said something. The black turned toward him. Old Marster he say you hush your mouth, she ain’t missin you nothin to what she goin to.

  He sat silent in the wagon and thought about his wife. She was waiting to go to church. He thought of her opening the door, looking impatiently up and down the road for him. The day wearing on, her worry mounting. After a while he tried not to think of her at all.

  At noon they stopped where there was a stream. The horses drank. They were in a sylvan wilderness, a place that seemed never to have known human habitation. The men had something in a bag: food, biscuits, some kind of meat. They didn’t offer him any. The Negro ate in a silent concentration, his jaws working over the tough meat. The white man tried to eat and couldn’t and a rage seized him. He swore and threw the bread and meat at Mayfield, the biscuit striking him in the face.

  They went on, and when they passed what Mayfield knew was the last cabin they blindfolded him.

  He was asleep when t
he wagon stopped. He awoke sore and cold and disoriented at the abrupt cessation of motion and the ending of noises. He couldn’t number the many hours of the monotonous creaking of the springs, the grinding of the wheels on the frozen ground.

  Rough hands at the binding of muslin and the blindfold fell away. The moonshine was black and silver, blurred from hours of darkness like an ink sketch left in the rain. His vision began to clear. The dark earth glittered with hoarfrost.

  Light, the black man commented.

  Mayfield climbed over the tailgate and fell against the wagon, his legs asleep. He righted himself and turned to look about.

  He still had no idea where he was but he perceived dimly they’d reached an area of human habitation. He could hear the lowing of cattle, a dog somewhere barking. He had a vague olfactory sense of woodsmoke, a barn, an outhouse.

  The cabin they led him to had no furnishing save a bed. He could see that much by the moonlight, then the door closed behind him and he was shut into a windowless darkness, a spiderlike negation of light against the paler black. The air in the cabin was fetid with the sour stench of sweat, old unwashed clothing, the stale smell of burnt-out fires, the odor of rancid grease.

  He shoved angrily at the door but it had been latched in some manner from the outside. He lay wearily on the bed.

  After a while the door opened and a heavy Negro woman came in carrying in one hand a kerosene lamp and in the other a plate. She moved slowly, deliberately, her face vacuous and benumbed as if she had been roused from sleep. She reached him the plate and he took it and sat on the side of the bed holding it. He could smell fried sidemeat, field peas. The angular black man stood in the doorway watching him.

  Where am I? Mayfield asked the woman.

  The woman didn’t look at him. Why, you right here, she said. Where did you reckon you was?

  He awoke sometime in the night scratching all over from the bites. He could feel something verminous crawling about under his clothing. He got up slapping at himself. You filthy little son of bitches, he said, half sobbing, uncertain even as to whom he was talking. He took off his coat and rolled it into a pillow. He lay down on the floor.