The Lobster Kings (12 page)

With Daddy’s history, a resumption of our fishing wars with
James Harbor should have left me nervous—his trip to the loony bin had left its mark on my sisters and me—but the truth was that I was preoccupied with something that felt more pressing than my worries about James Harbor: in the fifteen years since Daddy smashed up Al Burns’s hand, he’d started to get old.

He’d been aging well. He was trim from decades of hauling lobster traps, and at fifty-seven he could probably still have fit into the same suit that he was wearing in his wedding portrait, though that suit didn’t have a particularly fine fit even at the time. When he did wear a suit, which was rarely, only to weddings and funerals, he looked good, the silver in his hair like the cut of a fast boat through the water, his skin worked over by the sun and the wind, leaving him looking rugged. Put him in a tuxedo and it would be leading man looks from Hollywood before Technicolor came along.

But the rest of him wasn’t holding up. His dizzy spells had turned to fainting spells: I’d gone over to Daddy’s house for our weekly dinner and found him out cold on his kitchen floor. His dog—Sailor V, Fifth—was curled up beside him, like the two of them were just taking a nap. He claimed it was nothing. Low blood sugar or just standing up too quickly, Daddy said, the sort of thing that could happen to anybody, nothing to worry about, but of course I worried. He’d been in the middle of prepping food. There was a loaf of bread, a pot of stew simmering on the stove.

I set him down on the couch while I finished getting our meal together, and after I badgered him for a while he admitted that his energy had been down the past few weeks.

“Nothing to mind, Cordelia. A flu bug or something like that. Another ten days until pots go back in the water. I’ll maybe just take an early bedtime tonight.”

I put the tray with our dinners down and slid the coffee table closer to the couch. The broth in the stew trembled. “You’ll do more than that,” I said. “You’ll be going to the doctor’s tomorrow.”

He took a bite of his stew and grimaced. “Eh. You’d think I’d learn to let it cool down. Burned my tongue again.” He broke off
a piece of bread and put it under the table for Fifth. “You planning on going to the mainland before the season starts? I’ve got a few odds and ends I need picked up. Nothing big, and I can ask George or one of the other boys, but I—”

“Don’t you change the subject, Daddy. You’re going to the doctor tomorrow.”

He grumbled and tried to weasel out of it, and after dinner he insisted on heading over to the Grumman Fish House for a beer. I’m not sure if he really wanted to get out or if he was just trying to convince me that he was hale and hearty, hoping I’d forget about him going to the doctor, but once we were actually at the Grumman Fish House Daddy had complained that I was treating him like he’d gone old and senile overnight. “Next thing I know, she’ll be taking the
Queen Jane
from me, telling me there’s only room for one of the Kings to be on the sea,” he said, but even if he told the boys about it with a smile on his face, there was something about it that didn’t ring funny to me, because I knew that there would probably come a day when I
would
have to drag him off of the
Queen Jane
, and I worried that he’d be out on the water past the point where it was safe. I’d be staring a long, long time if I looked to my sisters to say anything. Rena would kiss a squid to stay in Daddy’s good graces, and the only person Carly was interested in pissing off was me. But maybe this was an opportunity. Maybe this fainting spell of Daddy’s was a chance to broach the subject with him, to see what his plans for the future were, see when he was ready to step down.

I
sleep better when I’m sharing the bed, but it had been a couple of years since I’d had a serious boyfriend, and that meant that there wasn’t anything keeping me tethered to the bedroom if I woke in the middle of the night. My dog, Trudy—a Newf, of course, and on the smaller side for the breed—was used to my restlessness and kept me company through the brutal hours. Mostly I read histories or biographies or the specialized fishing stuff that is only interesting to somebody in the business. I’d also gotten hooked on watching the cricket matches that my satellite dish picks up. I don’t understand the rules, but there is something in the pristine white uniforms, the ritual of the matches, that appeals to me. Sometimes, when a strange heat and lightning rolled over the island, I liked to head down to the water to wait for the night to pass.

