1968
In the winter of 1968, Kya sat at her kitchen table one morning, sweeping orange and pink watercolors across paper, creating
the plump form of a mushroom. She had finished her book on seabirds and now worked on a guide to mushrooms. Already had plans for another on butterflies and moths.
Black-eyed peas, red onions, and salt ham boiled in the old dented pot on the woodstove, which she still preferred to the new range. Especially in winter. The tin roof sang under a light rain.
Then, suddenly the sounds of a truck laboring through sand came down her lane. Rumbling louder than the roof. Panic rising, she stepped to the window and saw a red pickup maneuvering the muddy ruts.
Kya’s first thought was to run, but the truck was already pulling up to the porch. Hunched down below the windowsill, she watched a man in a gray-green military uniform step out. He just stood there, truck door ajar, looking through the woods, down the path toward the lagoon. Then, closing the door softly, he jogged through the rain to the porch door and knocked.
She cussed. He was probably lost, would ask directions and go on, but she didn’t want to deal with him. She could hide here in the kitchen, hope he went away. But she heard him call. “Yo!
Anybody home? Hello!”
Annoyed yet curious, she walked through the newly furnished sitting room to the porch. The stranger, tall with dark hair, stood on the front step holding the screen door open, five feet from her. His uniform seemed stiff enough to stand on its own, as if it were
holding him together. The breast of his jacket was covered with colorful rectangular medals. But most eye-catching of all was a jagged red scar that cut his face in half from his left ear to the top of his lips. Kya gasped.
In an instant she returned to the Easter Sunday about six months before Ma left for good. Singing “Rock of Ages,” she and Ma walked arm in arm through the sitting room to the kitchen and gathered up the brilliantly colored eggs they had painted the night before. The other kids were out fishing, so she and Ma had time to hide the eggs, then get the chicken and biscuits into the oven. The brothers and sisters were too old to hunt for treats, but they would run around searching, pretending not to find them, then holding each discovered treasure high in the air, laughing.
Ma and Kya were leaving the kitchen with their baskets of eggs and chocolate bunnies from the Five and Dime, just as Pa rounded the corner from the hall.
Yanking Kya’s Easter bonnet from her head and waving it around, he screamed at Ma, “Whar ya git the money for these fancy thangs? Bonnets and shiny leather shoes? Them prissy eggs and chocolate bunnies? Say. Whar?”
“Come on, Jake, please hush. It’s Easter; this is for the kids.”
He shoved Ma backward. “Ya out whoring, that’s what. That how you git the money? Tell me now.” He grabbed Ma by the arms and shook her so hard her face seemed to rattle around her eyes, which stayed very still and wide open. Eggs tumbled from the basket and rolled in wobbly pastels across the floor.
“Pa, please, stop!” Kya cried out, then sobbed.
He lifted his hand and slapped Kya hard across the cheek. “Shut up, ya prissy-pot crybaby! Git that silly-looking dress and fancy shoes off ya. Them’s whorin’ clothes.”
She ducked down, holding her face, chasing after Ma’s hand-painted eggs.
“I’m talkin’ to ya, woman! Whar ya gettin’ yo’ money?” He lifted the iron fire poker from the corner and moved toward Ma.
Kya screamed as loud as she could and grabbed at Pa’s arm as he slammed the poker across Ma’s chest. Blood popped out on the flowery sundress like red polka dots. Then a big body moved down the hall and Kya looked up to see Jodie tackle Pa from behind,
sending them both sprawling across the floor. Her brother got between Ma and Pa and hollered for Kya and Ma to run, and they did. But before she turned, Kya saw Pa raise the poker and whack Jodie across the face, his jaw twisting grossly, blood spewing. The scene played out in her mind now in a flash. Her brother crumbling onto the floor, lying among purple-pink eggs and chocolate bunnies. She and Ma running through palmettos, hiding in brush. Her dress bloody, Ma kept saying it was fine, the eggs wouldn’t break, and they could still cook the chicken. Kya didn’t understand why they stayed hidden there—she was sure her brother was dying, needed their help, but she was too afraid to move. They waited for a long time and then snuck back, looking through the windows to make sure Pa was gone.
