The Lobster Kings (2 page)

We weren’t out in Daddy’s lobster boat, the
Queen Jane
. I remember that, too. The boat was small, a skiff or something
borrowed, and my feet got wet from water in the bottom of the boat. I remember being cold, but there again my father says I’m remembering wrong. It was the beginning of June, he said, the week before Scotty was born, and hot in a way that comes as a surprise any day on Loosewood Island, but particularly that early in the summer. It makes sense that it was June, when the lobsters are busy tucking themselves into rocks and growing new shells. Loosewood Island has its own particularities with the lobstering season, and there’s a moratorium on catching lobsters from June through the middle of August. It’s different in different places, but that’s the calendar we work by. So my father would have just been maintaining traps, fixing up the
Queen Jane
. Plenty of downtime ahead of him, enough time to take me out fishing.

He cut my line with the knife he always kept clipped to his belt—or to his slickers when he was working—and he told me to quit crying, his voice now soft and calm, the lure hanging bloody from his lip. I put my fishing pole down on the bottom of the boat, snuffled, and wiped at my nose with my sleeve. He worked at the hook for a little, trying to see if he could thread it back out the way it had come, but he had been hooked cleanly, the barb pushing up and all the way through. The fishing line flossed in the soft breeze like a streamer. “You’ve caught yourself a whopper, darling,” he said to me. The hook in his lip turned his words into a bloody mumble, and he gave me a smile that made the lure jiggle in the sun. The spoon of the lure flashed at me. I had a magpie moment, wanting just to grab at the shininess of the metal, but I kept my hands down. He pulled out the tackle box and rooted around in it, calmly and slowly, as if he didn’t have my hook stuck full through him. The blood flowed, drip, drip, dripping down his chin and onto the floor of the boat. It mixed in with the seawater that had been wetting my feet, clouding out, diluted and strange. He took out a pair of pliers and said, “This will serve.”

He pulled his lip gently and nestled the pliers against the hook. For a second I thought he meant to just yank it, ripping out the flesh, and if I hadn’t been so afraid, I would have started crying again. Instead, he used the wire cutters on the pliers to snap
through the hook. He moved the lure away and then worked out the small piece of hook that still hung in his lip, holding on to the barbed end with his fingers and drawing the sheared end out of the flesh. As soon as he pulled the metal out, the blood welled up stronger and started to pour down his chin. Still, he was careful to put the lure and the sharp spear of the cut hook into the tackle box so that nobody would accidently step on it—the same sort of careful consideration of future actions and calamities that served him well as a lobster boat captain—before he pulled off his shirt and wadded it up as a bandage, pressing it against his lip.

“We’d best head in, darling,” he said to me. “I wouldn’t mind getting this cleaned up, see if I need a stitch or two. Besides, it’s getting late enough that your momma will be looking for us. Looking for me, really, to give her a hand with your sisters. And who knows,” he said, giving me a wink, “maybe the baby is on its way.”

That memory, of hooking Daddy, blurs with my memory of meeting my baby brother, but I know they were two separate events. It would have been a week or so after the fishing trip that Scotty came home from the hospital. The thin, ugly stitches knotted on Daddy’s lip were only partly disguised by the growth of his beard. I remember standing on the deck of the
Queen Jane
and getting my first look at my baby brother. It doesn’t make sense to me now—why wouldn’t Momma have been there with the baby?—but at the time it felt normal to be out on the
Queen Jane
without Momma, without my sisters. I’m sure there was nobody else on the boat, I’m sure it was just Daddy, my brother, and me.

Daddy sat in the captain’s chair, cradling the baby. Scotty was crying, the sort of mewl that comes from newborns, and I thought,
He doesn’t like it here, doesn’t like it on the boat, doesn’t like it on the water
. I understood right at that moment that he was just like my sisters: Scotty didn’t belong on the
Queen Jane
any more than they did. As I had that realization, Daddy scooped me up and into his lap, and I thought,
Daddy sees it too
. I remember what it felt like to burrow against him, to be looking down at Scotty, the surge of pleasure at the understanding that I thought I shared with Daddy, the belief that I was the one who was meant to be
out on the water with him. Daddy was a loving father, but he was certainly not a cuddly one, and to be on his lap was a privilege rarely afforded. I felt like a commoner sitting on the throne.

But as Scotty kept crying, Daddy looked at me and then nodded at Scotty and said, “Here, look at him, Cordelia. This is your brother. Look at him, because he carries with him the weight of our history, the lineage of the Kings family.”

Even though I know that I can’t actually remember the words with such exactitude, that I was only three and a half when Scotty was born, that those words wouldn’t have made any real sense to me at the time, I can still hear every word that Daddy said. “Look at him,” he said. “Look at this little boy, Cordelia, because he is both our past and our future, and there is going to be a day when he takes over the family business, when he is out on the water, when Scotty Kings is going to be the king of Loosewood Island.” He leaned over and kissed me on the head then and asked me if I wanted to hold Scotty. I nodded, but I didn’t really want to hold him. He was just a baby, I thought, small and loud and deserving of nothing, and Daddy had already decided to give him what I knew to be my birthright as the firstborn, girl or not: as much as I could feel Daddy’s arms around me, holding me on his lap and holding Scotty steady, I could also feel something else, could feel with a certainty as loud as Scotty’s increased cries, that this was not a boy who was born to rule the sea.

And I remember this, too, though I know it can’t have been real: Daddy standing up, stepping over the edge of the boat, and walking across the water to the shore, with me and Scotty in his arms, walking across the top of the ocean, taking me home to Momma, Rena, and Carly. I remember the way he cradled me, like I was still a baby, even with Scotty in my arms, and I remember that there was part of me that wanted to close my eyes and let it be a dream. Instead of closing my eyes, however, I looked down at Daddy’s feet leaving ripples on the surface of the ocean, and then out to the rocks and the shore of Loosewood Island, as he carried me across the water.

