The Lobster Kings (3 page)

I remember reading the story in the journal—Brumfitt’s handwriting so rushed compared to the lushness of his drawings and paintings—and being thrilled. It seemed romantic to me. Sometimes I imagined myself as Brumfitt’s bride, this queen of the waters, delivering the dowry, the bounty of the sea. Other times I pretended that one day I’d have my own prince wash ashore, that he’d step from the waves to take me in his arms. It was like having my own personal fairy tale.

But what I never thought about as a child was that, like in all fairy tales, the gift came at a cost.

With every blessing there is a curse.

When Brumfitt married, his wife’s dowry was the bounty of the sea, but the price for each and every generation of Kings was this: a son.

M
omma came into her marriage already knowing what it meant to be a lobsterman’s wife. Momma was an only child, her father the last of the Grummans on the island—all the rest had moved to the mainland and were fishing cod and haddock—and she knew Daddy from the time she was old enough to know anybody. She was five years younger, too young to get anything but passing notice until after he came back from Vietnam and realized that little Mary Grumman had grown up into the kind of woman who could have been washed to shore upon a wave nearly three hundred years ago.

But even if she wasn’t directly out of a fairy tale like Brumfitt’s wife, Momma made for a pretty picture as a bride. The photograph of the two of them on their wedding day, which still hangs above the sideboard in the dining room, looks like it could have been painted by Brumfitt: Momma and Daddy standing on the rock beach by the docks, mid-July with the sun washing over Loosewood Island, Momma in an ivory dress handed down from her mother’s wedding, Daddy, a late bloomer, in the dark suit he’d worn to his high school graduation, the sleeves so short that the white of his shirt showed from the forearms down. Daddy’s
facing the camera, his back to the water, but Momma, who is leaning into him, has her body quarter-turned, her gaze on the ocean behind him, like she was already practising for him to be out working the waters, already waiting for him to come home.

People always say that it’s Rena and Carly who remind them of Momma, and that I take after Daddy, a Kings through and through. But at least in that wedding photo, I’m a ringer for her. She looks beautiful in the same way that I’ve turned out sort of beautiful: she’s lean and strong, a rope in the shape of a woman, freckles in the summer and skin that doesn’t fade in the grey months of sleet and ice. Her hair, turned toward red from the sun, is braided and pulled into a crown twist, giving her an elegance that I’ve never mastered. She’s barefoot, which I can tell because she has the hem of her wedding dress snatched up in her hand, keeping it dry from the threat of the waves. She’s smiling so easily that I sometimes wonder if she even knew that she was having her picture taken.

She’s not wearing it in the picture, but for their wedding, Daddy gave her a matched pearl necklace. The same pearl necklace, Daddy claimed, that had been worn by Brumfitt’s bride when she was delivered by the sea. Before I was born, Momma said she used to walk out on the beach in the afternoons, waiting for the first sight of Daddy returning in the
Queen Jane
, and she’d touch the necklace every few minutes to remind herself that he’d be coming home soon.

“I knew,” she said to me, “that as long as I had those pearls on my neck, Daddy would come home. It was a covenant between me and the ocean, between me and Brumfitt. I’d wear the necklace, and Brumfitt would deliver your daddy home to me. But still, some days, when the sky turned ugly, when I could feel the weather hunting the island, I couldn’t breathe until I saw the
Queen Jane
come through the mouth of the harbour. I’d just worry those pearls and pace up and down that beach.”

“How come you stopped?”

Momma laughed at the question. I remember that she laughed,
because it wasn’t something that happened often. Like finding two pearls in one oyster. On some days, getting her to laugh was like finding an entire necklace, matched and strung, in the same shell. “I’ve got kids. I’ve got you three girls. I’ve got Scotty. I don’t have time to walk on the beach and worry about Daddy. Things change.”

They were married three years before Momma got pregnant, and once things changed, they changed fast: four kids in four years, all of us coming out straight and quick, bowling pins lined up just to be knocked down. Me first, and then Rena, Carly, and last of all, Scotty, the boy my father had been waiting for. Daddy worked the boat and Momma worked the house, and that’s the way it worked between them. Not that Daddy wouldn’t pitch in here and there—he was never the kind of man to be squeamish about folding sheets or washing dishes or even changing a diaper—but there’d be months of the year when he’d be gone before dawn and come home after dark, times when it seemed like he’d be gone on his boat for days. He was around more in the summer, when lobsters peeled themselves from their shells and scuttled deeper into the rocks to protect their newly soft flesh, when the industry on the island was tourists, and in the late winter and early spring, when the season was closed or when storms and ice made it so he’d only head to sea a few times a month. But when there was fishing to be had, Daddy was gone.

On the nights when Daddy was working the water late, Momma used to pile the four of us into her bed and sing to us before bedtime. Their marriage bed was small, particularly by today’s standards, but it was sized to fit their headboard, which had been passed down for long enough that it might have belonged to Brumfitt himself. I’m sure that back when it was just a woodstove heating the house, the cold salt winds murdering their way through the slits in the siding, it was good to be snuggled close to your husband or wife in such a small bed. The full-sized mattress was separate from the headboard itself, which was attached to the wall and carved like a shell, the base wide and then cut in
before flaring out and scalloping over the top. Around the edges, scrollwork ivied up and around, meeting at the top in a royal, gold-leafed clamshell. In places, the gold leaf had been worn down almost to wood by the touch of generations of Kings hands. Once Momma had us ready for bed, our teeth brushed, pyjamas on, hair still wet from the bath, she’d turn the lights down low and place Scotty, Rena, Carly, and me underneath the quilts; with the gilded headboard above us, we looked like nothing more than the Kings upon their throne. I remember the way that my sisters and Scotty would snuggle in and wait for her to sing, but I could never seem to get comfortable there; I always wished that I was out on the water with Daddy instead of stuck inside the house.

