Where the Crawdads Sing

“Kya.” Obviously, he didn’t remember their sidewalk-bicycle encounter or know her in any way except as the Marsh Girl.

“Kya—that’s different. But nice. You wanta go for a picnic? In my boat, this Sunday.”

She looked past him, taking time to evaluate his words, but couldn’t see them to an end. Here was a chance to be with someone.

Finally she said, “Okay.” He told her to meet him at the oak peninsula north of Point Beach at noon. Then he stepped into his blue-and-white ski boat, metal bits gleaming from every possible surface, and accelerated away.

She turned at the sound of more footsteps. Jumpin’ scurried up the dock. “Hi, Miss Kya. Sorry, I been totin’ empty crates over yonder. Fill ’er up?”

Kya nodded.

On the way home, she cut the motor and drifted, the shore in sight. Leaning against the old knapsack, watching the sky, she recited poetry by heart, as she did sometimes. One of her favorites was John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”:

 . . . all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

Kya recalled a poem written by a lesser-known poet, Amanda Hamilton, published recently in the local newspaper she’d bought at the Piggly Wiggly:

Trapped inside,

Love is a caged beast,

Eating its own flesh.

Love must be free to wander,

To land upon its chosen shore

And breathe.

The words made her think of Tate, and her breathing stopped. All he’d needed was to find something better and he was gone. Didn’t even come to say good-bye.

•   •   •

KYA DIDN’T KNOW, but Tate had come back to see her.

The day before he was to bus home that Fourth of July, Dr. Blum, the professor who’d hired him, walked into the protozoology lab and asked Tate if he’d like to join a group of renowned ecologists for a birding expedition over the weekend.

“I’ve noticed your interest in ornithology and wondered if you’d like to come. I only have room for one student, and I thought of you.”

“Yes, absolutely. I’ll be there.” After Dr. Blum left, Tate stood there, alone, amid lab tables, microscopes, and the hum of the autoclave, wondering how he’d folded so fast. How quickly he’d jumped to impress his professor. The pride of being singled out, the only student invited.

His next chance to go home—and only for one night—had been fifteen days later. He was frantic to apologize to Kya, who would understand after she learned of Dr. Blum’s invitation.

He’d cut throttle as he left the sea and turned into the channel, where logs were lined with the glistening backs of sunbathing turtles. Almost halfway, he spotted her boat carefully hidden in tall cord grass. Instantly, he slowed and saw her up ahead, kneeling on a wide sandbar, apparently fascinated by some small crustacean.

Her head low to the ground, she hadn’t seen him or heard his slow-moving boat. He quietly turned his skiff into reeds, out of view. He’d known for years that she sometimes spied on him, peeping through needle brush. On impulse, he would do the same.

Barefoot, dressed in cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt, she stood up, stretching her arms high. Showcasing her wasp-thin waist. She knelt again and scooped sand in her hands, sifting it through her fingers, examining organisms left squiggling in her palm. He smiled at the young biologist, absorbed, oblivious. He imagined her standing at the back of the birding group, trying not to be noticed but being the first to spot and identify every bird. Shyly and softly, she would have listed the precise species of grasses woven into each nest, or the age in days of a female fledgling based on the emerging colors of her wingtips. Exquisite minutiae beyond any guidebook or knowledge of the esteemed ecology group. The smallest specifics on which a species spins. The essence.

Suddenly Tate startled as Kya sprang to her feet, sand spilling from her fingers, and looked upstream, away from Tate. He could barely hear the low churn of an outboard motor coming their way, probably a fisherman or marsh dweller headed to town. A purring sound, common and calm as doves. But Kya grabbed the knapsack, sprinted across the sandbar, and scrambled into tall grass. Squatting low to the ground and snatching glances to see if the boat had come into view, she duck-walked toward her boat. Knees lifting nearly to her chin. She was closer to Tate now, and he saw her eyes, dark and crazed. When she reached her boat, she hunkered beside its girth, head low.

The fisherman—a merry-faced, hatted old man—puttered into view, saw neither Kya nor Tate, and disappeared beyond the bend. But she remained frozen, listening until the motor whined away, then stood, dabbing her brow. Continued to look in the direction of the boat as a deer eyes the empty brush of a departed panther.

On some level he knew she behaved this way, but since the feather game, had not witnessed the raw, unpeeled core. How tormented, isolated, and strange.