The Lobster Kings (38 page)

I was running slow, trying to time things so that we could go right to the cemetery without having to wait, and I realized that up ahead, past the last of Timmy’s buoys, the colours floating in the water were all wrong. Yellow with a triple ring of sky-blue and a band of green. James fucking Harbor. There wasn’t a single one of Daddy’s buoys left. Whoever it was had cut every single one loose. They’d erased any sign that Daddy had ever been here, that he’d been fishing these waters for nearly forty years, that our family had been pulling lobsters from this patch of ocean for three centuries. I turned to call for my sisters, but when I did, I saw that they hadn’t even noticed.

Rena had spent the entire trip with her back to me, leaning against the washboard and looking back at where we came from, as if she wanted to wait as long as possible before seeing Loosewood Island. She looked oddly beautiful like that, in her
mourning clothes, her hair fluttering in the breeze. The previous afternoon, after we’d taken care of choosing caskets for Daddy and Tucker, I’d left Rena and Carly at the hotel and gone to a department store to buy clothes for the funeral: three black dresses, three pairs of black tights, three pairs of flats, three black peacoats. Even given the circumstances, I hadn’t just been able to buy clothing that we’d throw away, and the coat cut a flattering silhouette for Rena now. Carly was standing behind Rena and leaning against her, the two of them a bulkhead against the grief that we were carrying.

And as we moved past the James Harbor buoys, as angry as I was, and as much as I wanted to cut the traps loose, I didn’t have it in me to stir my sisters. Instead, I kept us moving. As we rounded the point of the island and I got my first view of the harbour, whatever thoughts I had of that burst of invading colours were wiped away by the assembly of boats.

I knew that people would turn out for the funeral, but I hadn’t expected this.

The entire harbour was choked with boats.

I sucked in heavy mouthfuls of air, like I’d been gut-punched. It was physically imposing, the sheer heft of it. There were three hundred, four hundred, five hundred boats. The sun glinted off antennas; the water was covered in fiberglass and wood, every inch of space marked by lobster boats, sailboats, motorboats, larger fishing vessels. There were boats anchored out past where we kept mooring buoys for the island’s fleet, and I saw a stream of skiffs headed to the land. The ferry was docked, and the only open water was a path that had been left for me to bring the
Kings’ Ransom
up to the wharf. I slowed down the boat and felt a hand on my waist.

“Jesus,” Carly said. “They’ve come out in force for Daddy, haven’t they?” I felt Rena’s weight on my other side. “And Tucker,” Carly added.

“No,” Rena said. “They’re here for Daddy. Some of them, the ones who knew him, are here for Tucker, too, but they’re here for Daddy. The whole of them.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, and I realized that I was crying.

The dock was a tangle of men and women. As we came in to the space that had been left open for us, I started being able to pick people out. Some of them were obvious—George and Mackie standing with Guppy and Fatty, Stephanie in a modest black dress and blue trench coat, Kenny wearing a dark suit—and others were men and women I hadn’t seen in years, people who’d moved off-island, or who lived in Boston, Montreal, and Halifax, Northport and James Harbor and Calais. The crowd stretched thick down the length of the docks, ran up the road, spilled onto lawns and in front of businesses. There wasn’t enough land on the island for the greatness of all of it. Every piece of space was filled with suits and dark dresses.

As I came to the dock I realized that every single one of those people had stopped what they were doing, stopped talking, and turned to face us. I brought the
Kings’ Ransom
in so softly that I couldn’t even tell when we’d stopped moving entirely. Chip and Tony Warner grabbed her and tied her off to the dock and I shut off the motor.

The quiet of a couple of thousand people is something different. Off to the side, in a crowd of fishermen I thought I recognized from Lubec, a man moved to take off his hat, but otherwise the crowd was still. There were no words. There was the brush of the water against the pilings of the docks, calls from the gulls circling above. There was the hush of suit coats and leather shoes, a woman coughing, a child crying out of sight. George reached out his hand to Rena, and she stepped onto shore. She let Fatty and Guppy wrap their arms around her, putting a hand on each of her children’s heads. Carly stepped her way up and over and slipped her hand into Stephanie’s. I turned and looked at the coffins.