I know that other mothers read stories to their children, but Momma sang her stories to us: she sang “Mermaids of Dover,” “Tall Ships and Tall Sails,” and “Mulroony Goes Courting,” and we sang along with her; she sang “The Fishgutters,” “The High Wave,” and “MacAuley’s Lament,” and we listened quietly to the high, gentle tides washing over us; she sang “The Boatman,” “Nine Ships for Nine Daughters,” and “The Rocks of Wailing,” and she’d sing those to us in Gaelic, halting here and there to search for a word or a phrase that she couldn’t remember, telling us how her grandmother used to sing to her like that when Momma was no older than we were. She always ended with “Thief of the Ocean”:

I used to think that the king with his head held high meant Brumfitt Kings, and I remember one of the nights when I was eight or nine, all of my siblings had fallen asleep in the dark room, Momma’s voice lulling them under, and I asked her about the song.

“No, honey,” Momma said, as she led me down the hall to my bedroom, “it’s not the Kings, just a king. Any king.” She left Scotty, Rena, and Carly in her bed, for Daddy to carry to their own rooms when he got home from pulling traps. “The Thief of the Ocean isn’t Brumfitt, it isn’t Daddy, it isn’t even Scotty. It’s any man or boy who works the sea.”

“Or girl,” I snapped. I was ferocious at times with Momma. I had to be, to stay out of her grip. Even with Daddy pushing for it, saying that if I wanted to be out on the boat then I belonged out on the boat, she resisted. Oh, but Scotty belonged out there, she said. Momma sent him out on the
Queen Jane
when he was four, five, six, even though he would have been just as happy at home with Rena and Carly, up in aprons and mixing flour and eggs. When it came to me, I had to claw my way out of the house, had to fight for my birthright as a Kings.

Momma didn’t answer me, but she didn’t kiss me on the forehead when she tucked me in, either. As she stood up, however, I realized that I had another question. “What happens if the ocean catches you?” I said.

She took a breath to stay even, a sign I recognized to mean that she was ready for me to go to bed. On the nights when my father was not in the house, she did not have much left that she was willing to suffer by the time Carly, Rena, and Scotty were asleep. “If the ocean catches you … what?”

“If the ocean catches you stealing,” I said. “Does it steal you back?”

She stood straight and looked down at me. Her carriage was erect, like she practised walking with a cup of water balanced on her head, but she let her fingers drift to the pearls around her neck during the moment of time it took her to answer me. “Hush, dear. Time for sleep,” she said. “That’s enough from you.” As she lingered by the light switch, it felt like there was something she was waiting to say, but then she turned. Before I heard her feet on the stairs I was sitting up in bed and calling to her. I could hear how frantic my own voice sounded, but when she came back in,
I couldn’t think of why it was I needed her back, so I asked for a glass of water.

She touched my arm and then reached onto my nightstand and picked up the glass of water that was already waiting there. “Cordelia, do you know what my grandmother used to say to me?” I shook my head and took a sip of the water. It didn’t feel like enough somehow, to simply sip at it, so I took few great gulps and then had to cough. Momma took the glass out of my hand and put it back on the nightstand.
“Is i mhàthair bhrisg a nì ’n nighean leisg
, which means, An active mother makes for a lazy daughter,” she said, but in a voice that made me know that she didn’t mind. She gently pushed me onto my back and brought the blanket up to my shoulders before leaning low and letting her lips linger on my forehead. I remember how safe, how warm, how dry I was, how there are moments of childhood that feel brief but last forever.

I slipped my hand out and wrapped it around the back of her neck, feeling the pearls rolling under my fingertips. “I’m sorry, Momma,” I whispered.

“Well,” she said, “maybe you can just look next time, to see if there’s already a glass of water waiting for you.”

I could feel her lips moving against my forehead as she spoke, but I didn’t bother to correct her. I wasn’t apologizing for calling her back to me, and I wasn’t even apologizing for the way that I’d gotten sharp with her when I’d said that a girl could be the thief of the ocean. I was apologizing because I knew that I had no choice: girl or not, I had the blood of the Kings ebbing and flowing through my body. Nothing could stop me from getting on a boat. I was born to it.

B
rumfitt Kings wrote in his journal about seeing a mermaid, but his mermaid wasn’t something gentle out of a cartoon. She was pale and the fish part didn’t end neatly at the waist; scales climbed the mermaid’s body up to her shoulders, her eyes bulged, and her face flattened like a fish’s. When he reached for her, she showed teeth that made her look more shark than woman, snapping at his hand and drawing blood from one of Brumfitt’s fingertips. Brumfitt wrote that he stayed away from the water for nearly a week after seeing her. Daddy said that Brumfitt shouldn’t have been scared. His wife came from the sea, after all—which meant, I guess, that all his descendants have fish blood running through our veins—and that should have afforded him some protection from what he saw.