The Lobster Kings (5 page)

That Saturday, a fall day when the wind was hinting at what was in store for us with the coming of winter, was the last time that the four of us all went with Daddy at the same time, and it was also the first Saturday that Momma said it explicitly: “You girls are staying home.”

Scotty was still upstairs, even though Daddy had woken him first and Momma had gone into his room twice to get him moving, but I was at the table eating oatmeal with syrup. Daddy was pouring coffee into his thermos. Momma packed him his lunch every day, but he liked to doctor up his coffee with enough sugar to offset the salt of the sea, and he always heated the cream before he poured it in, so that the coffee wouldn’t go cold for him if he was still out on the
Queen Jane
in the evening. He rested the lid on top of the thermos, like he did every morning, to keep the steam in while he pulled the sugar from the pantry. He glanced at Momma when she said it, when she said, “You girls are staying home,” but he didn’t say anything.

Rena stuck her head out of the bathroom, where she was braiding her hair, but Momma glared at me and me alone. I hadn’t said anything, hadn’t responded, but she acted like I had. “That’s right, Cordelia. You’re staying home. It might be a weekend, but it’s cold outside and I don’t want you girls coming back home tonight with runny noses and skin that’s chafed from the wind.” She folded her arms under her small breasts and leaned back against the counter. She was wearing a blue dress that matched the sky more than the water, and I wondered how early she must have woken to have already done her hair and her makeup before
starting to make breakfast and pack lunches. She uncrossed her arms, crossed them again, and then brought one hand up to her necklace. I could tell that she was nervous. She hadn’t talked to Daddy, and she wasn’t sure what he’d say. She seemed to consider it, and then let her fingers fall away from the pearls, standing up straight and crossing her arms. “The
Queen Jane
is no place for a young lady.”

And this time I did speak. “Scotty can go fishing, but I can’t?”

There was a long silence. Rena stood still on the threshold of the bathroom. Carly put down her doll. Upstairs, I heard the first movements from Scotty’s room, the creak of his bed and then the floor. We were waiting for Daddy to respond.

He put the glass jar of sugar down on the counter and unscrewed the lid. He didn’t seem to be in any sort of a hurry as he opened the drawer, pulled out a soupspoon, and started scooping sugar into the thermos. I counted the spoonfuls, five, six, the squeak of the spoon in the sugar, the occasional tinkle of the handle hitting the glass of the jar or the rim of the thermos. Fourteen and fifteen, and then Daddy dunked the spoon in the thermos and gave it a twirl. He didn’t say anything, and the lack of voice was too much for me.

“Scotty’s a baby, and he’s still going fishing?” I said.

I was looking at Momma, and she was ready to respond, but it was Daddy who spoke. “Scotty’s a Kings, and he’ll be out fishing with me today, Cordelia.”

“You and your sisters can stay home with me,” Momma said. She was trying to make her voice sound bright, but all I could think of was glass breaking. “You’ll help me with painting the back room, and after lunch we can bake some cookies if you’d like.”

“I’m a Kings, too,” I said. I pushed myself away from the table, hard enough that some of the milk in my glass sloshed out. I’d like to be able to say that I hadn’t meant to push that hard, but I had, and more importantly, I meant what I said next. “I can’t go fishing because I’m a girl?” I paused, so that the next words would really hit. “That’s bullshit.”

I think that I was hoping the word would drop like a bomb. The men on the docks swore without any real thought, and I’d heard Daddy talking like he meant to take the paint off the hull of the
Queen Jane
, but that wasn’t the language we used in our house. I’d never heard anything stronger than a “darn it” come out of Momma’s mouth. I pressed hard on the word, “bullshit,” looking at Momma and waiting for her to respond. She opened her mouth, but it was Daddy who spoke.

