REMEMBERING WILLIAM GAY
THE PIT by William Gay (The unpublished chapter of the original manuscript now known as The Long Home)
His name was Dallas Hardin, but this had not always been so. Growing up in Cullman, Alabama, he had been named Herrin. His legs were long and ungainly and leant him a stilted birdlike look so it was inevitable that folks would think of him as Heron. Behind his back. Nobody ever thought it to his face; early on he had displayed a natural facility for cutting folks with pocketknives and before he was eighteen he had waylaid and killed the man he suspected of impregnating his sister, not out of any deep filial affection but out of some fierce sense of pride and outrage, the feeling that the fatal deed had been contemptuous of him, had deemed him no threat to be reckoned with. Folks knew he did it but they didnt say that to his face either. He had carried the body to an abandoned houseplace and rolled it off into a dry cistern and covered it with stones. So he was Mr Herrin to his enemies and acquaintances. He didnt have any friends.
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