Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens Page B

Kya pulled up to Jumpin’s wharf. He walked out of the little shop shaking his head.
    “I’m sorry as can be, Miss Kya,” he said. “But they beatcha to it. I got my week’s quota of mussels, cain’t buy no mo’.”
    She cut the engine and the boat banged against a piling. This was the second week she’d been beat out. Her money was gone and she couldn’t buy a single thing. Down to pennies and grits.
    “Miss Kya, ya gotta find some udder ways to bring cash in. Ya can’t git all yo’ coons up one tree.”
    Back at her place, she sat pondering on the brick ’n’ boards, and came up with another idea. She fished for eight hours straight, then soaked her catch of twenty in saltwater brine through the night. At daybreak she lined them up on the shelves of Pa’s old smokehouse—the size and shape of an outhouse—built a fire in the pit, and poked green sticks into the flames like he’d done. Blue-gray smoke billowed and puffed up the chimney and through every crack in the walls. The whole shack huffing.
    The next day she motored to Jumpin’s and, still standing in her boat, held up her bucket. In all it was a pitiful display of small bream and carp, falling apart at the seams. “Ya buy smoked fish, Jumpin’? I got some here.”
    “Well, I declare, ya sho’ did, Miss Kya. Tell ya what: I’ll take ’em on consignment like. If I sell ’em, ya get the money; if I don’t, ya get ’em back like they is. That do?”
    “Okay, thanks, Jumpin’.”
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    •   •   •
    T HAT EVENING Jumpin’ walked down the sandy track to Colored Town—a cluster of shacks and lean-tos, and even a few real houses squatting about on backwater bogs and mud sloughs. The scattered encampment was in deep woods, back from the sea, with no breeze, and “more skeeters than the whole state of Jawja.”
    After about three miles he could smell the smoke from cookfires drifting through the pines and hear the chatter of some of his grandchillin. There were no roads in Colored Town, just trails leading off through the woods this way and that to different family dwellings. His was a real house he and his pa had built with pine lumber and a raw-wood fence around the hardpan dirt yard, which Mabel, his good-sized wife, swept clean as a whistle just like a floor. No snake could slink within thirty yards of the steps without being spotted by her hoe.
    She came out of the house to meet him with a smile, as she often did, and he handed her the pail with Kya’s smoked fish.
    “What’s this?” she asked. “Looks like sump’m even dogs wouldn’t drag in.”
    “It’s that girl again. Miss Kya brung ’em. Sometimes she ain’t the first one with mussels, so she’s gone to smokin’ fish. Wants me to sell ’em.”
    “Lawd, we gotta do something ’bout that child. Ain’t nobody gonna buy them fish; I can cook ’em up in stew. Our church can come up wif some clothes, other things for her. We’ll tell ’er there’s some family that’ll trade jumpers for carpies. What size is she?”
    “Ya askin’ me? Skinny. All’s I know is she’s skinny as a tick on a flagpole. I ’spect she’ll be there first thing in the mornin’. She’s plumb broke.”
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    •   •   •
    A FTER EA TING A BREAKFAST of warmed-up mussels-in-grits, Kya motored over to Jumpin’s to see if any money’d come in from the smoked fish. In all these years it had just been him there or customers, but as she approached slowly she saw a large black woman sweeping the wharf like it was a kitchen floor. Jumpin’ was sitting in his chair,leaning back against the store wall doing figures in his ledger. Seeing her, he jumped up, waved.
    “G’mornin’,” she called quietly, drifting expertly up to the dock.
    “Hiya, Miss Kya. Got somebody here for ya to meet. This here’s ma wife, Mabel.” Mabel walked up and stood next to Jumpin’, so that when Kya stepped onto the wharf, they were close.
    Mabel reached out and took Kya’s hand, held it gently