His voice was calm and even, as if he were simply suggesting I wear rain boots instead of sneakers. “I don’t think you’re going to talk like that in front of your mother,” he said, “but the point is taken.” He picked up the thermos and screwed on the cap. “It
is
bullshit, Cordelia. You’re right. You’re a Kings, too, and if you want to be out on the water, you’ll be out on the water. All the kids will go today, and if any of the girls decide that they don’t want to be out on the
Queen Jane
in the future, well, they don’t have to be. But if they want to fish, if
you
want to fish, Cordelia, I’ll have you along.” He didn’t look at Momma as he said it, but he didn’t need to. We all knew that what he said, as far as it came to fishing and the Kings name, was how it would go.

To her credit, Momma didn’t storm out of the room, didn’t do anything more than nod and pack up lunches for me, Carly, and Rena, to go with the lunches she’d already packed for Scotty and Daddy.

Out on the
Queen Jane
, things moved like they normally did. Carly had brought along her doll, Mr. Pickles, and she and Rena pretended that he was their captain, giving them orders for what lines to move, what traps to bait. They were too old to be playing with dolls, but Carly never went anywhere without the raggedy thing. I didn’t care that they were acting like little kids. What I cared about was that they were out of the way, that it was just me and Scotty doing the real work. I wanted to show Daddy that I belonged on the
Queen Jane
.

By midmorning, my sisters had set themselves up with a snack on the deck under the cabin. We were across from Seal Coat Cove,
and Daddy was working over a jammed trap with a pair of pliers. Scotty and I were working together to lift a baited trap and get it over the rail, but mostly it was me. I could see Scotty looking over at where Rena and Carly were sitting. I’d like to believe that I told him he should go over with them, that he should just take a break, because I was trying to be thoughtful. But even at the time I knew that wasn’t the truth; I knew that I wanted him to go sit down with my sisters so that Daddy would see that he was weak, that he wasn’t meant for the water. Scotty didn’t think about my reasons. He immediately let go of the trap and walked forward to get himself one of the blueberry muffins that my sisters were eating.

I hadn’t expected him to just let go, to leave me holding the trap on my own, and it banged down off the edge of the boat and smashed into my shin. “Fuck,” I shouted. I didn’t mean to swear that time. It just jumped out of my mouth. The second time I’d sworn in front of Daddy that morning.

He looked up from the trap he had resting on the platform in the middle of the deck and raised an eyebrow. He loved raising his eyebrow. “You all right?”

“Just slipped. I’m okay.” I bit my lip. “Sorry about saying … that word.”

“Not the best habit to get into, particularly for a twelve-year-old,” he said, and then he glanced over at my sisters and at Scotty. “You three, come on. How about you help Cordelia out?”

Scotty blushed and shoved the muffin into his mouth before scampering back to me. I felt almost bad about it, but there was a part of me that was also happy that I was the one Daddy had seen working. Both Rena and Carly were slower to respond. I knew that they would have been just as happy to stay home with Momma. They’d worked the first hour we were aboard, but they were content to stay in the shelter of the cabin, out of the wind.

I wrestled the trap up myself and dumped it over the side of the boat. “We’re good,” I said, and Daddy nodded and moved up to the captain’s chair, easing the throttle forward to move us to
the next set of traps. I turned and started prepping bait. Scotty was already there, wiping the crumbs of the blueberry muffin on his slickers before putting his work gloves back on.

“Thanks a lot,” Rena said as she joined us. “Yay. Bait.”

Carly held up her doll to her ear as if Mr. Pickles were talking to her and then she said, “Mr. Pickles wants to know why we can’t use something that smells better.”

I didn’t bother looking at them. “Don’t be such girls,” I said, with as much scorn as a girl that age could muster.

“You just wish you could be a boy,” Carly said, “like Scotty.”

I don’t know if I did it because I was angry that what she said was true or because I was still angry that being a girl mattered so much to Momma, but I snatched Mr. Pickles away from her and stepped over to the rail. “Take it back,” I said, and I held the doll out over the water.

