The Valley of Light and "Giving Way": the Fiction of Terry Kay

An Essay by Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt

In a superb collection of home-spun essays that afford small glimpses into the humor and wisdom of Georgia novelist Terry Kay, the author describes a ramshackle house that was "the model for every tenant-sharecropper house, every rural setting" he ever wrote about ("Giving Way" 199). The house was home to the Carey family when Kay was a boy, and before them the Cromers and the Harts, the Carters, and a host of other southern Appalachian tenant farmers who eked out a living from the rocky soil of northeastern Georgia. Kay writes that the house "is deserted now. Has been for many years. The front porch has fallen away and it has a cracked backbone on the roof line and it is waiting for the vines of poison ivy and fox grape to pull it down" (199-200). Like so much of Terry Kay's life that he draws upon for the seed or donnee of a story, the house has filled his imagination over the years. He continues: "I wish the house could talk, but it cannot. Time has taken the talk out of it, all the words spilled from broken-out windows and doors. Some floated up the rock chimney, I would guess,... [or] seeped through floor cracks" (200).

What the house cannot tell Terry Kay, however, the writer conjures through what Henry James called, the "alchemy of art." Kay writes: "If the house could talk, I would ask it to tell me stories of the night-whispering that must have taken place among the Careys and the Cromers . . . . But the house has lost its words, and in its silence, I can only invent" (213). With a journalist's eye for the extraordinary amid the ordinary, Kay looks back on his life and the familiar world around him for fictional fodder. In an interview with Phil Brown, Kay explains how he took the mundane events from several summers he worked as a lad in a resort in the Catskills and turned them into his novel Shadow Song. He explains: "The hotel was real. . . . The drugstore was real. A lot of it was true. I think that a writer draws from insignificant moments. That is the smoke and mirror tricks of writing. Something insignificant, on paper" takes on a new life as it is transformed into art (1).

What particularly interests Terry Kay in the real and imagined stories of others are those dramatic or unusual moments that reveal some secret, some epiphany about life, dramatic moments that both entertain and enlighten readers. Kay continues to speculate about the Carey house in his essay "Giving Way":

I am not interested in the economics of the people who lived there. I would like to know about the trembling moments-the uncertainties, the fears, the anger, the rage, the bullying, the begging. . . . I want to hear the voices of sometimes-joy. I want to know what caused the joy. I want to know how the giving way took place. It would be a story worth writing. (216)

It is precisely this "giving way" that fascinates Kay most about the lives of his characters-whether he writes of the dark and fearful symmetry of good and evil, takes a nostalgic look back to the innocence of childhood in order to expose the nature of prejudice, explores a child's coming of age in the bitter-sweet world of experience, examines flawed justice or what he calls the "truth of distortion," or writes of the cruelties of Time which dallies shamelessly with our dreams and hopes. Beyond the extraordinary range of themes and the array of narratives that constitute the canon of Terry Kay, it is ultimately those periods of change, transition that interest him most-periods when one layer of the social fabric gives way to another, often its antithesis. It is always the clash of these polarities that provides the grist for Kay's fictional mill.

When one thinks of great Southern or Appalachian literature, rich local color descriptions come to mind. In the case of Terry Kay's writing, the visual local color is certainly present but not the central aim of his stories. Like Marilou Awiakta, Kay's art centers on sound, and the sound yields the vivid local color and highly descriptive quality. In his interview with Phil Brown, Kay speaks of his concern for "sound and the language of it." He says: "I didn't grow up with TV, I grew up with the radio. I grew up with sound not vision. I don't write anything that I consider visual. If I can't hear it, I can't write it" (3). Yet the visual is apparent in the stories. Kay admits, "I only know it's visual when I go back and read it. Sometimes it surprises me. I have a sense of sound-the wind, the birds, the voice" (3). When he gets the dialogue down just right, the description and characterization are right. "My theory," he says, "is that you can describe a person better in dialogue than in narrative" (3).

If dialogue is everything, dialect is not. Similar to Denise Giardina's idea about rendering Southern and Appalachian speech, the operating principle for Kay is that "less is more"!ÝÝ "Dialect," Kay has told Joyce Dixon, "distracts me and I believe it often turns characters into caricature. That's especially true of southern characters. I believe the southern expression has more to do with phraseology than accent, or dialect" ("Gentle Stories" 1-2). A word, a phrase, an idiom placed strategically is all that is necessary to render the authentic sound, as well as the essence, of a character. Thus writing for Terry Kay is a matter of listening, waiting for the voice to come, and then capturing the flavor of the voice in his writing. Kay has one of his characters express what could be viewed as his own storytelling aesthetic in The Valley of Light:

She liked the listening more than the talking, for she knew she would hear stories that could have been set in type and sealed between the hard covers of a book. . . . great stories were those begun with a single, dark seed of gossip, planted in the hotbed of a moist tongue, sprouted to life in whispers that had been fertilized by imagination. (212)Ý

Author of nine novels, a collection of nonfiction prose, several screenplays, and a children's story, Terry Kay has evolved into a seasoned writer. He is a native Georgian, born on February 10, 1938, in Hart County, in the foothills of Appalachia. Kay grew up on a 40-acre farm near Royston, close to the South Carolina border, the eleventh child of Viola Winn and T.H. Kay, a farmer, tree specialist, and owner of the local nursery. Kay remembers his father as a wise, strong man, who "taught carpentry, ran the canning plant, was chairman of the board of education of Vanna Junior High School and president of the Farm Bureau." Kay writes in an essay on his father:

I never heard more than five men call him anything but Mr. Kay. . . . He loved his work. He loved to be in the fields, his hand on the stock of a plow or around the handle of a hoe or shovel. He loved the evenness of rows, the muscular sweep of terracing, the delicate green of finger-long plants breaking through the soil-crust in spring. He loved the smell of the earth. ("T. H. Kay, Proprietor" 11-12)

Kay recalls the summer of 1955 when he took a summer job at a resort in the Catskills as a teen, missing family terribly and calling home. He writes: "I was seventeen and working as a busboy in one of those tiny villages that rest beautifully in the forests of lovely white birches. I had earned exactly one hundred dollars for a week's work and I wanted to celebrate" (T. H. Kay, Proprietor" 5). He called home and his father answered. Kay told him: "I just wanted to call and see how things are and to tell you and Mother that I earned exactly one hundred dollars this week" (5). After a poignant pause, his father asked, "Are you paying for this call, or am I?" A buoyant Terry answered, "I am, Daddy . . . with a fistful of quarters." "Well, son," his father answered, "you don't have a hundred dollars anymore, do you?" And then the dial tone filled the ensuing silence (5). Many years later, Kay wrote about the incident and his father's response: "It was a long time before I understood what he had done and why: it was for me, not for his other children. My father knew me well. He knew that I was lonely, that I wanted to be home. He knew I had to be angered to stay. And he knew I had to stay" (6). More than forty years later, Terry Kay would mine those years and the wisdom of his father to write two extraordinary books, Shadow Song about his experiences as a youth working in the Catskills and To Dance with the White Dog about his father's final years after his mother's death-the latter an extraordinary book that is essentially a son's love story.

Kay candidly recalls that as a lad he was impatient and easy to anger: "I was a dreamer. I was the one who hurried the family to the fields, then found a way to avoid the task. I was the con, the one who once sold three cotton stalks for a dollar apiece, telling the New York visitor that he had just purchased one of the rare, delicate plants of the South" ("T. H. Kay, Proprietor" 6). Kay remembered making the mistake once of cursing in front of his Dad, saying that "his damn, crazy mule did not know gee from haw. 'Everytime I say gee the damn mule goes to the right; everytime I say haw, it goes to the left.'" T. H. reflected disdainfully, shot his son a steely stare, saying, "Son, if you had a lick of sense you'd know gee means right and haw means left. It [isn't] the damn, crazy mule, it [is] the damn, crazy boy" (6-7). He also recalls being smacked in the face by T. H. after he answered his mother's request to take out the trash with the sarcastic retort, "Aw, I'll get around to it" (8). Yet Terry Kay also still remembers with nostalgic pride the day his father told him that he "could plow a furrow as straight" as his brother Thomas, who was killed in a freak accident when Terry was three. Terry Kay has said, with bemused irony: "My problem as a Southern writer is that I didn't grow up in a dysfunctional family" (Dixon, "Gentle Stories" 1). For an artist who draws upon his personal experiences for the seeds of his stories, his comment may contain a kernel of truth, but Terry Kay, as any postmodernism romantic, has learned skillfully how to utilize the transforming power of the imagination.

In 1955, Kay left the family farm and the Appalachian foothills for college, attending West Georgia College for two years and graduating in 1959 from nearby LaGrange College with a degree in social science. While in school he had participated in drama productions, later applying what he learned about theater to his drama and film criticism and finally to his fiction writing. Kay told Joyce Dixon that the theater had been a great influence on his writing. "I think there is a far greater relationship between theater and the novel," he observed, "than between film and the novel, primarily because of the importance of language" ("Southern Voice" 1). After graduation, Kay married his high school sweetheart, Tommie Duncan, and the two went to Atlanta where she had a teaching job. For a short time he worked nights selling life insurance, until he landed a position with the Decatur/Dekalb News as a $40 a week news writer. He writes of that first writing job: "I covered sports events and city hall meetings, fashioned want ads, and wrote a front-page column called 'DeKalb After Dark' under several pseudonyms." While working at this first newspaper job, Kay met another young writer just breaking into the business, Roy Blount Jr. (Special Kay xii).