Rena had pinned my hair back that morning, and I touched it to make sure it was still up. I felt the sweet relief of the ache from where I’d gotten the stitches. Even though the seas had been calm, the coffins had been strapped down to the deck so that they wouldn’t shift. I started trying to untie the knot on Tucker’s coffin,
fumbling with one good hand and a broken wrist. I could feel the weight of the crowd waiting for me, and it seemed like I was there forever working at the knot.

And then I felt Kenny’s hand covering mine. I felt it before I saw it, before I heard him say, “I’m here.” He reached out with his other hand so that he had both of them covering mine. It felt odd where his skin touched against the seam between my skin and the cast on my wrist. He bent over and his tie swung out. “Here,” he said again. “I’ll get it, Cordelia. Let me do it for you.”

I let my left hand swing away, but he didn’t push at my right hand. He left it on the knot and worked at the rope along with me. I could feel the knot loosening beneath our fingers, could feel the way that a line comes to obedience, can be melted into slackness by somebody who knows how to touch it properly. He slipped the end of the rope out of its embrace and then moved to the second line on Tucker’s coffin, leaving me standing at the other end. He didn’t look up as he untied that knot, moving from there to Daddy’s coffin. I left the line uncoiled on the deck of the boat.

When Kenny finished, he walked over to me and took my arm. We stepped into the cabin and watched as a party of men came on board, men I’d grown up with, men I’d fished with, men who defined my idea of Loosewood Island, men now placing themselves on the edges of Daddy’s coffin and Tucker’s coffin. The men lifted the handles and turned the coffins, marching them to the edge of the boat and then passing them up to the men on the dock. Once they had all disembarked, they took their places as pallbearers again.

“Wait.” The sound of my own voice startled me, and I called out again. “Wait,” I said, and I scrambled over the edge of the
Kings’ Ransom
and onto the dock. I walked over to Daddy’s coffin and touched Paul Paragopolis on the shoulder. “Do you mind?” I said. Paul shook his head lightly and let me slip in among the pallbearers, taking his place from him. There were eight pallbearers, but the coffin felt almost unbearably heavy as the weight settled on my right arm. Maybe I was just tired, I thought, but I
suddenly wondered if I would be able to carry Daddy’s coffin as far as the cemetery. Then, behind me, I heard a few low words, and felt a shifting.

“I’m right behind you, girl,” George said quietly. He said it quietly enough that, despite the quiet of the men and women lining the street, I was the only one who could hear him. “I’m here, and I’ll walk with you, okay, Cordelia?”

I turned my head enough that he could see me nod, see the small smile I gave him, and I hoped he understood how reassuring it was to have him behind me. George Sweeney might have been the strongest man I’ve ever met. He was gentle, but he was a big man, thick with work, and I remembered a time when I was a child when I saw him haul two wooden traps from the water, one in each hand, the wood dripping from the sea, full of lobsters and weighted by bricks, and it looking like nothing to George. And then, when I turned my head forward again, I saw that Kenny had taken the place of the man in front of me, and in front of Kenny, Timmy Green had stepped in, Etsuko beside him, holding their baby. On the other side of the coffin, Chip and Tony Warner, Tucker’s sternman, Colin O’Connor, and George’s sternman, Matty Frieze. And though Daddy’s coffin didn’t feel any lighter, I knew I could carry it.

The silent mourners, packed tight along the road, made a corridor for us to pass through: Tucker’s coffin, Daddy’s coffin, Rena and Fatty and Guppy, Carly and Stephanie. I could feel people closing in behind us. There was no talking, and I could hear the sound of footsteps, of rustling clothing. We walked past the Grumman Fish House like that, past Swedie’s General, past the Brumfitt Kings Museum, past the Five and Five, past Rena’s house, past Daddy’s house, past the park and the elementary school, past the bench where Brumfitt tourists liked to sketch the harbour, and into the cemetery, where there were two holes waiting in the earth.

