The Lobster Kings (4 page)

There are other stories about mermaids, though none like Brumfitt’s. The rest of the stories described beautiful mermaids who sang to sailors and seduced them. The boys liked to joke that if you jumped in the water after them you’d at least get a chance to see whether or not mermaids actually wore those little clamshell bikini tops before you drowned.

When Daddy told
his
mermaid story, however, he never joked.
It happened when he was six. He’d been playing on the shore, collecting shells or rocks or some such, and he’d turned his back to the ocean in the way that you’re taught never to do. A wave had curled over him and brought him out under the water.

He said that it hadn’t been at all like he’d expected. First there had been lung-searing blackness, and then he realized he could breathe underwater. The fish hung around him like birds strung from wires, seemingly oblivious to his presence. He walked across the rocky floor, heading down the slope and toward the dark of the deep water, and then he saw brilliant pinpricks coalescing into a great light before him. The light came from windows, and the windows were set into a castle that was unlike what he had imagined when he played war with his leaden soldiers. The castle was something more alive, as if it had been coaxed from the bottom of the ocean, the parapets pulsing with the movement of the waves. Daddy entered the castle, and even though light seemed to come from the walls themselves, there were dark and sad whispers swimming past him in the hallways.

He said he walked through corridor after corridor, but each door he came to was locked. And yet, he said that he never felt as if he were lost, and when he finally saw the entrance to the great hall, the wide doors thrown open, the light pouring out toward him, heard the tinkling of glass on glass, he was already half expecting what was in there: a lone mermaid waiting for him.

She was not like Brumfitt Kings’ mermaid, Daddy said. She had long dark hair that seemed nothing like seaweed, and her tail could have been any colour or no colour at all, but the light made it shine. The mermaid welcomed him, and said this was his castle now, that he was to be the king, and told him to lean down so that she could put a crown upon his head, so that she could welcome him to his kingdom. But as he bent over and the mermaid reached for him, he said he heard a dog barking, and then saw his mother burst into the room. His mother pulled him into her arms, away from the mermaid. Daddy said that my grandmother carried him across the rocky ocean bed, and up the rise, the water
seeming insubstantial to her. “Hush, hush, hush,” she kept saying to him, her words the rhythm of the waves breaking over them. Daddy felt the waves trying to pull him back into the ocean, but each one of his mother’s hushes beat back the water, breaking its pull on him, until the two of them broke through the dark tunnel of the salt water and onto the surface, the water flattening into a sheet of glass, the sun’s light exploding off the surface of the ocean bright and gleaming: everything disappeared and all he could see was light, light, light.

My grandmother, who died when I was eleven, liked to point out that my father didn’t include certain bits from the story. Like how when he’d finally opened his eyes again it was to the inside of a hospital room. Like how
she
didn’t see any mermaid. Like how what
she
saw was a fisherman’s Newfoundland dog going after Daddy and dragging his limp body from the surf. Like how Daddy was dead for at least a few minutes. But Daddy insisted. He went around the island telling anybody who asked how he was doing, and plenty of people who didn’t, that he’d been under the ocean, that he’d met a mermaid.

Carly thinks he likes to tell that story as a lesson: we all have a place where we belong, and Daddy’s place was above the water, on Loosewood Island.

I think it tells a different lesson, the same lesson that is in all of Daddy’s stories: there’s magic in the sea, magic on Loosewood Island. The problem is that some of the magic is like Brumfitt’s mermaid: sharp with teeth.

B
rumfitt Kings probably isn’t a name you’d hear in your daily conversation, but he’s famous enough that a good portion of the tourists who come to Loosewood Island come only for that reason. Others, of course, come for all the same reasons that tourists go anywhere: to see something beautiful and new, to play at being rich somewhere else, and simply to step outside themselves, to imagine that their lives could be something different. Every year we get a few tourist couples—they are always couples, but since I’ve grown up, some of the couples have been men—who fall in love with the island and decide that what we need is an upscale coffeehouse or a jazz bar or a shop that sells only olive oil, and they start their new business up. It doesn’t usually take more than one winter for those people to realize that the reason they fell in love with Loosewood Island wasn’t because of what the island was, but rather because of what Loosewood Island wasn’t. It wasn’t the life they wanted to leave behind. Still, some of them make a go of it year-round and become permanent islanders, and some of them are just tourists with a business interest, keeping shop during the summer months and closing up the rest of the year. There are plenty of islanders who make a good
living looking after cottages and houses and businesses that are shut up for the winters.

Even the tourists who don’t come for Brumfitt Kings have mostly heard of the island in the first place because of Brumfitt Kings. The bulk of tourists, Brumfitt Kings fans or not, come here during the summers, but the Brumfitt Kings pilgrims are less predictable. We’ll get a few every month of the year, even into January and February, and you can pick them out because they are the ones who walk the island with coffee-table-sized books in their hands, trying to match Brumfitt’s paintings to the views in front of them. We’ve encouraged it on Loosewood Island, keeping the Brumfitt Kings Museum open year-round. Islanders have grown used to seeing tourists stumbling across our lawns and getting lost in their search for the exact point where Brumfitt painted
Morning Breaks
, or
Broken Mast with No Hope for Shore
. The only people who get upset at the Brumfitt Kings tourists are the other tourists themselves, the summer people who built up their six-thousand-square-foot “cottages” and who think that buying into the island means that they’ve bought the island. Those are the ones who try to tell lobstermen whose families have been fishing the same spot for fifty or a hundred years or longer that they don’t want their view spoiled by lobster boats. Those things work themselves out.

