Where the Crawdads Sing(100)

Tate continued his job at the lab, and Kya published seven more award-winning books. And though she was granted many accolades—including an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—she never once accepted the invitations to speak at universities and museums.



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TATE AND KYA HOPED for a family, but a child never came. The disappointment wove them closer together, and they were seldom separated for more than a few hours of any day.

Sometimes Kya walked alone to the beach, and as the sunset streaked the sky, she felt the waves pounding her heart. She’d reach down and touch the sand, then stretch her arms toward the clouds. Feeling the connections. Not the connections Ma and Mabel had spoken of—Kya never had her troop of close friends, nor the connections Jodie described, for she never had her own family. She knew the years of isolation had altered her behavior until she was different from others, but it wasn’t her fault she’d been alone. Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would. If consequences resulted from her behaving differently, then they too were functions of life’s fundamental core.

Tate’s devotion eventually convinced her that human love is more than the bizarre mating competitions of the marsh creatures, but life also taught her that ancient genes for survival still persist in some undesirable forms among the twists and turns of man’s genetic code.

For Kya, it was enough to be part of this natural sequence as sure as the tides. She was bonded to her planet and its life in a way few people are. Rooted solid in this earth. Born of this mother.



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    AT SIXTY-FOUR Kya’s long black hair had turned as white as the sand. One evening she did not return from a collecting trip, so Tate puttered around in the marsh, searching. As dusk eased in, he came around a bend and saw her drifting in her boat in a lagoon surrounded by sycamores touching the sky. She had slumped backward, her head lying against the old knapsack. He called her name softly, and, when she didn’t move, he shouted, then screamed. Pulling his boat next to hers, he stumbled awkwardly into the stern of her boat. Reaching out his long arms, he took her shoulders and gently shook her. Her head slumped farther to the side. Her eyes not seeing.

“Kya, Kya, no. No!” he screamed.

Still young, so beautiful, her heart had quietly stopped. She had lived long enough to see the bald eagles make a comeback; for Kya that was long enough. Folding her in his arms, he rocked back and forth, weeping. He wrapped her in a blanket and towed her back to her lagoon in the old boat through the maze of creeks and estuaries, passing the herons and deer for the last time.


And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree,

When the footstep of death is near.

He got special permission for her to be buried on her land under an oak overlooking the sea, and the whole town came out for the funeral. Kya would not have believed the long lines of slow-moving mourners. Of course, Jodie and his family came and all of Tate’s cousins. Some curiosity-seekers attended, but most people came out of respect for how she had survived years alone in the wild. Some remembered the little girl, dressed in an oversized, shabby coat, boating to the wharf, walking barefoot to the grocery to buy grits. Others came to her graveside because her books had taught them how the marsh links the land to the sea, both needing the other.

By now, Tate understood that her nickname was not cruel. Only few become legend, so he chose as the epitaph for her tombstone:


CATHERINE DANIELLE CLARK

“KYA”

THE MARSH GIRL

1945–2009



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THE EVENING OF HER FUNERAL, when everyone was finally gone, Tate stepped into her homemade lab. Her carefully labeled samples, more than fifty years’ worth, was the longest-running, most complete collection of its kind. She had requested that it be donated to Archbald Lab, and someday he would do so, but parting with it now was unthinkable.

Walking into the shack—as she always called it—Tate felt the walls exhaling her breath, the floors whispering her steps so clear he called out her name. Then he stood against the wall, weeping. He lifted the old knapsack and held it to his chest.

The officials at the courthouse had asked Tate to look for her will and birth certificate. In the old back bedroom, which had once been her parents’, he rummaged through the closet and found boxes of her life stuffed in the bottom, almost hidden, under some blankets. He pulled them onto the floor and sat beside them.

Ever so carefully he opened the old cigar box, the one where all the collecting began. The box still smelled of sweet tobacco and little girl. Among a few birds’ feathers, insects’ wings, and seeds was the small jar with the ashes from her ma’s letter, and a bottle of Revlon fingernail polish, Barely Pink. The bits and bones of a life. The stones of her stream.

Tucked in the bottom was the deed for the property, which Kya had put in a conservation easement, protecting it from development. At least this fragment of the marsh would always be wild. But there was no will or personal papers, which did not surprise him; she would not have thought of such things. Tate planned to live out his days at her place, knowing she had wanted that and that Jodie would not object.

Late in the day, the sun dipping behind the lagoon, he stirred corn mush for the gulls and mindlessly glanced at the kitchen floor. He cocked his head as he noticed for the first time that the linoleum had not been installed under the woodpile or the old stove. Kya had kept firewood stacked high, even in summer, but now it was low, and he saw the edge of a cutout in the floorboard. He moved the remaining logs aside and saw a trapdoor in the plywood. Kneeling down, he slowly opened it to find an enclosed compartment between the joists, which held, among other things, an old cardboard box covered in dust. He pulled it out and found inside scores of manila envelopes and a smaller box. All the envelopes were marked with the initials A.H., and from them he pulled out pages and pages of poetry by Amanda Hamilton, the local poet who had published simple verses in regional magazines. Tate had thought Hamilton’s poems rather weak, but Kya had always saved the published clippings, and here were envelopes full of them. Some of the written pages were completed poems, but most of them were unfinished, with lines crossed out and some words rewritten in the margin in the poet’s handwriting—Kya’s handwriting.