The Lobster Kings (28 page)

“Like you’ll give me an honest report?” I said, but he had a point.

The first day Daddy and George were gone, things out on the water with Stephanie went smoothly enough. Or, as smoothly as could be expected. She and Kenny were stepping on each other some at first, like two drunks both trying to lead on the dance floor. Even though we fished limited lines off Loosewood, running one hundred and fifty of my traps and one hundred and fifty of Daddy’s together was a grind, and I was trying to keep things going double-time. I was sure it was the same on Tucker’s boat, made worse by him still getting used to being a captain. At least the fellows working behind him didn’t make things harder for Tucker: both Matt and Colin knew what they were doing as sternmen. On the
Kings’ Ransom
, I kept sneaking looks back to see how Stephanie was faring. She wasn’t as efficient as Kenny, which didn’t surprise me, since he had a decade on the water against her three weeks, but she wasn’t as bad as she could have been. For Kenny, pulling a lobster, slapping the gauge against the back, and banding or dropping it in the water depending on the size, seemed like a seamless action. He didn’t even bother measuring some of the lobsters. He
didn’t need to; his eye had gotten good enough that it was obvious in many of the cases that it was a short or oversized, or, even better, that it was a keeper, a lobster we could sell. There was no wasted movement on him. Stephanie made up for all of her wasted movement with enthusiasm. The girl had a motor that didn’t seem to quit. She had gotten strong, stronger than I would have expected in such a short time, and she handled the traps with no hesitation.

All morning Kenny and Stephanie kept bumping into each other. Stephanie stumbling over Kenny’s feet and taking a spill on the deck. Kenny turning and accidently swinging a lobster trap into Stephanie’s back. I kept Trudy with me in the cabin, afraid that she would get stepped on. Sometime after lunch, however, they settled into a rhythm, and we finished fishing my line only an hour later than we would have if it were just Kenny and me on a normal day. As Stephanie pushed the last pair of traps into the water, Kenny saw me glancing at my watch and then the sky.

“What you say, boss?”

“I say beer and burgers.”

He grinned at me, and I realized that he had given me the up-and-down, and when I grinned back at him I was unable to stop the hot flush that spread across my face. For a moment the sensation of heat came so strong that I thought the sun was falling from the sky toward me. And then he looked away and clapped Stephanie on the shoulder as she straightened up.

“Calling it a day, Stephie.”

“Seriously? What about Woody’s traps?” She pulled off her baseball cap and pushed back some of her hair that had worked loose of her ponytail.

“Yeah, seriously, Stephanie. I’m calling it a day. It’s not the way I like to do it, but I don’t see us pulling Daddy’s traps today. You guys have started working real well together”—she couldn’t stop herself from smiling—“but I’d rather just pull Daddy’s whole line tomorrow than do a portion tonight.”

“Sounds good to me,” Kenny said, peeling off his gloves and rubbing at his face.

“I’ll give Carly the heads-up, have her meet us there,” I said, thinking that it would serve as yet another peace offering. I picked up the radio. It wasn’t Carly who came back at me, however, but Etsuko.

“How you feeling, Etsuko?”

“Okay, Cordelia,” she said.

“Just okay, Etsuko?” I said back. She and Timmy planned to decamp for the mainland at the end of the week. She was close enough to her due date that she was going to live with Timmy’s aunt in Saint John until the baby came. The boys had already divvied up taking care of his traps while Etsuko and Timmy were gone, splitting his line into chunks of twenty-five traps, so that nobody had too much extra to do. That was one of the perks of living on a small island like Loosewood. Everybody might be in your business, but when your business needed taking care of, everybody helped.

“My back’s still sore,” she said. Even complaining, her voice sounded sweet, like a promise of the new family she was about to have, and I wondered if, in a few weeks, when she had her baby, she’d leave me behind as a friend. The Old Maid and the Sea. “But I rang over at Carly’s, and she said she’ll meet you all at the Fish House.”

“You and Timmy want to join us?” I asked, and as I said it, I saw Tucker’s boat tied off to the dock. My brother-in-law and his two sternmen were scuttling over the decks. I decided I’d invite Tucker and Rena, too. Another peace offering, even if Rena and I weren’t at war.

B
rumfitt worked the fishing boats his entire life, but from the day his wife washed ashore, he never set foot on dry land anywhere except for Loosewood Island. He’s buried up in the cemetery, same as his oldest son, the one who drowned as a boy, same as his other son, who lived into adulthood and from whom I can trace my line, same as Brumfitt’s four daughters, same as my daddy’s daddy and momma, same as my own momma, same as Scotty. But Brumfitt’s wife isn’t buried there.

She was given to Brumfitt by the sea, or at least that’s how the story goes, and most people here think that she returned to the sea once Brumfitt died. I’ve heard a lot of times that she was a selkie. A selkie is a sort of shape-shifter: a seal in the water, a human on land. Some of the selkie stories are just about mischief, particularly the stories about the male selkies, who were supposed to be something fancy and cunning come to shore to seduce young women, but the stories about the female selkies are usually about romance. If a fisherman takes a selkie’s sealskin while she’s in human form, she’s bound to marry, trapped ashore until she steals the skin back. But sometimes those trapped selkies fall in love with their fishermen husbands and regret returning to the sea, and that’s where
the myths become romance, because once a selkie returns to the ocean she is only allowed to return to shore for a short time, and even then only once every seven years.

