Late in the day, the sun dipping behind the lagoon, he stirred corn mush for the gulls and mindlessly glanced at the kitchen floor. He cocked his head as he noticed for the first time that the linoleum had not been installed under the woodpile or the old stove. Kya had kept firewood stacked high, even in summer, but now it was low, and he saw the edge of a cutout in the floorboard. He moved the remaining logs aside and saw a trapdoor in the plywood. Kneeling down, he slowly opened it to find an enclosed compartment between the joists, which held, among other things, an old cardboard box covered in dust. He pulled it out and found inside scores of manila envelopes and a smaller box. All the envelopes were marked with the initials A.H., and from them he pulled out pages and pages of poetry by Amanda Hamilton, the local poet who had published simple verses in regional magazines. Tate had thought Hamilton’s poems rather weak, but Kya had always saved the published clippings, and here were envelopes full of them. Some of the written pages were completed poems, but most of them were unfinished, with lines crossed out and some words rewritten in the margin in the poet’s handwriting—Kya’s handwriting.
Amanda Hamilton was Kya. Kya was the poet.
Tate’s face grimaced in disbelief. Through the years she must have put the poems in the rusty mailbox, submitting them to local publications. Safe behind a nom de plume. Perhaps a reaching-out, a way to express her feelings to someone other than gulls. Somewhere for her words to go.
He glanced through some of the poems, most about nature or love. One was folded neatly in its own envelope. He pulled it out and read:
The Firefly
Luring him was as easy
As flashing valentines.
But like a lady firefly
They hid a secret call to die.
A final touch,
Unfinished;
The last step, a trap.
Down, down he falls,
His eyes still holding mine
Until they see another world.
I saw them change.
First a question,
Then an answer,
Finally an end.
And love itself passing
To whatever it was before it began. A.H.
Still kneeling on the floor, he read it again. He held the paper next to his heart, throbbing inside his chest. He looked out the window, making certain no one was coming down the lane—not that they would, why would they? But to be sure. Then he opened the small box, knowing what he would find. There, laid out carefully on cotton, was the shell necklace Chase had worn until the night he died.
Tate sat at the kitchen table for a long while, taking it in, imagining her riding on night buses, catching a riptide, planning around the moon. Softly calling to Chase in the darkness. Pushing him backward. Then, squatting in mud at the bottom, lifting his head, heavy with death, to retrieve the necklace. Covering her footprints; leaving no trace.
Breaking kindling into bits, Tate built a fire in the old woodstove and, envelope by envelope, burned the poems. Maybe he didn’t need to burn them all, maybe he should have destroyed just the one, but he wasn’t thinking clearly. The old, yellowed papers made a great whoosh a foot high, then smoldered. He took the shell off the rawhide, dropped the rawhide in the fire, and put the boards back in the floor.
Then, in near dusk, he walked to the beach and stood on a sharp bed of white and cracked mollusks and crab pieces. For a second he stared at Chase’s shell in his open palm and then dropped it on the sand. Looking the same as all the others, it vanished. The tide was coming in, and a wave flowed over his feet, taking with it hundreds of seashells back into the sea. Kya had been of this land and of this water; now they would take her back. Keep her secrets deep.
And then the gulls came. Seeing him there, they spiraled above his head. Calling. Calling.
As night fell, Tate walked back toward the shack. But when he reached the lagoon, he stopped under the deep canopy and watched hundreds of fireflies beckoning far into the dark reaches of the marsh. Way out yonder, where the crawdads sing.
Acknowledgments
To my twin brother, Bobby Dykes, my deepest thanks for a lifetime of unimaginable encouragement and support. Thank you to my sister, Helen Cooper, for always being there for me, and to my brother Lee Dykes, for believing in me. I am so grateful to my forever friends and family for their unwavering support, encouragement, and laughter: Amanda Walker Hall, Margaret Walker Weatherly, Barbara Clark Copeland, Joanne and Tim Cady, Mona Kim Brown, Bob Ivey and Jill Bowman, Mary Dykes, Doug Kim Brown, Ken Eastwell, Jesse Chastain, Steve O’Neil, Andy Vann, Napier Murphy, Linda Denton (and for the horse and ski trails), Sabine Dahlmann, and Greg and Alicia Johnson.
For reading and commenting on the manuscript, I thank: Joanne and Tim Cady (multiple readings!), Jill Bowman, Bob Ivey, Carolyn Testa, Dick Burgheim, Helen Cooper, Peter Matson, Mary Dykes, Alexandra Fuller, Mark Owens, Dick Houston, Janet Gause, Jennifer Durbin, John O’Connor, and Leslie Anne Keller.
To my agent, Russell Galen, thank you for loving and understanding Kya and fireflies, and for your enthusiastic determination to get this story told.
Thank you, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, for publishing my words. I am so grateful to my editor, Tara Singh Carlson, for all your encouragement, beautiful editing, and vision for my novel. Also at Putnam, my thanks to Helen Richard for helping at every turn.
Special thanks to Hannah Cady for your cheerful assistance with some of the more mundane and gritty jobs—like the bonfires—of writing a novel.