In 1962, after three years with the Decatur/Dekalb News, he moved to The Atlanta Journal, where he worked first as a sports writer for three years and then as a film and theater critic for eight. Working at the Journal was his first real "apprenticeship as a writer," he says. In the company of such writers as Jim Minter, Furman Bisher, Lee Walburn, and Gene Asher, Kay consciously turned himself into a writer. He notes that he "began a writing exercise of occasionally copying Bisher's columns" in order to "feel the words." It is a strategy he still practices today when he becomes what he calls "brain-locked over a story." He writes: "I remain in awe over the power that is transferred from the likes of John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Jesse Stuart, Pat Conroy, Gabriel Barcia Marquez. I have never understood why such an exercise is not used in classrooms" (Special Kay xiii). The strategy is more than an exercise for Kay, however. In his 1999 mystery novel The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene, he vocalizes his point through the character Freda, who is a first-rate writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "When I was fourteen," Freda recalls, "I read a story about the reunion between a nurse and a soldier she saved during the Second World War. . . . I memorized it. Then I began to write it from memory. I wrote it so many times that I began to believe I . . . was the writer." Freda goes on to explain, "That's why I do what I do, why I'm the kind of person I am. I've always wanted to write that story-for real" (98).

After he became Entertainment Editor of The Journal in 1965 and began covering film and theater, Kay had the good fun and fortune to meet and interview many celebrates who came to Atlanta: Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, Vanessa Redgrave, Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, Pearl Bailey, and others. In 1968, Kay's talent for arts criticism was recognized when he was named by the Sang Jury of Fine Art Criticism one of the "best theater critics in the nation" (Dixon, "Southern Voice" 1). Kay writes that it was "a great job, yet, in those days, journalism was a low-paying, tiring profession," so in 1973 he resigned from The Journal to take a position as creative director for a film and television production company that made commercials (Special Kay xiii). "The pay was an astronomical $350 per week," he recalls. At this time, Kay believed that his "writing career was essentially over" (xiii). However, the prediction of the demise of his writing was definitely premature. Before too long, Jim Townsend, the founding editor of the Atlanta Magazine, called to ask if he would be a regular contributor to Georgia Magazine, which Townsend was also editing. Kay began contributing the journalistic style of essay that he had written for years, but Townsend nagged him for fiction. Finally, Kay said, "I'll write a story if you'll let me do a mixture of truth and fiction" (xiv). So after an afternoon composing, he finished "I Was a Teenage Quarterback," a story that readers will recognize as vintage Terry Kay. Kay addresses his readers in the story: "Part of what you are about to read is true; part of it is the natural liar of the writer. But it could have happened as reported . . . . That is why some of the names have been changed, to protect the guilty" (165).

The piece worked well and convinced Kay's friend Pat Conroy to encourage him to become a novelist. Kay protested; he wasn't interested in writing novels, but Conroy persisted, finally calling his editor Anne Barrett at Houghton Mifflin. Conroy told Barrett that Kay had 150 pages of a superb new book and she must read it. Kay recalls, "I didn't have a thing," but Conroy gave him the choice of calling Barrett to say that either he was a liar or that Kay had the manuscript (xv). For the next month, Kay lived in front of his manual typewriter, furiously pounding out the four stories that alternated between childhood recollections and the contemporary scene. "I thought they were trash," he recalled, but Barrett offered him a contract, and The Year the Lights Came On (1976) was born (The Year the Lights Came On xv). Kay writes about his journey as a novelist: "Writers can be-often are-astonishingly dumb, which may be why many of them are successful. They start with a smidgen of knowledge and experience and set about tracking a story through the hot-scented ground of their imagination. It is an intoxicating process of discovery" (xvii).

The Year the Lights Came On was written at a period when Kay was particularly nostalgic for his childhood, a time when the sounds of childhood echoed vividly in his mind, when the simplicity of a unique time in American life was on the cusp of change. The novel brings into focus a concern that most of his work grapples with to one degree or another-the complexity of human morality and the paradoxes associated with such complexity, an idea that Blake would reference as "the fearful symmetry." The novel is set within the framework of "childhood loss of innocence," and in this sense it is a bildungsroman or coming-of-age story. It is narrated by twelve-year-old Colin Wynn, employs a picaresque or episodic structure, and achieves a thematic profundity reminiscent of the work of Mark Twain, particularly The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Because the book illustrates the principle that Kay calls "giving way," it explores the paradoxes of time, in the process revealing cultural and social changes that have both positive and negative manifestations, as well as exploring the nature of truth and prejudice.

The story begins with an oath of friendship at Big Gully among those Emery Junior High kids who live south of Banner's Crossing, the "sorriest dirt road in Eden County" (4). The children-Wesley, Lynn, and Colin Wynn, Freeman Boyd, and the rest of their motley "Our Side" crew-are opposed, as it were, by the hoity-toity, well-to-do "Highway 17" gang, in large part because of their lack of indoor toilets and dearth of electricity and those modern appliances and conveniences that accompanied the rural electric phenomenon of the forties and fifties in Appalachia. ÝÝIt is clear from the opening pages of the book that this is a time of extraordinary change and transition.

The year is 1947, and the second great war is over. The young men have returned from a world at war, the young women who had taken their places in the factories and mills have experienced some of the world beyond the kitchen sink and back-door garden, and the American cultural and social landscape is poised for extraordinary change, particularly in those insular, small communities of southern Appalachia. Kay writes: "The Great Depression and World War Number Two had been our only experience with the Larger World. . . . The Larger World had issued messages that we lived in a temporary time, that we, ourselves, were temporary. . . . Because of the Larger World, and what it said to us in the voices of the Radio Evening News Network . . . we had been mightily influenced and had adopted the habit of clustering, as though clustering was an affirmation of our existence" (24). Emphasizing the significance of this particular time also accomplishes another task for Kay: he is able to utilize this touching tale of growing up in southern Appalachia as a microcosm and connect in the minds of his readers this unique period in one small community with the horrific events of a world war and the genocide possible when everyday acrimony grows into lethal animosity and intolerance.

While the "Our Side" children continue to define themselves in terms of their family and neighborhood loyalties, their world of definitive boundaries is already destined to vanish. Kay writes: "In clustering, we became isolationists; in isolation, we assumed identities; in identity, we were assigned value; in value, we learned of imperatives; and, in imperatives, we realized perspective" (24). The "boundaries" or divisions that separate the good folks of Emery are formidable and varied. Many of these boundaries have to do with places-Highway 17 and Black Pool Swamp, for example. Others have to do with socio-economic differences, racial differences, and personal eccentricity that labels someone as different. Characters who fall into this latter category are generally the "have nots" of Emery, and they are designated as "other" by the well-to-do Highway 17 crowd and their leader Dupree Hixon, son of the owner of the local dry goods store. There are Shirley and Walter Weems, who are viewed as "white trash" by the Dupree and the Emery Junior High elite but who are befriended by Colin's older brother Wesley, a moral center in the story. There is the gangly, inept Alvin Bond, whom all the children make fun of until they discover his astonishing curveball. Alvin's propensity to "walk backward" serves as an emblem not only for marching to a different drummer but for hanging onto the past (288). Another of the "have-nots" in Emery is Delores Fish, the local prostitute who introduces Alvin to the pubescent pleasure that sustains his interest in pitching for the Our Side softball team. Other outsiders include Granny Woman Jordan, Willie Lee, his wife Little Annie, and Baptist-all devalued and designated as different or "other" by virtue of the color of their skin.

The boundaries that Kay portrays in The Year the Lights Came On are really a metaphor for those inner mindsets and attitudes that feed the narrowness and intolerance of prejudice and hatred; and both sides-Our Side and the Highway 17 kids-are susceptible, as evidenced by the rebuff Colin receives when his school-boy affection is revealed for Megan Priest, one of the Highway 17 children. The significance of those inner attitudes becomes clear when Wesley tries to explain to teacher Hollister and Principal Simmons Our Side's part in the Great Fight with the Highway 17 gang, who persist in harassing the Our Side kids for their lack of rural electric service and supposed "inferiority." Wesley explains, as he walks across the Highway 17 divide to stand defiantly before Dupree Hixon: "Truth is, there ain't one dab of real difference between us. It's what you think, and what I think, that makes us different. All our lives, we been without some of them things you think were god-given to you and your kind. You been acting like we had some kind of disease because we ain't got all them things. But the REA will fix that" (52). Of course, Wesley will discover, as will the narrator Colin, that the REA may make the lights come on but will not bring enlightenment nor will it eradicate the gulfs that separate the kids and others in the community.

