William Gay (1) (1941–2012)

William Gay’s stories have gravity, intensity, and a deep sense of place. His characters learn the hard way “that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way.” Many of them have reached the end of the line in one manner or another, often involving violent death.

People treat each other with cruelty but somehow retain their dignity, most of the time. Marriages are broken, people are deeply wounded. Stubborn old men are featured. In Sugarbaby a man takes stubbornness to show more the extreme – and this is after he shoots his wife’s dog off the porch because he “just couldn’t stand that goddamned yip yip yip.” An apparent suicide on a couple’s property reveals an unknown aspect of their relationship in A Death in the Woods. An old man whose son has put him in a nursing home returns on his own to find his house rented to a “loafer” in the title story, which also has some of the more amusing episodes in the collection.

Gay has created his own town of Ackerman’s Field and a wild forest area called The Harrikin, based on his native Tennessee. He describes nature with passion: “Beyond the Rorschach trees the heavens were burnished with metallic rose so bright it seemed to pulse.” “The horizon had almost merged with the darkness. It was dissolving rapidly, like a horizon cut from paper and dropped into acid.”

William Gay's South is a distinct place with a character of its own and stories that have strength and resonance. show less

A real discovery for me. I was immediately taken by his style and use of language. I'm not usually one for highly descriptive writing but its so poetic and rich that it really beguiled me. It's dense but still approachable. If that's not enough he also draws some great ne'er-do-well characters while Edgewater the main protagonist is slowly revealed. The storytelling and dialogue are excellent with some hilarious humour. I can see influence from the big three: McCarthy, O'Connor and Faulkner show more and I honestly think he is their equal. I often get new literary enthusiasms but I can say in a sober frame of mind that he should not be forgotten. show less

Nathan Winer is a teenager in a small town in Kentucky, who's working the summer at a chicken farmers. He lives with his mother, a bitter woman made more bitter by what she thinks was her husband's abandonment; Nathan's not so sure. He likes to read, so right away I'm endeared to him.
Thomas Hovington is an old man, back bent and unable to straighten, lying in a bed in his house, where Dallas Hardin has moved in, taking over his wife, Pearl. He also has a daughter, Amber Rose, who Dallas has show more left alone, for now.
When three church women come to visit Hovington, they're sitting at his bedside, when Hardin calls Pearl out of the room. She excuses herself, and they hear:
"then voices, his mocking, conspiratorial, hers interrogative, faintly protesting, both made at once indecipherable and unmistakable through the thin walls, laughter vague and androgynous, and they all felt rather than heard the descension of flesh onto flesh, timeless, the protest of the bed springs, an involuntary gasp, sounds they seem to have possessed all their lives as inherent knowledge. Silence then save the whir of the fan tracking in its mechanical orbit and then, unbelievably, the creak of the bedsprings commencing in earnest, intensifying, attaining the desired rhythm. The front door opened and closed and they saw that the girl Amber Rose had gone out.
The women sat in a hot, aghast silence. Color crept into their faces, they did not look at each other but all stared at the dying man who seemed charged with the performance of something that might break the furious agony of silence, propel them onto whatever their next action might be. When he made no move the woman in the middle arose, perred at the wasted face. 'I believe brother Hovington's gone to sleep.' The other two arose with a thick rustling of silk, turned to the door. 'Poor soul. I expect he needs his rest.' The door pulled to when they crossed the porch and passed into the sun, Parasol's fluttering open, their foreshortened Shadows darting attendance like dark foel underfoot."

Thus we get a glimpse into the character of Dallas Hardin. And the spinelessness of Pearl. And the silent endurance of Amber Rose.
Hardin is a moonshiner; he runs a honky tonk out of his house, until he decides to build an addition where he can do more volume. Soldiers and sex workers and country boys keep him in business.
He employs Amber Rose as an ornament in his bar: men will pay him money to have Amber Rose sit with them while they drink at a table.
William Tell Oliver is an old man who lives down the road. From a ridge on his property, hidden by trees, he can see what goes on at Hovington's.
Motormouth Hodges, aka Clifford Hodges, was a boy when Oliver's pigpen was found with holes dug in it. Oliver covered them up, pondering the reason for it, and when he found them dug up again, he decided to watch from his barn one night. The boy came slipping into the pigpen with a shovel, and commenced to digging again.
When Oliver questioned him, bit by bit the story came out that his mother told him pigs came from holes dug in the ground in a pig pen.
" 'My mama did and I don't know what cause she'd have to lie.'
'I see,' Oliver said.
'I ast her where they come from and she said the old sow rooted them up in the hogpen.'
'and you not havin a hogpen... '
This is our introduction to "motormouth" Hodges. When we later meet him in the book, he is married to a woman who leaves him for one of the Blalock brothers. He is a friend of Nathan's.
In response to his cuckolding, motor mouth cuts the fence to the Blalock brothers' horse pasture. These horses are supposedly some fine "Morgan" horses.
A stallion and his two mares wander into Covington's property, and Hardin doesn't bother to tell anyone when he takes them in. He just has his worker build fence for a past year. Blalock finds out 3 weeks later takes his truck, sideboards put up, and heads over there. But we already know what Hardin's like, so we, the readers, are hardly surprised when Blalock finds himself stymied.
" 'you tearing my yard all to hell, Blalock. Ain't you had no raisin? I never heard you say could you cross it or kiss my ass or nothin.'
Blalock looked down from the driver's seat of the truck, his face tight and angry. He had been about halfmad all night anyway and he wanted his horses but an innate sense of caution had made him hope Hardin would still be asleep. By All odds he should have been after Saturday night but here was Hardin all wide awake and cleareyed at 6:00 of a Sunday morning, playing the country squire, smiling upon him despite the harshness of his words, a benign smile so transparently crafty it would not have deceived a child.
'I come after my horses.'
'can you prove they're yourn?'
'You know damn well I can.'
'I sort of thought you could. Get out awhile and we'll talk about it.'
he crossed over to the porch and stepped onto it. He hitched up his dress slacks and squatted not on the porch but on the heels of his shiny shoes.
'There ain't nothin to talk about. I come after em. Figure out what I owe for their keep and send me a bill.'
'whatever you say, you're the doctor. I guess we could dicker about it. I figure you owe me somethin in the neighborhood of $800.'
Suspecting some defect in his hearing, Blalock sought clarification. '$800? For what?'
Hardin arose and crossed the branch. Curiously birdlike, a graceless bird all joints and angles. Imprints of his shoulderblades through the thin yellow dress shirt he wore, morning Sun off a gold cufflink when he pointed across the stream.
'I had me a damn fine corn crop there and they done wiped me out before I knew they was on the place. They came in the night.'
Apoplectic with rage Blalock swung open the door and leaped out. He slammed the door so hard the truck rocked on its springs and he strode past Hardin and across the stream and up the Stony bank. Past the tilting dead cornstalks all he could see was Spanish nettles and sawbriars and great slabs of white limestone. He turned. Hardin was watching him amiably, a grin on his crooked face, hands pocketed and thumbs tucked in the loops of his trousers."

