The Lobster Kings (8 page)

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” he said.

“Fuck you.”

The words came out of my mouth as a surprise, but they didn’t seem to surprise Daddy. He didn’t react at all other than to say, “Step aside, Cordelia.” His voice was low and soft. He had a deep voice and he talked with deliberateness, but he sounded tired. He was missing the sea foam in his voice.

“Did you hear me? I said, fuck you. I’m not stepping aside, not until you tell me what you’re doing. Why did you push Second in the water? You’re not going to shoot him,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if that last sentence came out as a question or a statement.

He tried to step around me, but I blocked his path. Looking back, I can’t believe he didn’t just push me aside. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to move past me, but he let me stop him. “At the docks,” he said, “I told you to go back to bed.” He leaned his head back, looking up into the darkness and the snow, as if he were going to open his mouth and stick his tongue out like a little boy trying to catch a snowflake. His arms hung down at his sides and he would have looked innocent and hopeless if he hadn’t still been holding the gun. The blued steel of the revolver wanted to sink into the shadows. “Yes, Cordelia,” he said, letting his head sink back down and staring at me. “I’m going to shoot him.”

I don’t know what it says about him—or about me—that I wasn’t surprised, that I had already known the answer. I think I knew the answer before I even left my bedroom. “Why?”

“I have to do it,” he said. He looked at me, no break in his gaze, and I could see that he’d had no question about it, and if I hadn’t been there he would have already shot Second and been motoring back to the harbour.

“He didn’t mean to knock into Scotty,” I said. I could hear my voice breaking, and I was cold again, despite the bib-pants and the extra jacket.

“But he did knock into Scotty, Cordelia.” He said it patiently, as if it were something he was explaining to a small child.

“He’s just a dog.” I looked down at my feet and tried to swallow. I wanted to hit Daddy, but I couldn’t. “I hate you,” I said, and the words surprised me. I hadn’t expected to say that, hadn’t known those words were going to come out of my mouth, but Daddy didn’t seem surprised at all. I looked up to see him nodding. “I hate you,” I said again, like I was trying the words on. “It wasn’t Second’s fault.”

“No, Cordelia, it wasn’t Second’s fault,” he said. He sounded
tired. Not like he was giving in or giving up, not like he thought for even a second of wrapping the gun back in its oilcloth and putting it away in the plastic case, but like he hadn’t slept in a thousand nights, like maybe all those years since he’d been tugged under the water as a boy he’d actually stayed under the sea in the mermaid’s castle, staying awake and waiting, waiting, waiting to resurface. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault except for mine, Cordelia,” he said. He reached out and lifted my chin, his voice going hard.

Second barked again, and we both looked into the water where the dog kept swimming in circles. I began to think I saw something akin to panic on Second’s black face. “So why—”

“Second went in after him, didn’t he? That’s what Newfs do,” Daddy said. “They go in the water and they pull fishermen away from certain doom. I didn’t even do that. I didn’t go into the water. I stayed on deck where it was safe and dry and did my rescuing with a gaff and my hands, but Second went right to the water.” He put his free hand on my shoulder and then glanced out at Second again. “Let me tell you a story, Cordelia, and it’s not one I want to talk about again or want to hear you telling your sisters or your mother, okay? You don’t get to repeat this.”

He stared at me until I nodded dumbly. “You know George had a brother, right? Billy? That the three of us went overseas together, but only George and I came back.” Second barked again, but Daddy didn’t look away from my face. I could have been afraid to breathe—whatever Daddy was going to say, I was sure that I didn’t want to hear it—but I was all reflex and stillness. “It’s more complicated than this, of course. Everything is more complicated. I could string out the story, pretend there was something more to it, but in the end, it’s as simple as this: Billy was killed. That’s what happens in war, I guess. Billy was killed, and we did what we felt like we had to do, which was to bring a punishment down upon the earth.”

He took a deep breath after he said this, and in the moment of quiet I remember thinking how that sounded both like and unlike Daddy: “to bring a punishment down upon the earth.”
That sounded like the man I’d seen doing Shakespeare in summer stock plays, taking the part of Henry IV, Caesar, Coriolanus, and Iago, it sounded like the man that I knew from home, his voice roaring through the house when he read aloud a section from a novel that seemed to sing to him. But it didn’t sound like the salt-grooved man who squinted over the water, who fished and hauled and never left anything undone.

