The Lobster Kings (40 page)

B
y eleven, the twins had long gone to bed, and the dozen or so people left in Rena’s house, other than my sisters and me, collected empty cups and bottles, plates with bits of cookies, crumpled napkins. Timmy was asleep in Tucker’s recliner, a half-drunk bottle of beer resting in the cup holder of Mordecai’s stroller, Etsuko in the kitchen washing dishes. Chip and Tony were chatting with George—talking about how best to deal with Tucker and Daddy’s lines, with my lines, I knew—when I announced I was headed to bed.

“Early start tomorrow,” I said, loud enough that the other people in the room could hear me. “Stephanie, Kenny, early start.” Kenny nodded, but Stephanie stared at me blankly. She looked at Carly, and after a moment’s hesitation, Carly nodded.

“It’s a fishing day,” I said.

Stephanie looked at me, back to Carly, and then at me again. “It’s the day after Woody’s funeral.”

“It’s a fishing day,” I said. Everybody in the room was quiet, and then, finally, Stephanie nodded. “Early,” I said. “We’ll push at five-thirty.”

I started to turn and then I stopped. “There was a James
Harbor boat out in the water today.” I looked at George, and he tried not to meet my eye, but then he nodded.

“I saw it,” he said.

“And?”

“Looked like the same one that shot at me.”

“You sure?”

“The only thing I’m sure of, Cordelia, is that things are changing.”

“No,” I said. “No, they aren’t. These are still our waters.”

I
woke up a few minutes before my alarm clock was scheduled to go off. Kenny had come home with me, and I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake him. I’d forgotten to ask if I could get my cast wet, so I kept it out of the spray as best I could. I was awkwardly trying to shampoo my hair when Kenny got in the shower with me.

He picked up the soap and started rubbing my back with it. The tenderness of the gesture almost made me start crying, and I ducked my head down so that my face got wet before turning and leaning my head back so that I could rinse out the shampoo.

We weren’t more than a couple of minutes late down to the docks, but Stephanie was waiting in the skiff. She’d put the oars in their locks and was sitting on the bench with her hands wrapped around the handles. She didn’t smile when she saw us, but her voice was light when she said, “You ready, Skipper?”

“I guess I can’t row, can I?”

Kenny laughed. “With one hand, we’d be going in circles.” I stepped into the skiff and settled myself down at the bow. Trudy worked her way from dock to bench to the bottom of the boat and then waddled over to where Stephanie was sitting. She nosed
at Stephanie until Stephanie scratched her neck and ears, and then she flopped down. We were halfway out to the
Kings’ Ransom
when I touched Stephanie on the shoulder.

“No,” I said. “Over there. The
Queen Jane
.” She glanced at me and then changed course without a word. “At least until I can get the
Kings’ Ransom
fixed up,” I said, though she hadn’t asked. “The electronics are still shot.”

I ran the
Queen Jane
back to the wharf while Kenny and Stephanie started gearing up. The tank was half full, but I filled it at the co-op anyway and then we loaded up with enough bait to work through both my line and Daddy’s. As I was signing my chit, I realized Kenny was looking at me like he’d accidently broken something.

“What?”

“No chai, boss. I didn’t bring the thermos, and I didn’t bring anything to eat, either.” He looked down and then scuffed his boot on the deck. I glanced over to Stephanie, who was chatting with Paul Paragopolis near the offices.

I cut Kenny a smile. “What’s the matter? Something got you distracted this morning?” I popped open the console box and rooted around. “No matter,” I said. “You can run up to the Coffee Catch, get us something for the day. Daddy always keeps some cash in here. I’ll get him back later.” I stopped and closed my eyes, realizing what I’d said. I closed the box. “Fuck it. Just tell them I’ll pay for it tonight, when we’re back onshore. Grab some sandwiches—see what Stephanie wants. I’ll take a coffee, too.” He raised an eyebrow and I found that there was still the hint of a smile left in me. “Fine. A tea.”