But the night that Daddy passed out I slept straight through. I wouldn’t have thought it would be the night for it, not with worrying about Daddy, but the storm that had come in a few nights before had turned from a biblical torrent into a solid, cool, windless rain that tangled with the metal roof and kept me soothed until dawn.

With the rain, I hadn’t been much out walking or running—the
gravelled tourist walks were the only paths that hadn’t gotten slopped out in the weather—and I’d been feeling cooped up in the house. I could only read or watch television for so long. I’d tried working on some of my paintings, but couldn’t concentrate with the greyness. Besides which, it felt like I was touching up things that didn’t need to be touched anymore, working on them for the sake of work. I was itching to take my pochade box out and start something new. Some of the other painters on the island could bring what they saw inside with them, used the winter and the grey and rainy days as a chance to paint from what they remembered, but I’d always been somebody who needed to stand out there and work with what was in front of me. Once I got properly started I could finish indoors, in foul weather, but I’d used that up a couple of days ago, and to start something new I needed to be in front of it. It meant I looked like one of the tourists during the summers: with my pochade box flipped open and attached to a tripod, if I was working somewhere that was of particular importance in the Brumfitt canon, I might be one of a line of a half dozen painters scraping away at the water and the cliffs. I couldn’t help it. I needed to be outside to capture that sense of being outside.

I didn’t have any illusions about my paintings: I was serious in my intent, but I knew I’d never be better than competent. It didn’t matter, because I enjoyed it, and on Loosewood Island, being an artist was almost as common as being a fisherman. Most of us did at least some of both. We had the history of Brumfitt, of course, and another half dozen or so minor artists who had either lived here or painted works on the island, the sort whose work might seem familiar even if their name didn’t. We had the seasons, too, and with the weather and the way that lobstering tacked back and forth between brutal days and stretches of inactivity, you had to have some sort of a hobby. There were enough people who took up drinking or smoking pot, but arts and crafts came in a pretty popular second to self-destruction.

I’d started painting more seriously since Kenny Treat had
moved to Loosewood Island nearly a decade before. Kenny hadn’t been born here, and even if his wife, Sally, who teaches kindergarten through third grade, had been raised close by on the mainland, in Lubec, most of the islanders still thought of them as outsiders: coming from off the island is something that longevity can’t change, but it was more than that. Kenny worked for Daddy for five years, and then moved to my boat, the
Kings’ Ransom
, once Rena’s husband, Tucker, took to the water and started working on the
Queen Jane
. Kenny went to college at Yale and everybody says he comes from money, but he never talked about buying his own boat, like he had no aspirations to do anything more than be a sternman and paint his pictures. That lack of ambition is the sort of thing that can only come with a safety net, and left some of the boys suspicious, despite my attesting to Kenny’s work ethic. I couldn’t imagine having a different sternman than Kenny. He was funny and kind and he saw lobstering the way I did: as a chance to prove that the sea can never beat us. Though, of course, it does sometimes.

I’d gone to college, too, and raced through four years in three so that I could come home and start working my own boat. I was on the island when Kenny moved here. The first time I saw him was down at the docks. I was working on the engine of the
Kings’ Ransom
and tied up two boats closer in than the
Queen Jane
when he came walking toward me, Daddy at his side. I was struck by the way Kenny moved. This was before Kenny had worked a day on the
Queen Jane
, before he’d done anything but take a pleasure cruise, but he came toward me with his knees tilted out, the sway that you get from spending years on the ocean. He was taller than Daddy, broad across the chest and shoulders—something that I learned later came from time on the crew team when he was in college. Each step Kenny took was solid, his hips open, his boots ticking against the wood of the dock. He had his head tilted down, listening to something that Daddy was saying, and I remember that as he came over to me, he gave a small smile. I don’t remember what we talked about that day—it was probably nothing more
than an exchange of names and a few pleasantries—but I remember the way he looked at me.