“Billy died and we, in turn, killed. George and me and all of the boys who were with Billy when he went down, we killed until there was nobody around to kill and all that was left to us was Billy and the pieces of his body and the understanding that there are times when it isn’t about what you want or don’t want, about right or wrong, but only about what needs to be done.”

He looked down at the pistol in his hand and his voice dropped into something quiet and falling, like the snow that kept coming down over the water and the
Queen Jane
. “Do you understand, Cordelia?” Second barked again, and whatever spell Daddy had fallen into seemed to break. “Of course you don’t. You’re just a kid,” he said. There wasn’t any scorn in his voice. Just fact. “I did what I had to do. And if I could do it again, if I could go back then, to when I was a kid myself, maybe I would have been able to tell myself, tell George, tell all of the other boys, that this
wasn’t
what we needed to do, that Billy’s dying was senseless and bad luck and bad decisions, that spilling more blood wouldn’t do anything for what happened to Billy, but that’s not the way it was. Not the way it is. And maybe in some later year I’ll look back on now and think this isn’t what had to happen.” He took another heavy breath. I wanted to believe, in that momentary pause, that he was going to change his mind, but even then, even as a girl, I knew better. “Right now,” he said, “right here, it’s all I know to do. When everything is over, when everything that can be said is said, when everything that won’t be said is swallowed down, I can’t just do nothing. I wish I could just howl, that I could scream loud enough to make it right.”

He looked down at his hand and seemed almost surprised to see the pistol, and then he cocked it. The sound was softer than I would have expected, nothing like the breaking click that I would have expected at that moment, and it was perhaps that quietness that made the sound pass through me with the impact of a bullet that hadn’t yet been fired.

He swallowed hard and then his voice turned hard as well. “But all I know is that I’m not heading back to shore with that fucking dog.”

I thought about Brumfitt Kings and his wife rising from the ocean, about what it meant to be a Kings, about the price we had to pay for being able to haul fish out of the ocean like they were called by our voice, and maybe Daddy was thinking the same thing, because when I said, “It’s not his fault, it’s not Second’s fault,” the broken glass in his voice smoothed over.

“You’re right, Cordelia.” He reached out like he was going to put his free hand on my shoulder but then let it drop. “It’s not Second’s fault. I should have taken care of the traps myself or helped Scotty out. I should have kept Second away from Scotty. I should have kept an eye on him, kept the throttle down until he was clear of the ropes. It was my fault, Cordelia, and it was Scotty’s fault. He knew better than to leave the warp such a mess, connected to the bridles, to leave the traps tied together.” He paused, coughed, glanced down to the gun in his hand, and then stared at me again.

“And you. It’s your fault, too, Cordelia. You knew better than to kill the engines, kill the hauler, so I was pulling line by hand. Could have gotten him up faster, out of the water. Might have made the difference. And you should have been helping him. You should have been there to make sure your brother was safe. I thought he was going to be the heir to these waters, the next generation of the Kings men to work as a fisherman, but no. No. He’s gone forever, and instead, I’m left here with three daughters and Scotty to be buried once the light comes up on the morning. It’s my fault, it’s Scotty’s fault, and maybe you don’t deserve as
much blames as I do, but it’s your fault, too, Cordelia. You should have helped him, but you didn’t. And what am I left with now? What am I left with?”

Me
, I wanted to scream,
You’re left with me
.

But I was choking down a sob, and he answered his own question.

“I’m left without a son, Cordelia. That’s what I’m left with.”

He turned away from me and I couldn’t keep it swallowed anymore, the tears and shaking coming out of me, but then he was turned back to me and taking me in his arms, and his voice had the air gone out of it. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean that. You couldn’t have done anything. It wasn’t your fault. You did right. You did right by all of this, baby. Oh, honey, oh, sweetie. I’m sorry. You brought us around and lined us up, and we got him out of the water as quick as we could.”