Jodie lay cold on the floor, blood pooled around him, and Kya
cried that he was dead. But Ma roused him and moved him to the sofa, where she stitched up his face with her sewing needle. When all was quiet, Kya snatched her bonnet from the floor and ran fast through the woods and threw it with all her might into the saw grass.
Now she looked into the eyes of the stranger standing on her porch and said, “Jodie.”
He smiled, the scar going crooked, and replied, “Kya, I hoped you’d be here.” They stared, each searching for the other in older eyes. Jodie couldn’t know he had been with her all these years, that scores of times he had shown her the way through the marsh, taught her over and over about herons and fireflies. More than anyone else, she had wanted to see Jodie or Ma again. Her heart had erased the scar and all the pain in that package. No wonder her mind buried the scene; no wonder Ma had left. Hit by a poker across the chest. Kya saw those rubbed-out stains on the flowered sundress as blood again.
He wanted to hug her, fold her into his arms, but as he moved toward her, she hung her head low to the side in profound shyness and backed up. So he simply stepped onto the porch.
“Come in,” she said, and led him into the small living room chock-full with her specimens.
“Oh,” he said. “Yes, then. I saw your book, Kya. I didn’t know for sure if it was you, but yes, now I can see it was. It’s amazing.”
He walked around looking at her collections, also examining the room with its new furniture, glancing down the halls to the bedrooms. Not wanting to snoop, but taking it all in.
“Do you want coffee, tea?” She didn’t know if he’d come for a visit or to stay. What did he want after all these years?
“Coffee would be great. Thank you.”
In the kitchen, he recognized the old woodstove next to the new gas range and refrigerator. He ran his hand over the old kitchen table, which she had kept as it was. With all its peeling-paint history. She poured the coffee in mugs, and they sat.
“You’re a soldier, then.”
“Two tours in ’Nam. I’m staying in the army for a few more months. They’ve been good to me. Paid for my college degree— mechanical engineering, Georgia Tech. Least I can do is stay in a while.”
Georgia wasn’t all that far away—he could have visited sooner.
But he was here now.
“You all left,” she said. “Pa stayed a while after you, but then he went, too. I don’t know where, don’t know if he’s alive or not.”
“You’ve been here by yourself since then?” “Yes.”
“Kya, I shouldn’t have left you with that monster. I’ve ached, felt terrible about it for years. I was a coward, a stupid coward. These damned medals don’t mean a thing.” He swiped at his chest. “I left you, a little girl, alone to survive in a swamp with a madman. I don’t expect you to forgive me, ever.”
“Jodie, it’s okay. You were just a kid yourself. What could you do?”
“I could’ve come back when I was older. At first it was day-to-day survival on the back streets of Atlanta.” He sneered. “I left here with seventy-five cents in my pocket. Stole it from the money Pa left in the kitchen; took it knowing it would leave you short. I scraped by on odd jobs till the army took me in. After training, it was straight to war. When I got home, so much time had passed, I figured you were long gone, run away yourself. That’s the reason I didn’t write; I think I signed up to go back as a kind of self-punishment. What I deserved for leaving you. Then after I graduated from Tech, a couple of months ago, I saw your book in a
shop. Catherine Danielle Clark. My heart just broke and leapt for joy all at once. I had to find you—figured I’d start here and track you down.”
“Well, here we are then.” She smiled for the first time. His eyes were the same as they had been. Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was, and she could see him there. “Jodie, I’m so sorry you worried about leaving me. Not once did I blame you. We were the victims, not the guilty.”
He smiled. “Thank you, Kya.” Tears welled, and they both looked away.
