1970
As Jodie’s truck bumped off the pavement onto the sandy marsh road, he talked gently to Kya, saying she’d be fine; it would just take some time. She scanned cattails and egrets, pines and ponds flashing past. Craned her neck to watch two beavers paddling. Like a migrating tern who has flown ten thousand miles to her natal shore, her mind pounded with the longing and expectation of home; she barely heard Jodie’s prattle. Wished he would be quiet and listen to the wilderness within him. Then he might see.
Her breath caught as Jodie turned the last bend of the winding lane, and the old shack came into view, waiting there beneath the oaks. The Spanish moss tossed gently in the breeze above the rusted roof, and the heron balanced on one leg in the shadows of the lagoon. As soon as Jodie stopped the truck, Kya jumped out and ran into the shack, touching the bed, the table, the stove. Knowing what she would want, he’d left a bag of crumbs on the counter, and, finding new energy, she ran to the beach with it, tears streaming her cheeks as the gulls flew toward her from up and down the shore. Big Red landed and tramped around her, his head bobbing.
Kneeling on the beach, surrounded by a bird frenzy, she trembled. “I never asked people for anything. Maybe now they’ll leave me alone.”
Jodie took her few belongings into the house and made tea in the old pot. He sat at the table and waited. Finally, he heard the porch door open, and as she stepped into the kitchen, she said, “Oh, you’re still here.” Of course, he was still there—his truck was in plain view outside.
“Please sit down a minute, would you?” he said. “I’d like to talk.”
She didn’t sit. “I’m fine, Jodie. Really.”
“So, does that mean you want me to go? Kya, you’ve been alone in that cell for two months, thinking a whole town was against you. You’ve hardly let anyone visit you. I understand all that, I do, but I don’t think I should drive away and leave you alone. I want to stay with you a few days. Would that be okay?”
“I’ve lived alone almost all my life, not two months! And I didn’t think, I knew a whole town was against me.”
“Kya, don’t let this horrible thing drive you further from people. It’s been a soul-crushing ordeal, but this seems to be a chance to start over. The verdict is maybe their way of saying they will accept you.”
“Most people don’t have to be acquitted of murder to be accepted.”
“I know, and you have every reason in the world to hate people. I don’t blame you, but . . .”
“That’s what nobody understands about me.” She raised her voice, “I never hated people. They hated me. They laughed at me. They left me. They harassed me. They attacked me. Well, it’s true; I learned to live without them. Without you. Without Ma! Or anybody!”
He tried to hold her, but she jerked away.
“Jodie, maybe I’m just tired right now. In fact, I’m exhausted. Please, I need to get over all this—the trial, jail, the thought of being executed—by myself, because by myself is all I’ve ever known. I don’t know how to be consoled. I’m too tired to even have this conversation. I . . .” Her voice trailed off.
She didn’t wait for an answer but walked from the shack and into the oak forest. Knowing it was futile, he didn’t go after her. He would wait. The day before, he’d supplied the shack with groceries—just in case of acquittal—and now set about chopping vegetables for her favorite: homemade chicken pie. But as the sun set he couldn’t stand keeping her from her shack another minute, so he left the hot, bubbling pie on the stovetop and walked out the door. She had circled to the beach, and when she heard his truck driving slowly down the lane, she ran home.
Whiffs of golden pastry filled the shack to the ceiling, but Kya still wasn’t hungry. In the kitchen she took out her paints and planned her next book on marsh grasses. People rarely noticed grasses except to mow, trample, or poison them. She swept her brush madly across the canvas in a color more black than green. Dark images emerged, maybe dying meadows under storm cells. It was hard to tell.
She dropped her head and sobbed. “Why am I angry now? Why now? Why was I so mean to Jodie?” Limp, she slid to the floor like a rag doll. Curling into a ball, still crying, she wished she could snuggle with the only one who’d ever accepted her as she was. But the cat was back at the jail.
