The Lobster Kings

by Alexi Zentner

  ALSO BY ALEXI ZENTNER

  Touch

  PUBLISHED BY KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2014 Alexi Zentner

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States of America by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Zentner, Alexi, author

  The lobster Kings / Alexi Zentner.

  ISBN 978-0-307-36295-7

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-36297-1

  I. Title.

  PS8649.E565L63 2014 C813’.6 C2013-906000-6

  Cover design by Terri Nimmo

  Cover image: © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to all the men and women who work the water.

  And to Laurie, Zoey, and Sabine.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  WE’RE NAMED THE KINGS, and we’re the closest thing to royalty on Loosewood Island. The story goes that when the first of the Kings, Brumfitt Kings, the painter, came to Loosewood Island near on three hundred years ago, the waters were so thick with lobster that Brumfitt only had to sail half of the way from Ireland: he walked the rest of the way, the lobsters making a road with their backs. He was like Jesus walking on the water, except there was no bread to be found anywhere. Lobster there was plenty of. In 1720, the waters were crawling with them in sizes that no man today has seen. To catch his first lobster, Brumfitt didn’t bother with boats or traps or anything more complicated than simply wading into the water at low tide and gaffing a lobster ten or twenty pounds or more. He caught lobsters five feet long. When I was young I heard old men down at the harbour and in the diner talking about how when their grandfathers were boys they saw lobster claws nailed to the sides of boathouses, claws big enough to crush a man’s head. The lobsters are smaller now, but they’ve done well for the Kings. Back when I was a girl in school, we were told about how lobsters used to be cheap trash fish for filling bellies, but it’s hard to believe. Daddy and I both drop pots and haul lines and he’s raised all three of us girls on the money the lobsters bring in. Raised us well enough, too. Carly, the youngest, teaching in Portland for the last few years after Daddy put her through Colby College, hard cash that could have gone to buy a third boat. Rena, the middle daughter, like so many of us living on an island that is claimed by both the U.S. and Canada, taking some schooling on both sides of the border—she started nursing school at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, and finished up as an accountant at the University at Albany, SUNY—and now is married and back to the island, running the fish shop and managing our books, with her husband, Tucker, trained as an architect but working as Daddy’s sternman. And me. The oldest daughter. I went to college, too, and I studied art, but as much as I love to paint, I never wanted to paint anything other than Loosewood Island, never wanted to do anything other than live here and walk the same beaches and paths, painting the same famous landscape that Brumfitt Kings painted, and, girl or not, to head to sea to work like Daddy and his daddy before him, and so on and so forth all the way back to Brumfitt Kings, Kings of the ocean, lobster Kings. I have two sisters, but I’m the one who works the ocean with Daddy, Cordelia Kings, heir to the throne.

  Daddy likes to say that you can find both the history and the future of the Kings family in Brumfitt’s paintings. You just have to know where to look. Sometimes I wonder if Brumfitt could have imagined a future with me working the water, if Brumfitt really predicted that a woman would be the next to wear the Kings crown. I said this to Daddy and he laughed and said that Brumfitt painted all of the memories of Loosewood Island, even the ones that hadn’t happened yet, and what I had to do was look at the right paintings. But that’s the problem. At night, when I’m up late worried about the legacy—and the burden—of being a Kings, working my way through Brumfitt’s paintings feels too close to trying to divine my fortune through tea leaves or fortune cookies: I can read things any way that I want. Any future and every future for the Kings family is laid before me in The Collected Works of Brumfitt Kings if I just pick the right paintings in the right order.

  Some of my skepticism tonight is the heat that has settled in over the island and chased me out of the house. It’s late, late enough that it’s close to being early, and I’ve given up on the tangled sweat of my sheets. Instead, I’m sitting at the edge of the dock. Trudy, my dog, is pacing behind me. I wish I could explain to her that I’m just restless, sleepless, turned out by the heat, that we’re not heading to the Kings’ Ransom to go fishing. I can hear her panting behind me, but I’m forcing myself to look out over the water and watch the heat lightning paint the sky instead of turning around and doing what I really want to do, which is to stare at the crooked elbow of houses that embrace the harbour. There, by the shoulder, is Daddy’s house, the light in his downstairs den left on through the night, and there, near the wrist, is Rena’s house, dark for hours, my sister and her husband and the twins all asleep. There, too, is Kenny’s house. Kenny Treat. My sternman for the last five years, lying in bed with his wife.