She hesitated, then said, “This may be hard to believe, but for a while Pa was good to me. He drank less, taught me to fish, and we went out in the boat a lot, all over the marsh. But then, of course, he went back to drinking and left me to fend for myself.”
Jodie nodded. “Yeah, I saw that side of him a few times, but he always went back to the bottle. He told me once it had something to do with the war. I’ve been to war myself and seen things that could drive a man to drink. But he shouldn’t have taken it out on his wife, his own kids.”
“What about Ma, the others?” she asked. “Did you ever hear from them, know where they went?”
“I don’t know a thing about Murph, Mandy, or Missy. I wouldn’t know them if I passed them in the street. By now I ’spose they’ve scattered with the wind. But Ma, well, Kya, that’s another reason I wanted to find you. There is some news of her.”
“Some news? What? Tell me.” Chills flowed from Kya’s arms to her fingertips.
“Kya, it’s not good. I only found out last week. Ma died two years ago.”
She bent at the waist, holding her face in her hands. Soft groans came from her throat. Jodie tried to hold her, but she moved away from him.
Jodie continued. “Ma had a sister, Rosemary, who tried to track us down through the Red Cross when Ma died, but they couldn’t find us. Then a couple of months ago they found me through the army and put me in touch with Rosemary.”
In hoarse tones Kya mumbled, “Ma was alive until two years ago. I’ve been waiting all these years for her to walk down the
lane.” She stood and held on to the sink. “Why didn’t she come back? Why didn’t somebody tell me where she was? And now it’s too late.”
Jodie went to her, and even though she tried to turn away, he put his arms around her. “I’m sorry, Kya. Come sit down. I’ll tell you what Rosemary said.”
He waited for her, then said, “Ma was ill from a major breakdown when she left us and went to New Orleans—that’s where she grew up. She was mentally and physically ill. I remember New Orleans a little bit. I guess I was five when we left. All I remember is a nice house, big windows overlooking a garden. But once we moved here, Pa wouldn’t let any of us talk about New Orleans, our grandparents, or any of it. So it was all wiped away.”
Kya nodded. “I never knew.”
Jodie continued. “Rosemary said their parents had been against Ma’s marriage to Pa from the start, but Ma went off to North Carolina with her husband, not a penny to their names. Eventually Ma began writing to Rosemary and told her of her circumstances
—living in a swamp shack with a drunk man who beat her and her children. Then one day, years later, Ma showed up. She had on those fake alligator heels that she cherished. Hadn’t bathed or combed her hair in days.
“For months Ma was mute, didn’t speak one word. She stayed in her old room in her parents’ home, barely eating. Of course, they had doctors come out, but no one could help her. Ma’s father contacted the sheriff in Barkley Cove to ask if Ma’s children were all right, but his office said they didn’t even try to keep track of the marsh people.”
Kya sniffed now and then.
“Finally, almost a year later, Ma became hysterical and told Rosemary she remembered she had left her children. Rosemary helped her write a letter to Pa asking if she could come get us and bring us to live with her in New Orleans. He wrote back that if she returned or contacted any of us, he would beat us unrecognizable. She knew he was capable of such a thing.”
The letter in the blue envelope. Ma had asked for her, for all of them. Ma had wanted to see her. But the outcome of the letter had been vastly different. The words had enraged Pa and sent him
back to drinking, and then Kya had lost him as well. She didn’t mention to Jodie that she still kept the letter’s ashes in a little jar.
“Rosemary said Ma never made friends, never dined with the family or interacted with anybody. She allowed herself no life, no pleasure. After a while, she started talking more, and all she talked about was her children. Rosemary said Ma loved us all her life but was frozen in some horrible place of believing that we’d be harmed if she returned and abandoned if she didn’t. She didn’t leave us to have a fling; she’d been driven to madness and barely knew she’d left.”
Kya asked, “How did she die?”
“She had leukemia. Rosemary said it was possibly treatable, but she refused all medication. She just became weaker and weaker, and slipped away two years ago. Rosemary said she died much as she had lived. In darkness, in silence.”