S
tone Marker
is a self-portrait, of sorts. It’s not a traditional self-portrait, but there’s no question to me that the man in the painting, whom you only see from behind, is Brumfitt. The cemetery has changed a lot since 1774, but it’s also stayed the same, and it’s easy to find Brumfitt’s grave. Mostly, the cemetery has gotten bigger, but it’s still in the same place. It’s bordered by houses now, and the island put a low metal fence around it sometime before the Second World War, but it still sits on the hummock, still has a clear view out over the water and the harbour. Plenty of islanders with people on the mainland, which is to say, everyone, end up making their dirt beds off the island, but the Kings have always been buried on the rock. Back when Brumfitt painted
Stone Marker
, however, there were only a few Kings in the ground.

Not all of the gravestones in the painting have survived, but enough have that, with a reproduction in hand, you can figure out that the man in the painting is working on what became Brumfitt’s gravestone. Though you only see his back, you can tell by the way he’s bent over, by the curve of his arm, by the thin grey hair hanging from his head, that it won’t be long until
the cemetery isn’t a place he just comes as a guest. It’s hard to see much of what he’s carving into the rock. He’s got a chisel pressed against the marker, a hammer in his other hand, and there’s a small girl, maybe seven or eight years old, standing next to him and working as an assistant.

I suppose you could argue that the man in the painting is supposed to be somebody other than Brumfitt, but when you stand in front of Brumfitt’s grave, when you rub your fingers on the carved letters in the rock, it’s hard to believe it could have been anybody else.

Instead of catching the gravestone so that the painting included the water, Brumfitt focuses on the spread of the cemetery, and he positions the man, the girl, and the gravestone in the lower left of the painting, so that the majority of the canvas is grass and rock and trees, showing the empty space that would come to be inexorably filled by bodies, the empty space that would come to be marked by stone.

I
’d stayed at the cemetery for what seemed like forever, standing next to Rena and Carly, shaking hands and taking hugs from men and women I’d known my whole life and from men and women I didn’t recognize. Men, big men, men who worked hard for a living, who carried scars on their hands and who at one time lifted water-soaked wood traps like they were nothing, stood in front of me and cried. Women shook their heads and trembled. Through all of it, I stood there and thanked them and said yes and no and thank you, and at some point people started drifting away from the cemetery. When I looked off over the water I saw that there was a steady stream of boats leaving the harbour, people leaving the island and heading back to their lives on the mainland, able to escape as if nothing had changed. One of the boats, however, didn’t seem to be steaming away from the island: it was working out among the thicket of buoys.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said, touching Carly’s arm.

The day had turned warm, and at some point after Daddy’s coffin was lowered into the ground, after the priest had said everything that he had to say, somebody had taken my coat. I couldn’t remember who it was, but I knew that it would make its way back
to me. Without it, the sun felt good on the black cotton of my dress, on my bare arms. My left hand and wrist would look odd when the doctor peeled the cast off. I’d seen the way skin came out worm-pale and soft after a few weeks or months under a cast, and I knew that it would take me a while before I was back to where I needed to be on the boat. For now, I thought, I’d need an extra sternman, somebody to help Kenny out with the things I couldn’t manage with one hand. And as soon as I had the thought, I felt myself trying to choke back another round of tears, because I realized that with Daddy dead and Tucker dead, Stephanie and Colin O’Connor didn’t have boats to work. There were sternmen to go around. I wasn’t worried about Colin. I guessed that his father would help him buy Tucker’s boat, and he’d just take over Tucker’s line. It wasn’t the way the O’Connors had been planning things, but Colin was an islander through and through, and he didn’t need any more time as a sternman. That left Stephanie as my responsibility, and if she and Carly were still planning on staying on the island with Daddy gone, I’d be taking her on. We’d be fishing my line and Daddy’s line for a while, until I had things sorted out, and certainly with my broken wrist I needed the help anyway.