The Lobster Kings (11 page)

“I’m saying that I end up dead.”

“Never!” He shouted the word and I jumped back in my chair. He’d come home from the loony bin seeming like the same
man that he’d been before things went wrong with Scotty, and that left me nervous: If I didn’t see it coming before, why would I see it coming again? His outburst left me all tilted, but the next words came out more softly. “Never. Never. Never. Never.” He shrugged. “The professor who taught me
King Lear
was a Shakespeare nut. He was losing his sight. Huh. Going blind. I guess I never thought about it in the context of the play before, but that’s kind of funny. He was going blind, and he’d decided to try to memorize each and every one of Shakespeare’s plays before he lost his sight entirely. He’d almost done it, too. He had all the ones we did that semester, and when he was up there in front of the class, he acted it out for us.” Daddy shook his head, a real smile on his face. “It’s unbelievable to me how clear that is, probably the thing I remember most from four years at university. This was in the first few weeks of my first term at school, and I still didn’t know what to expect from my professors, and here we go with him up in front of the class.” Daddy stood, and his voice dropped lower. “And my poor fool,” and back to his own voice, “meaning you, meaning Cordelia. Even if there is a fool in the play, he means Cordelia. Lear is overcome with grief, his kingdom ravaged, his one true daughter dead, madness descending, and you could hear it with my professor, too, that he had that same kind of grief.” He looked at the kitchen cabinets as if they were an audience, and let his voice change again. “And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no, no, life? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all? Oh, thou’lt come no more,” Daddy said, and then let out a breath. “And here he goes, and the entire class was still. I had goose bumps on my arm, and I can tell you, every single student in that class was paying attention.” Daddy tapped the table with his finger each time he said the word: “Never, never, never, never.” He shook his head, and I could see how much Daddy was enjoying acting this out for me. “And then his voice got soft and you could see that he was almost ready to cry—this old, bearded, almost-blind man, about to cry because of some words from a play written four hundred years ago—and he lets
out one more ‘never.’ The fifth and final ‘never.’ And it came out, that last ‘never,’ in an almost-moan. And that was the moment I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be an actor.’ Right at that moment. It was all that passion.”

“And here you are, an actor,” I said.

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Cordelia. I was twenty and all I’d known was Loosewood Island and Vietnam, and those two worlds sure as shit didn’t come together with what I was learning at Williams.”

He rarely just mentioned Vietnam casually, as a place where he had once been, and I wanted to take the opportunity to ask him about it. He talked around Vietnam all of the time, what it was like at basic training, what it was like to go to Hong Kong on leave, what the hospital was like after he was shot in the leg, the flight home, but he almost never actually talked about what it was like when he was there: what it meant to be gone from everything he knew, what it felt like to be scared and only a year or two older than I was at that moment. Walking through the jungle with a bunch of other boys who were eighteen, nineteen, carrying machine guns and all the other paraphernalia of war, each one hoping that he’d make it back to wherever it was he came from. And other than that one day on the boat, when he shot Second, he never talked about Bill Sweeney, George’s older brother, who went over with Daddy but never made it home.

I didn’t think about any of that at the time. What I said was, “So why did you come back to the island?”

He studied me, like he didn’t even understand the question, and after a second I realized that he
didn’t
understand the question. “Don’t you know? I thought of all my daughters, you were the one who’d understand. I mean, have you even been listening? Didn’t you just ask me about your name? Cordelia? You’re the one, true daughter, the rightful heir.”

“Because you couldn’t do anything else. Because of the sea.”

He nodded and sat back down, picking up his beer. “Because of the sea. I loved acting, and it was fun, still is fun during the
summers, but I could never fully imagine myself as being anywhere other than Loosewood Island and working on a boat. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been a better actor. A failure of the imagination. I like to think of it as something else, something mythical and primal, like the sea just pulls at me and will never let me go. We’re connected to the earth and the earth is connected to the sea, and once you’ve had a taste of the ocean—if you’re a true child of the ocean—nothing can keep you away.”

I raised my eyes at him and he leaned back in his chair. “Wow, Daddy. Very moving. I guess you’re trying to be an actor
and
a poet? Or maybe you’ve been drinking?”

“You know, just because you and your sisters are all teenagers doesn’t mean you have to mouth off.”

Even though I was only seventeen, I wanted to call bullshit. I wanted to say that I knew his talking, his joking, his willingness to say things that other lobstermen wouldn’t—his frequent professions of love for me and my sisters, the way he admitted he was afraid of drowning, afraid that the catch would dry up and we’d go broke—covered all of the other things he didn’t say. That his talking was meant to be an ocean in and of itself, so that we’d be washed away by the words and never wonder about the things he didn’t talk about: Scotty, my mother, Vietnam, his own father. And most of all I wanted to call bullshit because he’d only been back from the loony bin for a year since then, and we never talked about the way he’d gone blank in the face and taken a hammer to that cunt Al Burns’s hand. We never talked about the way that he had left my sisters and me to fend for ourselves while he swallowed pills and wore a bathrobe in the psych unit. We never talked about what it was that had bent him enough to grab the hammer in the first place, whether it was Scotty or Momma, whether it was something to do with Vietnam, or whether it was something more disturbing to me: that he believed his own stories about Brumfitt Kings, that he actually thought that Al Burns was a dragon circling the dark and waiting to strike. I wanted to call bullshit on all of that.

