The Kentucky Anthology: Two Hundred Years of Writing in the Bluegrass State

John Hay

502 The Kentucky Anthology John Hay “Renascence” Although John Hay has published four popular children’s books and several superb stories in the Sewanee Review and other periodicals, he is surely one of Kentucky’s best-kept secrets. Born in Frankfort in 1944, he grew up on nearby Scotland Farm caring for horses. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of the South, a master’s degree in writing from Hollins College, and a J.D. from the University of Louisville. He has received a number of awards for his writing and continues to live and write and care for the horses on the family farm. “Renascence,” which first appeared in the 2002 issue of Brescia University’s literary magazine, Open 24 Hours, demonstrates that he is a writer with major talent. h There are many stories—to hear a gentler one than this, we must earn it. You can try an antique, leather-bound book on the Renaissance full of riches, but the cosmos demands the oblique. The rhythms of life demand discrimination . The broad gestures of language can only hope to be generous. My travels are inward now, connected with something electrical: the light bulb burning in the empty kitchen, the gas stove burning the edges of the fat pizza, the burning starlight, the dull eyes of Deliberator, the blind stallion racing across the field. The stallion is satisfied in his travels across the field. He will stop at the fence on a dime. He is burning or cold at the shiver of a mare, or a fat cob of corn. He is only a stallion. He looks to breed his mare, Dusty Dream, as his kind have looked for a thousand years. I am not a blind stallion. Is my friend Candice a blind mare? Do I look for loving arms today? I have been alone for awhile since my loved-one passed on. The pizza is in the oven, and starlight is seething at the edge of the cheese. Candice is coming to lunch. I am singing in the key of blue. If you flinch at a caustic thought or two, off the cuff and lazy, forgive me. I am singing a song in the key of yellow. If I offend, know that I am but a friend of someone who is living out a thought. . . . But wait! The moments come and go . . . Candice wheels in. Her red car sweeps down the lane, a quarter mile away, makes fresh tracks in the deep, sparkling snow. Candice. A young woman I’ve known only a little while. Maybe twenty-eight, she is. A success with her own company, a painter in her spare time. Landscapes. 502 John Hay 503 I have been sifting through books to clarify the useless and left them scattered. Candice wants to know me, and I her, of course. If I leave the books out, will she be scanning titles, looking for her own brand in me? Branded. Sizzling, permanent. Well, all right, you might say, people have got to look at something. But for today, no books. Let the pizza be enough for her, all vegetables in the snow-covered kitchen looking out over the empty, white, rolling, monastic hills of Kentucky. It is a warm, easy kitchen with an ancient, wooden table. Will she worry then if the vegetable knife decapitates a bug? No, not Candice. She isn’t like that. She is sensitive (not issue bound), and she is charming. Charming because what she is makes charm happen— courteous, bright, kind, seeking. Doomed, possibly, I think, as I sift through the books. One eye on the window, I track her in the red car. She slides at the big curve, a long, graceful, slow-motion slide to the ditch. Maybe she was testing the snow against her speed—having fun. Now in the ditch she revs it up— spinning—rich, black earth shoots from the back tires flying into the field. Back on the road, she is out to check the damage. From my perspective: dark red coat, bright red car, white field, black dirt—color and stillness. She drives on, curving toward me, slower now. I imagine her thoughts by the thousands tumbling off in the wind: honey bees, five hundred Luna moths on the wing, birds of paradise, dying house flies toddling behind like penguins, a mantis with a mouth full of broken wings trying to pray, all drags against the wheels. We know them all...