Rural electricity will make the lives of the Our Side families easier, it will bring a larger world into their homes and all those conveniences that we take for granted today; however, it will also take something away from the community. Colin looks back in retrospect at the end of the story and admits: "We are easily deceived. The REA changes our lives. The REA made us more comfortable. The REA also destroyed . . . something-some intangible security people have always enjoyed in isolation. The world came into our house on those shining, singing wires. The world came in, intruding and changing, commanding us to obey its hypnotic lure. The world came in like a torrent . . . " (285). As Emerson reminds us with his transcendental tenet compensation, progress always comes with accompanying debits. Colin recalls that their night games "of racing with Bullet and Short Leg through Black Pool Swamp stopped. We stayed inside and developed pretensions about the sophistication of having electricity" (285). Our Side found itself becoming in small ways like the Highway 17 gang. Even the swamp felt the negative effects of progress, as the chainsaws and axes of the REA hacked their way through this natural refuge (262). Colin's family too must pay a harsh toll for the progress that comes with the lights, as older brother Thomas, a lineman for the REA, is killed in an automobile accident. Perhaps, however, the most important loss for the Our Side families as a whole is their foregoing of what Colin calls "clustering," their evenings spent huddled together around the kerosene lamp on the kitchen table doing homework and their family talks by candlelight.

The novel has an apparent loose narrative structure, one which appears a series of vignettes about growing up in the Appalachian foothills of Georgia; yet there is a remarkable coherence and unity to the book, particularly as it explores the moral and philosophic issues that interest Kay. Many of those vignettes-such as the Shirley and Walter Weems episode and the Alvin Bond episode-explore the nature of prejudice and intolerance, as well as reinforce Kay's other themes. However, the most significant segment is the story of Dupree Dixon's treachery of Freeman Boyd and Freeman's ordeal in Black Pool Swamp.

Fatherless and dirt-poor, Freeman is clearly one of the rougher and more-spun of the Our Side gang, coming from far down the muddy roads on the wrong side of Highway 17. Yet Freeman is honest, earnest, and admirable in his independent spirit and work ethic. To the dismay of Dupree, Freeman is hired at his father's store and performs exceptionally until the day $20 is stolen from the cash register and lands up in Freeman's shirt pocket. The sheriff comes to settle the dispute after Dupree tells his father he saw Freeman take the money. On the way to jail, Freeman escapes and heads for Black Pool Swamp, the Our Side refuge from the encroachment of civilization and parents. When the hounds are called out, Wesley and the boys take some of Freeman clothes and tramp through the swamp, purposefully confusing the scent and the search. When Colin and Wesley visit the home of Willie Lee and Little Annie, African American friends of Freeman who may have seen or helped him, the children see for the first time the connection between the intolerance their Black neighbors endure, Freeman's trials, and their own experiences with the Highway 17 gang. The boys learn that Willie Lee has indeed helped Freeman and that the dangers of doing so could get him into serious trouble. When Wesley and Colin are incredulous, Baptist interjects a wisdom reminiscent of Jim in Huckleberry Finn:

"It's like this," Baptist counseled in a voice that had told many stories in the hush of night. "Now, you boys is smart. God knows you smart! Brains on top of brains, I reckon. But there's one thing you ain't learned about, and that's people's meanness. Mean? People are Me-e-e-e-ean, boys! Bad mean. . . . Freeman knows about meanness." (210)

Later, Colin asks Wesley if he will tell their mother about Willie Lee and Baptist's encounter with Freeman. Wesley answers that he will not. "Ain't that like lyin?" questions Colin. "Maybe. I don't know," replies his brother, and for the first time the moral complexity of the dark world in which they live looms before then. When their mother does indeed ask whether either has seen or heard anything about Freeman that day, they both answer, "No'm" (211). For a time, there is a standoff, and Freeman is able to elude the sheriff and survive in the swamp, with Colin and Wesley leaving bags of food at sundry and discreet places. However, when blood is discovered on clothes Freeman has left behind in a cave, the "search and destroy" pursuit becomes a "search and rescue." Among the gathering crowd at the edge of the swamp, some think that Baptist and Willie Lee, who live nearby, may be involved. Wesley and Colin listen "astonished" to the sinister muttering of the men. Colin thinks: "Baptist had been right. If we had told about Willie Lee, there would have been a mob storming his house" (213).

One of the interesting motifs that Kay sets up in this first novel, and references later in other works, is the want of justice in the American "justice" system and the nebulousness of "truth," which varies almost as often as it is perceived. This theme becomes a major focus of Kay's later books After Eli (1981) and Dark Thirty (1984). When Freeman finally turns up in the Wynn barn, sick and injured but none the worse after a few weeks rest and the care of a devoted mom, a few good folks of Emery petition the judge to set him free (253), and Jackson Whitmire offers to take Freeman's case for a dollar (261). Despite his champions, however, Freeman learns that his story, as it is bandied about the community, has more lives than a feckless feline. Colin recalls: ". . . in the days following Dupree's tearful admission of guilt, two truths developed concerning Freeman Boyd-the True Truth and the Truth of Distortion" (274). Most folks, he observes, preferred the Truth of Distortion, particularly the adults: "The Truth of Distortion had a peculiar influence on adults and was woefully naÔve. In its telling," Colin observes of this false truth, "A Thing happened to a Boy and that Boy, being boyish, ran away, got into trouble, and required the unified effort of able men doing an able duty. The Truth of Distortion failed to recognize the threat of The Doom, the intervention of the spirits, the genius of Freeman's dominance of Black Pool Swamp, or any of the other realities that were clearly evident, except to adults" (274).

Two individuals, however, were undeceived by the Truth of Distortion: wise woman Granny Jordan, a character deeply attuned to the spiritual world, and Dover Heller, something of a guru for the Our Side children and often instigator of first-rate adventures. Both of these individuals are able to retain a sense of wonder and imagination that gives them kinship with the children. Colin recalls: "Dover had had the good sense to resist adulthood. He was not ridiculous, as people said; he simply was not willing to accept becoming a man under terms of surrender" (274). Dover, like Granny Woman Jordan, "knew the True Truth of Freeman" (274). Though Kay makes it clear that though this particular kind of innocence and discernment is usually lost as one grows into adulthood, it is a necessary quality for anyone who calls himself artist or a writer of fiction. While the composition of The Year the Lights Came On was for Kay a nostalgic look back into his own past, he closes the book with a qualification about lingering too long in childhood. "There are times," he writes, "when I long to adopt Alvin's old habit and walk backward. . . . But I know what Wesley would say: 'The problem with walking backward, is that you see only where you've been'" (288). Wesley, however, became the preacher; Colin, the writer.

If The Year the Lights Came On explored the innocence of childhood against a backdrop of a postlapsarian world on the cusp of change, Kay's next two novels take the reader directly into the heart of darkness: Evil, in After Eli (1981) and Dark Thirty (1984), is formidable, forbidding, and omnipresent, as if the author has stepped from Paradise Lost into the last circle of Dante's Hell. After Eli is a story inspired by the theater image and fits within a narrative frame of Shakespeare's Othello, which drives this Appalachian tale toward its wonderfully fitting and ironic ending. Throughout the story, the particular Scot-Irish traditions of mountain people, with their unique sense of pride, honor, and justice inform the tale. The Petite farmstead sits at the edge of the wilderness, in a quiet, Eden setting, apart from the town of Yale. The only neighbors of Rachel, her sister Dora and daughter Sarah are the Caufields and Floyd Crider many miles away. Eli Petite has long left behind his wife Rachel and family, as well as a legend of stolen money, a buried treasure that has become part of the lore of the mountains. If the treasure is real, the women seem unaware as they eek a meager living from the land and their quilting.

Stepping onto this stage is a stranger, Michael O'Rear, an Irishman who has made his living from the stage but is essentially a wanderer, an immensely charming man with the Irish gift of gab, who craves attention and who is brutally unforgiving if anyone crosses him or tries to obstruct what he aims to have. Michael's charm and ability to put others instantly at ease belies the malignant malevolence of his personality, a compassionless evil that consumes him. He is, in short, a master of deception and the embodiment of an Iago-like character without honor or pity. Michael stops by the farm of Lester Caulfield and his young wife Mary, and is invited to dine and stay the night. As he sits with Lester chatting through the evening, his easy and open manner wheedles from the talkative Lester the tale of Eli Petite's "treasure," and the fatal invitation to stay the night sets into motion the action of Michael's play of deception. That night he kills Lester, rapes and murders Mary, and takes to the woods to wait and to plan.

A few months later Michael appears at the Petite farm, all charm and pleasure for the women, each of whom he wins favor with-Rachel first who has missed the masculine bond and strong love of her husband Eli whom Michael resembles, then her daughter Sarah who is only budding into womanhood, and eventually the crusty Dora who is initially suspicious of the Irishman and slow to warm to his winning ways-Dora at last giving up her reserve on the night of Sarah's birthday when she dances with Michael. It is the degree of trust that the women show to Michael O'Rear that explains the fierce and ironic ending after his ruse is uncloaked.

Rachel tells her friend Dr. Conner and neighbor Floyd Crider, who has kept an eye on the farm and the three women since Eli left, that Michael is a cousin of Eli, and the Irishman settles into the community life of Yale and the routine of the farm, helping with the work and building a fence, a fence that is flawed by a gap he leaves, just as his deception is flawed. Garnett Conner and Mama Ada, Floyd's wise mountain-woman mother, are not fooled by Michael's ruse, though Garnett, an outsider, is less attuned than the old woman to the degree of evil that Michael represents. On the afternoon that Rachel introduces Michael to the frail old woman, she pushes his body away as he stoops to greet her: "Her eyes widened and her tiny, dry mouth cracked open in a tight circle. Her hands turned up and she began to push weakly against an invisible force above Michael's body. . . . 'Mama Ada?' whispered Rachel. . . . 'Be gone, be gone,' [Ada] cried"; afterward, the old woman collapses to the floor (41-42). While Michael wins the doubting Dora and eventually Dr. Conner, Mama Ada and another character in the story, mountain tracker Tolly, understand the sinisterness of the Irishman.