The island being as small as it is, it took maybe twenty minutes after I met Kenny before I figured out he was married, and that he and his wife had bought a small two-bedroom Colonial one road up from Gull Street. I decided to go over there and welcome her. I hadn’t been up there in a few months, hadn’t even realized the house was up for sale, and as I walked up the street I could see that Kenny and Sally had painted it blue. There was a wheelbarrow on the lawn and the freshly turned dirt in front of the porch where they’d planted bright flowers: black-eyed Susans, asters, and blue flags. It looked like a hopeful little house.

I’d gone with a cheap bottle of white wine. Sally was sitting on the front steps, a bottle of beer in her hand. She had a pair of gardening gloves next to her and a small smear of dirt on her legs. She had makeup on and her hair done up. She looked like she expected Kenny to take her away from gardening and out for a fancy dinner. Even though she was sitting, I could see that she filled out her clothes nicely. Not to say that I don’t have a good body, but I take after Momma. I look taller than my five-seven, and I’ve got breasts, but they’re not like Rena’s or even Carly’s; I eat like a horse, but with all of the time I spend out fishing, I don’t have any extra meat on me. Or maybe it’s just a good metabolism. Either way, while nobody would mistake me for a boy, I’m definitely built for speed.

As I came up the walk to her I held the bottle of wine out in front of me, but she didn’t make a move to get up or do anything other than simply watch me come to her. I handed her the bottle of wine and said, “Welcome to Loosewood Island.”

“Thanks.” She reached out and took the bottle. “It’s cold.”

“Straight from the fridge.”

She put it on the step next to her. “I’m not going to open it now,” she said. I suppose that I must have flinched at that, because I saw her try to recover. “I can offer a beer.” She sighed and shook her head. “Sorry. I’m just still trying to wrap my head around the
idea that I moved back. I always swore that once I left Lubec I’d be gone for good, but Kenny wanted it.”

“Well, Loosewood Island isn’t exactly Lubec.”

She laughed and then finished her beer. “No kidding. At least in Lubec I could drive somewhere if I wanted.”

“I’m Cordelia. Cordelia Kings.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s a small island.”

“Well, looks like your husband’s going to be working as a sternman for my father.”

“You fish, too, right?” I nodded. “Early mornings, I guess.” She pushed herself to her feet and then bent down and picked up the bottle of wine. She tipped it in my direction. “Thanks for the wine. I’m Sally. And now I’ll go put this bottle back in the fridge. I’ve got some unpacking to do.”

She didn’t slam the door behind her as she went inside, but she might as well have, for the impression it made on me. I don’t think it took that long for her to put other people off, even the boys who were taken by her looks at first. It’s not that she was deliberately nasty or cold. There was just something tight about her. I don’t think she was aware of the way she was acting, but she never stopped complaining about being on Loosewood Island. She didn’t get along well with any of the women I knew, and she was never more than indifferent toward me. Despite that, I felt bad for her at times, particularly after she started having miscarriages.

Over the years she had three. Kenny told me about them, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could keep hidden on a place as small as the island anyway. And for a couple of years she had a drinking problem, too, which made me feel bad about giving her a bottle of wine for a housewarming present. Ten years on and we all thought we knew everything there was to know about Sally Treat. Gossip got around the island quicker than a divorcée spending a week’s vacation on the rock.

Maybe if Sally had been a different woman we’d have become friends and I’d have looked at Kenny differently, or maybe if I’d known from the first moment that Kenny was married I wouldn’t
have gotten the thought of him as somebody to be attracted to, but those twenty minutes of meeting him were just enough to turn him into a splinter lodged under my skin. Of course, once I actually got to know Kenny, it got even worse. As Daddy’s sternman, he was somebody who was in my constant orbit, and then, five years ago, when Tucker and Rena moved to the island, Daddy took on Tucker, and Kenny moved on to the
Kings’ Ransom
with me.