Where the Crawdads Sing(20)
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? ? ?
PA DIDN’T COME HOME that night or the next day, and when he finally did, it was the old drunk who staggered through the door. When she mounted the courage to ask about the letter, he barked, “It ain’t none a’ yo’ bidness.” And then, “She ain’t comin’ back, so ya can just forget ’bout that.” Carrying a poke, he shuffled toward the boat.
“That isn’t true,” Kya hollered at his back, her fists bunched at her sides. She watched him leaving, then shouted at the empty lagoon, “Ain’t isn’t even a word!”
Later she would wonder if she should have opened the letter on her own, not even shown it to Pa. Then she could have saved the words to read someday, and he’d have been better off not knowing them.
Pa never took her fishing again. Those warm days were just a thrown-in season. Low clouds parting, the sun splashing her world briefly, then closing up dark and tight-fisted again.
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? ? ?
KYA COULDN’T REMEMBER how to pray. Was it how you held your hands or how hard you squinted your eyes that mattered? “Maybe if I pray, Ma and Jodie will come home. Even with all the shouting and fussing, that life was better than this lumpy-grits.”
She sang mis-snippets of hymns—“and He walks with me when dew is still on the roses”—all she remembered from the little white church where Ma had taken her a few times. Their last visit had been Easter Sunday before Ma left, but all Kya remembered about the holiday was shouting and blood, somebody falling, she and Ma running, so she dropped the memory altogether.
Kya looked through the trees at Ma’s corn and turnip patch, all weeds now. Certainly there were no roses.
“Just forget it. No god’s gonna come to this garden.”
10.
Just Grass in the Wind
1969
Sand keeps secrets better than mud. The sheriff parked his rig at the beginning of the fire tower lane so they wouldn’t drive over any evidence of someone driving the night of the alleged murder. But as they walked along the track, looking for vehicle treads other than their own, sand grains shifted into formless dimples with every step.
Then, at the mud holes and swampy areas near the tower, a profusion of detailed stories revealed themselves: a raccoon with her four young had trailed in and out of the muck; a snail had woven a lacy pattern interrupted by the arrival of a bear; and a small turtle had lain in the cool mud, its belly forming a smooth shallow bowl.
“Clear as a picture, but besides our rigs, not a thing man-made.”
“I dunno,” Joe said. “See this straight edge, then a little triangle. That could be a tread.”
“No, I think that’s a bit of turkey print, where a deer stepped on top, made it look geometrical like that.”
After another quarter hour, the sheriff said, “Let’s hike out to that little bay. See if somebody boated over here instead of coming by truck.” Pushing pungent myrtle from their faces, they walked to the tiny inlet. The damp sand revealed prints of crabs, herons, and pipers, but no humans.
“Well, but look at this.” Joe pointed to a large pattern of disturbed sand crystals that fanned into an almost perfect half circle. “Could be the imprint of a round-bowed boat that was pulled on shore.”
“No. See where the wind blew this broken grass stalk back and forth through the sand. Drawing this half circle. That’s just grass in the wind.”
They stood looking around. The rest of the small half-moon beach was covered in a thick layer of broken shells, a jumble of crustacean parts, and crab claws. Shells the best secret-keepers of all.
11.
Croker Sacks Full
1956
In the winter of 1956, when Kya was ten, Pa came hobbling to the shack less and less often. Weeks passed with no whiskey bottle on the floor, no body sprawled on the bed, no Monday money. She kept expecting to see him limping through the trees, toting his poke. One full moon, then another had passed since she’d seen him.
Sycamore and hickories stretched naked limbs against a dull sky, and the relentless wind sucked any joy the winter sun might have spread across the bleakness. A useless, drying wind in a sea-land that couldn’t dry.
Sitting on the front steps, she thought about it. A poker-game fight could have ended with him beat up and dumped in the swamp on a cold, rainy night. Or maybe he just got fall-down drunk, wandered off into the woods, and fell face-first in the backwater bog.
“I guess he’s gone for good.”
She bit her lips until her mouth turned white. It wasn’t like the pain when Ma left—in fact, she struggled to mourn him at all. But being completely alone was a feeling so vast it echoed, and the authorities were sure to find out and take her away. She’d have to pretend, even to Jumpin’, that Pa was still around.
And there would be no Monday money. She’d stretched the last few dollars for weeks, surviving on grits, boiled mussels, and the occasional remnant egg from the rangy hens. The only remaining supplies were a few matches, a nubbin of soap, and a handful of grits. A fistful of Blue Tips wouldn’t make a winter. Without them she couldn’t boil the grits, which she fixed for herself, the gulls, and the chickens.