  Out over the water, the lightning spills in r
ipples and lines, like a circulatory system drawn in the night, but there isn’t even a lick of thunder, a hint of rain. If I wanted to pick a Brumfitt painting to match the weather, it would be God’s Wrath, but God’s Wrath wouldn’t do anything to explain the dizzy spells that Daddy’s been having, and God’s Wrath wouldn’t tell me what to do about the talk of James Harbor’s drug trade pushing into our waters. And there isn’t a Brumfitt painting in any of the books on my shelves that tells me what I want to hear about Kenny Treat or shows me how to deal with either of my sisters. There’s no Brumfitt Kings painting to chase the heat of this night away from me, no hidden messages in the weather. There’s just me and Trudy, sitting on the dock, just the play of lightning in the sky and the way it’s reflected in the water. But with the lightning—and there, the first push of thunder—I don’t need Brumfitt to know that a storm is coming.

  My own memories start on a boat. I was small enough that Daddy had cut me down a rod, I think, though it might even just have been a stick with some twine tied to it. Whichever it was, it did the trick: I went to cast my line and I hooked Daddy’s lower lip with my lure. The metal was speared completely through the flesh. Blood spilled out of Daddy’s mouth, the silver dangle of the lure flashing in the sun. I remember that I cried when he yelled at me, but he says that I’ve got the story wrong, that it was the other way around, that he yelled at me because I cried, and that sounds about right for my father. He can’t remember why it was just me with him out on the boat, what my sisters were doing—“probably at home with your momma, just waiting for your brother to be born”—but he can remember the weather and the low tide time for every day stretching past more than forty years. He says that was why he married Momma, so he’d have somebody to remember things for him, like birthdays. That’s the only way he talks about my mother anymore, as if she were some sort of prank he pulled.

  We weren’t out in Daddy’s lobster boat, the Queen Jane. I remember that, too. The boat was small, a skiff or something borrowed, and my feet got wet from water in the bottom of the boat. I remember being cold, but there again my father says I’m remembering wrong. It was the beginning of June, he said, the week before Scotty was born, and hot in a way that comes as a surprise any day on Loosewood Island, but particularly that early in the summer. It makes sense that it was June, when the lobsters are busy tucking themselves into rocks and growing new shells. Loosewood Island has its own particularities with the lobstering season, and there’s a moratorium on catching lobsters from June through the middle of August. It’s different in different places, but that’s the calendar we work by. So my father would have just been maintaining traps, fixing up the Queen Jane. Plenty of downtime ahead of him, enough time to take me out fishing.

  He cut my line with the knife he always kept clipped to his belt—or to his slickers when he was working—and he told me to quit crying, his voice now soft and calm, the lure hanging bloody from his lip. I put my fishing pole down on the bottom of the boat, snuffled, and wiped at my nose with my sleeve. He worked at the hook for a little, trying to see if he could thread it back out the way it had come, but he had been hooked cleanly, the barb pushing up and all the way through. The fishing line flossed in the soft breeze like a streamer. “You’ve caught yourself a whopper, darling,” he said to me. The hook in his lip turned his words into a bloody mumble, and he gave me a smile that made the lure jiggle in the sun. The spoon of the lure flashed at me. I had a magpie moment, wanting just to grab at the shininess of the metal, but I kept my hands down. He pulled out the tackle box and rooted around in it, calmly and slowly, as if he didn’t have my hook stuck full through him. The blood flowed, drip, drip, dripping down his chin and onto the floor of the boat. It mixed in with the seawater that had been wetting my feet, clouding out, diluted and strange. He took out a pair of pliers and said, “This will serve.”

  He pulled his lip gently and nestled the pliers against the hook. For a second I thought he meant to just yank it, ripping out the flesh, and if I hadn’t been so afraid, I would have started crying again. Instead, he used the wire cutters on the pliers to snap through the hook. He moved the lure away and then worked out the small piece of hook that still hung in his lip, holding on to the barbed end with his fingers and drawing the sheared end out of the flesh. As soon as he pulled the metal out, the blood welled up stronger and started to pour down his chin. Still, he was careful to put the lure and the sharp spear of the cut hook into the tackle box so that nobody would accidently step on it—the same sort of careful consideration of future actions and calamities that served him well as a lobster boat captain—before he pulled off his shirt and wadded it up as a bandage, pressing it against his lip.

  “We’d best head in, darling,” he said to me. “I wouldn’t mind getting this cleaned up, see if I need a stitch or two. Besides, it’s getting late enough that your momma will be looking for us. Looking for me, really, to give her a hand with your sisters. And who knows,” he said, giving me a wink, “maybe the baby is on its way.”

