William Gay: A Life of Writing by J. M. White

THE REST IS SILENCE

ONE DREARY FEBRUARY MORNING I SAT DOWN AT THE COMPUTER AND OPENED UP THE EMAIL AND THERE WAS A MESSAGE FROM RENEE. She lived in Hohenwald and was an old friend of William Gay. Renee had published a couple of his novellas and even appeared as a character in one of his short stories.

There was nothing in the subject line. The message said, "I loved him so much."

I felt cold fingers grip my heart and started making calls. I had talked with William the night before. How could this be? He was scheduled to be at a writer's conference in East Tennessee in two days and was going to stop by my house on the way to the conference.

I called William's number, the phone rang and rang, no answer.

I called his oldest son, then his youngest; no one was answering the phone.

I called the local newspaper and they confirmed the news. He had died of an apparent heart attack the night before. They gave me the name of the local funeral home where a solemn country voice, in a deep baritone, informed me in muted tones that he had been cremated and the family had no plans for a service.

Gone just like that.

The night before he was making plans and moving right along, now gone, gone beyond the veil.

William had suffered a series of seizures and heart attacks over the last two years and was wearing a pacemaker. In the heat of the summer he had been going around with no shirt and the damn thing looked like a can of snuff inserted under the skin over his heart. The worst of the heart attacks happened one night as he was watching television. His son Chris noticed he was passed out in his chair and was shaking with convulsions. Chris immediately called an ambulance and away they went to the nearest hospital about thirty miles away in Columbia. Chris rode in the back of the ambulance, listening to the sirens wailing in the deep of night on lonely country back-roads.

William died right then and there, but the techs or nurses or whoever was riding with him knew what to do and they kept his heart going and got him through it.

His impulse, when he came to in the hospital, was to refuse all treatment and get home as quickly as possible. The doctor came in and told him if he did, he would be dead in a matter of days, maybe weeks, but certainly not long. So he came home with the pacemaker surgically implanted under his skin.

A week later I stopped by the house and once we sat down he told me all about it. "My goodness, Will, give me a report from the other side. What's it like in the land of the dead?"

He got a weird little grin on his face. It wasn't a question he was expecting and he was enjoying it.

He paused for a moment and then said, "It's really quiet." He went on, "It was one of the strangest days of my life. All day I was haunted by a weird longing, it was like severe nostalgia, like my body was trying to tell me something." He gave me a sidelong piercing look. "If you ever get that feeling, watch out."

Find the rest of story in September's Issue - you don't want to miss it...

William Gay in typical attire with ever-present cigarette in hand circa 2008.

Throughout his life, William wrote his original manuscripts by hand into either spiral binders or legal pads. As the years went by, the author no longer crossed his t's nor dotted his i's. For those left with the many dozens of such books, the rewards would be worth all the effort required to decipher the scratchy pencraft.

Even in this draft of a story William wrote in high school some of the author's skills are emerging. During these early years, William wrote with a traditional fountain pen. The variance in lettering is due to the young writer's solution to running out of ink. When his store-bought ink ran dry, William would grind walnut shells into a fine powder, add water and strain the concoction into his pen. The murky brown fluid worked just fine until William could afford to buy a new bottle of genuine ink.