The Lobster Kings

W
E
’
RE NAMED THE
K
INGS
, and we’re the closest thing to royalty on Loosewood Island. The story goes that when the first of the Kings, Brumfitt Kings, the painter, came to Loosewood Island near on three hundred years ago, the waters were so thick with lobster that Brumfitt only had to sail half of the way from Ireland: he walked the rest of the way, the lobsters making a road with their backs. He was like Jesus walking on the water, except there was no bread to be found anywhere. Lobster there was plenty of. In 1720, the waters were crawling with them in sizes that no man today has seen. To catch his first lobster, Brumfitt didn’t bother with boats or traps or anything more complicated than simply wading into the water at low tide and gaffing a lobster ten or twenty pounds or more. He caught lobsters five feet long. When I was young I heard old men down at the harbour and in the diner talking about how when
their
grandfathers were boys they saw lobster claws nailed to the sides of boathouses, claws big enough to crush a man’s head. The lobsters are smaller now, but they’ve done well for the Kings. Back when I was a girl in school, we were told about how lobsters used to be cheap trash fish for filling bellies,
but it’s hard to believe. Daddy and I both drop pots and haul lines and he’s raised all three of us girls on the money the lobsters bring in. Raised us well enough, too. Carly, the youngest, teaching in Portland for the last few years after Daddy put her through Colby College, hard cash that could have gone to buy a third boat. Rena, the middle daughter, like so many of us living on an island that is claimed by both the U.S. and Canada, taking some schooling on both sides of the border—she started nursing school at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, and finished up as an accountant at the University at Albany, SUNY—and now is married and back to the island, running the fish shop and managing our books, with her husband, Tucker, trained as an architect but working as Daddy’s sternman. And me. The oldest daughter. I went to college, too, and I studied art, but as much as I love to paint, I never wanted to paint anything other than Loosewood Island, never wanted to do anything other than live here and walk the same beaches and paths, painting the same famous landscape that Brumfitt Kings painted, and, girl or not, to head to sea to work like Daddy and his daddy before him, and so on and so forth all the way back to Brumfitt Kings, Kings of the ocean, lobster Kings. I have two sisters, but I’m the one who works the ocean with Daddy, Cordelia Kings, heir to the throne.

Daddy likes to say that you can find both the history and the future of the Kings family in Brumfitt’s paintings. You just have to know where to look. Sometimes I wonder if Brumfitt could have imagined a future with me working the water, if Brumfitt really predicted that a woman would be the next to wear the Kings crown. I said this to Daddy and he laughed and said that Brumfitt painted all of the memories of Loosewood Island, even the ones that hadn’t happened yet, and what I had to do was look at the right paintings. But that’s the problem. At night, when I’m up late worried about the legacy—and the burden—of being a Kings, working my way through Brumfitt’s paintings feels too close to trying to divine my fortune through tea leaves or fortune cookies: I can read things any way that I want. Any future and every
future for the Kings family is laid before me in
The Collected Works of Brumfitt Kings
if I just pick the right paintings in the right order.

Some of my skepticism tonight is the heat that has settled in over the island and chased me out of the house. It’s late, late enough that it’s close to being early, and I’ve given up on the tangled sweat of my sheets. Instead, I’m sitting at the edge of the dock. Trudy, my dog, is pacing behind me. I wish I could explain to her that I’m just restless, sleepless, turned out by the heat, that we’re not heading to the
Kings’ Ransom
to go fishing. I can hear her panting behind me, but I’m forcing myself to look out over the water and watch the heat lightning paint the sky instead of turning around and doing what I really want to do, which is to stare at the crooked elbow of houses that embrace the harbour. There, by the shoulder, is Daddy’s house, the light in his downstairs den left on through the night, and there, near the wrist, is Rena’s house, dark for hours, my sister and her husband and the twins all asleep. There, too, is Kenny’s house. Kenny Treat. My sternman for the last five years, lying in bed with his wife.

Out over the water, the lightning spills in ripples and lines, like a circulatory system drawn in the night, but there isn’t even a lick of thunder, a hint of rain. If I wanted to pick a Brumfitt painting to match the weather, it would be
God’s Wrath
, but
God’s Wrath
wouldn’t do anything to explain the dizzy spells that Daddy’s been having, and
God’s Wrath
wouldn’t tell me what to do about the talk of James Harbor’s drug trade pushing into our waters. And there isn’t a Brumfitt painting in any of the books on my shelves that tells me what I want to hear about Kenny Treat or shows me how to deal with either of my sisters. There’s no Brumfitt Kings painting to chase the heat of this night away from me, no hidden messages in the weather. There’s just me and Trudy, sitting on the dock, just the play of lightning in the sky and the way it’s reflected in the water. But with the lightning—and there, the first push of thunder—I don’t need Brumfitt to know that a storm is coming.

M
y own memories start on a boat. I was small enough that Daddy had cut me down a rod, I think, though it might even just have been a stick with some twine tied to it. Whichever it was, it did the trick: I went to cast my line and I hooked Daddy’s lower lip with my lure. The metal was speared completely through the flesh. Blood spilled out of Daddy’s mouth, the silver dangle of the lure flashing in the sun. I remember that I cried when he yelled at me, but he says that I’ve got the story wrong, that it was the other way around, that he yelled at me
because
I cried, and that sounds about right for my father. He can’t remember why it was just me with him out on the boat, what my sisters were doing—“probably at home with your momma, just waiting for your brother to be born”—but he can remember the weather and the low tide time for every day stretching past more than forty years. He says that was why he married Momma, so he’d have somebody to remember things for him, like birthdays. That’s the only way he talks about my mother anymore, as if she were some sort of prank he pulled.