The Lobster Kings (7 page)

I ran to the radio and I remember that there was the sound of someone laughing and then a moment of static, a transmission cut off, before I grabbed the mic and started asking for help. It was George Sweeney who answered, and the few times he’s talked about it with me he said that it still gives him the creeps how calm I sounded when my voice came across the radio and said, “We need help, George. We need help. Scotty’s dead. Scotty’s dead.”

E
xcept he wasn’t. By the time I clipped the radio back to its mount, Daddy had gotten Scotty untangled from the trap, had pounded his back, had blown air into his lungs, and Scotty was puking water and coughing and shuddering, his lips blue and chattering, a red, raw line marking where the rope had pulled tight against his throat.

It only took George Sweeney five minutes to pull alongside, John O’Connor with him for the ride. Daddy had already stripped Scotty out of his wet clothes and wrapped him in blankets, pulled Second back on board, and reassured me that my brother wasn’t going to die. The water was calm enough that George drew his boat almost touching ours, and John hopped over onto our deck. While Daddy cradled Scotty on his lap, John fired up the engine and ran the
Queen Jane
full-throttle back to the docks, where Momma and what seemed like half of the winter population of Loosewood Island were already waiting.

It wasn’t exactly a party at our house that night, but neither was it anything but a party. The Christmas tree in the corner winked at the room, the tinsel breezing like seaweed. The fridge was overstuffed with beer, and ladies brought casseroles, more
than we could possibly eat, as if they had started filling up their glass baking dishes the moment they heard me on the radio, and then couldn’t stop themselves from finishing their cooking once the news went out that Scotty had survived. The women hovered over Scotty, rubbing his hair and kissing him on the forehead, and the men put a full drunk on, toasting Second both for knocking Scotty overboard and then for trying to rescue him, toasting to me for keeping my head, even toasting to the shelf that the trap had landed on, knowing that with the short rope on the traps, if the water had been twenty fathoms or even ten—anything deep enough so that the traps would have pulled tight the fifty feet of warp and sunk the buoy beneath the waves—there would have been no pulling Scotty back from the water.

Scotty was tired and pale, complaining that his neck was sore and that his chest hurt from the water he’d swallowed, and he was put to bed early, worn out from the cold and from the experience of both dying and being reborn. Carly and Rena and I were allowed to stay up late—despite my sisters hacking and coughing to seize the day—but there were still at least a dozen men sitting around the woodstove and drinking beer when I went to bed, Second curled up near my father’s feet, celebrating a Christmas miracle.

Only the celebration had come too early. Sometime in the middle of the night Scotty started coughing, a pink, frothy ooze from his lips, and then his breath started coming in short gasps, and then nothing. He was dead before Carly, Rena, or I had woken. When the doctor finally got to the house, late in the morning and a thousand hours too late to help, he said it was delayed drowning, that Scotty had swallowed so much water when he had gone under that he continued to drown even after he was pulled from the water. Maybe if he’d been pulled out quicker, but the way it was, not much could have been done. Perhaps if Daddy had taken him to the hospital in Saint John, or even the clinic in James Harbor, but even then, whichever side of the border, a hospital probably wouldn’t have helped.

Years later, before Rena dropped out of nursing school, she called me and said she’d studied it, studied what killed Scotty.

“It was hypoxemia. That’s what they call it.”

“I’m not following you, Rena.”

“It was the salt. If he would have drowned in a river or a pool or somewhere other than the goddamned ocean, he might have lived, but it was the salt water. It pulled the water into his lungs.”

A few years after that phone call, she told me that she might have had her facts wrong, that maybe freshwater was worse, that there was some disagreement, but that she was so excited to have something that made sense to her that she just had to call. She wanted to make sure I knew that there was something that could explain how we had a breathing brother at night and a corpse in the morning. But knowing it didn’t change the fact: Scotty was dead.

