Делия Оуэнс - Where the Crawdads Sing

Kya had not tasted anything like cake for years. Tate lifted some books out of the boat, so Kya moseyed out of the bushes behind him.

“Oh, there you are. Look at this.” He opened the box, and there, arranged neatly, were little cakes, each only an inch square, covered in vanilla icing with a tiny pink rose perched on the top. “Come on, dig in.”

Kya lifted one and, still not looking at Tate, bit into it. Then pushed the rest of it into her mouth. Licked her fingers.

“Here.” Tate set the box next to their oak. “Have all you want. Let’s get started. I brought a new book.” And that was that. They went into the lessons, never uttering a word about the other thing.

• • •

AUTUMN WAS COMING; the evergreens might not have noticed, but the sycamores did. They flashed thousands of golden leaves across slate-gray skies. Late one afternoon, after the lesson, Tate lingering when he should have left, he and Kya sat on a log in the woods. She finally asked the question she’d wanted to ask for months. “Tate, I appreciate your teaching me to read and all those things you gave me. But why’d you do it? Don’t you have a girlfriend or somebody like that?”

“Nah—well, sometimes I do. I had one, but not now. I like being out here in the quiet and I like the way you’re so interested in the marsh, Kya. Most people don’t pay it any attention except to fish. They think it’s wasteland that should be drained and developed. People don’t understand that most sea creatures—including the very ones they eat—need the marsh.”

He didn’t mention how he felt sorry for her being alone, that he knew how the kids had treated her for years; how the villagers called her the Marsh Girl and made up stories about her. Sneaking out to her shack, running through the dark and tagging it, had become a regular tradition, an initiation for boys becoming men. What did that say about men? Some of them were already making bets about who would be the first to get her cherry. Things that infuriated and worried him.

But that wasn’t the main reason he’d left feathers for Kya in the forest, or why he kept coming to see her. The other words Tate didn’t say were his feelings for her that seemed tangled up between the sweet love for a lost sister and the fiery love for a girl. He couldn’t come close to sorting it out himself, but he’d never been hit by a stronger wave. A power of emotions as painful as pleasurable.

Poking a grass stalk down an ant hole, she finally asked, “Where’s your ma?”

A breeze wandered through the trees, gently shaking branches. Tate didn’t answer.

“You don’t have to say nothing,” she said.

“Anything.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“My mother and little sister died in a car wreck over in Asheville. My sister’s name was Carianne.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry, Tate. I bet your ma was real nice and pretty.”

“Yes. Both of them were.” He spoke to the ground, between his knees. “I’ve never talked about it before. To anybody.”

Me neither , Kya thought. Out loud she said, “My ma walked off one day and didn’t come back. The mama deer always come back.”

“Well, at least you can hope she does. Mine won’t come back for sure.”

They were silent a moment, then Tate continued. “I think . . .” But he stopped, looked away.

Kya looked at him, but he stared at the ground. Quiet.

She said, “What? You think what? You can say anything to me.”

Still he said nothing. From a patience born from knowing, she waited.

Finally, very softly he said, “I think they went to Asheville to buy my birthday present. There was this certain bike I wanted, had to have it. The Western Auto didn’t carry them, so I think they went to Asheville to buy that bike for me.”

“That doesn’t make it your fault,” she said.

“I know, but it feels like my fault,” Tate said. “I don’t even remember what kind of bike it was.”

Kya leaned closer to him, not enough to touch. But she felt a sensation—almost like the space between their shoulders had shifted. She wondered if Tate felt it. She wanted to lean in closer, just enough so their arms would gently brush together. To touch. And wondered if Tate would notice.

And just at that second, the wind picked up, and thousands upon thousands of yellow sycamore leaves broke from their life support and streamed across the sky. Autumn leaves don’t fall; they fly. They take their time and wander on this, their only chance to soar. Reflecting sunlight, they swirled and sailed and fluttered on the wind drafts.

Tate sprang from the log and called to her, “See how many leaves you can catch before they hit the ground!” Kya jumped up, and the two of them leapt and skipped through curtains of falling leaves, reaching their arms wide, snatching them before they fell to the earth. Laughing, Tate dived toward a leaf only inches from the ground, caught it, and rolled over, holding his trophy in the air. Kya threw her hands up, releasing all the leaves she had rescued back into the wind. As she ran back through them, they caught like gold in her hair.

Then, as she whirled around, she bumped into Tate, who had stood, and they froze, staring into each other’s eyes. They stopped laughing. He took her shoulders, hesitated an instant, then kissed her lips, as the leaves rained and danced around them as silently as snow.

She knew nothing about kissing and held her head and lips stiff. They broke away and looked at each other, wondering where that had come from and what to do next. He lifted a leaf gently from her hair and dropped it to the ground. Her heart beat wildly. Of all the ragged loves she’d known from wayward family, none had felt like this.

“Am I your girlfriend now?” she asked.

He smiled. “Do you want to be?”

“Yes.”

“You might be too young,” he said.

“But I know feathers. I bet the other girls don’t know feathers.”

“All right, then.” And he kissed her again. This time she tilted her head to the side and her lips softened. And for the first time in her life, her heart was full.

18. White Canoe

1960

Now, every new word began with a squeal, every sentence a race. Tate grabbing Kya, the two of them tumbling, half childlike, half not, through sourweed, red with autumn.

“Be serious a second,” he said. “The only way to get multiplication tables is to memorize them.” He wrote 12 × 12 = 144 in the sand, but she ran past him, dived into the breaking surf, down to the calm, and swam until he followed into a place where gray-blue light beams slanted through the quiet and highlighted their forms. Sleek as porpoises. Later, sandy and salty, they rolled across the beach, arms tight around each other as if they were one.

The next afternoon he motored into her lagoon but stayed in his boat after beaching. A large basket covered in a red-checkered cloth sat at his feet.

“What’s that? What’d you bring?” she asked.

“A surprise. Go on, get in.”

They flowed through the slow-moving channels into the sea, then south to a tiny half-moon bay. After wrist-flicking the blanket onto the sand, he placed the covered basket on it, and as they sat, he lifted the cloth.

“Happy birthday, Kya,” he said. “You’re fifteen.” A two-tiered bakery cake, tall as a hatbox and decorated with shells of pink icing, rose from the basket. Her name scripted on top. Presents, wrapped in colorful paper and tied with bows, surrounded the cake.

She stared, flabbergasted, her mouth open. No one had wished her happy birthday since Ma left. No one had ever given her a store-bought cake with her name on it. She’d never had presents in real wrapping paper with ribbons.