I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories

“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]s 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 … 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.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“After two stunning novels that combined the esoteric language of Cormac McCarthy with the subtle humor of Larry Brown, Gay delivers a concise craft work in his first short-story collection …. Much in the same way that 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 (Portland, Oregon)

“[Gay’s] strong words never fail to paint a precise picture …. Fans of his novels will find lots of meaty reading here.”

—Chattanooga Times

“William Gay writes like a man possessed.”

—The Montgomery Advertiser

“Gay’s characters come right up and bite you …. [His] well-chosen words propel the reader straight through his 13 stories.”

—The 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.”

—Southern Living

“A literary country music song …. With deft and lyrical prose, he captures the poignancy of loss, isolation and double-fisted grief, of disappointment, rage, jealousy, violence and heartbreak.”

—GoMemphis.com

Also by William Gay

The Long Home

Provinces of Night

I Hate to See That
Evening Sun Go Down

Collected Stories

William Gay

FREE PRESS
NEW YORK   LONDON   TORONTO   SYDNEY   SINGAPORE

This book is for my friends Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin, and for their daughter, Claire Elizabeth.

FREE PRESS
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by William Gay

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Free Press trade paperback edition 2003

FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected].

DESIGNED BY PAUL DIPPOLITO

Manufactured in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Gay, William.

I hate to see that evening sun go down : collected stories / William Gay.

p. cm.

1. Southern States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3557.A985 I15 2002

813′.54—dc21

2002073945

“I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down” first appeared in The Georgia Review, Fall 1998; “A Death in the Woods” first appeared in GQ, May 2000; (continued on page 306)

ISBN 0-7432-4088-X

ISBN 978-0-7432-4292-9

eISBN 978-1-4391-0514-6

0-7432-4292-0 (Pbk)

(continued from copyright page)

“The Paperhanger” first appeared in Harper’s, February 2000; anthologized in Best New American Voices (Harcourt Books, October 2000), Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards (Anchor Books), New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2001 (Algonquin Books), Best Mystery Stories 2001 (Houghton Mifflin); “Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues” first appeared in The Missouri Review, Fall 1998; anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 1999 (Algonquin Books); “Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1999; “Good ’Til Now” first appeared in Oxford American, January 2001; “My Hand Is Just Fine Where It Is” first appeared in Oxford American, January 2000; anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2000 (Algonquin Books).

CONTENTS

I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down

A Death in the Woods

Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair

The Paperhanger

The Man Who Knew Dylan

Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues

Crossroads Blues

Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway

Sugarbaby

Standing by Peaceful Waters

Good ’Til Now

The Lightpainter

My Hand Is Just Fine Where It Is

I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down

I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down

WHEN THE TAXICAB let old man Meecham out in the dusty roadbed by his mailbox the first thing he noticed was that someone was living in his house. There was a woman hanging out wash on the clothesline and a young girl sunning herself in a rickety lawn chair and an old dust-colored Plymouth with a flat tire parked in Meecham’s driveway. All this so disoriented the old man that he dropped the cardboard suitcase he was holding and forgot about paying the cab driver. He thought for a dizzy moment that he had directed the driver to the wrong place: but there was the fading clapboard house and the warm umber roof of the barn bisected by the slope of ridge and on top of that the name ABNER MEECHAM on the mailbox in his own halting brushstrokes.

Looks like you got company, the cab driver said.

Beyond the white corner of the house the woman stood holding a bedsheet up to the line and she was studying him transfixed with a clothespin in her mouth. She seemed frozen to the ground, motionless as statuary a sculptor in a whimsical mood might have wrought of a sharecropper’s wife.

How much was it I owed you? Meecham asked, finally remembering. He fumbled out a wallet with a chain affixed to it and a clasp hooked to a belt and turned slightly to the side as an old man does when studying a wallet s contents.

Well. Twenty dollars. That seems like a lot but it’s a right smart way from Linden.

And worth ever nickel of it, the old man said, selecting at length a bill and proffering it through the window. Twenty dollars’ worth of distance from Linden, Tennessee, is fine with me. If I was a wealthy man I would of bought more of it.

Glad to of brought you, the driver said. You be careful in all this heat. Meecham raised a hand in farewell, dismissal. He was already forgetting the driver and was at picking up his luggage and preparing to investigate these folks making free with his property.

As he passed the lawn chair the girl casually tucked a pale breast into her halter top. Hidy. Do I know you? She removed a pair of plastic-framed sunglasses as if she might study him more closely.

You will here in a minute.