As the months pass, Michael wins the usually insular and reserved townsfolk of Yale, with the finesse and skill of an accomplished actor, playing each scene with crafted and practiced subtlety. His patience is extraordinary: "It had been a long plotting, he thought. Almost five months of it. He had played it meticulously, expertly, as grandly as the grand theater roles he had performed or watched. And it was no longer only Eli's money that mattered. It was the performance, too" (127). His patience pays off when the abusive Frank Benton beats his boy Owen, who is afterward placed in protective custody by the sheriff, and Michael is hired as jailor's assistant to care for him. Owen Benton is accused by his demented father of killing the Caufields, and Michael seizes on the lie to bring his play to a close. Michael befriends Owen and wins his trust. He concocts an "escape" that takes Owen to the Caulfield house. As the sheriff's men search the hills in the direction of Atlanta, Michael doubles back to the Caufields to meet Owen. Only mountain man and tracker Tolly is suspicious and watches Michael. On the night that Michael lures Owen to the Petite farm, he feigns a fight in the barn and runs the boy through with a pitchfork, telling Rachel that it was self-defense and fostering the lie that Owen killed the Caufields.ÝÝ He tells the boy right before he kills him: "Once I played Iago. . . . Iago, Owen, Iago. It's from Shakespeare, from a play called Othello. I could hear the handclapping for a week. You know what it's like? . . . There's a role you could've played, Owen. Cassio. He was wronged. Like you" (221-22).

Michael has gown careless and cocky on his self-aggrandizing stage, however, and Rachel becomes suspicious when she finds her quilts rifled through, surmising that Michael is searching for Eli's treasure. When she learns that Eli has seduced her daughter Sarah and maliciously killed Owen, it is clear that Michael has wronged them all deeply, that he is worse than the Serpent in the Garden in his deceit and malevolence; therefore, she tells him that she will show him Eli's treasure, hidden in the well. Michael climbs down by a rope, as Rachel holds his safety line. As his attention is diverted by his greed, she cuts the rope at the same time she carefully slips a chain down over his head. Michael O'Rear is thus hanged for his crimes and justice is accomplished. Tolly later finds his body where Rachel and Dora have hidden it, and he thinks of Eli: "Eli. Laughing Eli. Off all these years, chasing after a ghost that teased him with promises of immortality. And the women, left to wait, pinned to their place by the days and the years, enduring the mutterings of pity that had followed them like a disgrace. They had stayed and waited because it was expected of them. It was their duty. And all that time had been lost because they had done what was expected of them" (270). As Tolly walks away content to keep the women's secret and satisfied that justice has been rendered, he looks "across the field to the fence the Irishman had almost finished. There was only one span left unconnected. One span, a gap, like an unkept promise" (270).

Dark Thirty (1984) is an even bleaker portrayal of evil and the fearful symmetry of our flawed universe. Kay takes the title from that brief window of the day between sunset and night when the world is more shadow than light. He associates his theme of the unfathomable ambiguity of good and evil and the malevolent malignity at loose in our midst (embodied in the senseless murder of Jesse Wade's family) with the senseless destruction of the landscape, specifically the mountains of north Georgia, developed to the point of ruin. Added to this intriguing mix of themes is his continued indictment of the legal system: "The law-the law," says the defense attorney of the man who murders Jesse's family, "requires that you find, beyond reasonable doubt, that the charge against the defendant is true before you can convict him. It is not the responsibility of the defense to prove Eddie Copeland is innocent beyond reasonable doubt. It is the responsibility of the prosecution to prove him guilty beyond reasonable doubt" (287). Kay structures the novel in three parts: the Slaughter, the Trial, and the Judgment.

On the day of the tenth birthday of Jesse Wade's grandson Winston, at dark thirty in the evening, Jesse arrives home to find a horror totally indescribable-every person in his family (with the exception of his daughter-in-law Anna) is brutally slain. His wife Jean, whose depression and premonitions had forecast the tragedy, his sons Doyle and Carl, daughter Macy, grandson Winston . . . all murdered at his home. His daughter-in-law Florence is found raped and murdered in a culvert near the house. The stupidity and arrogance of the three men responsible for the crime-local Zack Vickers whose family lives close by on land Jesse had deeded them as a gift, his army buddies Eddie Copeland and Albert Bailey-make them easy to track and capture at Indian Cave Mountain above Jesse's family farm, where they had hidden themselves. Bailey is killed by the sheriff's men at the scene, but Copeland and Vickers are arrested and charged.

The case against the two men seems at first open and shut, and prosecutor William Fred Autry is confident he'll convict. Zack, however, is deemed incompetent to stand trial and is clearly insane: his crazed blathering of his father's civil war stories, which detail a slaughter uncannily similar to that of Jesse's family, make prosecuting him impossible. A trial is set for Eddie Copeland, a calculating, arrogant man, as cool about his deed as if he had attended a sports event. Parker Mewborn takes on Eddie's defense, and it becomes clear that there is no direct proof that Eddie himself did the deed, while Albert is dead and Zack hopeless to give testimony. Eddie is both smart and brazen, calling for reporter Toby Cahill to hear his story even before he sees a lawyer. The men of the quiet mountain town of Tickenaley, which serves as an emblem for old world values that are passing away, are incensed by the crime, waiting only for a nod from Jesse before they enact a retribution and slaughter of their own.

Another sort of mutilation is also scheduled for Tickenaley. During the trial, William Fred shares what is in store for the community: ". . . land speculators in Atlanta are making plans to buy up farms in the Tickenaley Valley and turn those farms into resorts or vacation homes"(292). The developers ask for William Fred's assistance but he refuses. "But that's not going to stop them," he says. Pretty soon you'll see helicopters flying around, circling around out there like buzzards over some dead animal on the side of the highway. And if they start buying the land up here, it'll be like that. But it's not some dead animal they'll be flying over. It'll be us. All of us" (292). The brutality toward the land and the crime against Jesse Wade's family have a common link.

During the trial, Jesse is strong and calm, trusting the system to do the right thing. Jesse Wade has been a rock in the community and a steward of the land, his family having lived in the valley for generations, always managing well and giving back both to the land and the community: "The land had been Jesse's and his father's and his grandfather's and his great-grandfather's. Each had tended it well, had extended its boundaries. They had farmed the black soil of the bottomlands and cut timber from the mountains. With each generation, portions had been given for homesites and the buildings had been constructed by the families. It was always assumed that a child would never leave the valley; the heritage was too great" (23). As the trial progresses, Jesse attends each day, quietly listening and waiting; in the evenings and off-days, he continues the process of building his dead son Carl's home that he and Anna had planned and saved for. The work is therapy; the trial, an extraordinary strain. For Anna, the days are made tolerable by visits from the preacher, whose self-assured and wheedling influence irked Jesse when his wife Jean was alive and now he finds almost unbearable. In the end, both the law and religion prove ineffectual in dealing with the unholy forces at work in the story.

The trial of Eddie Copeland is intense, the news media adding to the circus atmosphere. Convinced of their son's guilt, Reba and George Copeland, Eddie's parents, travel a great distance to offer their apology to Jesse Wade. After that apology, they quietly commit suicide in their car by asphyxiating themselves. Their son is cold and unaffected by the news. The Copelands were essentially good people, never really able to "cope" with their son and never fully comprehending his cruelty-certainly, the heinousness of this deed is for them unfathomable. Kay speculates on the presence of a motiveless malignity inherent in the core of the Universe and in us all: "Somewhere in the genetic circuits of their [the Copeland's] lives-back, perhaps, in the madness of a prehistoric instinct-the first cell of their son was formed as a microscopic puddle of evil. There were no words to undo what had been unstoppable, no incantations, no rituals, no illusions. To his parents, Edward White Copeland had become what he had always been" (178). As the hoopla surrounding the trial grows, Jesse is sickened by the injustice of the law: "The law was wrong, Jesse thought. It was all wrong. All of it. The stories had made Eddie Copeland famous, his face and name familiar. But there were no stories of his family, only the listing of their names, like afterthoughts" (227).

When prosecuting attorney William Fred Autry makes the fatal decision to put Zack on the stand to testify against Eddie, Zack dissolves into a ranting monologue. An audible gasp is heard from some of the jurors. It is clear that Zack probably committed the crimes but there is no proof beyond reasonable doubt that Eddie did. The jury is hung and a mistrial is declared, a retrial inevitable. William Fred does not object when bail is requested. The preacher is sure that Eddie Copeland's soul is saved, and he takes full credit for the event. "This boy's under God's protection until he goes on trial again," he asserts confidently. Eddie's first act is to contact Toby Cahill, "I believe, he says, "we could make us some money. Of course, I may never be able to spend mine, except to pay some lawyer, but you could spend yours and enjoy it" (330). In the process of their interviews, Eddie admits his guilt to Toby. Even Anna, who goes to see Eddie, knows the moment she speaks face to face with him that he is guilty. Certainly, his parents were convinced of the fact. So one evening, at Dark Thirty, Toby picks up Eddie at the Preacher's home and drives him into the mountains for some photos that will be sent to publishers supposedly interested in a book deal. Toby takes Eddie to the cave, where they will take some shots. Waiting there are Jessie Wade, Aubrey Hart, Florence's father, William Fred Autry, and another trusted friend.ÝÝ They take the self-assured Copeland to son Carl's house that now Jessie has finished. There they exact a frightful retribution, appropriate for the rapes and murders that Eddie Copeland has committed.