Of course, there was more to it than that. The day of the funeral, December 24, Daddy slipped out early in the morning. I don’t think anybody else was up—which in a fishing village meant it must have been god-awful early—or that he knew I was awake. I had been sleeping poorly since Scotty went overboard, bad dreams keeping me fitful. Even the night it happened, before I woke up to find out my brother had died, I had nightmares. Sharp-toothed mermaids, hands reaching from the deeps, dragons circling in the shadows: a Brumfitt Kings slideshow.

I was awake when Daddy left the house on the morning of the funeral. I heard footsteps on the stairs and then the less cautious movement of Second, behind him. A few bumps from the kitchen and then the opening and closing of the front door. I pushed myself out of bed and pulled on my jeans and sweatshirt from the day before, putting them over the panties and T-shirt I slept in. At the front door I stepped into my boots, the mix of felt and rubber inside odd and cool against my bare feet, and grabbed my mother’s slicker.

I was maybe a minute behind my father, and I hurried down the path toward the harbour, moving through occasional pools of
yellow light. It was wet, and the weather was cold enough that it came down in equal parts snow and rain. The snow stuck to the grass and the bushes, but it was liquid running down the arms of Momma’s slicker and turned to puddles on the pavement. I was shivering by the time I caught up to Daddy and Second at the head of the dock.

I called out to him and he turned to look at me. If he was surprised by my presence he didn’t show it. “Head on home, Cordelia,” he said. “It’s too early for you to be up yet. The funeral isn’t for another five or six hours. Go back home and go back to sleep.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going out in the boat for a while,” he said. “Go on, now, go home.”

“Come home, Daddy. It’s raining. Or snowing. Both.”

“Let it,” he said. He let out a small, strangled laugh and looked past me toward the water. “Blow, winds. Rage, blow. Spit, fire. Spout, rain.”

“Daddy,” I said, and I was worried because he was right here in front of me, but he sounded like he was drifting away. “Daddy, please?”

He looked away from the water and at me, and his voice was his own again when he said, “Go home, Cordelia. Just go on home.” He said it gently and started walking again, but I didn’t turn around. I stayed next to him, following him as he climbed into the skiff. Second dropped himself over the gunwale, stepping onto the bench and then giving a quick circle before settling himself on the floor of the boat. I got in and went to the bow of the skiff, reaching out to untie the painter. Daddy sat down with his back to me and picked up the handle of the oars. There was a pool of water and slush on the bottom of the boat, but it didn’t seem to bother Second none, and he looked like he might have already fallen asleep. I brushed the first takings of snow off the bench and tucked my jacket in under the ass of my jeans so I could sit down. A bead of water dropped off the hood of my jacket and
landed on my knee, immediately soaking through. I wished I’d thought to throw on a pair of bib-pants under Momma’s slicker. I wished I’d worn a warmer coat. I wished Scotty wasn’t dead. I wished a lot of things.

Daddy didn’t move the oars at all and he didn’t turn around, but his voice came through clear, despite the guzzling of the waves and the constant patter of rainy snow on my hood and all around us. “You sure you want to come out with me, Cordelia?”

“Seems like fine weather for it,” I said.

“You’re not to question me or to get in my way,” he said. He sounded stern in the way in which I rarely heard unless it was something that was well deserved. “The weather is the way the weather is, and I’m telling you that if you come with me, then you are telling me that you’ll give me your obedience.” He let his head hang down, and with his back to me, his voice became muffled. “I’m losing my wits here, Cordelia.”

I didn’t say anything, and that seemed to be enough for Daddy, because he bent his back into the oars and started moving us across the bay. It only took us a few minutes to get to the
Queen Jane’s
mooring buoy. I tied us off while Daddy held the rail of the
Queen Jane
so Second could navigate his way on board.

