Where the Crawdads Sing

by Delia Owens

“No, I cain’t leave the gulls, the heron, the shack. The marsh is all the family I got.”

“Well, we better hide way out there where the crawdads sing. I pity any foster parents who take you on.” Tate’s whole face smiled. “What d’ya mean, where the crawdads sing? Ma used to say that.” Kya remembered Ma always encouraging her to explore the marsh: “Go as far as you can—way out yonder where the crawdads sing.” “Just means far in the bush where critters are wild, still behaving like critters. Now, you got any ideas where we can meet?”

where the crawdads sing? It's where even the marsh can be called close, making the title meaning even more powerful. Even the marsh is not peaceful for Kya, she must isolate even farther from humanity. All because she wants to have human connection.

For anyone to know her at all seemed strange enough, but now he knew about the most personal and private occurrence of her life. Her cheeks burned at the thought of it. She would hide until he left.

Not much has changed, she thought, them laughing, me holing up like a sand crab. A wild thing ashamed of her own freakish ways.

Kya’s mind could easily live there, but she could not. Breathing hard, he stared at his decision hiding there in cord grass: Kya or everything else.

She laughed for his sake, something she’d never done. Giving away another piece of herself just to have someone else.

Kya desire to have any connection with humanity, so much so that she's willing to sacrifice herself.

Those four years at university, he’d convinced himself that Kya could not fit in the academic world he sought. All through undergraduate, he’d tried to forget her; after all, there were plenty of female distractions at Chapel Hill. He even had a few long-term relationships, but no one compared. What he’d learned right after DNA, isotopes, and protozoans was that he couldn’t breathe without her. True, Kya couldn’t live in the university world he had sought, but now he could live in hers.

She didn’t know exactly how she felt about Chase, but she was no longer lonely. That seemed enough.

As he passed into sleep, she watched the blinking lights of the Vacancy sign.

Still, Kya didn’t say anything. Once again Tate was nudging her to care for herself, not just offering to care for her. It seemed that all her life, he had been there. Then gone.

She knew it wasn’t Chase she mourned, but a life defined by rejections. As the sky and clouds struggled overhead, she said out loud, “I have to do life alone. But I knew this. I’ve known a long time that people don’t stay.”

Amanda Hamilton poem: “I must let go now. Let you go. Love is too often The answer for staying. Too seldom the reason For going. I drop the line And watch you drift away. “All along You thought The fiery current Of your lover’s breast Pulled you to the deep. But it was my heart-tide Releasing you To float adrift With seaweed.”

Faces change with life’s toll, but eyes remain a window to what was, and she could see him there.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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 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.