Where the Crawdads Sing

Kya stalked through brush until she was ahead of them, her eyes glued on their caps bobbing above the branches. She crouched at a spot where thick bushes grew next to the lane, where in seconds they would pass within a foot of her. Jumpin’ was up ahead, out of sight. She twisted the cloth bag with the jam so that it was wrung tight and knotted against the jars. As the boys drew even with the thicket, she swung the heavy bag and whacked the closest one hard across the back of his head. He pitched forward and fell on his face. Hollering and screeching, she rushed the other boy, ready to bash his head too, but he took off. She slipped about fifty yards into the trees and watched until the first boy stood, holding his head and cussing.

Toting the bag of jam jars, she turned back toward her boat and motored home. Thought she’d probably never go viztin’ again.

•   •   •

THE NEXT DAY, when the sound of Tate’s motor chugged through the channel, Kya ran to the lagoon and stood in the bushes, watching him step out of his boat, holding a rucksack. Looking around, he called out to her, and she stepped slowly forward dressed in jeans that fit and a white blouse with mismatched buttons.

“Hey, Kya. Sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. Had to help my dad, but we’ll get you reading in no time.”

“Hey, Tate.”

“Let’s sit here.” He pointed to an oak knee in deep shade of the lagoon. From the rucksack he pulled out a thin, faded book of the alphabet and a lined writing pad. With a careful slow hand, he formed the letters between the lines, a A, b B, asking her to do the same, patient with her tongue-between-lips effort. As she wrote, he said the letters out loud. Softly, slowly.

She remembered some of the letters from Jodie and Ma but didn’t know much at all about putting them into proper words.

After only minutes, he said, “See, you can already write a word.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“C-a-b. You can write the word cab.”

“What’s cab?” she asked. He knew not to laugh.

“Don’t worry if you don’t know it. Let’s keep going. Soon you’ll write a word you know.”

Later he said, “You’ll have to work lots more on the alphabet. It’ll take a little while to get it, but you can already read a bit. I’ll show you.” He didn’t have a grammar reader, so her first book was his dad’s copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. He pointed to the opening sentence and asked her to read it back to him. The first word was There and she had to go back to the alphabet and practice the sound of each letter, but he was patient, explaining the special sound of th, and when she finally said it, she threw her arms up and laughed. Beaming, he watched her.

Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “‘There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.’”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.”

“It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”

He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”

•   •   •

OVER THE COMING DAYS, sitting on the oak knee in shade or the shore in sun, Tate taught her how to read the words, which sang of the geese and cranes, real all around them. “What if there be no more goose music?”

In between helping his dad or pitching baseball with his friends, he came to Kya’s place several times a week and, now, no matter what she was doing—weeding the garden, feeding the chickens, searching for shells—she listened for the sound of his boat humming up the channel.

On the beach one day, reading about what chickadees eat for lunch, she asked him, “You live with yo’ family in Barkley Cove?”

“I live with my dad. Yes, in Barkley.”

Kya didn’t ask if he had more family, now gone. His ma must have left him, too. Part of her longed to touch his hand, a strange wanting, but her fingers wouldn’t do it. Instead she memorized the bluish veins on the inside of his wrist, as intricate as those sketched on the wings of wasps.

•   •   •

AT NIGHT, sitting at the kitchen table, she went over the lessons by kerosene lamp, its soft light seeping through the shack windows and touching the lower branches of the oaks. The only light for miles and miles of blackness except for the soft glow of fireflies.

Carefully, she wrote and said each word over and over. Tate said long words were simply little ones strung together—so she wasn’t afraid of them, went straight to learning Pleistocene along with sat. Learning to read was the most fun she’d ever had. But she couldn’t figure why Tate had offered to teach po’ white trash like her, why he’d come in the first place, bringing exquisite feathers. But she didn’t ask, afraid it might get him thinking on it, send him away.

Now at last Kya could label all her precious specimens. She took each feather, insect, shell, or flower, looked up how to spell the name in Ma’s books, and wrote it carefully on her brown-paper-bag painting.