T
he wife of Brumfitt Kings, first of the Kings, was a miracle. Brumfitt was Scots-Irish, and when he crossed the ocean and ended up on Loosewood Island, he saw birds he knew: gulls and terns, eider ducks and cormorants. Gannets, with their vast expanse of wings diving from a hundred feet above the waves, striking into the water and emerging with fish that no other bird could scoop. And there were other birds as well. He described these birds in his journals, sketched out some of them with the loose attention to detail that art historians have lauded him for, but these birds are such that I’ve never seen around Loosewood Island and that I have never been able to find in books. I go back and forth between thinking Brumfitt was fanciful and believing that there is some truth to his sketches.

He left a dozen of his journals, leather-bound books filled with his crimped and spidered writing, his delicately shaded drawings of fish and bird and lobster, and they are the first records we have of the Kings. Most of the Brumfitt things that we own—two paintings, sketches, an unfinished canvas, knickknacks from his personal life—are on loan to museums, but Daddy has kept the journals at home. Every year or two an academic writes Daddy a
letter asking for permission to come to the island to spend time looking over the journals. Mostly, art historians and academics are interested in the later books, eight through twelve, which read to me more like ledgers. Those are the journals that Brumfitt kept after he married and had his two sons. Occasionally there is a study for a painting that I recognize, but they are mostly lists and records of catches, purchases, the weather, and the few odd drawings of plants and fish. They have notes on mixing paints, studies of birds and fish and the coastline, the day-to-day drudgery of surviving on Loosewood Island, his household finances, lists of repairs or building projects to be undertaken. I’ve always been more interested in the first seven journals, however, since they show Loosewood Island as Brumfitt first found it, first imagined it, and as a girl I spent a lot of time curled up in a chair by the window reading through the journals, deciphering Brumfitt’s tortured spellings, trying to piece together sentences that didn’t connect or never finished.

At the end of the seventh journal—his last entry before moving on to the eighth journal a half year later, when his focus shifted to the detritus of life—Brumfitt writes about how he met his wife. Scholars have claimed that she was a native woman from one of the local tribes, though there is debate over which tribe: Micmac, Abenaki, Malecite, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, or Beothuk. I find it hard to believe that Brumfitt married any native woman, however. The idea seems almost as far-fetched as Brumfitt’s own story, because about that time the indigenous population was—with reasonable cause—hell-bent on wiping out the white men who’d come to their shores. No, according to the journal, his wife was neither a white woman nor an Indian, but rather a gift from the sea.

Brumfitt had been on Loosewood Island for eight years by the time he married. When the boats had started coming, they’d fished out the season and then crossed back over the ocean, the men returning home with the salted and dried cod, but after a while the companies realized they could do better if they left
someone behind to keep the drying racks together, to keep a permanent encampment for the benefit of all the other men who fished. Brumfitt volunteered, and that first year he was the only man left behind. He seemed to thrive on the isolation of Loosewood Island. He spent a few hours a day seeing to company business, cooking, cutting firewood, or doing other chores of survival, and the rest of his time drawing. This went on for three years. During the season he worked the waters and he worked the shore, and as the boats left when the season was done, he waved them off. After the third year, a handful of other men stayed behind, and the year after that, those men fetched wives from England or Ireland and began to start families among the hardness of the new country.

After eight years on Loosewood Island, Brumfitt found himself surrounded by husbands and wives and children but still living alone. According to the journal, he went out one night to the edge of the island to draw by the glow of the emptiness of the sky, and he found himself, unexpectedly, crying. He realized that the island itself was not enough for him: he had want of a wife.

The night was clear and calm, with the stars and the moon making the soft lapping of the waves into pulses of light, but as he cried, a thin mist started drifting down from the sky. Then, with a crackle like ice breaking, the water suddenly flattened and then seemed to pull away from the island, leaving rocks that were normally just skimming above the ocean bare and dry, crabs and starfish recoiling at the sudden air. Brumfitt peered through the mist and walked toward where the memory of the ocean marked the land, and he looked out toward where the water stopped. And the water did stop, according to Brumfitt’s journals. It was not simply that the tide had receded, but rather like something great and mighty had erected a wall of glass that held back the sea. The water lay absolutely still and flat on its surface, no sense of wind or waves. Then, from the flush of the moon, from the pinpricks of the stars, Brumfitt saw something roiling and bubbling out near the Sea Clift Rocks. The mist dropped out of the sky the same
way that a silk scarf drops from a lover’s balcony, leaving the night clear until, Brumfitt wrote, the roiling water suddenly sprayed into the air like a whale was clearing its blowhole.

And then he saw her, he saw his wife.

A miracle.

She rose inside the spray of water. Her eyes were open and fixed upon him, like she knew he was waiting.

The invisible hand holding back the ocean opened its fingers, letting go, and the water rolled back toward him, the first waves pushing over his ankles and soaking his feet, but he barely noticed, so intent was he on the woman gliding toward him. It was not that the woman herself moved, Brumfitt wrote in his journal, but rather that she was carried. He wrote it both ways, that she stood and that she sat—she sat upon a throne, she stood upon a chariot—but either way, she was carried on the waves, the seawater still dripping off of her. She was wearing a dress made of oyster shells and coral, a necklace of pearls, and she was delivered into his arms with a dowry.

The dowry was this: if Brumfitt married her, his children, and his children’s children to each and every generation, would carry a blessing: the bounty of the sea.