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A meaningful letter in which McCarthy announces that he has finished The Road and mentions his young son, John Francis, to whom the book is dedicated. The book Kidwell had praised is most likely No Country for Old Men, published in July 2005. The play McCarthy refers to is The Sunset Limited, first produced by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, directed by Sheldon Patinkin and starring Freeman Coffey and Austin Pendleton. It premiered on May 18, 2006.

Bill Kidwell met Cormac McCarthy in 1963 in Knoxville while on vacation from Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. They met again in Atlanta in 1964 at a mutual friend’s home. In 1969, the two lived next door to each other in Rockford, Tennessee, and in 1970 they lived nearby in Louisville. Between 1969 and 1973, Kidwell and McCarthy were in frequent contact, and in 1972 they collaborated on two mosaic sidewalks in downtown Maryville, Tennessee—projects designed by Kidwell and engineered by McCarthy. The two men performed all the labor for this HUD project.

Kidwell moved to Williamson County near Nashville, to a community called Fernvale, in 1973, where he began building custom homes from recycled materials, primarily timber-framed structures. McCarthy called one day in 1978 and asked to come stay with him. Kidwell gave McCarthy a job and an old Dodge pickup to drive. During this time, McCarthy built several additions and a beautiful limestone-and-white-mortar chimney for a client—work Mr. Kidwell described as impeccable. It was also during this period that McCarthy worked alongside men who would later inspire the characters in The Stonemason. Together, they constructed a large addition to house a duck decoy collection for a Nashville client. McCarthy both designed the room and supervised its construction. He left Nashville in 1979 for Tucson, Arizona, and later moved to El Paso, Texas, where he lived on Coffin Avenue—an appropriately named street for the writing of Blood Meridian.

In a personal letter to Heritage explaining his friendship with McCarthy, Kidwell wrote: “One of the things he [McCarthy] told me years ago was that when he was in New Orleans writing The Orchard Keeper, he used a wooden crate for a desk, and on the crate was the inscription ‘World Renowned.’ He made up his mind that that description would apply to him one day. And it did. I owe him so much. He introduced me to books I would never have read and enlightened me in so many ways during our times together. He was and still is the most intelligent person I’ve ever met.”