Where the Crawdads Sing: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Shortly after her seventh birthday, Kya is out in the marsh when she hears a car pull up to the shack. A truancy officer yells that she has come to take Kya—though she calls her by her legal name, Catherine—to school. Speaking loudly, the truancy officer promises that Kya will be able to eat a free lunch every day if she comes to school, adding that the cafeteria is making chicken pot pie that day. Because she’s hungry and has only ever eaten chicken pot pie several times, Kya emerges from the woods, and the truancy officer introduces herself as Mrs. Culpepper before going inside to help her get dressed for school. When Kya’s ready, Mrs. Culpepper extends her hand, and Kya hesitates to take it because she hasn’t touched anyone else since Jodie left. After a moment, though, she puts her hand in Mrs. Culpepper’s. 

At school, the principal puts Kya in the second grade even though she’s never had any education. He does this because the first grade classrooms are too full, but he also notes that it doesn’t matter because she comes from “marsh people” and will probably only go to school for a couple of months before disappearing once more. Nervously, Kya enters the classroom and observes that, though some of the students are barefoot like her, most of them have shoes. They all stare at her when she finds her seat, and when the teacher later asks her to spell the word “dog,” she hesitates before eventually saying, “G-o-d.” Everyone laughs, and Kya slouches back into her seat, trying to make herself as small as possible.

At lunch, nobody sits with Kya. When a group of girls approaches her table, she becomes nervous until she realizes—with a slight sense of disappointment—that they’re headed to a table behind her. Then, when nobody is looking, Kya wraps up some food, saving it for later. For the rest of the day, she doesn’t speak even when the teachers ask her to, not wanting to subject herself to humiliation. Unfortunately for her, though, she doesn’t manage to go unnoticed on the bus ride home, during which a group of children mock her and call her “marsh hen” and “swamp rat.” When Kya finally gets home, she goes to the beach and calls out to the gulls, who circle around her. Though she’s close to tears, she starts laughing when they gently peck her toes.

Kya doesn’t go back to school. When Mrs. Culpepper comes to fetch her, Kya slips into the woods, running in circles to confuse the man Mrs. Culpepper has brought to chase after Kya. Each time, Kya finds it almost too easy to lose him. For the rest of her life, she never attends another day of school, instead spending her time watching herons and collecting shells—activities she thinks can teach her something useful.

While playing alone one day, Kya jumps from a tree and lands on a rusty nail. Instantly, she calls out to Pa, but he’s nowhere to be found. As she reels in pain, she remembers what Jodie told her about lockjaw, suddenly worrying that the nail will give her tetanus, which is what happened to a boy Jodie knew. Limping toward the shack, she remembers that Ma used to put saltwater on cuts and then cake a mixture of vitamin-rich mud onto the wound, so she puts her foot in a salty stream trickling through the marsh. After washing out the cut, she digs a hole in the mud and puts her foot into the earth, all while opening and closing her jaw so that it doesn’t lock up. That night, Pa doesn’t come home, and she falls asleep waiting for him, wondering if she’ll ever wake up.

In the morning, Kya’s jaw hasn’t locked up, but she still makes her way back to the stream to treat her foot. She does this for the next several days, until it becomes clear that she doesn’t have tetanus. Pa still hasn’t come home, so she survives on Crisco and saltines. Meanwhile, she listens intently each morning for Ma, hoping to hear her in the kitchen, though this never happens. Pa, on the other hand, does come home, and fall turns into winter. Finally, Kya admits once and for all that Ma isn’t coming home, deciding that her true mother will be the marsh.