Those other kind of summer tourists, the wealthy ones, can be a bit much sometimes, thinking that Loosewood Island’s a sort of fishing theme park, but they are mostly bearable. The ones who come to the island for Brumfitt Kings are almost always easy to deal with, however. For some of them, the trip to the island has been a lifelong dream, and for others it’s something they do every summer.

I think that Daddy and I both look kindly on the Brumfitt tourists because we understand the pull. For Rena and Carly, the idea of the family legacy, of being the descendants of a famous painter, is appealing, but there isn’t any urgency to it. A few years ago, when the Met installed Brumfitt’s most well-known painting,
The Catch
, neither of my sisters were interested in making the trip to New York with Daddy and me.

“I’m happy to go to the city if Tucker wants to watch the babies,” Rena said, “but I’m not making the trip just to see a painting that I’ve already seen.”

Daddy raised his eyebrows and then put down his beer with an exaggerated slowness and theatricality that made Rena start smiling even before he began his lecture.

“And where, exactly, have you seen
The Catch
?”

“It’s in every Brumfitt book ever. Plus, all I have to do is head to the west side of the island to get the same view. Seems a lot quicker to take a walk over there than to drive to New York City,” she said.

She was teasing, and she indulged Daddy and me in going to museums when we used to take vacations as a family, but she just didn’t understand. Brumfitt painted the island, but in some of his paintings he saw a different island than the one my sisters did.
The Catch
was one of those paintings. The paintings that got Brumfitt “discovered” in the 1950s are menacing portraits of Loosewood Island: men drown, a body floating in the water is one that is ravaged by the seas, and a man in a boat is a man who despairs of ever getting home. Brumfitt also has his share of what I like to call “restaurant and hotel lobby paintings,” even though that pisses Daddy off almost as much as when I say that Brumfitt is what you’d get if you combined Andrew Wyeth and Winslow Homer: paintings of birds caught on the wing, fish brushing against the surface of the waves, the ruggedness of the coast with all menace removed. My favourite works, however, like
The Catch
, are the ones that remind me of the stories Daddy likes to tell about Brumfitt: paintings where hands snatch at you from the ocean, where birds I’ve never seen before cover the air, where sailors beat back monsters from the waves.

The Catch
shows the purpling skies of dawn, a lush light coming over the horizon, but enough shadows to make the ocean seem sinister, and a small, single-masted boat overmatched by the waters
and the waves breaking on the rocks. There’s a pair in the boat: a seasoned man and a boy who could be ten or eleven. The man is struggling to pull a single fish from the water. It’s not clear what kind of fish it is—where the rope meets the water there is simply the froth of water—but the man’s back is bent and his muscles and sinews seem to jump from the canvas, and the thing that
is
clear is that this is a large fish, and that this man with his son, and presumably a wife and more children at home, will use this fish to feed his family.

Despite the strain of the man, the movement of the catch in the water, the menace of the ocean, it’s the son, however, who caught my eye as I stood in the museum with Daddy, and who always catches my eye when I look at prints of
The Catch
. The boy is smooth and delicate, more like a bird than a boy. He’s looking over the side of the boat and into the water. His hand is extended, almost touching the water.

And this is why I love the painting, why it reminds me of the stories of Loosewood Island that Daddy raised me with: if you gave
The Catch
only a cursory glance you might wonder at the reflection of the boy’s fingertips in the foam of the ocean.

Except it’s not a reflection.

It’s not the boy’s fingertips at all, but some other person’s fingertips—some other creature—reaching from the water to grasp at his hand, to pull him under.

E
very time we boarded the
Queen Jane
, Daddy gave us the same lecture: watch our feet with the ropes, watch our fingers in the hydraulics, watch that we sit where we’re out of the way, watch that we help when it is needed, and always, he’d add at the end, giving us a wink, watch to see if there’s anything that Brumfitt might have painted out in the water.

By the time I was twelve I’d started showing breasts, though it was Rena, early at only eleven, a full year younger than me, who’d gotten her period already, and Momma had been making noises about how the
Queen Jane
wasn’t a place for me or my sisters to be spending our weekends, that squatting on the deck to pee and hosing it off wasn’t the best training for the kind of girls she was trying to raise. She’d never been warm to the idea of me, Rena, and Carly fishing, but she was always ready with an extra lunch for Scotty to take along. He belonged out there with his daddy, she’d say, because otherwise how would he learn to be a lobsterman? It might be in the Kings blood, but that didn’t mean Daddy didn’t also need to teach him how to be a man.

Despite Momma’s urgings and Daddy’s steady attention, Scotty was always the last one out the door. On a Saturday morning,
when I’d already be in my boots and slicker down at the docks, checking the bait, re-coiling any lines that I didn’t like the look of, he’d still be sitting at the table, as if his sugared cereal could stand to soak up more milk. Rena and Carly were somewhere in between. Sometimes they’d come fishing because I wanted to be there—and Scotty
had
to be there—and because they didn’t want to be left behind. Sometimes they’d stay home to walk the island and bake with Momma or play with friends.