So the reader learns that Dallas Hardin does whatever he wants, just as he did with Thomas Hovington and his property and his family, and Blalock's Morgan horses. It's not the first time Hardin has talked about his great corn and bean crops, when all he ever had was a few dried out Bean Vines and cornstalks.
Hardin came by his attitude in a curious way, as the grocer Sam Long recalls, telling the story:
" 'anyway we got there and got the whiskey unloaded. Hardin took him a little drink and got to braggin. Spread hisself a little bit. That's when he said what I started out to tell you that was the damnedest thing I ever heard of. He said he was a walkin miracle, that nothin bad couldn't ever happen to him cuz the worst already had. He said he was a walkin Dead man.
'he told me he was born in a casket. Said his mama was killed when a horse run off with a buggy and throwed her out and broke her neck. They had her laid out and everything and was preachin her funeral, and and in a way I guess his too, when they heard a baby squallin. Folks didn't know what on Earth to do. Some just jumped up and took off runnin out of the church. Some of the women finally got up and looked. Godalmighty. He was down in her clothes. He'd crawled out or got Jarred out by them handling the casket or something. Anyway there he was.' "
Uh-HUH

Hardin offers Nathan Winer a job after Weiss, the chicken farmer's wife dies. He's so broken by her death, that he sells up everything and takes off.
Hardin knows that Nathan's father was a carpenter, so he figures Nathan has picked up some of the skills. Winer is working on the building when the drunks in Hardin's house get more riled up than usual:
"one afternoon he paused in nailing weatherboarding on the walls when a fight erupted inside and boiled out the back door, The old malen picking up their jars or jellyglasses or whatever and retreating to more neutral territory. Two soldiers were rolling in the yard and when a stringyheaded blonde broke a beer bottle over the top lmost one's head a girl with red hair and knocked her down with a 2x4 and fell upon her. Winer, watching their exposed white thighs and rent clothing, ultimately counted 18 participants and he wondered how they kept up with who was fighting whom and which side they were on.
They fought all over the backyard pulling hair and cursing and falling over one another. Winer swung himself onto the top plate the better not to be mistaken for a participant. Hardin tried to yell them down, then he and Wymer moved among them like dogs snapping at the heels of milling cattle, first with blackjacks then Hardin slipping on his Sunday knucks and wading in.
When they subsided no one seemed to know what the fight had been about and they all went back inside to discuss it save one soldier sitting crying in the grass with his jaw hanging crazy. He sat there awhile by himself and then he got up and hobbled around the corner like a very old man. Winer went on back to work and after awhile the old men came up from the branch laughing and seated themselves again."

Winer and Amber Rose end up getting together, and when Hardin finds out, he gives Nathan a Stern warning. Nathan doesn't heed it, endangering himself.

William Gay died way too young; perhaps he let a rough life. His character are some of the meanest you're likely to find in Southern Gothic but also creates characters like Nathan Winer and William Tell Oliver, endearing. Gay's writing is comic, cynical, and some of the most beautiful prose and he has a curious way of using two words as one and clopping off the g's in ing-words without using apostrophes. Well he does what he wants with the language and does it so lovingly.
The ending so sad. show less

Twilight is a good gothic mess. It's got graves, mud, blood, murder, necrophilia, and a community of folks who have the misfortune of coming across Granville Sutter. Tyler and his sister, Corrie, are determined to make the undertaker pay for the things he's done to bodies of the town's loved ones. It doesn't go well, and the result is a horrible long bloodthirsty chase through the local wilderness.
Looking at William Gay's photo on the back , I got a chill. I bet he is the nicest person, and show more would be a pleasant someone to just stt down and have a glass of iced sweet tea with on a boiling hot day. show less