Jodie and Kya sat still. Kya thought of the poem by Galway Kinnell that Ma had underlined in her book:
I have to say I am relieved it is over:
At the end I could feel only pity For that urge toward more life.
. . . Goodbye.
Jodie stood. “Come with me, Kya, I want to show you something.” He led her outside to his pickup and they climbed into the back. Carefully, he removed a tarp and opened a large cardboard box, and one by one, pulled out and unwrapped oil paintings. He stood them up around the bed of the truck. One was of three young girls—Kya and her sisters—squatting by the lagoon, watching dragonflies. Another of Jodie and their brother holding up a string of fish.
“I brought them in case you were still here. Rosemary sent these to me. She said that for years, day and night, Ma painted us.”
One painting showed all five children as if they were watching the artist. Kya stared into the eyes of her sisters and brothers, looking back at her.
In a whisper, she asked, “Who’s who?” “What?”
“There were never any photographs. I don’t know them. Who’s who?”
“Oh.” He couldn’t breathe, then finally said, “Well, this is Missy, the oldest. Then Murph. Mandy. Of course, this little cutie is me.
And that’s you.”
He gave her time, then said, “Look at this one.”
Before him was an astonishingly colorful oil of two children squatting in swirls of green grass and wild flowers. The girl was only a toddler, perhaps three years old, her straight black hair falling over her shoulders. The boy, a bit older, with golden curls, pointed to a monarch butterfly, its black-and-yellow wings spread across a daisy. His hand was on the girl’s arm.
“I think that’s Tate Walker,” Jodie said. “And you.”
“I think you’re right. It looks like him. Why would Ma paint Tate?”
“He used to come around quite a bit, fish with me. He was always showing you insects and stuff.”
“Why don’t I remember that?”
“You were very young. One afternoon Tate boated into our lagoon, where Pa was pulling on his poke, really drunk. You were wading and Pa was supposed to be watching you. Suddenly, for no reason at all, Pa grabbed you by your arms and shook you so hard your head was thrown back. Then he dropped you in the mud and started laughing. Tate jumped out of the boat and ran up to you.
He was only seven or eight years old, but he shouted at Pa. Of course, Pa smacked him and screamed at him to get off his land, never come back or he’d shoot him. By this time we’d all run down to see what was happening. Even with Pa ranting and raving, Tate picked you up and handed you to Ma. He made sure you were all right before he left. We still went fishing some after that, but he never came back to our place again.”
Not until he led me home that first time I took the boat into the marsh, Kya thought. She looked at the painting—so pastel, so peaceful. Somehow Ma’s mind had pulled beauty from lunacy.
Anyone looking at these portraits would think they portrayed the happiest of families, living on a seashore, playing in sunshine.
Jodie and Kya sat on the rim of the truck bed, still looking quietly at the paintings.
He continued. “Ma was isolated and alone. Under those circumstances people behave differently.”
Kya made a soft groan. “Please don’t talk to me about isolation. No one has to tell me how it changes a person. I have lived it. I am isolation,” Kya whispered with a slight edge. “I forgive Ma for leaving. But I don’t understand why she didn’t come back—why she abandoned me. You probably don’t remember, but after she walked away, you told me that a she-fox will sometimes leave her kits if she’s starving or under some other extreme stress. The kits die—as they probably would have anyway—but the vixen lives to breed again when conditions are better, when she can raise a new litter to maturity.
“I’ve read a lot about this since. In nature—out yonder where the crawdads sing—these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother’s number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time.
Without them, we wouldn’t be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive—way back yonder.
“Maybe some primitive urge—some ancient genes, not appropriate anymore—drove Ma to leave us because of the stress, the horror and real danger of living with Pa. That doesn’t make it right; she should have chosen to stay. But knowing that these tendencies are in our biological blueprints might help one forgive even a failed mother. That may explain her leaving, but I still don’t see why she didn’t come back. Why she didn’t even write to me.