Just before dark, Kya walked back to the beach where the gulls were preening and settling in for the night. As she waded into the surf, shards of shells and chips of crabs brushed her toes as they tumbled back to the sea. She reached down and picked up two pelican feathers just like the one Tate had put in the P section of the dictionary he had given her for Christmas years ago.
She whispered a verse by Amanda Hamilton:
“You came again,
Blinding my eyes
Like the shimmer of sun upon the sea.
Just as I feel free
The moon casts your face upon the sill.
Each time I forget you
Your eyes haunt my heart and it falls still.
And so farewell
Until the next time you come,
Until at last I do not see you.”
The next morning before dawn, Kya sat up in her porch bed and breathed the rich scents of the marsh into her heart. As faint light filtered into the kitchen, she cooked herself some grits, scrambled eggs, and biscuits, as light and fluffy as Ma’s. She ate every bite. Then, as the sun rose, she rushed to her boat and chugged across the lagoon, dipping her fingers into the clear, deep water.
Churning through the channel, she spoke to the turtles and egrets and lifted her arms high above her head. Home. “I’ll collect all day, anything I want,” she said. Deeper in her mind was the thought that she might see Tate. Maybe he’d be working nearby and she’d come across him. She could invite him back to the shack to share the chicken pie Jodie had baked.
LESS THAN A MILE AWAY, Tate waded through shallow water, dipping samples in tiny vials. A wake of gentle ripples fanned out from each step, from each dip. He planned to stay near Kya’s place. Maybe she’d boat out into the marsh, and they’d meet. If not, he’d go to her shack that evening. He hadn’t decided exactly what he’d say to her, but kissing some sense into her came to mind.
In the distance an angry engine roared, higher-pitched and much louder than a motorboat—defeating the soft sounds of the marsh. He tracked the noise as it moved in his direction, and suddenly one of those new airboats, which he hadn’t seen, raced into view. It glided and gloated above the water, above even the grasses, sending behind a fantail of spray. Emitting the noise of ten sirens.
Crushing shrubs and grasses, the boat broke its own trail across the marsh and then sped across the estuary. Herons and egrets squawking. Three men stood at its helm, and seeing Tate, they turned in his direction. As they neared, he recognized Sheriff Jackson, his deputy, and another man.
The flashy boat sat back on its haunches as it slowed and eased near. The sheriff shouted something to Tate, but even cupping his ears with his hands and leaning toward them, he couldn’t hear above the din. They maneuvered even closer until the boat wallowed next to Tate, sloshing water up his thighs. The sheriff leaned down, hollering.
Nearby, Kya had also heard the strange boat and, as she boated toward it, she saw it approaching Tate. She backed into a thicket and watched him take in the sheriff’s words, then stand very still, head lowered, shoulders sagging in surrender. Even from this distance she read despair in his posture. The sheriff shouted again, and Tate finally reached up and let the deputy pull him into the boat. The other man hopped into the water and climbed into Tate’s cruiser. Chin lowered, eyes downcast, Tate stood between the two uniformed men as they turned around and sped back through the marsh toward Barkley Cove, followed by the other man driving Tate’s boat.
Kya stared until both boats disappeared behind a point of eelgrass. Why had they apprehended Tate? Was it something to do with Chase’s death? Had they arrested him?
Agony ripped her. Finally, after a lifetime, she admitted it was the chance of seeing Tate, the hope of rounding a creek bend and watching him through reeds, that had pulled her into the marsh every day of her life since she was seven. She knew his favorite lagoons and paths through difficult quagmires; always following him at a safe distance. Sneaking about, stealing love. Never sharing it. You can’t get hurt when you love someone from the other side of an estuary. All the years she rejected him, she survived because he was somewhere in the marsh, waiting. But now perhaps he would no longer be there.
She stared at the fading noise of the strange boat. Jumpin’ knew everything—he’d know why the sheriff had taken Tate in and what she could do about it.
She pull-cranked her engine and sped through the marsh.
