The Lobster Kings (6 page)

I guess if you aren’t familiar with lobster boats, one looks about the same as the other: a high bow forward of the cabin, and back of the cabin, low sides and stern to make it easier for hauling traps. The
Queen Jane
was no different. Daddy had off-loaded most of the gear so that he could make repairs, prepare for the resumption of day-in-day-out lobstering in April, but the bait barrel was still lashed against the starboard railing, and there was plenty of space for the traps. Daddy had been fishing these traps as pairs, which meant that pulling one trap actually meant pulling two.

Daddy gaffed the buoy, slapped the warp into the hauler, and let her rip. The traps broke the surface glistening with mud and a decent catch of bugs despite being an off time of year.

Daddy put the brass gauge against each carapace, checking to make sure we were legal, though I bet he could have done it by eye. He threw four overboard and kept two, and from the second trap he kept one and threw back five. “We’re not looking to sell any, but maybe we’ll get enough for dinner tonight,” he said, which was what he said almost every time we were on the boat with him, as if this might be the one time he didn’t get enough for our dinner. He pulled the second trap off the rail and put it on deck with the other and then said, “Here, Scotty, come on over. I’ll rebait, but you separate the traps out. I want to put them back in as singles.”

I got to my feet, but Daddy looked at me and shook his head. “I want Scotty to do it, Cordelia. He’s nine. Old enough to start taking over more. He’s a Kings, and he can earn his keep.”

That was all he said, but it felt more like a kick in the gut. It wasn’t just that Daddy wanted Scotty to do it, but that he
didn’t
want
me
to do it. I spent as much time on the
Queen Jane
as I could. Daddy liked to joke that I was the youngest sternman on the island, but the price was right. I could haul a trap, empty it, and rebait it fast enough that I was more of a help than a nuisance, and Daddy never said anything about me being just a girl. I was a
Kings through and through, and Daddy knew it. I belonged out on the water. But Daddy never seemed able to see what I could see so clearly about Scotty, which was that my brother wasn’t made for the ocean. Scotty tried, he really did, but only when Daddy was looking. When Daddy asked if Scotty wanted to learn a new knot, to see how to adjust the diesel engine, Scotty always said yes. When we were on board and Daddy called him over, Scotty scrambled like a puppy because he didn’t want to disappoint Daddy, but the truth was that Scotty didn’t want any of it for himself. Left to his own devices, Scotty would have been just as happy to be playing football with his friends or to be back at the house with Momma.

It killed me. No matter how often it happened, no matter how many times Daddy called Scotty over to do something on the boat that I could have done blindfolded in half the time, it still felt like a betrayal. Why could Daddy never see that only one of us was suited to the sea?

I stayed in the relative warmth of the cabin and watched Scotty untie the knots from the paired traps while Daddy rebaited and banded the keepers. And I didn’t say anything when I saw that Scotty had only tied a line to one of the two traps. He struggled with that first trap, getting it up and over the rail, letting it splash into the water. The line played out of the boat as the trap sank. I waited for him to notice that the second trap was naked, that there was no line attached, no buoy, nothing to keep it from disappearing in the depths, but Scotty didn’t notice. Scotty didn’t notice, and I didn’t say anything, and it was only when the trap was already up on the rail and starting to teeter over that Daddy saw the mistake my brother had made.

Daddy lunged for the trap, but it was too late. It fell from the boat, hit the waves, and sank. “Scotty,” Daddy barked. Scotty had already started to realize what had happened, and I saw the way his face went blank, as if by not acknowledging that he’d thrown away a trap it would mean that it hadn’t happened. “You didn’t tie a line … how could you …” Daddy shook his head and pursed his lips. He didn’t say anything more than that, but he didn’t need
to. Even from the cabin I could feel the way Scotty was trying to shrink into himself. It wasn’t the cost of the trap—we lost gear all the time to weather and accidents—but the way that he’d lost it. Such a stupid thing to do. But then Daddy shook his arms, forced a smile back onto his face, and put his hand on Scotty’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, son. Mistakes happen. It’s a good lesson. Always double-check to make sure you’ve got your gear ready to go. It could happen to anybody,” Daddy said.