She could’ve written letter after letter, year after year, until one finally got to me.”
“I guess some things can’t be explained, only forgiven or not. I don’t know the answer. Maybe there isn’t one. I’m sorry to bring you this bad news.”
“I’ve had no family, no news of family for most of my life. Now within a few minutes I’ve found a brother and lost my mother.”
“I’m so sorry, Kya.”
“Don’t be. Actually, I lost Ma years ago, and now you’re back, Jodie. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to see you again. This is one of the happiest and yet saddest days of my life.” She touched his arm with her fingers, and he already knew her enough to know this was rare.
They walked back into the shack, and he looked around at the new things, the freshly painted walls, the handcrafted kitchen cabinets.
“How’d you manage, Kya? Before your book, how’d you get money, food?”
“Oh, that’s a long boring story. Mostly I sold mussels, oysters, and smoked fish to Jumpin’.”
Jodie threw his head back and laughed out loud. “Jumpin’! I haven’t thought about him for years. Is he still around?”
Kya didn’t laugh. “Jumpin’ has been my best friend, for years my only friend. My only family unless you count herring gulls.”
Jodie turned serious. “Didn’t you have friends in school?”
“I only went to school one day in my life,” she chuckled. “The kids laughed at me, so I never went back. Spent weeks outsmarting the truant officers. Which, after all the things you’d taught me, wasn’t very hard.”
He looked astonished. “How did you learn to read? To write your book?”
“Actually, it was Tate Walker who taught me to read.” “You ever see him anymore?”
“Now and then.” She stood, faced the stove. “More coffee?”
Jodie felt the lonely life hanging in her kitchen. It was there in the tiny supply of onions in the vegetable basket, the single plate drying in the rack, the cornbread wrapped carefully in a tea towel, the way an old widow might do it.
“I’ve had plenty, thanks. But what about a ride around the marsh?” he asked.
“Of course. You won’t believe it, I have a new motor but still use that same old boat.”
The sun had broken up the clouds and shone bright and warm for a winter day. As she steered them through narrow channels and glassy estuaries, he exclaimed at a remembered snag, the same as it had been, and a beaver lodge still piled in the exact
spot. They laughed when they came to the lagoon where Ma, Kya, and their sisters had grounded the boat in mud.
Back at the shack, she put together a picnic, which they ate on the beach with the gulls.
“I was so young when they all left,” she said. “Tell me about the others.” So he told her stories of their older brother, Murph, who carried her around on his shoulders through the woods.
“You used to laugh the whole time. He would jog and turn circles with you way up there. And one time you laughed so hard you wet your pants right on his neck.”
“Oh no! I didn’t.” Kya leaned back, laughing.
“Yes, you did. He squealed some, but he kept on going, ran right into the lagoon until he was underwater, and you still riding his shoulders. We were all watching—Ma, Missy, Mandy, and me— and laughed till we cried. Ma had to sit right down on the ground, she was laughing so hard.”
Her mind invented pictures to go with the stories. Family scraps and shreds Kya never thought she’d have.
Jodie continued. “It was Missy who started feeding the gulls.” “What? Really! I thought I started it on my own, after
everybody left.”
“No, she fed the gulls every day she could get away with it. She gave them all names. She called one Big Red, I remember that.
You know, after that red spot on their bills.”
“It’s not the same bird, of course—I’ve gone through a few generations of Big Reds myself. But there, the one on the left, that’s Big Red today.” She tried to connect with the sister who had given her the gulls, but all she could see was the face in the painting. Which was more than she’d had before.
The red spot on a herring gull’s bill, Kya knew, was more than decoration. Only when the chicks pecked at the spot with their bills would the parent release the captured food for them. If the red spot was obscured so that the chicks didn’t tap it, the parent wouldn’t feed them and they would die. Even in nature, parenthood is a thinner line than one might think.
They sat for a moment, then Kya said, “I just don’t remember much about it at all.”
