What I’d just written, I knew, would become the background for one of the characters. And it gave me a foothold. I knew something about her I hadn’t before. From there I began, slowly, to write.

Years later, the novel finished at last, William read it for me. He called and said I needed to work on one part. I asked where. He told me the page number. I had one of my poorer sharecroppers in too much misery, William told me. It was the only time I ever offended him, though he never said that. “No matter how hard he got worked,” he said, “he’d still want to set on the porch with his kids in the evening. Maybe play a guitar or banjo.”

What did I learn? That no character should be a one-note character.

He would say “Really?” a lot, his italics, always fascinated or amused by something or other, and it was here his dialect stood out the most. Say the word “Israeli” and take off the “is.” That’s how he said it.

My wife and I invited him to visit us one of the years we lived in Galesburg, Illinois, and he read “The Paperhanger” at Knox College, where we taught. After he finished, the room packed with students and teachers was quiet. There was a token question, an awkward silence, and so we dismissed. Later, I heard that none of those Midwesterners had been able to understand him, his accent was too thick.

Mostly when we talked we talked late at night. He’d be watching Letterman or a movie.

“Hey, Thomas,” he’d say, the only person who used that version of my name.

If you called him in the middle of the day and let the phone ring and ring, he’d sometimes answer, breathless from having run in from picking tomatoes. But mostly it just rang.

I visited when I could. His son Chris made the best beef stew I’ve ever eaten. Full of fat carrots and potatoes and onions from the garden. Sitting in their living room, a fire in the woodstove, talking politics or Larry Brown. The Cubs on or, in deference to me, the Braves.

We’d sit on the back porch in summer and look out over Little Swan Creek, which ran behind his house, William scratching the dog’s ears, the dog changing as the years passed, first Gus, named for Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove, and then, after he died, Jude, a sweet pit bull.

In the later years of his life, I’d take my kids to visit William and we’d stand on the bank of the creek, me with a beer, him coffee, and watch as his grandkids joined my children catching small fish on the poles we’d brought, or on their knees in the water after minnows or crawfish or bullfrogs. Jude there, supervising. On those nights Chris would cook for everyone and all the kids, six or seven by now, would fall asleep watching a movie and William and Chris and I would go outside on the porch where Chris would strum his guitar and we’d talk or, later still, watch Apocalypse Now again, a film William thought perfectly mimicked in structure the Vietnam War itself, a questionable mission going more and more crazy.

Over the years, we talked. On the phone, on porches, in bars, walking in woods, side by side on literary panels or side by side signing books, in hotel rooms, on a plane, once in South Carolina, where we sat detained for hours because the man with the red Igloo cooler’s paperwork didn’t match the human organ he was transporting. When the plane finally landed, William, eager for a cigarette, leaned over and whispered, “This’ll be the last time you catch me in one of these cocksuckers.”

People loved to tell stories about William, and stories about the stories. Mostly they revolved around his being a famous drunk. The funny thing is this: he wasn’t a drunk. I’ve been around a few, and I would tell you if he was. It’s interesting that people convince themselves otherwise. As if the myth of desperate, outlandish boozing augmented his talent.