Except, I wanted to say, it couldn’t. That wasn’t the sort of thing that I would have done, I wanted to say. I didn’t say any of that. I kept quiet even as Daddy moved the
Queen Jane
to the next spot on his line, even as he pulled the next pair of traps, measured the lobsters, kept one, and threw the rest back. He looked at the two traps and then shook his head. “We’ll throw these ones back in the water and pull the rest of the line. The first two are rebaited, and I’ve got a couple on the backside of the island that will do for the family.” He roughed Scotty’s hair. “Everything else we pull we’ll bring back to land. You kids stack them up and lash them.”

I didn’t bother moving from the cabin. If Daddy didn’t want me to help when we were rebaiting and dropping traps, I didn’t want to help now. Besides, Daddy was watching, so Scotty was acting the good son, was already dragging the traps across the deck. He was being quick and eager, trying to do the right thing, trying to make Daddy forget his mistake. Daddy came back to the wheel and pushed the throttle. He didn’t say anything to me about not helping Scotty, but he gave Second a tap with his boot. The big Newf uncurled himself from under the wheel and walked over to where Scotty wrestled with the traps and the bounce of the boat over the waves. Second nosed at Scotty and let out a few barks.

It was the sort of thing that happens all of the time. A mistake. There’s the weather, there’s the waves, there’s the lobsters themselves with their crusher claws. There’s all sorts of hooked and sharp things aboard a fishing boat, and there’s the hydraulic haulers to take a finger off. But most of all, there are the ropes. Warp scatters everywhere; good lobstermen will keep their warps
organized, lines coiled and out of the way, where they need to be, and so will the bad lobsterman. Highliners and dubs alike, they keep the ropes neat. The only lobstermen who don’t keep their ropes neat are the dead ones.

Scotty hadn’t bothered taking the floating rope off the bridles on the traps, and he left the pair of traps still lashed together; the warp was tangled up in a bundle around his feet. Scotty was struggling to get one trap stacked up on the other, and the top trap was half on its twin, half on the railing, and that big, stupid fucking Newf, Second, was barking and nosing at Scotty. I can’t remember if I was watching the whole time, if I saw Scotty straining with the traps, a nine-year-old trying to be a man, trying to live up to Daddy, to live up to the name that he carried with him everywhere he went on and off of Loosewood Island. I can’t remember if I didn’t offer to help because I was a twelve-year-old girl and busy with simply not being near him, or if I didn’t offer to help him because I knew that he would never live up to the name that he carried with him, that he wasn’t deserving of it in the same way that I was. What I do remember is the sound of Second’s barking.

Daddy heard the barking, too, because he looked over his shoulder and yelled out, “Second. Get off him,” but as he yelled at Second, the
Queen Jane
caught a wave. The boat gave an unexpected bounce, and it wasn’t clear if Second stumbled into Scotty or if Second jumped onto Scotty, but the results were the same: the trap that Scotty was balancing on the rail went over, and Scotty fell in the tangle of ropes on the deck of the boat.

I wish I could say that something spectacular happened, that it was a scene from one of Brumfitt’s paintings. I wish I could say that the ocean flattened into glass, sea turtles rose to encircle the
Queen Jane
, the weather crackled black, and the winds cursed at us, ripping a hole in the clear blue sky as water spouted into the air like hissing serpents. And I’d like to believe that we all had a chance to realize what was going to happen, that Scotty and I locked eyes, and that Daddy, in that moment, understood that the promise Brumfitt Kings had been given when he married—that the Kings
would receive the bounty of the ocean, but that our sons would be at the mercy of the sea—was being fulfilled. But I know better than that. There was nothing to set this moment aside from all of the other moments that came before and all of the other moments that came afterward. There was no magical marker to delineate then and later, no animal from the deeps reaching out and drawing Scotty away from us. It was just an accident. It was just the ropes.

Scotty fell to the deck, slipping in and under the ropes, the first trap hitting the water and yanking tight the lines to its twin. The warp snapped against Scotty, and I could see a piece snug across his throat, his body slamming into the trap, and then the whole mess—line, trap, Scotty—crashed into the rail and flipped over and out into the water. The buoy line that hadn’t tangled up with my brother smoked over the rail and left a scar that still marks the
Queen Jane
seventeen years later. The buoy smacked against the rail, the last thing out of the boat, bouncing into the air and then settling in the water. The traps, and Scotty with them, were already under the water.

