Little Sister Death
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
L
ITTLE
S
ISTER
D
EATH
. 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
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.