  That memory, of hooking Daddy, blurs with my memory of meeting my baby brother, but I know they were two separate events. It would have been a week or so after the fishing trip that Scotty came home from the hospital. The thin, ugly stitches knotted on Daddy’s lip were only partly disguised by the growth of his beard. I remember standing on the deck of the Queen Jane and getting my first look at my baby brother. It doesn’t make sense to me now—why wouldn’t Momma have been there with the baby?—but at the time it felt normal to be out on the Queen Jane without Momma, without my sisters. I’m sure there was nobody else on the boat, I’m sure it was just Daddy, my brother, and me.

  Daddy sat in the captain’s chair, cradling the baby. Scotty was crying, the sort of mewl that comes from newborns, and I thought, He doesn’t like it here, doesn’t like it on the boat, doesn’t like it on the water. I understood right at that moment that he was just like my sisters: Scotty didn’t belong on the Queen Jane any more than they did. As I had that realization, Daddy scooped me up and into his lap, and I thought, Daddy sees it too. I remember what it felt like to burrow against him, to be looking down at Scotty, the surge of pleasure at the understanding that I thought I shared with Daddy, the belief that I was the one who was meant to be out on the water with him. Daddy was a loving father, but he was certainly not a cuddly one, and to be on his lap was a privilege rarely afforded. I felt like a commoner sitting on the throne.

  But as Scotty kept crying, Daddy looked at me and then nodded at Scotty and said, “Here, look at him, Cordelia. This is your brother. Look at him, because he carries with him the weight of our history, the lineage of the Kings family.”

  Even though I know that I can’t actually remember the words with such exactitude, that I was only three and a half when Scotty was born, that those words wouldn’t have made any real sense to me at the time, I can still hear every word that Daddy said. “Look at him,” he said. “Look at this little boy, Cordelia, because he is both our past and our future, and there is going to be a day when he takes over the family business, when he is out on the water, when Scotty Kings is going to be the king of Loosewood Island.” He leaned over and kissed me on the head then and asked me if I wanted to hold Scotty. I nodded, but I didn’t really want to hold him. He was just a baby, I thought, small and loud and deserving of nothing, and Daddy had already decided to give him what I knew to be my birthright as the firstborn, girl or not: as much as I could feel Daddy’s arms around me, holding me on his lap and holding Scotty steady, I could also feel something else, could feel with a certainty as loud as Scotty’s increased cries, that this was not a boy who was born to rule the sea.

  And I remember this, too, though I know it can’t have been real: Daddy standing up, stepping over the edge of the boat, and walking across the water to the shore, with me and Scotty in his arms, walking across the top of the ocean, taking me home to Momma, Rena, and Carly. I remember the way he cradled me, like I was still a baby, even with Scotty in my arms, and
I remember that there was part of me that wanted to close my eyes and let it be a dream. Instead of closing my eyes, however, I looked down at Daddy’s feet leaving ripples on the surface of the ocean, and then out to the rocks and the shore of Loosewood Island, as he carried me across the water.

  The wife of Brumfitt Kings, first of the Kings, was a miracle. Brumfitt was Scots-Irish, and when he crossed the ocean and ended up on Loosewood Island, he saw birds he knew: gulls and terns, eider ducks and cormorants. Gannets, with their vast expanse of wings diving from a hundred feet above the waves, striking into the water and emerging with fish that no other bird could scoop. And there were other birds as well. He described these birds in his journals, sketched out some of them with the loose attention to detail that art historians have lauded him for, but these birds are such that I’ve never seen around Loosewood Island and that I have never been able to find in books. I go back and forth between thinking Brumfitt was fanciful and believing that there is some truth to his sketches.

  He left a dozen of his journals, leather-bound books filled with his crimped and spidered writing, his delicately shaded drawings of fish and bird and lobster, and they are the first records we have of the Kings. Most of the Brumfitt things that we own—two paintings, sketches, an unfinished canvas, knickknacks from his personal life—are on loan to museums, but Daddy has kept the journals at home. Every year or two an academic writes Daddy a letter asking for permission to come to the island to spend time looking over the journals. Mostly, art historians and academics are interested in the later books, eight through twelve, which read to me more like ledgers. Those are the journals that Brumfitt kept after he married and had his two sons. Occasionally there is a study for a painting that I recognize, but they are mostly lists and records of catches, purchases, the weather, and the few odd drawings of plants and fish. They have notes on mixing paints, studies of birds and fish and the coastline, the day-to-day drudgery of surviving on Loosewood Island, his household finances, lists of repairs or building projects to be undertaken. I’ve always been more interested in the first seven journals, however, since they show Loosewood Island as Brumfitt first found it, first imagined it, and as a girl I spent a lot of time curled up in a chair by the window reading through the journals, deciphering Brumfitt’s tortured spellings, trying to piece together sentences that didn’t connect or never finished.