Kenny touched me lightly and then turned to walk up the path. He stopped and said a few words to Stephanie. She nodded and went with him. Paul looked over and gave me an unsure wave.

I waved back, but I turned to the boat. I didn’t have anything left that needed to be done, but I didn’t want to have to face Paul. I didn’t want to face anyone. I was glad that we were headed out on the water. Even with a broken wrist, the pattern of pulling
traps was something that would feel familiar. I hadn’t fished with Daddy for years, since I’d had my own boat, but it was something that I’d learned from him. Everything I did on the boat, every practice, every movement, was something I’d inherited from him, and I couldn’t think of a better way to be with him than to be out on the water on the
Queen Jane
. Let Rena and Carly stay at home, let them make coffee and accept condolences, let them sit on the couch and cry, I thought. I wanted to be out on the ocean, where the Kings belonged.

I ran my hand along the rail of the
Queen Jane
and let it linger on the scar that the rope had burned into the wood on the day that Scotty had gone overboard. There should be something similar for Daddy, a mark, but there wasn’t, and it felt strange. It had never occurred to me that he’d die on land. I had never even really believed that he’d die at all. I’d seen him getting older, of course, seen the way his hair silvered and his skin took the sun, but I was never able to see him as anything other than the man who’d sat there calmly when I’d lip-hooked him, a lure dangling from his lip, blood dripping down his chin. Even with the fainting, the recent troubles, I’d known, but I’d never really
believed
it. Maybe it was better. He wasn’t somebody who would have been suited for a recliner, for growing old gracefully.

I’d left Fifth with Rena, but Trudy had come along and didn’t seem put out by taking the
Queen Jane
instead of the
Kings’ Ransom
. I reboarded the
Queen Jane
and waited for Trudy to settle herself out on the deck before I went forward to the wheelhouse. I opened one of the lockers and sorted through it fitfully. It was no surprise to me that it was neatly organized. Spare slickers were on a hook, the toolbox was latched closed, lines were neatly coiled. It looked the same as the lockers on the
Kings’ Ransom;
Daddy was the one who’d taught me how to stow my gear. I held on to the door and touched the stitches on my forehead. The stitches itched and I was dizzy.

I should have been happy, standing on the boat, knowing that Kenny was going to come back to me, but I felt uneasy in a way
that I never was on a boat. When I closed my eyes, I wasn’t sure if we were tied to the dock or if I was simply adrift at sea, and it was unsettling to not be able to tell. I opened my eyes back up, and what stood in front of me, what I stood upon, was Daddy’s boat, the
Queen Jane
, but Daddy was nowhere in sight and never would be. I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t dumb enough to think that because I’d slept with Kenny, because it seemed like what I wanted was within my grasp, that it would make me forget that Daddy had died, but until that moment I hadn’t understood that there’d be something more than sadness.

I admired Daddy, but I knew he hadn’t been perfect. There were things about him that I believed even though they weren’t true. I’d mythologized him in the same way that every child mythologized—or demonized—her father. To be fair, it was probably easier to mythologize Daddy than it was most fathers. Even if I just stuck to the things that were undeniably true, he was still unlike anybody else. And I know it sounds naïve, but it hadn’t occurred to me that being sad that he was gone and missing him were two separate things. I’d cried at the hospital and at the funeral, cried so hard that my lungs ached and my eyes hurt, but it was only standing there, on the deck of the
Queen Jane
, that I realized I also missed him.

Even when I was at college, I’d never gone more than a couple of days without talking to him, and when I was at home, on Loosewood Island, which is to say my entire life, he was everywhere I looked. I could trace my name all the way back to Brumfitt Kings, to the first of Loosewood Island, and for some people, that was what made the Kings the kings of Loosewood Island, but I realized that as much as I’d spent my life poring over Brumfitt’s journals, looking at his paintings, painting my own versions of the landscape he’d claimed, when it came down to it, the island wasn’t defined for me by Brumfitt. Loosewood Island was defined for me by Daddy, by the way he told me stories about Brumfitt and stories about his own childhood, how he’d learned to fish, by the way he’d taken me by the hand when I was a child and walked
me down the crushed-shell paths, by the way he’d shown me the waters and taught me to fish myself. And it was defined by the stories that Daddy didn’t tell me: the way he never talked about his older brother or his father, the way he never mentioned Billy Sweeney dying in Vietnam except for that one day on the boat, when he killed Second. He didn’t talk about the time he spent in the loony bin, didn’t talk about the way Scotty had looked when we’d pulled him from the water, and he didn’t talk about the way Momma had walked out to the end of the wharf and then decided not to stop walking.