The doll was dingy and faded, something that had been well used even before Carly latched onto it as something that was special to her. The fabric around one of his ears was puckered where Momma had to mend it, and the markings where his eyes had been were so faded that he looked more like something cooked up to scare a child than a favourite toy. But still, Mr. Pickles was Carly’s. Where Rena and I had special blankets and Scotty had a teddy bear, Carly had Mr. Pickles, and she’d already started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted. “I take it back. You’re not a boy.”

It wasn’t just me trying out cursing that day, because it was Rena who spoke next. “Don’t be such a bitch, Cordelia.”

The doll fell into the water.

My hands were slippery from the bait, and we’d hit a wave so that the
Queen Jane
bucked. I’m almost certain it was an accident.

I blubbered that night while Momma paddled me. I had snot streaming down my face, and I told her it wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t meant to, but it didn’t matter much. The result was the same.

T
hat was in the early fall, and by December, Rena and Carly had stopped coming fishing altogether. I was two months shy of thirteen, Scotty was nine, and our first dog, Sailor, had been dead long enough that Sailor II, who we all called Second, was past being a puppy. He was a big dog, even for a Newfoundland dog, at 150 pounds, black and gliding and never willing to leave Daddy’s sight. Newfoundland dogs are gentle things, great slobbering balls of fur. Loyal and sweet. They shed like the ocean makes seaweed, but they’re good dogs for a fisherman to have: Newfoundland dogs’ coats keep the water away from their skin, so they’re warm in the water even when the sea spray rims the boats with ice, and they’ve got webbing between the toes on their paws so that they can power through the swells. There are lots of stories of them saving men from the waves.

Me and my sisters had all been sick for weeks: the cooped-up, crouped-up, coughing crud you can get when you live hard against the ocean’s edge and winter has come to settle itself in for good. School had just taken to vacation for the winter break, and we already had our Christmas tree cut and standing in the living room, trimmed with tinsel and ornaments that Momma
unpacked from the same tissue-paper-filled boxes every year. Carly and Rena were still hacking, but I’d been clear of sickness for a few days, driving Momma crazy with energy, and Scotty had never taken to coughing, so when the weather broke clean and warm—or what passed for warm in December on Loosewood Island, just above freezing—Daddy bundled the two of us up in our woollens and rain gear, whistled up for Second, and took us out on the the
Queen Jane
. He’d pulled all his deepwater traps already, saying he expected some storms in the next week, but he still had twenty or thirty traps in the shallow water, on the shelf off the island, and he told Momma that he wanted to pull them as well. After that, he said he’d stay out for a while, either to catch something fresh for dinner, or maybe even to make a run across to James Harbor to pick up a few more small things to put under the Christmas tree. The sky was clear and we were squinting with the bounce of the sun off the water. I was sitting in the cabin, trying to keep out of the wind and the cold, huddled against Scotty, who was already whining about not being allowed to stay home.

We were barely out of sight of the docks—Momma could have seen us from the window if she’d been watching with a pair of binoculars instead of being busy cleaning up the mess from tending to Rena and Carly—when Daddy came to his first set of traps and started hauling them up.

Nowadays, about half of the men on the island have fiberglass boats made local in Maine, and a few have Novi boats, but the fleet is still choked with wooden boats like the
Queen Jane
. Daddy’s made a few concessions to the times: the hydraulic hauler that his father did without, a citizens band, and even a tape deck—if a tape deck can be considered a concession to the times—that he uses to listen to Johnny Cash and books he takes out from the Loosewood library. He hasn’t bothered with a depth finder or LORAN or GPS or most of the other things that the younger men and I are kitting out our boats with. For the most part, the
Queen Jane
looks like what it is, which is a lobster boat that was bought new in 1952 and handed down from my grandfather to my father, a
boat that has seen a lot of weather but that has been taken care of like my daddy’s life depends on it. Which it does.