The Lobster Kings (9 page)

And past that, it wasn’t something we talked about. Sailor II was gone. Scotty was gone. The ocean gave us our life and it also took life away.

T
he funeral was behind us when school started up again after New Year’s. I turned thirteen in February, Rena turned twelve a few days later, and Carly made eleven in April. In the spring, sometime in May, Daddy took a day off of lobstering to make a run to the mainland and when we came home from school there was a Newf puppy running around the house, Sailor III. Third. We taught Third to carry a beer from the kitchen to Daddy’s recliner in the living room.

And then, in June, around what would have been Scotty’s birthday, and about the time Daddy pulled his traps for molting season, Momma put bricks in her pockets and walked off the edge of the dock, leaving Rena, Carly, and me alone with our father.

I don’t know what Brumfitt Kings would have painted if he’d been looking out over the water and watching Scotty, Daddy, Second, and me on the boat that day, but the only thing he would have had to paint was the ocean. No monsters from the deeps were necessary. The water takes enough away on its own.

W
hat Brumfitt did paint was a series of three paintings commonly referred to as
The Drowned Boy
paintings.

If you head from the village toward the school-house, and then turn at the end of Coral Avenue, there’s a path that leads up the hill toward the west side of the island. The Brumfitt Kings Museum has a donation box specifically for the upkeep of “Brumfitt Trails” on the island, and this is one of the most well used trails. There’s even a small brass marker on the trailhead post that labels it
THE DROWNED BOY PATH
. During the tourist months, when the population of the island more than triples, there’s a steady stream of people making their way along the path. It’s about a ten-minute walk up a soft grade, and it doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere because the trees grow heavy, and even on a sunny day there’s not much you can see outside of the woods and the path in front of you. It’s best in the winter months, because when you finally come to the top of the trail, the leaves are gone and the trees are bare; the trail suddenly bursts open in front of you, and you realize that you are standing on a sheer cliff a couple hundred feet above the sea, and you can see the same thing that Brumfitt Kings must have seen. In the winter, the waves
hit the rocks sitting a hundred yards off shore differently. What in the summer is a rolling, smooth whiteness has become something ferocious and energetic. The waves smash against the rocks and send spumes of water into the air, a mist that carries across to shore if you take the shore path. The light falls differently, too.

There’s a bench at the top of the path near the guardrail, and if you sit on it, you are sitting more or less in the same spot from where it seems like Brumfitt painted the first two paintings in the series. The paintings are large for Brumfitt—each one is seven feet wide and five feet high—and they are clearly a series; he dated the back of his canvases, and these were completed respectively in January, February, and March of 1740.

In the first painting, Brumfitt captures the waves and the spray of the water off the rocks, but nothing of the actual coast; it’s as if you’re only fifty or sixty feet from the boat. The boat itself is small against the waves, and the boy, maybe nine or ten, is at the oars and clearly struggling with the wind and the wash. The mast is broken, but that seems something that had happened before, since there is no evidence of sails or rigging, nothing other than the oars. There’s fishing line and some sort of oilcloth tarp, indication that the boy wasn’t out on a pleasure cruise, but had been getting food. Behind the boat, the sky is split between darkness and, if not exactly light, then not exactly dark, either; it’s clear that the storm has come in fast and hard, and the boy has been taken unawares. There’s a look of panic on his face. He’s glancing back over his shoulder, but you can see that no matter how hard he’s struggling to row, he’s not going to clear the rocks where the water is breaking.

The second painting in the series is more expansive. It shows the coast and the spit of pebbled beach, the water between the beach and the offshore break of rocks. Between the break and the beach, the water isn’t truly calm, but it doesn’t have the manic energy and whitewash of the waves on the ocean side of the break. Out there, on the other side of the break, the ocean side, the wind has whipped up the water into nothing other than spray and foam,
and the waves make the boy’s boat look like some sort of a beach toy. And like a toy, the boat is caught up in a wave, turned at a three-quarter angle in the wave’s gutter, the stern smashing into the break of the rocks; it’s clear that if the painting were a filmstrip, the next frames would show the boat hung up on the rocks, tumbled end over end. The boy himself is already sliding from his seat. One hand is raised as if to ward off the rocks, the other still firmly fastened to the handle of an oar. That’s what the eye is drawn to, but it’s the figure on the beach that breaks my heart: at the edge of the picture, small enough that we know he’s too far away to do anything, a man runs across the polished rocks of the beach. He’s wearing a heavy jacket and boots. You can’t make out any other details, but you can see the urgency and you know it’s too late.

