Where the Crawdads Sing

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.

Amanda Hamilton was Kya. Kya was the poet.

Tate’s face grimaced in disbelief. Through the years she must have put the poems in the rusty mailbox, submitting them to local publications. Safe behind a nom de plume. Perhaps a reaching-out, a way to express her feelings to someone other than gulls. Somewhere for her words to go.

He glanced through some of the poems, most about nature or love. One was folded neatly in its own envelope. He pulled it out and read:

The Firefly

Luring him was as easy

As flashing valentines.

But like a lady firefly

They hid a secret call to die.

A final touch,

Unfinished;

The last step, a trap.

Down, down he falls,

His eyes still holding mine

Until they see another world.

I saw them change.

First a question,

Then an answer,

Finally an end.

And love itself passing

To whatever it was before it began. A.H.

Still kneeling on the floor, he read it again. He held the paper next to his heart, throbbing inside his chest. He looked out the window, making certain no one was coming down the lane—not that they would, why would they? But to be sure. Then he opened the small box, knowing what he would find. There, laid out carefully on cotton, was the shell necklace Chase had worn until the night he died.

Tate sat at the kitchen table for a long while, taking it in, imagining her riding on night buses, catching a riptide, planning around the moon. Softly calling to Chase in the darkness. Pushing him backward. Then, squatting in mud at the bottom, lifting his head, heavy with death, to retrieve the necklace. Covering her footprints; leaving no trace.

Breaking kindling into bits, Tate built a fire in the old woodstove and, envelope by envelope, burned the poems. Maybe he didn’t need to burn them all, maybe he should have destroyed just the one, but he wasn’t thinking clearly. The old, yellowed papers made a great whoosh a foot high, then smoldered. He took the shell off the rawhide, dropped the rawhide in the fire, and put the boards back in the floor.