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 welclass="underline" “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.
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.
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.