KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Cormac McCarthy could spend three pages of a novel writing about the sweat on the bridle of a horse -- and you'd be utterly fascinated.
So says veteran Knoxville attorney Dennis B. Francis, who knew McCarthy more than 50 years after striking up a friendship one wintry morning while tending bar at a beer joint on Cumberland Avenue.
"He was the best storyteller -- and I've known some -- I've ever seen. It didn't hurt that we were both Irishmen, and we had spent a little time in the Emerald Isle," said Francis.
When told Tuesday that McCarthy had died in New Mexico, Francis said he'd feared as much. He knew the 89-year-old writer hadn't been doing well; he could tell from their last phone conversation around St. Patrick's Day.
Some months ago, he'd cautioned WBIR that the writer of such novels as "The Road", "All the Pretty Horses" and "Child of God" might be in his last days.
McCarthy had long since moved to Santa Fe, but Francis said they tried to speak every year around that day of days.
The attorney, who also became friends with McCarthy's brother Dennis and wife Judy Pinkston McCarthy, said one could use many words or phrases to describe Cormac McCarthy -- "a wolf after the coin," a raconteur, an intensely private man, a man who reveled in the company of all the shady characters in Knoxville.
He knew every one of Knoxville's darker spots, Francis said.
"And I've been to most of those darker spots with him," he said with a smile.
McCarthy's family moved to the area when he was a child. He stayed through high school, attended the University of Tennessee for a bit, married an Englishwoman here named Annie DeLisle, holed up and wrote for awhile in Blount County, and moved on to see the rest of the world.
McCarthy befriended gamblers, drinkers, prostitutes, hobos and reprobates.
"He just had a certain passion about life that most folks don't ever get to, you know," Francis said.
Loyalty was his No.1 quality, Francis said. If you were his friend, you remained so for life. A few years ago, someone he'd grown up with here died. McCarthy was in England but flew back to Knoxville to pay his respects, Francis said.
"He had the same friends, and I inherited every one of them when he left town," he said.
Francis said he read all of McCarthy's books. His favorite is "Child of God," horrific but fabulous and "Appalachia" at its best or maybe worst. Most of his characters were based on people he knew, he said.
About that first meeting in 1971...let Francis tell the story.
It was about 11 a.m., perfect for a beer breakfast. McCarthy and a longtime friend -- "those two morons" -- came in looking for the bar's owner, Francis said.
"So they start playing, you know, who knows who and who knows what and trivia about authors," Francis said. "I'm sitting there, my feet up on the beer cooler, trying to figure out how I can make a dollar for the day. And all of a sudden, they get a beer, they go in to get a toast.
"And the toast is pretty simple. It's from (American-Irish author) J.P. Donleavy's book, 'The Ginger Man.'
" 'God's mercy,' I chimed in, 'on the wild Ginger Man.' And Cormac looked at me, and he goes, 'My life is complete, I've met a literate bartender.'
"Needless to say it turned into an all-day debacle, and fortunately it had snowed so nobody was out and about."
Francis concluded his recollections of McCarthy on Tuesday afternoon with another toast to the old writer, again recalling the closing words of Donleavy's 1955 novel.
"God's mercy, on the wild Ginger Man," he said.
"Because he (McCarthy) was the wild Ginger Man."
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