Read The Psalmist for Free Online

largely undeveloped place with three thriving industries—­fishing, farming, and tourism—­and two incorporated towns—­Tidewater and the simply named, more traditional old town of Bay. In summer, tourists packed the quaint streets of Tidewater, once a fishing village, now an enclave of Victorian-­style homes, souvenir and curiosity shops, dockside crab and oyster restaurants, and seafood packing plants.
    Luke’s parents first brought him to Tidewater as an impressionable eight-­year-­old, and he had been instantly charmed: the breezy bay views and seafood smells, the wood-­planked waterfront, the working harbor, and, especially, the generosity and fetching backwoods accents of the locals—­which he’d later determined were a blend of Old South and English brogue. He and his parents had taken a skipjack ride into the windy Chesapeake that morning, then wandered Main Street much of the afternoon, exploring the shops and sampling the seafood. Finally they’d discovered the commercial docks, where crabs and oysters were picked and packed, and watched as a crew unloaded fifteen bushels of oysters onto giant stainless-­steel pans.
    Luke’s parents were travelers who’d nurtured in him a capacity for wonder and a healthy sense of curiosity. When he was a boy, they’d taken him to remarkable places—­Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Niagara Falls, Mt. Rushmore—­as if wanting to impress upon him how large and enchanting the country really was. As an adolescent, though, he often turned his curiosity inward, and pondered his own heritage.
    He’d always been told that his father’s family was Irish and French, his mother’s Eastern European. But he didn’t look much like either parent, or, for that matter, their relatives or ancestors. His mother and father were both short, with strong features and darkish skin. When Luke was fifteen, lean and still growing, he stood two inches taller than his father, three and half inches taller than his mother. Eventually he’d tower over his mother by nearly a foot. Both parents were brown-­eyed, although there had been blue eyes on his mother’s side, they told him. “That’s where your blue eyes come from,” she used to say. But since the photographs she showed him were always black and white, it was hard to tell. Luke’s father had begun to lose his hair in his early twenties, whereas Luke had thick hair—­“unruly,” a barber once called it—­and it was an odd color, a dark and light-­blond mixture; “surfer hair,” according to Charlotte.
    By the time he entered high school, Luke was all but certain that his parents’ stories about where he came from had been no more genuine than their tales about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Coincidentally, it seemed, when he was sixteen his parents called him to the family room on a Saturday morning and confessed the truth, with lowered eyes and a tone of gravity. His father began with an oddly constructed sentence that Luke still remembered with great affection: “As you may have guessed by now, Luke, we have something to tell you.” The fact that he’d been adopted didn’t cause him to love his parents any less; it was the opposite—­ recognizing how much they had wanted to be his real parents and, in their way, how much they had been, he loved them more. The fact that his parents had brought him, as a wide-­eyed eight-­year-­old, to these briny, seafood-­scented streets of Tidewater County made it feel like home to him years later when he returned with Charlotte.
    At the Gas ’N Bait in town—­which sold everything from apples to ammunition to hangover remedies—­Billy Banfield, a genial, obese man, came lumbering out as soon as Luke pulled in.
    â€œHey there, Pastor, what d’you say?” He pretended to be checking a pump on the next island.