Kay's fourth and one of his best novels-To Dance with the White Dog (1990)-was a complete departure from his two previous books. He told Joyce Dixon that writing the story was unique for him: "Because it was such a personal story, I did not have to invent much of it. I merely served as a translator. I think every writer has one story that humbles [him], one story that is grander than [his] talent. This was it for me" ("Southern Voice" 2). The book has a magical quality, similar in its whimsy, humor, and delicate touch to Fred Chappell's Kirkman tetrology; and like the Kirkman books, Kay's novel has an element of magical realism in the narrative. To Dance with the White Dog is, in some respects, a love letter to his father. Kay writes that it "was that sense of knowing him that made the writing of To Dance with the White Dog a simple task" (Kay, "Lay-By Time" 61).

To Dance with the White Dog is a story about family and loyalty, about growing old with dignity, and about the gain that can sometimes come with loss. Once a pillar of the community, strong and respected as a farmer and arborist, Sam Peek is now old, crippled by a degenerative hip bone, bereaved by the loss of his wife Cora, and profoundly lonely, despite having several of his children close by. Sam is a man who has lost his power, and in the loss he gains in unexpected ways. The story is told through a third person limited omniscient point of view, somewhat from Sam's perspective-in large part through the journal that he keeps.

Sam Peek had spent his life working hard, having had little time for his children-his wife Cora the "core" or center of the family and certainly for him throughout their fifty-seven years of married life. Sam recalls in his journal the period when his children were young: "When they were small, I could not play games with my children. There was always work to do. I did not throw baseballs to my sons as other men did. I did not build doll houses for my daughters. There was never enough time. It was sun-up-to-sundown work" (72). Sam climbs into his truck a few weeks after his wife's funeral and drives to the cemetery in order to take his wife flowers. He looks at his wife's grave beside that of a son who had died many years before in a car accident as he was on his way to work. "I have never placed flowers on the grave of my son, he thought. Never. It was something she did. I stood back and let her do it" (45). Then he recalled the circumstances of his son's death and Cora's reaction. "The death of their son was a grief that she could not release, and she had obsessively tended the grave, pushing him away with her sobs and her bitterness. It was the one thing they had never been able to resolve: she blamed him for their son's death. 'Drove him away from home when he was too young,' she had said. 'Too hard on him. Too hard'" (45).

Yet Sam's children rally around him, try to protect him, his two daughters perhaps too cloyingly, his youngest son James providing some solace as he begins to deal with his grief and settle into a new routine. Besides James, Sam best tolerates, on a day-to-day basis, Neelie, the African American woman who has shared their family life over the years, helped to raise their numerous brood, and is now more "family" than employee. Daughter Kate remembers when a visitor once asked her whether "Neelie belonged to the family, saying the word 'belonged' with the acid of cynicism, and Kate had answered, innocently, 'No. We belong to Neelie'" (20-21). Neelie can usually needle and cajole Sam out of his melancholy, but not now since Cora's death.

As Sam sinks deeper into himself and into his grief and sadness, his children and Neelie begin to worry about him-until one morning when a homeless mongrel shows up at the farmhouse. No one can see White Dog but Sam, his children convinced that the old man's mental faculties are slipping away. The dog, however, becomes a solace, something magical about the way she comes into Sam's life. One night when the pain in Sam's hip becomes unbearable, he tries to rise up on his walker then falls unconscious to the floor. When he awakens, it is White Dog that has somehow gotten into the house and has appeared majestically at his daughter Kate's home to alert the family. While in the hospital, Sam dreams of Cora. They are young again and have rescued a small dog that Cora loved dearly. As he feels "the cool air of his dream sliding through his fingers," Sam reaches up to touch Cora and finds White Dog instead (94). After this, Sam and the dog are inseparable.

Sam recovers and seems happier with the dog. When a letter comes with an invitation to the Madison A&M sixtieth class reunion, Sam plans to attend, with White Dog. He gets $600 from his bank account and asks his son-in-law Hoyt to fix his truck-but does not tell the children where he is going. When the day arrives, he and White Dog climb into the truck and head down the highway, but Sam becomes disoriented, ending up on a lonely dirt road with the chill of night coming on. Sam looks into the eyes of White Dog and sees Cora-knowing now that Neelie's "ghost dog," as she has referred to White Dog, has been Cora all along: ". . . he saw Cora's eyes, the gemstones of hazel and brown. With a cry he pulled the dog to him and held to her" (147). When Sam wakes the next morning, preacher/farmer Howard Cook is knocking on the window. Howard takes Sam home, feeds him, listens to his story, and drives to Madison with Sam following at the breakneck speed of 30 mph. Howard thinks to himself as he looks at the elusive White Dog, devoted so completely to the old man: "Maybe the lesson the Lord had intended for him to learn was in the White Dog . . . . Maybe the dog was like the whale in the Jonah story, or like the lions with Daniel, or the doves of Noah's ark. Maybe the dog was the message and Sam Peek only the messenger" (161).

In the years that follow, Sam Peek slowly gives himself over to his children, and he devotes his time to rediscovering not only his children, the present, but another part of his family, the past. He studies his and Cora's genealogy: "[Sam] . . . spent many hours each week writing letters, gathering information that he carefully structured in the tree-shape of matings and progeny. . . . from Georgia to the Carolinas, from the Carolinas to Virginia, from Virginia to Pennsylvania, from Pennsylvania to England and Ireland. He found among his ancestors (and hers) laborers and politicians, preachers and trappers, carpenters, silversmiths, thieves, farmers, soldiers, journalists, teachers. With each discovery he felt less lonely" (179). When at last Sam surrenders completely to his children, White Dog leaves. One evening not long afterward, Sam sits with his youngest son James. Sam is aware that he is dying and asks James if he ever made a picture of White Dog. James answers no, that whenever he tried the dog would disappear. Sam tells his son: "White Dog. It was your mama come back to watch over me. . . . Your mama knew it was all right to go when you children came back, . . . I'm going to see her soon. I'll see my dog, too" (190). But White Dog has done more than watch over Sam Peek; she has helped him to understand the importance of family-for this is Cora's legacy to her husband and to her children, and this is the wisdom Sam Peek gains, even in his loss.

To Dance with the White Dog was one of Kay's most successful stories. Made into an award-winning Hallmark film, White Dog starred Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, winning for Cronyn an Emmy and bringing to Kay a larger audience and critical appreciation. Kay's next book, Shadow Song (1994), would take him on another turn on his creative journey-writing a love story. However, as in all of his work, Shadow Song is about the concept of "giving way"; it is about those defining moments of our lives when we make a choice, when we change some aspect of our lives and follow another path. In an interview with Phil Brown, Kay explains how the book came about in 1992. "I was struggling with an idea," he confessed, "looking for something to write. One day I was having a conversation with my friend Pat Conroy. He was in San Francisco at the time. He said, 'What are you working on?" I said, 'Pat I'm having a problem. I'm looking for something to write.' He said, 'Why don't you write a book set in the Catskills?" (1) At first Kay scoffed at the idea, recalling his youthful summers working at a New England resort: "Nothing happened except work" (Brown 2). "Well, here's the story," replied Conroy, "dumb redneck Southerner gets on the Greyhound and he goes to the Catskills to work in a resort. There he meets and falls in love with a beautiful Jewish girl who is a guest in the hotel" (Brown 2). Despite laughing at Conroy's idea as "the silliest storyline I've ever heard," Kay took this cliche of a story and transformed it into art.

Kay flew to the Catskills, spending several days exploring old haunts around the Pine Hill Resort, where he had worked as a kid, and researching the renown opera diva Amelita Galli-Curci, who summered in the area during the 1920s and was known for filling the mountains with her wafting soprano strains as she practiced from her porch, entertaining the Jewish guests that frequented the inn. Kay recalls: "I never had a sense of ghosts as strongly as I did when I was researching. I really could sense the ghost of my youth because it was such a powerful experience for me. That led to the premise in the book that there is one great change in your life. . . . If you don't have the first great change, you can't have the other changes. That is why the first one is so important. My first real change from my childhood was the summers in the Catskills" (Brown 3).ÝÝ As Kay strolled back from the village to the hotel one evening, he had a "remarkable sense of an old Jewish man sitting on a bench on the sidewalk." He remembers that he "knew instantly and wholly [how he would tell his story]. . . . As soon as I felt that old man, I knew I had my book" (Brown 2). In this image, the book's donnee or germ, Kay had found his central character, Avrum Feldman, who would befriend and inspire for a lifetime the story's protagonist and narrator, Bobo Murphy, a callow young Georgian who worked for the resort in the summer of 1955 and would later become a painter-maintaining his relationship with Feldman over the years until the old gentleman died at the age of one hundred and six. The story centers on Bobo's trip, as a middle-aged artist, to New England after the death of his friend, to arrange Feldman's memorial service and Kaddish.