But I was only seventeen. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that I can only think about now that I’m older and past the age of thirty, but either way, I let him steer the boat back to where he had always wanted it pointed.

“It’s a tragedy, Cordelia. There are Shakespearian comedies and there are Shakespearian tragedies, and
Lear
is a tragedy.”

And then he did something that surprised me, because he’d never done more than say, “Sorry I was gone,” never said anything about his recent trip to the loony bin. He said, “You don’t have to worry, Cordelia. I’m not going to end up crazy like Lear did, wandering around on the heath. I’ll never, ever, ever leave you and your sisters again. I’ll never leave you, okay?” I looked down at my hands and was suddenly unsure what I should do with them. I could feel my shoulders slumping, knew that I looked like a sullen teenager, but it was all I could do not to start crying, not to jump up and wrap my arms around him, to curl up in his lap like I had when I was a little kid. I could feel him staring at me, and finally, I nodded.

“Did you know I wanted to name all of you girls after the daughters in
Lear
?” he said.

“Reggie and Goneril?”

“Regan. And yes, I thought it was romantic, but your mother decided otherwise. She pointed out that Goneril might be too close to gonorrhea. Well, that and she also reminded me that the other sisters were evil bitches.” I started to open my mouth to make the obvious joke, but he shook his finger at me. “Don’t,” he said, but he was smiling. He reached up and slid his glasses down onto his nose and then picked up one of the bills on the table before him. “Jesus. We should turn down the thermostat.”

“I’m already wearing wool socks and a heavy sweater, Daddy, I’m not sure how much lower we can turn it.”

“You’ll just have to wear wool underwear as well,” he said.

“How’d you end up with Carly and Rena’s names, then?” I wanted to steer the conversation back to what he’d just said about never leaving me again, but I knew that we’d passed that point.
Sometimes you can’t turn a boat in time. It was all I could do to ask him about Carly and Rena. I couldn’t even make myself ask him about Scotty’s name; it wasn’t that we never talked about Scotty, but it was just that I hated that hitch I always heard in his breath if someone other than Daddy was the one to say Scotty’s name. He sometimes brought Scotty up himself, said “Scotty would have liked that,” or “Scotty would have done this,” and we had pictures up in the house, but it was different when somebody else said Scotty’s name, when my father wasn’t expecting it.

“I’ve never told you?” He looked genuinely surprised. “Carly’s Carly because your mom liked that singer, and Rena was the name of one of my great-aunts. Or maybe one of your mom’s great-aunts.” He looked down at his feet and gave Third a nudge. “Damn it, Third. Quit your farting.” He looked back up at me and gave a shy half-smile, the kind I associated with little boys hiding behind the legs of their mothers. “Doesn’t that beat all to hell? I can’t remember if it was my great-aunt or your mom’s great-aunt. Well, it was somebody’s great-aunt, that’s for sure.” He reached down, grabbed Third’s collar, and then hauled the dog out from under the table. “I’m going to take her down to the boat with me for a bit, at least let her stink up the ocean instead of the house. In the meantime, why don’t you make yourself useful and start putting dinner together? What are we having?”

I stood up and left the chair sitting next to him. I didn’t want to bring it back into the dining room, to tuck it under the round table. We only ever kept four chairs there, neat and ready for their four occupants, a defining limit on the number of people living in our house now. I knew Daddy would put it back. “Lobster,” I threw back at him over my shoulder as I left the kitchen. It’s what I always said, what all of us always said to his question of what we were having for dinner, and it never failed to elicit our intended response: a quick, deep chuckle that sounded more like a coughing dog than a man’s laughter.

I remember that, from my room, I looked out on Daddy and Third climbing down the steps to the wharf. Third was a girl,
and small for a Newf, which meant that she topped out at about 110. I remember her as a puppy, though I know that she would have been four or five the year I was seventeen. Walking next to Daddy, she could have been a version of his shadow.

I knew I’d missed my chance. When we were sitting at the table and Daddy said that I was named Cordelia after the king’s one true daughter, that I was named Cordelia because I was the rightful heir, what I should have done was asked him if he was sure of that, if he’d known that for sure when Scotty was alive. I should have asked him if he’d always known that I was going to be the one to follow him onto the water, to take up the mantle of the Kings.

I should have asked him this: If he could go back and make a bargain with the ocean, would he have traded my life for his son’s?

O
ur waters stayed clear of James Harbor buoys for nearly fifteen years after Daddy destroyed Al Burns’s hand, but nothing lasts forever.

There’d been trouble the year I got back from university, and Daddy had taken me and George and a couple of other men to James Harbor, and we’d marched right into Al Burns’s office. I’d made sure Daddy wasn’t carrying a hammer, but all it took was for Daddy to say, “Your boys are fishing our ocean again,” for Al to clamp things down. Still, that had been more than a decade ago. More than fifteen years had passed since Daddy smashed Al’s hand and headed to the loony bin, and things had changed. There was a new generation of boys who were working the boats, and the story of Daddy flattening Al Burns’s hand with a hammer was just that to them: a story. There were rumours that James Harbor lobstermen were planning to make a push for our waters again. The fact was, generations of overfishing in their waters had taken their toll. There were rumours, too, that something uglier was going on than simple lobster poaching, that James Harbor had gotten run-down with drugs—meth in particular.