The diesel fired up without any complaint, and Daddy kept the motor low as he threaded his way out of the harbour. He kept quiet, but he saw me shivering and pulled a spare jacket and a pair of bib-pants from a hook in the cabin and handed them to me. I stripped off Momma’s slicker, pulled on the pants, and then threw the jacket on before putting Momma’s slicker back on. I was still cold, and my hands had begun to ache, but with standing in the cabin and out of the sleet I felt some relief from the weather.

Once we were away from the boats, he reached over to the controls and turned off all of the lights, leaving us running dark except for the thin glow from the dials behind the wheel. With sleet coming down on us, it felt like we were moving through ink. The lights of the village had already dimmed into nothingness, and when Second lumbered into my legs and then settled at my
feet, I could only tell by touching him, his wet, black fur making him invisible. We motored like that for ten or fifteen minutes, Daddy steering by feel and memory and three hundred years of the Kings living and fishing off Loosewood Island, and then Daddy pushed the throttle into neutral and hit the lights again.

The lights came up bright and burning, and as soon as I could open my eyes again I realized that the sleet had turned completely to snow, the running lights bouncing back at us. The snow fell heavy and deep, and there was already a thin coating on the deck of the boat. It was mesmerizing in the way it fell, and I spent a few seconds trying to see if I could figure out a pattern to how it lined down in the lights. I could have kept staring out into the dark morning forever if Daddy hadn’t reached down and grabbed Second’s collar, hauling the dog to his feet.

Second came up eager enough. He followed as Daddy made his way aft, out of the cabin. Daddy motioned to the stern and said, “Up,” twice, but Second didn’t move until Daddy grabbed his collar again and half wrestled the dog up and off the deck. Second stood on the stern, looked out over the water, and then at Daddy. The dog turned to get back in the boat. “Go on, then,” Daddy said, pushing back at Second, manoeuvring him toward the edge. “Go on,” he said again, and then he gave Second enough of a shove that the dog half stumbled and half leapt into the water. The splash was quiet, and Second didn’t even let out a bark. I moved to the port quarter and saw Second treading water, staring up at me with the same eager almost-smile that he always had on his face. Daddy brushed past me and went back to the cabin. He opened a compartment and pulled out a plastic box and rested it on the captain’s chair.

“What are you doing?” I asked, even as I recognized the box. He kept his old service revolver in there, a Smith & Wesson Model 10, smuggled home from Vietnam. He let Rena, Carly, Scotty, and I fire it off sometimes, when we were out on the boat with him and tired of lobstering or bored with waiting to get wherever it was we were going. We’d shoot at lobster buoys and empty
glass bottles that Daddy threw into the water for us. If he wasn’t looking, we’d occasionally take a shot at a seagull, missing every time we tried. The gun probably only weighed two pounds, but it felt heavier. We were all small enough that the square butt felt enormous in our hands, and even if we’d been on land instead of on the decks of the
Queen Jane
, it would have been hard for a girl my size to keep the sight steady. The Model 10 fired .38 Special rounds, so it was easier for us kids to handle than his new pistol, a Model 65 stainless steel chambered to fire .357s. He’d gotten the Model 65 the winter before, and he’d let me fire it once. The kickback was like a whale yanking at my shoulder, and I was so surprised that I didn’t even notice the gun had bounced up and the barrel had smacked me above the eye until Daddy handed me a cloth to press against the open flap of skin in my eyebrow.

He didn’t answer me, didn’t look at me. He simply unwrapped the gun from the oilcloth he kept it wrapped up in to protect it from the salt air, flipped open the fluted cylinder, glanced at it, and then flipped the chamber shut again. Second gave out a sharp bark, and I looked into the water again. The snow was still falling, disappearing as it hit the surface of the ocean, and it seemed like a magic trick in the lights of the boat: it was hard to understand how something that looked so substantial could float from the heavens and then disappear as soon as it met the ocean.

Daddy walked over to the side of the boat, but I stood in front of him. “What are you doing?” I asked again. “The funeral is in just a couple of hours.” I was twelve and my brother was dead and I wasn’t letting him by until he told me what he was doing. I wanted to hear him say it.