Feldman had come each summer to the Catskills, to rest and devote himself to the memory and magic of Amelita Galli-Curci, whose music and person he had fallen in love with and had celebrated thereafter. Feldman first heard Gali-Curci sing on January 28, 1918, "sitting beside his annoyed wife, listening to . . . 'Ombra Leggiera'-the "Shadow Song" [from Dinorah]-the voice of the music spoke to Avrum, and the power to wish, to dream, was released in him and he became another man" (Shadow Song 3). Feldman loved both the diva and her voice, devoting "his life to the celebration of that moment. It was a life of innocent fantasy and sweetly endured anguish" (4)-though the one time he actually met Galli-Curci, she had been rather condescending and rude to him. Feldman's devotion to his ideal, to the romantic illusion of music, beauty, and art, is shared with young Bobo Murphy during that summer at Pine Hill. Bobo explains, "Avrum Feldman believed in the power of one grand, undeniable moment of change, and in the voice of the music" (8).

Feldman found immense joy in the natural setting of the Catskills, having endured like so many of his Jewish American friends who summered at Pine Hill "Hitler's fiery purging of the Jews" (17). Bobo thus finds it odd but typical of Feldman's dark irony that the old man had requested to be cremated: "Cremation was to be Avrum's gesture of grief, his last ceremony of honor to an extinct family" (17). In many ways, Kay's celebration of art and beauty in this book functions as an antidote to the darkness and fearful symmetry that he presents in After Eli and Dark Thirty. Certainly, for Bobo, Feldman himself represents the idealism, the "visionary gleam," the passion and nebulous but necessary illusions of life which are important for most, but particularly so for the artist. On the other hand, Bobo's wife Carolyn is an emblem for reality, "the common light of day," the everyday intruding upon illusion. Carolyn is the familiar; Feldman, the dream. Bobo finds the familiar comfortable and safe, recalling home and Carolyn: "Yes, I did miss home. I missed the chair that I loved. I missed the invasion of the children in my home studio. I missed the feel of my bed, the sound of Carolyn's breathing in sleep, the taste of breakfast coffee at my table" (188). However, the familiar, too cloying at this point in Bobo's life, can smother the ideal, the dream. "The familiar was too familiar," he concludes (189).

The book presents an interesting interplay between past and present time, as Bobo considers a formidable change that will alter his life forever. Toward the end of the story, after he has refound his first love, a Jewish girl Amy whom he had met while working at Pine Hill-a young love Feldman had helped to foster but both he and Amy had chosen to reject at the end of that eventful summer in 1955-Amy wishes that they could stop time now that they were at last together, so many years having been lost. Bobo says, "But if we can't stop it, let's make the most of it. . . . [something] worth remembering" (206-07). Feldman has tried to teach Bobo to live life with gusto, to go after his dreams, and to remember always the child within. Bobo recalls, "Avrum did not believe in passing through life; he believed in living in it, and he knew that living in it was risky, more risky than simply being swept along on the current that he once described to me as 'the little waves called days'" (138).

As Bobo arranges the details of Avrum's Kaddish, he revisits all the secrets of the past, both his and Feldman's. In the process, the reader is reminded of Whitman's "A Child Went Forth," both literally and figuratively, as there is a child in the story who intrudes again and again upon the grown up Bobo as he fulfills his duty for Feldman at Pine Hill and journeys through the past in the process. The child, sometimes jumping rope, sometimes riding her bicycle, sometimes thumping her ball relentlessly against a wall, is a reminder of the "child" within, of that youthful spark of idealism that one should never completely extinguish.ÝÝ Bobo sees her at one point "inside the stone fence that surrounded the cemetery and she was pulling buds from white rose bushes that grew wild and crawled over the stones like vines" (157). As the little girl goes from bush to bush, filling her hat with rose buds, she begins "to walk among the graves, dropping a single white rosebud on each, like someone planting seeds" (157).ÝÝÝ Bobo watches her, entranced: "Her dark eyes were bright and daring. A strange, playful smile-almost superior-waved over here lips. She took a bud from the hat, held it over a grave, posed for a moment looking at me, then she released it" (157). Translating the image is clear to Bobo-we must seize the day, he thinks, before Time's Winged Chariot has the opportunity to catch us.

On the other hand, typical of Kay's way of looking at moral issues, there is a danger in following life with abandonment. Bobo's wife Carolyn complains to him about always feeling herself an outsider when he makes his trips each year to the Catskills. "There've been a lot of memories, that's all," he tells her. "Well, enjoy them, because . . . I've had enough of that place, and everything about it, dragging you away from where you belong." "My God, Carolyn," Bobo retorts, "you won't ever understand it, will you?" His wife answers, "Do you know something, Bobo, I could say the same of you, couldn't I" (200). Even the faithfulness that Avrum Feldman has shown to his own ideal (or illusion), his devotion to the music and memory of Galli-Curci, is not without its double edge. Before Bobo goes to bed one night, he studies the picture of the diva, "leaning against the candlesticks on the night table," arranged in the same way as when it served as a kind of shrine for Avrum. Bobo admits, "Avrum had thought she was beautiful. I did not. There was nothing soft about her face. It had the expression of arrogance, of a complaining queen" (242-43). But there was no denying the voice: "I believed it was her voice that Arum loved, because he loved the music that it created" (243). Bobo goes on to make the connection between the vision and the dream of Galli-Curci that Feldman had carried with him for almost a century, and its connection with his own dream and memory of Amy: "Amelita Galli-Curci had been Avrum's moment. Amy Lourie had been my moment" (243).ÝÝ However, perhaps the long-lasting appeal of Feldman's dream was that he had never achieved it. At the end of the story, Bobo has a choice to make: he elects to embrace the dream and attempt to turn it into reality. Kay leaves the story with no promise of a happy ending, only the fact that Bobo will leave his family for Amy Lourie and the idealism of a time long past. In making this choice, Bobo distinguishes himself from his old friend and mentor, and the reader wonders whether he may come to regret embracing the ideal rather than merely holding it in his heart.

The Runaway (1997) takes Kay back to the roots of childhood, as he tells a story that portrays the racial divide of the 1940s and forecasts the inevitable change that will occur in the South and across America, as an old way of life gives way to a new. Son Jesus (Sonny) Martin and Thomas Winter are born on the same day, February 7, 1937-an African American child and a White child predicted by Conjure Woman to be inexorably linked in bringing change to the Appalachian hill country in which they live: "They be bound," Conjure Woman tells Sonny's mother Reba. "They make the change" (8). Change is something sorely needed in the community, as the law of the land has operated for as long as anyone can remember under the principle of "Logan's Law"-a kind of moral complacency or, as Sheriff Logan Doolittle, who never allowed "civil" law to suffice for "justice" where Black people were concerned, was want to say: "It's the law of the way things are" (138). For Sheriff Logan, there "was no law governing a white man beating a colored . . . . it [was] the law of nature, and the law of nature always superseded the law of the book" (138). To tell this tale of murder, mystery, and moral choices, Kay uses an interesting third person or limited omniscient point of view, with the first half of the story told from the consciousness or perspective of the white child Tom and the second half of the book abruptly giving way to the perspective of Sheriff Doolittle's successor, Sheriff Frank Rucker. The differing perspectives underscore the transition that comes to the valley, a change that was inevitable.

Tom and Sonny grow up together, as close as if they were brothers despite the edicts in the community against such bonds. Their friendship is close in part because their mothers-Reba Martin and Ida Winter-are friends, but only Conjure Woman completely understands the nature of their friendship. When Sonny is small, his father Rody is killed by a mysterious Black man called Pegleg , but old Sheriff Logan doesn't trouble himself much since this is, he thinks, Black on Black crime. As the years go by, Tom, whose imagination is surpassed only by his voracious love of reading, takes to running away from home. Most of these excursions are short events, where Tom is quickly found and punished by increasingly perturbed and concerned parents. At age twelve, when Tom stumbles across The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he and a reluctant Sonny, made to assume the role of Jim to Tom's Huck, stage a fake kidnapping and the mother of all "runaways." On their way to the river, they pass the saw mill of the late Jed Carnes, a local tough who, with Harlan Davis and Coy Philpot, had regularly terrorized Black folks in the community, usually with impunity. Each of these well-to-do but thoroughly redneck men had long felt he has a right to any Black woman in the community, and their carnality was usually assuaged despite whomever they hurt.

Something catches Sonny's eye as they pass one of the sawdust piles, a bone that the boys carry with them on their river adventure. After running some rapids and careening over a waterfall, the adventure comes to an end, with Sonny injured severely. A contrite and humbled Tom waits with his friend to be rescued, which happily occurs with Sheriff Rucker leading a community effort to save the boys. When Frank Rucker discovers the bone among the things the boys left at the river, he becomes intrigued, seeing that it resembles a human bone. At this point in the story, Tom's consciousness ceases to dominate and Frank's takes us through the story's conclusion, a narrative "giving way" that signifies a fairer, more mature way of looking at the world.