Second, barking, went over the stern and into the water to save Scotty, unable to leave him alone even after he’d knocked my brother overboard. There wasn’t time for Daddy to try to throw the boat hard in reverse—from Second knocking Scotty down to the time he was in the water wasn’t even enough for a blink, like a car crash or a bullet wound—and instead Daddy did the only thing he could do, which was to slam the throttle full forward and crank the wheel, turning the
Queen Jane
nearly on her edge. He reached out to me and grabbed my shoulder, and it was suddenly like I had woken from a daze. “Turn her around,” he said. “Line me up.”

He moved back to the rail, and for a minute I thought he was planning to go in after Second, after Scotty, but he had already recognized that with the cold of the winter water and the weight of the traps and Scotty’s body, he was best off in the boat.

Even though I was still short enough that I could barely see through the glass—I didn’t really grow until I was in eleventh grade, and then I shot up five inches in a year, heading to my full
height of five-seven, just like Momma—I kept the wheel hard to starboard. The boat turned against the waves and, though the sea was calm for that time of year, I glanced back to see Daddy stumble as he went for the gaff.

I stood on my tiptoes and could see Second moving swiftly across the water toward the buoy. The sky was clear and the sun hung up so that it bounced off the water, Second’s black fur glistening in the light and the wet. A series of shadows cast through the water and under Second, a school of fish or just a play of darkness.

“Off the throttle, honey,” Daddy called, and his voice sounded so calm, so reassuring, that I half wondered if I was in some sort of a dream, if Scotty was in a mermaid’s castle, if my grandmother would come flying through the water, if Second would simply pluck my brother from the sea.

Second barked, and then barked again, and started swimming in a tight circle around the buoy. He kept ducking his head under the surface. I lined up the boat, one cold hand on the throttle, one cold hand on the wheel—I wasn’t wearing mittens, for some reason—and I heard Daddy yell, “Stop her!” He meant for me just to throw the throttle into neutral, but I panicked and killed the motor, killed all the power on the boat, killed everything.

Daddy gaffed the rope neatly and slapped it into the hydraulic, but nothing happened. When I killed the motor I’d cut the power to the hydraulic; the rope hung tight, not moving, doing nothing to take Scotty from the depths.

How long did it take before Daddy pulled the rope back and started hauling it by hand? Half a second? One second? Two?

Second kept barking. With the motor cut, the sound of the dog and Daddy’s breath competed with the waves and the few gulls overhead.

Maybe a minute had passed since the dog had knocked Scotty into the traps. I left the wheel and hurried to start stacking the wet warp—the rope—on the deck behind Daddy, though I had no hope of keeping up and no real sense of why such a thing would be useful. We were over the shelf, and the water wasn’t that deep,
three, four fathoms, which was the only reason why the buoy, with all that fouled line, still shone on the surface. By the time I got behind Daddy, he’d already pulled twenty feet of warp from the water, the first lobster pot breaking the surface. I gasped at the sight of my brother’s body: he was pressed tight against the trap, a loop of warp around his neck, the rest of the line tangled against his nine-year-old body and the trap, his arms splayed out. When he broke the surface, he wasn’t breathing and his skin had turned pale and headed to blue, though I didn’t know if it was from the cold or the lack of air.

I couldn’t look at my brother, and I couldn’t look away, but there was something to the side of him that caught my attention: a small movement among all of the other movements of the waves and the water. I leaned over the rail and extended my hand toward the water, the sun and the reflection of my fingertips in the foam bouncing back to me, and for an instant I thought it was not a reflection, but some other creature reaching from the water to grasp at my hand, to pull me under, like in Brumfitt’s painting. And then that instant was broken by Daddy’s voice.

“Call it in, Cordelia,” Daddy said.

I looked again at the water, but it was just my hand and my own reflection. I straightened up and watched as Daddy reached over and grabbed the trap and hauled it—and my brother’s body—up from the ocean. At the time I could have lifted neither my brother nor a wet wooden trap. The trap could have easily hit eighty or ninety pounds, more with the second trap trailing behind, and Scotty must have weighed another eighty or ninety. But my father made it look effortless.