“You’re lucky, then. Just keep it that way.”
They sat there like that, quietly. Not remembering.
• • •
SHE COOKED A SOUTHERN SUPPER as Ma would have: black-eyed peas with red onions, fried ham, cornbread with cracklin’, butter beans cooked in butter and milk. Blackberry cobbler with hard cream with some bourbon Jodie brought. As they ate, he told her he would like to stay a few days, if that was okay, and she said he was welcome as long as he liked.
“This is your land now, Kya. You earned it. I’m stationed at Fort Benning for a while yet, so I can’t stay long. After that I’ll probably get a job in Atlanta so we can stay in touch; I’d like to see you as often as I can get up here. Knowing you’re okay is all I ever wanted in my life.”
‘‘I’d like that, Jodie. Please come whenever you can.”
The next evening, as they sat on the beach, wave tips tickling their bare toes, Kya chatted in unusual fashion, and Tate seemed to be in every paragraph. There was the time he showed her the way home when she, as a little girl, was lost in the marsh. Or the first poem Tate read to her. She talked about the feather game and how he taught her to read, how he was a scientist at the lab now.
He was her first love, but he had dropped her when he went to college, left her waiting on the lagoon shore. So it had ended.
“How long ago was that?” Jodie asked.
“About seven years, I guess. When he first went to Chapel Hill.” “Did you ever see him again?”
“He came back to apologize; said he still loved me. He was the one who suggested I publish reference books. It’s nice to see him now and then in the marsh, but I’d never get involved again. He can’t be trusted.”
“Kya, that was seven years ago. He was just a boy, first time away from home, hundreds of pretty girls around. If he came back and apologized and says he loves you, maybe you should cut him a little slack.”
“Most men go from one female to the next. The unworthy ones strut about, pulling you in with falsehoods. Which is probably why Ma fell for a man like Pa. Tate wasn’t the only guy who left me.
Chase Andrews even talked to me about marriage, but he married someone else. Didn’t even tell me; I read it in the paper.”
“I’m so sorry. I am, but, Kya, it’s not just guys who are unfaithful. I’ve been duped, dropped, run over a few times myself. Let’s face it, a lot of times love doesn’t work out. Yet even when it fails, it connects you to others and, in the end, that is all you have, the connections. Look at us; you and I have each other now, and just think, if I have kids and you have kids, well, that’s a whole new string of connections. And on it goes. Kya, if you love Tate, take a chance.”
Kya thought of Ma’s painting of Tate and herself as children, their heads close together, surrounded by pastel flowers and butterflies. Maybe a message from Ma after all.
• • •
ON THE THIRD MORNING of Jodie’s visit, they unpacked Ma’s paintings—all but one, which Jodie kept—and hung some on the walls. The shack took on a different light, as though more windows had opened up. She stood back and stared at them—a miracle to have some of Ma’s paintings back on the walls. Pulled from the fire.
Then Kya walked Jodie out to his pickup and gave him a bag lunch she’d made for his trip. They both looked through the trees, down the lane, everywhere except into each other’s eyes.
Finally he said, “I better get going, but here’s my address and phone number,” as he held out a scrap of notepaper. She stopped breathing, and with her left hand held herself steady on the truck as she took the paper with her right. Such a simple thing: the address of a brother on a slip of paper. Such an astonishing thing: a family she could find. A number she could call and he would answer. She choked on her own throat as he pulled her to him, and finally, after a lifetime, she sagged against him and wept.
“I never thought I’d see you again. I thought you were gone forever.”
“I’ll always be here, I promise. Whenever I move, I’ll send my new address. If you ever need me, you write or call, you hear?”
“I will. And come back for a visit whenever you can.”
“Kya, go find Tate. He’s a good man.”
He waved from the truck window all the way down the lane, as she watched, crying and laughing all at once. And when he turned onto the track, she could see his red pickup through the holes of the forest where a white scarf had once trailed away, his long arm waving until he was gone.