As Sheriff Rucker begins to investigate the mysterious bone that turned up at Jed Carnes' sawmill, Frank comes into contact with Jed's widow, Evelyn. Eventually, he begins to search for any excuse to visit the Carnes home, and Evelyn slowly fills the empty places in Frank's heart. At first, Frank makes no connection between the mysterious Pegleg, the human bone, and the abuse that Sonny's older sister Ramona is suffering with Harlan Davis, on whose land the Martins live. Sonny knows that his sister is being raped by Davis, but there is little the twelve-year-old can do. When Tom's mother Ada complains about Harlan, Frank books him, a courageous thing to do since Davis comes from one of the most powerful White families in the valley. Released on bale, Harlan heads straight for the Martins but is stopped by Uncle Jule, who with great trepidation raises a shotgun to protect Ramona. Harlan retreats but is incensed. That night someone comes to the Davis barn to kill Harland Davis as he sits in his office. When Frank investigates, he finds the "Pegleg" disguise, which Harlan had used after Jed Carnes' death to terrorize the Black families, and he understands the source for the killings in the Black community.

Folks assume Uncle Jule has killed Harlan Davis, but Frank is certain he did not. Still, for Jule's protection, Frank arrests him. To his amazement, Jule is indicted and a trial is scheduled, but not before an angry mob storms the jailhouse, anxious to bring the old brand of "justice" to Uncle Jule. In the dramatic standoff at the jailhouse, Harlan Davis's father confesses to killing the son that has been such an incredible disappointment-though Frank doubts too that old man Davis killed his son. The climax of the story is the dramatic trial of Uncle Jule, which ends in mistrial. The Avery brothers take on Jule's defense, with their dramatic summary, stating Kay's case for "giving way": "Things are not like they used to be, no matter how much we want to pull in the reins," Jule's attorney asserts to the jury, demanding they "have the decency" to convict only "on a burden of proof, not because it may be the popular, or the historic, thing to do" (340). "The world's on top of us. We can't just tuck ourselves away here in Overton County, no matter how much we like being here. We can't just shut the door and say, 'We like it just like it is, just like it's always been.' We can't do that because it's not true. We just came out of a war that changed all of that forever. We won that war because being free meant too much to us. Now we've got to start acting like the men we're supposed to be, and that means being fair" (341).

After Jule's release, Sonny becomes progressively more moody and distant with Tom, though Tom takes a beating from the Darby twins defending his friend. One night, Sonny puts an object into a fertilizer sack and makes his way to Conjure Woman's shack. She opens the door as if expecting him. "You be leaving?" she tells him. . . . Leave what you got here" (400). As Son Jesus turns to walk out the door, Conjure Woman offers another prophesy, one that balances the prophesy made at the beginning of the book: "You been picked. . . . The world be changing. You one of the changers. The time for breaking be here.ÝÝ You breaking away from all that ever was. Someday, you be famous. People call out your name" (400). After he is gone, Conjure Woman opens the sack and removes the shotgun, holding it in the air, in a gesture of offering similar to when Son Jesus was born: "My hand be on him," she whispered (406).

The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene (1999) is another story that spent some time ruminating in the recesses of Terry Kay's mind. He had actually begun the story as a screenplay during the years he worked for The Atlanta Journal. He writes that he wanted to do something "that was action driven yet unusual in nature" (i). Sometime later, in 1974, Reg Murphy, editor for The Atlanta Constitution, was kidnapped, and the newspaper paid a ransom of $700,000 to the kidnapper who was later apprehended and convicted. One of the copyboys happened to make the remark: "I wonder if they'd pay that much for me?" (Kidnapping i).ÝÝ That comment made Kay wonder what the value of individual life was to the commercial world and big business that intrudes so pervasively in all of our lives. What if a "nobody" had been kidnapped-would a ransom likely be forthcoming? For years the question ran through Kay's mind, until he sat down to rewrite the screenplay as a novel.ÝÝ Aaron Greene, who works as a "gofor" at the National Security Bank in Atlanta, is chosen by his kidnappers not for his wealth and fame but precisely because he is a "nobody." Ewell Pender, a philanthropist and maverick , benefactor of the Carlton-Ayers private school which prides itself in instilling in young children a sense of mission and altruism, wants to prove a point about the bank with its multi-national connections, power and influence. He also wants to reveal the true colors of its rather insensitive CEO Etheridge Landon. When a ransom is requested for Aaron's release, Landon answers with an unhesitating "No!" At this point, the news media and Pender go into action, and Aaron's predicament and the Bank's callous response are shared with the world.

One of the kidnappers Carla Napier, a young protege of Pender as are all the conspirators, tells Aaron, whom she and the other conspirators have befriended: "People say you were kidnapped, but that's not really true, Aaron. You were selected. Selected to be one of us" (245-46). At one point, Aaron's kidnappers take him out to buy a newspaper, which for weeks has been inundated with stories and photos of Aaron Greene, but still no one recognizes him as Aaron walks up to the newsstand. Aaron even helps to serve and assist guests at the gala benefit to raise money for his release-guests that include two of the central individuals assigned to the case, Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer Cody Yates and Atlanta detective Victor Menotti-still, he is invisible to the rich and powerful and everyone else who attends the party. Menotti explains to Yates and his colleague at the paper Freda Graves why public interest in Aaron's kidnapping is so intense: "Deep down in their souls they know they're a nobody" (102). Menotti continues, calling these feelings of inconsequentiality a "little shiver of doom": "Don't you feel like a nobody occasionally? I do. Every day. Maybe for just a second, or if it's a bad day, maybe for hours" (102). Pender's point about the bank is that the few rich and powerful, the "Haves" as opposed to the "Have-nots" (108), are growing ever more powerful and rich, while the Aaron Greens of the world, and most of the rest of us, are increasingly rendered more inconsequential. For people like Bank CEO Etheridge Landon, the triumvirate money, sex, and power suffice for one's raison detre, while people like Aaron feel they are at the mercy of these selfish wheeler-dealers. As the country rallies around Aaron's predicament, public opinion turns dramatically against Landon, who receives a no confidence vote from the board of directors, and the Bank, which undergoes an ominous audit by government security investigators. When the kidnapping plan goes horribly awry and Ewell Pender is shot by one of his own employees and chosen ones, Aaron is kidnapped for real, and the plot begins to turn with more twists than the winding road that takes Aaron and Carla into the mountains as hostages.

Another book that had a long incubation period is Taking Lottie Home (2000), both a great baseball story and a novel about home, loyalty, and friendship. In the author's note on the book, Kay offers this advice to all young writers: ". . . never trash, burn, or delete the words you have written. There could be a time when you will discover in them the story you always intended" (i). He notes that in the 1970s he began a baseball story inspired by Ty Cobb, a Georgian who had lived close to where Kay was living. He called the story The Memorial, but it never really went anywhere. Almost twenty years later he rediscovered the manuscript, and a secondary character caught his attention, one he hadn't thought about in years. As he sat reading the old book, he found a new one: "I knew immediately that I had failed her in that early writing. And in the mystic way that characters have of revealing themselves, she forgave my blindness and began to tell me who she was" (Taking Lottie Home i).

Taking Lottie Home portrays one of Kay's most interesting and poignant themes, one reminiscent of Milton's conception of the "Fortunate Fall" or what the Victorians called "success in failure." Young baseball hopeful Ben Phelps does not make the cut after playing in the minors and having hopes of going to the big leagues with his hometown friend Milo Wade, but Ben's failure in the end places before him a happier and more satisfying life than Milo is able to achieve through his success in the majors. However, Ben is sorely tested when he promises another failed baseball hopeful, Foster Lanier, to take his wife and companion Lottie home. Lottie, the character who regenerated Kay's interest in the story, a character whom Kay has called one of his favorites, is also representative of a problematic issues in Kay's canon-his portrayal of many of his female characters, who with the exception of the mothers in the stories are too often gullible, or flighty and shallow, or uncomfortably non-assertive and malleable. Lottie is Kay's "angel in the house," or, in this case, "angel in the carnival," where Ben meets her for a second time, a quarter way through the story, when she offers herself to him, with Foster's approval as his supreme gift of friendship. Lottie is one of the several benign and beneficent prostitutes in Kay's work, a woman whose passivity and pliancy are extraordinary to the point of incredulity, a character loving, kind, good-natured, and rendered at times little more than object by the men in her life, a source of solace and satisfaction to them, the real players in the "game" of life.

After being cut from the Augusta minor league baseball team, ironically after having just played perhaps his best game ever, Ben Phelps returns home to Jericho, Georgia, saying goodbye to his friend Milo Wade, who continues his journey toward baseball stardom, and to Foster Lanier, who like Ben has been let go. On the train ride home, Ben meets for the first time Lottie Parker, the companion of his friend Foster. Lottie's life has been hard-she's been able to survive by virtue of her beauty and by the kindness of strangers-and the quiet, gentle nature of Foster makes her feel safe. Ben takes a job at Arthur Ledford's clothing store, where he and Sally Ledford fall in love and expect to be married. All the while, Ben keeps track of Milo's meteoric rises to baseball fame with the Boston Red Sox, writing regularly to his friend and encouraging Milo to do Jericho proud. At one point Milo's train passes through Jericho, and everyone expects him to get off just for a moment to greet old friends. Milo gives the town little more than a condescending nod, while Ben, having seen a glimpse of him, hollers as the train pulls off: "Good luck, Milo . . . I'll be keeping up with you" (47). When Ben gets back to work that day, Akers Crews asks if he saw Milo, and when Ben tells him Milo didn't actually get off the train to greet his friends, Crews shakes his head: "That boy should've got off that train, even if it was for a minute. This is his home, where he grew up. A man ought never get too big to stand on the ground of his home" (47-48). Akers looks at Ben and concludes, "Son, once you been somewhere, you don't never leave it out of sight behind you . . . . You just drag it along with you, like a cranky old dog on a leash" (48). As the years pass and his letters never answered, Ben stops writing to Milo; however, when Milo is interviewed in late life and asked about his personal life, he says that Ben Phelps was his "best " friend, and when Milo dies, Ben's letters are found among his things (282). Foster Lanier, on the other hand, will be a true friend to Ben and Ben to him.

