1969
One July afternoon in 1969, more than seven months after Jodie’s visit, The Eastern Seacoast Birds by Catherine
Danielle Clark—her second book, a volume of stark detail and beauty—appeared in her mailbox. She ran her fingers over the striking jacket—her painting of a herring gull. Smiling, she said, “Hey, Big Red, you made it to the cover.”
Carrying the new book, Kya walked silently to the shady oak clearing near her shack, searching for mushrooms. The moist duff felt cool on her feet as she neared a cluster of intensely yellow toadstools. Midstride, she halted. There, sitting on the old feather stump, was a small milk carton, red and white, just like the one from so long ago. Unexpectedly, she laughed out loud.
Inside the carton, wrapped in tissue paper, was an old army-issue compass in a brass case, tarnished green-gray with age. She breathed in at the sight of it. She had never needed a compass because the directions seemed obvious to her. But on cloudy days, when the sun was elusive, the compass would guide her.
A folded note read: Dearest Kya, This compass was my grandpa’s from the First World War. He gave it to me when I was little, but I’ve never used it, and I thought maybe you would get the best out of it. Love, Tate. P.S. I’m glad you can read this note!
Kya read the words Dearest and Love again. Tate. The golden-haired boy in the boat, guiding her home before a storm, gifting her feathers on a weathered stump, teaching her to read; the tender teenager steering her through her first cycle as a woman
and arousing her first sexual desires as a female; the young scientist encouraging her to publish her books.
Despite gifting him the shell book, she had continued to hide in the undergrowth when she saw him in the marsh, rowing away unseen. The dishonest signals of fireflies, all she knew of love.
Even Jodie had said she should give Tate another chance. But every time she thought of him or saw him, her heart jumped from the old love to the pain of abandonment. She wished it would settle on one side or the other.
Several mornings later, she slipped through the estuaries in an early fog, the compass tucked in her knapsack, though she would not likely need it. She planned to search for rare wild flowers on a wooded tongue of sand that jutted into the sea, but part of her scanned the waterways for Tate’s boat.
The fog turned stubborn and lingered, twisting its tendrils around tree snags and low-lying limbs. The air was still; even the birds were quiet as she eased forward through the channel.
Nearby, a clonk, clonk sounded as a slow-moving oar tapped a gunwale, and then a boat emerged ghoul-like from the haze.
Colors, which had been muted by the dimness, formed into shapes as they moved into the light. Golden hair beneath a red cap. As if coming in from a dream, Tate stood in the stern of his old fishing boat poling through the channel. Kya cut her engine and rowed backward into a thicket to watch him pass. Always backward to watch him pass.
At sundown, calmer, heart back in place, Kya stood on the beach, and recited:
“Sunsets are never simple. Twilight is refracted and reflected But never true.
Eventide is a disguise Covering tracks, Covering lies.
“We don’t care That dusk deceives.
We see brilliant colors,
And never learn
The sun has dropped Beneath the earth
By the time we see the burn.
“Sunsets are in disguise, Covering truths, covering lies.
“A.H.”
