“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.
34.
Search the Shack
1969
Well, again she’s not here,” Joe said, knocking on the frame of Kya’s screen door. Ed stood on the brick-’n’-board steps, cupping his hands on the mesh to see inside. Enormous limbs of the oak, hung with long strands of Spanish moss, cast shadows on the weathered boards and pointy roof of the shack. Only gray patches of sky blinked through the late November morning.