He’d defined Loosewood Island for me, and I realized that he’d defined Brumfitt Kings for me as well. Most people looked at Brumfitt’s paintings and saw rocks and water, saw gulls and codfish and lobsters, saw the fishing boats and the contours of the island. Even when they looked at the paintings that had something else, all they saw were ghostly hands, all they saw were monsters. They never saw the things that Daddy saw, what I saw, the way that Brumfitt imagined the island as something more than a spit of rock upon which the Kings had chained their lives.

I closed the locker and then opened the one next to it. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I knew there was something that I wanted to find, something that I hoped would help me make sense of things. I was willing to believe that Brumfitt Kings’ wife had been a gift from the sea, that she’d come with a dowry that meant the Kings would be given the bounty of the sea and a curse that meant the death of every firstborn son that bore the name Kings. But if I believed that, then I had to believe there was a way to break that curse, to stop the sea from taking back what it gave us.

My head ached, and I couldn’t figure out if it was my head and my wrist and all of the bumps and bruises from the night of the storm catching up to me, or if I was just tired and dehydrated. There were several unopened bottles of water hanging from a mesh bag on the hook in the locker I’d just opened, and I fished one out. Above the hooks in the locker there was a shelf that held some papers. Maps and charts. They were organized in
tabbed folders, but I doubted that Daddy had looked at them in decades. He’d built dividers lower down in the locker and he had his gun cases neatly strapped in. Two shotguns cases and a pistol, I knew. I undid the tab holding one of the shotgun cases in and laid the case on the captain’s chair. The latches made a satisfying click when I opened them. I didn’t pull the shotgun out. I just looked at it for a few seconds. It was oiled and I was sure that it was loaded. Daddy wanted things safe, but he’d also told me once that if he had to balance the safety of keeping a gun unloaded against the safety of having it ready to go, he’d rather err on the side of things going boom.

By the time I finished rooting through the lockers, Kenny and Stephanie hadn’t come back yet, and I decided to look belowdecks. It wasn’t much of a space. Enough to store gear and for some uncomfortable sleeping. The
Kings’ Ransom
was newer and nicer belowdecks, but there weren’t any lobster boats in the island fleet that I could recommend instead of a night at home. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d been below the
Queen Jane
. Certainly not since I was a young kid, before Scotty died. There was a time when it would have been fun to play down there with Scotty and my sisters, when a small, dark space could give hours of fun, but I know that by the time I was a teenager I had no use for the dank dampness below the decks.

Daddy kept all of the sorts of things that I would have expected him to keep down there. The same sort of crap I had on the
Kings Ransom
: spools of wire for repairing traps, spare parts for the engine, life-saving gear, lobstering supplies, a rough galley that wouldn’t serve for more than heating up a can of soup. The stingy bunk was made with a blanket and pillow, hospital corners making it look even less inviting than it already was. There were things that surprised me, though. He’d built a small bookshelf, cordage keeping the books in their place, and I wondered when it was that he read on the
Queen Jane
. The books themselves were nothing that I would have looked twice at—a few Shakespeare plays; two Dickens novels; Jane Austen; Hemingway;
Moby-Dick
;
a few others I’d never read. To the side, there was a heavy trunk that was lashed against the wall, and it caught my attention because it looked big enough that I wasn’t sure how Daddy had gotten it down the ladder. There was something about the trunk that was familiar, and I wondered if it had been there when I was a kid and still played belowdecks.