Seven years. A long time to be waiting for someone you love, but at least in those stories the love is returned.

I’ve always been fascinated with Brumfitt’s wife, selkie or not. Even though every woman in Brumfitt’s painting wasn’t the same, they actually
were
the same: he painted his wife in every woman he painted. In one painting, she’s standing on a rock, her dress bunched about her and held by one hand in an attempt to keep it out of the spray from the ocean. The location is one that Daddy and I walk out to sometimes on our days off. It’s on the back of the island. At low tide, the rock is part of a spit of land that reaches out into the ocean, but for a short while, at high tide, it is a small island peeking above the sea, no larger than a dining room table. For Brumfitt’s wife to actually be standing on the rock pictured, she’d either have had to position herself there an hour early, allowing herself to be marooned by the rising water, or she would have had to get her feet wet, and risk falling, walking across the barely submerged path that connected the highest part of the rock to the Island. Unless, of course, she really was a selkie, and then she could have just swum. Either way, in the painting there’s a rime of frost on the edges of the rock, and her position is precarious. The waves aren’t hitting with the force of a storm—it’s relatively calm for February—but there is still the thrash of water boiling below her, sending a spray that would have left her wet and should have made her miserable. She’s turned in three-quarter profile, her back to the open ocean, and she has a piece of a smile, a sort of crooked, half-thought of happiness.

In other paintings, Brumfitt’s wife hovers in the background.
Self-portrait, with Family
, features Brumfitt seated on a chair on the dock, his younger son and four daughters seated around him. There is an awkward space in the grouping of Brumfitt and his children, where X-rays of the painting show he covered over his oldest son, who drowned in the winter before the painting was
finished. Standing directly behind him, straight and tall above the seated Brumfitt and the children, who were reclining on the dock, his wife has her hand on his shoulder, but again, she is looking away. This time, she is turned even more, looking out over the sea. When I stare at that painting I am always convinced that if we could see what happened immediately afterward, we’d see his wife finish turning, see her run toward the edge of the dock and launch herself into the water, changing into a seal while in flight.

My favourite picture of Brumfitt’s wife is probably
Marriage Bed
. It’s dated from the first year of their marriage. Brumfitt’s wife’s hair is splayed down her naked back, the sheets billowing and creased around her lower body, leaving an amorphous shape below her waist that Daddy thinks looks like a mermaid’s tail. I’m not sure that I agree with Daddy, but there is something else in the picture that makes me think of the selkie myth instead: pushed partially under the table is a stool, and on the stool is what appears to be a coat made of sealskin. Maybe Brumfitt stole her skin, but loved her enough to offer it back. And maybe she loved him enough that she didn’t take it up, loved him enough that she refused the gift of her skin returned, loved him enough that she let him keep her skin, let him keep her bound to Loosewood Island, bound to Brumfitt Kings.

I
’d prepped Kenny and Stephanie on making an early go of it the next morning so that we could pull all of Daddy’s traps and then get started on mine again before the end of the day, figuring that would work to get both lines pulled twice in three days, not a bad turn for the
Kings’ Ransom
. Still, I got out of the house a few minutes later than I intended, closer to five-fifteen than five, and Kenny was already waiting in the backyard. The weather had turned, and the air hung low and wet, a thick, soupy fog. The two of us walked down to the docks together. Trudy trotted ahead of us, a ghost dog in the mist. There was something in Trudy’s step that made her seem like she was inordinately happy with herself. We were three-quarters of the way down the dock when Stephanie, who was standing next to where I’d tied off the skiff, appeared out of the fog.

“Tucker and his boys just left. Making us look lazy, I guess,” she said, and then stifled a yawn. “Jesus. How long is it going to take me to get used to waking up this early?” She yawned again and then waved at the fog. “Are we seriously going to work in this disaster? You can’t see anything.” Trudy sniffed Stephanie’s
crotch and then lay down on the dock. Stephanie toed at the dog. “Even Trudy thinks we should just lay low.”

I hesitated for a second. I didn’t actually want to go out in this kind of fog. We’d be moving slow and I’d be relying entirely on the instruments for getting us around. I could do it, but I preferred navigating by the visual landmarks that I knew. I could call it off, but the weather service was forecasting rain and waves starting the next day, which would slow us down, and I was already feeling like maybe I’d made the wrong decision yesterday to leave Daddy’s traps an extra day instead of working into the darkness. He would’ve stayed out and pulled my line if the situations were reversed. I didn’t want him coming back tomorrow in bad weather to find out that I hadn’t pulled his traps either of the days. But still, the fog was thick enough that I couldn’t see any of the boats moored in the bay, and even rowing the skiff out would be a bit of an adventure. I was just starting to think that his line could wait until tomorrow, that it wouldn’t be that bad for his traps to spend another day in the water until the rain and wind cleared off the fog, when Stephanie said, “Shouldn’t we just stay onshore today?”

I could hear a few other voices on the dock, the low hum of a diesel motor kicking on in the harbour, but it was quiet for fishing season. Clearly, most of the boys had decided to take the day off, but not all of them. Kenny glanced at me. I knew I didn’t have to prove anything to him, and certainly not to Stephanie, but it felt like she was challenging me. Maybe it was because I was tired or because I liked being out on the boat with Kenny, and maybe it was because there was suddenly another woman on the water when before it had only been me, but I hardened at her question.