I cuffed at my eyes. “But why—”

He cut me off. “I stayed on the deck and pulled Scotty out, and Second went into the water. And it didn’t matter, did it? I didn’t save Scotty, and Second didn’t save Scotty. But that’s what I had to do, that’s what Second had to do. And this is what I have to do now.”

He moved to step past me again, and this time I didn’t stop him. Maybe it was because I was still paralyzed by what he had said, by the way he had said it was my fault, with no doubt. Never mind the apology. I had already pointed at myself, already wondered if my mistake had been what pushed Scotty past the point of reclamation, but it was different when my father said it. To have a father like that, and then to have him say it was my fault, my fault that Scotty died? No matter that Daddy said he was sorry, that he was wrong, because I knew the truth: my father didn’t make mistakes.

I walked to the cabin and sank into a chair, trying to dry my face with my sleeve as I turned to watch him. He stood alone and solid on the deck of the
Queen Jane
. The lights of the boat washed around him and made him seem like an absence against the snow
that fell over the boat and the waters. He raised his arm and pointed it down and out over the water, like an accusatory finger.

And then, a lick of fire.

The shot came sharp and stark against the night. The only sounds were the lapping of the water and the hum of the motor in idle. The crack of the gunshot snapped against me like I’d been shot myself. There was barely a pause between the first and second shots, and then again between the second and third shots, one, two, three, and then there was silence, but in the space of that silence, it felt like the sound of the bullets echoed from every wave around, bouncing in and around the cabin and filling the boat. I tried to keep my crying to myself, but I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a gasp and then a few sobs.

I saw Daddy’s head drop, his whole body seeming to sag against the effort, like the snow that had started collecting on his shoulders was weighing him down. And then he began to howl and rage against the night, screaming like it would stop the snow and the waves. The snow streaked down and over him, breaking out of the darkness and framing him in the white. He lifted his arm and fired the gun out into the distance of the ocean and the dark that lay behind the curtain of reflected snow from the ship’s lights, the last three bullets in the gun flaming into nothingness. His voice died in the night, leaving us again with only the hum of the motor and the constancy of the ocean, his screaming and the sound of the gunshots already fading to memory. He grasped the rail of the boat with one hand, and then, with the other, almost casually, he spun the gun out into the air and over the water. The metal soaked up the lights of the boat and the darkness of the sky, turning around and around, lost to my sight before it hit the water. By the time I heard the heavy splash, Daddy had already turned back toward the cabin, his hands empty, the gun sinking into the deeps.

We didn’t speak on the way home, and I looked through the windshield out into the night. I was crying hard enough that things kept coming in and out of focus. Daddy tied us up to the
mooring buoy and then we reversed our trip across the bay, a thin coating of snow sticking to all of the surfaces of Loosewood Island. When we got to the dock, I stepped out of the skiff and tied us up, but Daddy didn’t move. He sat hunched over in his seat, his hands still on the handles of the oars. I let him stay there shaking for a few minutes, and then he wiped at his face and got out of the skiff, the two of us making our way through the snow and up to the house.

In the vestibule, he cupped his hand around the back of my neck. I didn’t know what to do and wasn’t sure what to expect. I think that I thought Daddy was going to say something, either to justify his killing Second, or something to comfort me about Scotty, or Second, or even just about his love for me. I wanted him—needed him—to say that he understood that he wasn’t left with nothing, that despite the death of my brother, he knew that he had me, had my sisters, but he didn’t say anything. He leaned over and kissed me on the top of my head, his breath warm through my hair, and he held me like that for an uncomfortable amount of time.

When he released me, he turned and walked into the living room, and it wasn’t until the click of the lamp sent the shadows leaning away from the doorway and I heard the compression of the sofa, the thin crisp of paper in his book, that I snuck back upstairs to my room. I stayed in my bed, in and out of sleep until I heard the stirrings of Momma and my sisters. I didn’t say anything when Daddy told them all that there had been an accident, that he had gone out on the
Queen Jane
just to clear his head, that Second had gone into the water and gotten tangled up in the propeller. Rena and Carly wailed for a while, but Momma just bowed her head, like she was all cried out. Daddy didn’t look at me. Afterward, we cleaned up, ate our breakfast, and put ourselves into our black dresses for Scotty’s funeral.