Before his marriage to Sally Ledford, Ben determines that he will visit Foster and Lottie once more, but he tells everyone that he is going to Boston to see Milo. He hasn't seen Foster and Lottie, who are now married, since that summer the carnival had come to Jericho and Lottie had offered herself to Ben as a gift of friendship. That night had been propitious for a number of reasons, in addition to Lottie's gift which Ben chivalrously refuses. Ben was also brutally attacked and beaten by Baby Cotwell, the carnival giant after Ben had gotten the best of him in a batting game. The next day Baby Cotwell was found murdered. Now, years later, Ben walks up the mountain path to visit with his old friend and Lottie, who has a son the couple has named Little Ben. Foster's health is precarious, and one afternoon after Ben and the boy return from fishing, they find that he has died. Now Ben must keep his promise to carry Lottie Lanier and her son home. They are delayed for a time on the trip south when little Ben becomes ill, and when they eventually continue their train journey and pass through Jericho, they have to stop as Ben too has been stricken-with rheumatic fever. So as not to offend Jericho's small-town sensibilities, Lottie tells Ben's mother that Ben had befriended her on the train trip when her son became ill, and she had not felt comfortable leaving him. In gratitude, Margaret Phelps offers Lottie and Little Ben a home, falling in love with the child and developing a deep attachment for Lottie. Lottie gets a job at Ledford's clothing store, to some discomfort of Sally who is awed by Lottie's beauty and a bit uncomfortable that she and Ben are now living in such close proximity.

Lottie's beauty and kindness gain the admiration of just about every man in Jericho, including Arthur Ledford, who has long been unhappily married to a termagant and discontented wife.ÝÝ On an afternoon when the two are alone in the store, Arthur makes an awkward sexual gesture to Lottie and she freely gives herself to him: "She had submitted to his clumsiness quietly and gently, letting her body unfold in his hands like the cloth of silk, and he had been stunned at the ease and grace of her giving" (232). Arthur is contrite after the event, and Lottie plans to leave Jericho. When a local drunk Coleman Maxey recalls Lottie as the woman from the carnival whom he had tried to proposition many years before, he considers her a whore and fair game, wanting a piece of the action as he supposes Arthur Ledford to have enjoyed. He attempts to rape the submissive Lottie, who is ready to comply without any struggle, one afternoon when she is working late in the store (247); Lottie is saved by the timely entry of Arthur Ledford to the store. Lottie is loath leaving her friends in Jericho, but she knows she must go. Before she leaves Jericho with Little Ben, she thanks Margaret Phelps, who has been so kind to her and Little Ben and who has been as much as a mother as a friend, praising her hospitality and her home. Margaret answers with what is one of the themes in the book and in Kay's canon: "It's just a place, Lottie . . . . It becomes a home when there's people like you and Little Ben in it" (255). Lottie, whose life had always been so hard, understands now the truth about home, and, sometime later, on the day of Ben and Sally's wedding, Little Ben arrives to live permanently with the Phelps, who can offer him a far better chance in life than can Lottie. Thereafter, Lottie seemingly disappears from the life of the Phelps, though she will turn up twenty years later when she is brought back to Jericho to be buried in the Ledford cemetery plot, to lie beside Arthur, as "Augusta Ledford, a "cousin" who had lived quietly in Charleston, South Carolina-a place Arthur regularly would regularly visit over the years. Lottie Parker, Lottie Lanier, Augusta Ledford . . . had learned the meaning of home and had been herself a testament for friendship and loyalty.

Terry Kay dedicated his latest book, The Valley of Light (2004), to Scott Kay, his son who possesses a remarkable gift. Kay recalls when Scott was a child and the family was vacationing at a lake house: "I saw him go to the lake and kneel down and place the palm of his hand on the water's surface, like a ritual in an innocent religious ceremony" (The Valley of Light xi). As the two stepped into the water, side by side, Kay found it remarkable that the boy was "fishing-and catching," while he didn't get "a nibble" (xi). He explains, "That gesture of touching the surface of the water has stayed with me for years, and it is the leaping-off point of this story" (xi). It is the "mysticism of being gifted," and the burden that a gift entails, that has always intrigued Kay-"seeing that person who, by nature, had a way of doing something that was, in the long run, inexplicable, yet thrilling. The artist. The musician. The gardener. The mechanic. The engineer. The chef. The anything" (xii). Thus Kay concedes that the "dominant theme" of The Valley of Light is the "power of gift" ("A Conversation with Terry Kay," The Valley of Light 241). The protagonist of this, perhaps Kay's best novel, Noah Locke, has a gift for fishing, and "that gift is part of his 'whole' life, not just catching fish. It has to do with how he thinks, acts, and how he has an impact on other people" ("A Conversation with Terry Kay," The Valley of Light 241).

It is precisely Noah Locke's impact on the people he meets along his journey that provides the core of the book . . . because Noah is also a "fisher of men." The biblical imagery and associations with Christ dominate the story. Kay notes in an interview with Joyce Dixon that Noah is "the kind of character who inspires others to spiritual awareness. . . . Noah impacts the people in the Valley of Light with his unique gift" ("The Teller of Gentle Stories" 3). He is thus the catalyst in the novel, providing The Way for characters to achieve their own enlightenment or to come to an epiphany about themselves. Kay frames the main character as a "Christ" figure who influences others, as Christ, the "lowly carpenter could impact so many people" (3). The book is therefore the antithesis to his second novel After Eli, where a stranger comes to a mountain town as representative of unalloyed evil: Noah represents the hope of salvation.

In addition to the biblical imagery in the novel, Kay's method of telling the story is particularly interesting, as he intersperses a narrative present with Noah's remembrances of the past, utilizing a modified stream-of-consciousness technique in the process. The story frame is best read as an expression of the monomythic journey of the hero, as Noah ventures into the Valley of Light and comes to terms with the catastrophic evil he has endured (his experiences in Europe as an infantryman and seeing the horrors of Dachau). As all heroes, Noah has a guide or prophet on his journey-in this case Hoke Moore, who has told him about the hamlet of Bowerstown, an Eden-like setting in the Valley of Light but a place with shadows suggesting the hidden darkness of sin in all our lives, shadows that find an emblem in the Lake of Grief. Finally and most important, the story is about "letting go" of those demons that we harbor in our lives, that limit us and impede our journey and our understanding of the secrets that lie below the surface of our lives.

Noah Locke has set his compass for the north Georgia mountains, specifically the Hiawassee River which runs into Chattooga Lake near the North Carolina line. His friend Hoke Moore has told him about the Valley of Light, and as he walks into town he thinks that "Hake Moore had been right . . . it was a good place" (23). Noah had observed the "clotheslines of the valley" which tell him it is "a place fairly well off, with people more or less settled in, happy enough to be where they were and who they were" (7). Almost immediately he sees Eleanor Cunningham, a widow whose troubled husband Boyd had returned home from the Second World War only to shoot himself. Taylor Bowers, owner of the local store, tells Noah that Boyd "didn't get so much as a scratch . . . then comes home and shoots himself about a year ago" (27). Afterward, Eleanor, who remained at their farm to care for Boyd's elderly mother, retreated into a shell of loneliness. Taylor tells Noah that Boyd "always was the kind of man that'd make you want to check how many fingers you had left after you shook hands with him" (27). He adds that when "Boyd killed himself, it left Eleanor in a bind. . . . She's had her place up for sale, but nobody's made any kind of offer that I know of" (27).

Eleanor tells Noah, a quiet, gentle man, a man who knows how to listen more than he speaks, that he may stay in the lake cabin that her husband built for hunting and fishing. Noah helps her with odd jobs about the farm and settles quickly into the life of the community. When townsfolks learn that he is a fisherman, an extraordinary fisherman, they invite him to join the yearly fishing competition that is immanent, and Noah hears about the great fish that inhabits the Lake of Grief, accepting the challenge of catching the mythic fish. Eleanor, Noah, and Taylor find a comfortable companionship with each other that provides solace for each in different ways. Though he will profoundly affect their lives during the short time he is in Bowerstown, Noah's own life is filled with shadows, his tranquil nature belying the personal testing he has experienced: the loss of his army buddy Marvin Linquist (whom Taylor resembles uncannily) and the memories of the death and destruction of the war that he has just returned from-his own time in the wilderness. In part, Noah has become a wanderer to soothe the savage discontent and doubt bred by the atrocities of war. By the end of the novel, while Noah has helped each of the main players in the story to search within and find meaning, he too will be able to let go of the demons that have accompanied him on his journey.

On the eve of the fishing competition, young Matthew Reynolds turns up missing, having last been seen near the Lake of Grief, intrigued by the great fish in the lake. The whole community is involved in the search for Matthew, but it is Noah who finds the boy's body. Distracted by the great fish, Matthew had slipped into the deep lake and drowned. Noah blames the elusive fish and determines to catch it. As the competition is transformed from a celebration into a memorial for the drowned boy, the Valley community comes together to renew its sense of connection. Chapter twent