The third painting is from a different location on the island, and it’s a spot that seems to draw all kinds of tourists, not just the Brumfitt tourists: the cemetery. There is a man digging out a grave. You can’t tell for sure if it is the same man from the second painting in the series, but it’s hard for me to believe anything else. The sky has cleared, the storm from the first two paintings blown past, and the sunlight is achingly bright, so that the body lying next to the grave has no shadows to hide it. It’s the boy’s body, wrapped in oilcloth. A flap is turned over by his head so that we can see his face. If you stand too close to the painting, the picture is smeared and blurry. It’s only when you move back from the painting that it comes into focus and it’s clear that Brumfitt wants you to see the face of a boy who was smashed against the rocks.

The series probably wouldn’t have been considered so important if the dates and the events hadn’t lined up so neatly with Brumfitt’s own life: his oldest son died at the age of ten, in December of 1739, his boat overturned in a storm, his body broken against the rocks. The first Kings boy taken by the sea.

W
e floated together as a family for more than three years after Momma drowned herself. Her body spent three days in the water, and when they finally fished her out, she went right into a closed casket. I’d like to think that she looked calm and peaceful resting on the silk liner, a clean dress and styled hair, closed eyes, but I knew too much about what the water could do after three days: bloated and bitten skin, soft features smeared by the fish that fed on the bottom of the ocean.

By the time I was sixteen, Carly and Rena were completely done with pulling lobster pots. I fished with Daddy on the weekends and after school, hauling lobsters on the
Queen Jane
, while Carly and Rena went off with friends, fucking boys in the back of cars and in dank basements. With Scotty gone, Daddy took me on for a full share of what he pulled out of the ocean, and in response, my sisters separated themselves from him with a violent absence that turned me into the bridge between them and Daddy; it was as if the only way they knew how to figure out who they were was to obliterate the ground around them, a teenage policy of scorched earth. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe
it was Daddy responding to Rena and Carly pushing away by pulling me tighter.

Either way, it never occurred to me to worry about Daddy. He was always a self-contained man in most ways. That’s not to say that he was always quiet. I can’t think of a day that went by when he didn’t tell me that he loved me, but he was a hard man, and I also couldn’t think of a day when I felt like he
needed
me,
needed
anybody. Still, in retrospect, I should have been able to see that there were times when whatever it was that he was holding inside of him was beginning to leak out, that he was in danger of coming undone, but I couldn’t see beyond myself.

It was that fall, nearly four years after Scotty drowned, that James Harbor made a play for our waters, dropping traps in Loosewood Island fishing grounds. I remember tense men crowded into our kitchen, talk of guns and fists and cutting traps. I was old enough to be around the fringes while still being too young to be in the thick of things, but I remember the way that every time I heard somebody talk about the kingpin of James Harbor, Al Burns, his name was prefaced with the phrase, “that cunt.” The only person who didn’t seem worked up over the poaching was Daddy. He’d let the men grumble and flame, and then he’d tell them that these things had a way of working themselves out, that “Brumfitt Kings claimed these waters for Loosewood Island, and that cunt Al Burns can’t change that.”

Out on the
Queen Jane
, with James Harbor buoys floating thick in our waters, it seemed like Brumfitt Kings was just a piece of ancient history. When I said that to Daddy, however, he snapped at me.

“You spend too much time looking forward, Cordelia. It would do you some good to look back more often.”

I lifted a trap onto the rail and dropped it into the water. “I just think that we need to do something.”

“What do you want to do, Cordelia? You think we should be cutting traps? You think we should sink a couple of their boats?”

“There are worse ideas,” I said. I swallowed the words into
a mumble, and Daddy either didn’t hear me or decided that he didn’t hear.

“You’re thinking about this wrong. This isn’t about us against James Harbor. This is like Brumfitt and
The Sea Dragon
.”

I knew enough not to groan. Daddy’s only response to me complaining about getting yet another lecture on our family history was to tell me more of that history, as if by weight alone he could get me to understand its importance. And he always told me the stories about Brumfitt as if I had never heard them before, as if I hadn’t read the same journals he had. I’d never actually seen
The Sea Dragon
in real life—it hung in a national museum in Denmark—but I’d seen reproductions and heard the story dozens of times. None of which stopped Daddy.

“There be dragons,” Daddy said. “That’s what they used to write on the edges of maps, in the undiscovered waters, and they weren’t just words. We’ve got mermaids and selkies and the merrow, and those are still in the waters off the island, but there was a time when there were dragons, too. Sea serpents, some men called them, but doesn’t matter what you called them, Brumfitt knew they were real. And you’ve got to understand that Brumfitt was alone when he painted
The Sea Dragon
. This was before he had a wife. It was just him, in a cold cabin, drawing and painting and trying to keep warm despite the winds coming off the ocean.

“And you’ve heard the winds yourself, but they were different then. They carried traces of Ireland, reminding him of the home he’d left behind, but they also carried crystals of ice and salt that worked their way through the cracks in the walls of his shack. Sometimes, at night, when Brumfit was trying to sleep, he heard the sound of a harp: it was a merrow trying to sing him to the deeps. He stuffed his ears with greased rags and sketched with charcoal to keep his body from wandering to the water.”