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.

Yet it would be months—which was characteristic for William Gay, a man I never once heard brag—before he told me of his own history with Cormac McCarthy.

In the early 1970s, he’d plucked an early McCarthy novel, Outer Dark, from a drugstore paperback rack because the guy who’d written it lived in Tennessee, too. William loved the book so much he decided to look up the author in the Knoxville phonebook and was stunned when Cormac McCarthy actually answered. It was awkward at first, and McCarthy wouldn’t talk about his own work, but perked up when William mentioned Flannery O’Connor. And then they were off. They spoke intermittently on the phone over the next year, developing enough of a friendship that McCarthy sent William a manuscript copy of Suttree before the book was published. It arrived in the mail, coffee-stained, and William read it, then his brother read it, then William read it again and sent it back. This is before one could Xerox, and that copy had been one of the only two. “Or maybe the only one,” William said. He also told me that the manuscript contained a scene that was later edited from the novel, a bar fight re-described. McCarthy’s marginal note was, “Why re-fight the fight?” William never went to college (out of high school he volunteered for the Navy, figuring the view from Vietnam would be safer from the deck of a ship), so books were his teachers, books and Cormac McCarthy.

After a while, as their phone conversations continued, McCarthy said he gathered that William was a writer. When William confessed he was, McCarthy offered to read his stories. He’d mark the manuscripts and send them back. When I asked William what his edits were like, he said, “I used to like the word ‘moon’ a lot. I used it four times on one page, and he underlined the first one one time, the second one twice, the third one three times, and by the fourth one he wrote something like, ‘Too many goddamn moons.’” From that William learned to intend one’s repetition, otherwise it’s just clumsy, lazy.

He told me this story late one night in the fall of 1999. I was living in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a very lonely Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. I talked to Beth Ann, who was back in Illinois, on the phone each night before she went to bed, and after that I called William, or he’d call me. He’d given me his galley—his only copy of his first galley—of The Long Home, and I’d found it amazing, a Tennessee noir (which William pronounced “nar”) where the worst sort of character comes to town. As we talked, night after night, he told me about a new novel he was writing, Provinces of Night. He sent me the book in manuscript and, as I read it, I realized it was even better than his first.

I was trying to begin my own first novel then, that’s why I was at Bucknell in the first place, but I wasn’t having any luck. I had a few bad pages. I had a looming deadline. I was growing desperate, and one night told that to William. I said I didn’t know if I even had a novel in me.

He didn’t say anything for a while, and I opened another beer. Then he told me a story he heard growing up, of a man who tried to steal a ham on Christmas so he could feed his family, and the man he was stealing from shot and killed him. Then the fellow brought the dead man back to his family in a wagon. He pulled him off and laid him on the ground. But he gave them the ham.

I didn’t know what to say. The long distance buzzed between us.

“I just thought maybe you could put that in there somewhere,” William said.

I don’t remember how I responded, but after I hung up, that very night, I wrote six pages, that scene, woman and child waiting and her husband being brought back, shot dead. Along with a ham. As I read over the pages, I realized I had my novel’s tone.