1970
The Barkley Cove graveyard trailed off under tunnels of dark oaks. Spanish moss hung in long curtains, creating cavelike sanctuaries for old tombstones—the remains of a family here, a loner there, in no order at all. Fingers of gnarled roots had torn and twisted gravestones into hunched and nameless forms. Markers of death all weathered into nubbins by elements of life. In the distance, the sea and sky sang too bright for this serious ground.
Yesterday the cemetery moved with villagers, like constant ants, including all the fishermen and shopkeepers, who had come to bury Scupper. People clustered in awkward silence as Tate moved among familiar townspeople and unfamiliar relatives. Ever since the sheriff found him in the marsh to tell him his father had died, Tate simply stepped and acted as guided—a hand behind his back, a nudge to his side. He remembered none of it and walked back to the cemetery today to say good-bye.
During all those months, pining for Kya, then trying to visit her in jail, he’d spent almost no time with Scupper. Guilt and regret needed clawing away. Had he not been so obsessed with his own heart, perhaps he would have noticed his father’s was failing. Before her arrest, Kya had shown signs of coming back—gifting him a copy of her first book, coming onto his boat to look through the microscope, laughing at the hat toss—but once the trial began she had pulled away more than ever. Jail could do that to a person, he thought.
Even now, walking toward the new grave, carrying a brown plastic case, he found himself thinking more of Kya than of his dad and swore at that. He approached the fresh-scarred mound under the oaks, the wide sea beyond. The grave lay next to his mother’s; his sister’s on the far side, all enclosed in a small wall of rough stones and mortar embedded with shells. Enough space left for him. It didn’t feel as if his dad were here at all. “I should’ve had you cremated like Sam McGee,” Tate said, almost smiling. Then, looking over the ocean, he hoped Scupper had a boat wherever he was. A red boat.
He set the plastic case—a battery-operated record player—on the ground next to the grave and put a 78 on the turntable. The needle arm wobbled, then dropped, and Miliza Korjus’s silvery voice lifted over the trees. He sat between his mother’s grave and the flower-covered mound. Oddly, the sweet, freshly turned earth smelled more like a beginning than an end.
Talking out loud, head low, he asked his dad to forgive him for spending so much time away, and he knew Scupper did. Tate remembered his dad’s definition of a man: one who can cry freely, feel poetry and opera in his heart, and do whatever it takes to defend a woman. Scupper would have understood tracking love through mud. Tate sat there quite awhile, one hand on his mother, the other on his father.
Finally, he touched the grave one last time, walked back to his truck, and drove to his boat at the town wharf. He would go back to work, immerse himself in squirming life-forms. Several fishermen walked to him on the dock, and he stood awkwardly, accepting condolences just as awkward.
Head low, determined to leave before anyone else approached, he stepped onto the aft deck of his cabin cruiser. But before he sat behind the wheel, he saw a pale brown feather resting on the seat cushion. He knew right away it was the soft breast feather of a female night heron, a long-legged secretive creature who lives deep in the marsh, alone. Yet here it was too near the sea.
He looked around. No, she wouldn’t be here, not this close to town. He turned the key, churned south through the sea, and finally the marsh.
Going too fast in the channels, he brushed past low branches that slapped at the boat. The agitated wake sloshed against the bank as he pulled into her lagoon and tied his boat next to hers. Smoke rose from the shack’s chimney, billowing and free.
“Kya,” he yelled. “Kya!”
She opened the porch door and stepped under the oak. She was dressed in a long, white skirt and pale blue sweater—the colors of wings—hair falling about her shoulders.
He waited for her to walk to him, then took her shoulders and held her against his chest. Then pushed back.
“I love you, Kya, you know that. You’ve known it for a long time.”
“You left me like all the others,” she said.
“I will never leave you again.”
“I know,” she said.
“Kya, do you love me? You’ve never spoken those words to me.”
“I’ve always loved you. Even as a child—in a time I don’t remember—I already loved you.” She dipped her head.
“Look at me,” he said gently. She hesitated, face downcast. “Kya, I need to know that the running and hiding are over. That you can love without being afraid.”
She lifted her face and looked into his eyes, then led him through the woods to the oak grove, the place of the feathers.