At the end of the seventh journal—his last entry before moving on to the eighth journal a half year later, when his focus shifted to the detritus of life—Brumfitt writes about how he met his wife. Scholars have claimed that she was a native woman from one of the local tribes, though there is debate over which tribe: Micmac, Abenaki, Malecite, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, or Beothuk. I find it hard to believe that Brumfitt married any native woman, however. The idea seems almost as far-fetched as Brumfitt’s own story, because about that time the indigenous population was—with reasonable cause—hell-bent on wiping out the white men who’d come to their shores. No, according to the journal, his wife was neither a white woman nor an Indian, but rather a gift from the sea.
Brumfitt had been on Loosewood Island for eight years by the time he married. When the boats had started coming, they’d fished out the season and then crossed back over the ocean, the men returning home with the salted and dried cod, but after a while the companies realized they could do better if they left someone behind to keep the drying racks together, to keep a permanent encampment for the benefit of all the other men who fished. Brumfitt volunteered, and that first year he was the only man left behind. He seemed to thrive on the isolation of Loosewood Island. He spent a few hours a day seeing to company business, cooking, cutting firewood, or doing other chores of survival, and the rest of his time drawing. This went on for three years. During the season he worked the waters and he worked the shore, and as the boats left when the season was done, he waved them off. After the third year, a handful of other men stayed behind, and the year after that, those men fetched wives from England or Ireland and began to start families among the hardness of the new country.
After eight years on Loosewood Island, Brumfitt found himself surrounded by husbands and wives and children but still living alone. According to the journal, he went out one night to the edge of the island to draw by the glow of the emptiness of the sky, and he found himself, unexpectedly, crying. He realized that the island itself was not enough for him: he had want of a wife.
The night was clear and calm, with the stars and the moon making the soft lapping of the waves into pulses of light, but as he cried, a thin mist started drifting down from the sky. Then, with a crackle like ice breaking, the water suddenly flattened and then seemed to pull away from the island, leaving rocks that were normally just skimming above the ocean bare and dry, crabs and starfish recoiling at the sudden air. Brumfitt peered through the mist and walked toward where the memory of the ocean marked the land, and he looked out toward where the water stopped. And the water did stop, according to Brumfitt’s journals. It was not simply that the tide had receded, but rather like something great and mighty had erected a wall of glass that held back the sea. The water lay absolutely still and flat on its surface, no sense of wind or waves. Then, from the flush of the moon, from the pinpricks of the stars, Brumfitt saw something roiling and bubbling out near the Sea Clift Rocks. The mist dropped out of the sky the same way that a silk scarf drops from a lover’s balcony, leaving the night clear until, Brumfitt wrote, the roiling water suddenly sprayed into the air like a whale was clearing its blowhole.
And then he saw her, he saw his wife.
A miracle.
She rose inside the spray of water. Her eyes were open and fixed upon him, like she knew he was waiting.
The invisible hand holding back the ocean opened its fingers, letting go, and the water rolled back toward him, the first waves pushing over his ankles and soaking his feet, but he barely noticed, so intent was he on the woman gliding toward him. It was not that the woman herself moved, Brumfitt wrote in his journal, but rather that she was carried. He wrote it both ways, that she stood and that she sat—she sat upon a throne, she stood upon a chariot—but either way, she was carried on the waves, the seawater still dripping off of her. She was wearing a dress made of oyster shells and coral, a necklace of pearls, and she was delivered into his arms with a dowry.
The dowry was this: if Brumfitt married her, his children, and his children’s children to each and every generation, would carry a blessing: the bounty of the sea.
I remember reading the story in the journal—Brumfitt’s handwriting so rushed compared to the lushness of his drawings and paintings—and being thrilled. It seemed romantic to me. Sometimes I imagined myself as Brumfitt’s bride, this queen of the waters, delivering the dowry, the bounty of the sea. Other times I pretended that one day I’d have my own prince wash ashore, that he’d step from the waves to take me in his arms. It was like having my own personal fairy tale.
But what I never thought about as a child was that, like in all fairy tales, the gift came at a cost.
With every blessing there is a curse.
When Brumfitt married, his wife’s dowry was the bounty of the sea, but the price for each and every generation of Kings was this: a son.
Momma came into her marriage already knowing what it meant to be a lobsterman’s wife. Momma was an only child, her father the last of the Grummans on the island—all the rest had moved to the mainland and were fishing cod and haddock—and she knew Daddy from the time she was old enough to know anybody. She was five years younger, too young to get anything but passing notice until after he came back from Vietnam and realized that little Mary Grumman had grown up into the kind of woman who could have been washed to shore upon a wave nearly three hundred years ago.
But even if she wasn’t directly out of a fairy tale like Brumfitt’s wife, Momma made for a pretty picture as a bride. The photograph of the two of them on their wedding day, which still hangs above the sideboard in the dining room, looks like it could have been painted by Brumfitt: Momma and Daddy standing on the rock beach by the docks, mid-July with the sun washing over Loosewood Island, Momma in an ivory dress handed down from her mother’s wedding, Daddy, a late bloomer, in the dark suit he’d worn to his high school graduation, the sleeves so short that the white of his shirt showed from the forearms down. Daddy’s facing the camera, his back to the water, but Momma, who is leaning into him, has her body quarter-turned, her gaze on the ocean behind him, like she was already practising for him to be out working the waters, already waiting for him to come home.
People always say that it’s Rena and Carly who remind them of Momma, and that I take after Daddy, a Kings through and through. But at least in that wedding photo, I’m a ringer for her. She looks beautiful in the same way that I’ve turned out sort of beautiful: she’s lean and strong, a rope in the shape of a woman, freckles in the summer and skin that doesn’t fade in the grey months of sleet and ice. Her hair, turned toward red from the sun, is braided and pulled into a crown twist, giving her an elegance that I’ve never mastered. She’s barefoot, which I can tell because she has the hem of her wedding dress snatched up in her hand, keeping it dry from the threat of the waves. She’s smiling so easily that I sometimes wonder if she even knew that she was having her picture taken.
She’s not wearing it in the picture, but for their wedding, Daddy gave her a matched pearl necklace. The same pearl necklace, Daddy claimed, that had been worn by Brumfitt’s bride when she was delivered by the sea. Before I was born, Momma said she used to walk out on the beach in the afternoons, waiting for the first sight of Daddy returning in the Queen Jane, and she’d touch the necklace every few minutes to remind herself that he’d be coming home soon.
“I knew,” she said to me, “that as long as I had those pearls on my neck, Daddy would come home. It was a covenant between me and the ocean, between me and Brumfitt. I’d wear the necklace, and Brumfitt would deliver your daddy home to me. But still, some days, when the sky turned ugly, when I could feel the weather hunting the island, I couldn’t breathe until I saw the Queen Jane come through the mouth of the harbour. I’d just worry those pearls and pace up and down that beach.”
“How come you stopped?”
Momma laughed at the question. I remember that she laughed, because it wasn’t something that happened often. Like finding two pe
arls in one oyster. On some days, getting her to laugh was like finding an entire necklace, matched and strung, in the same shell. “I’ve got kids. I’ve got you three girls. I’ve got Scotty. I don’t have time to walk on the beach and worry about Daddy. Things change.”
They were married three years before Momma got pregnant, and once things changed, they changed fast: four kids in four years, all of us coming out straight and quick, bowling pins lined up just to be knocked down. Me first, and then Rena, Carly, and last of all, Scotty, the boy my father had been waiting for. Daddy worked the boat and Momma worked the house, and that’s the way it worked between them. Not that Daddy wouldn’t pitch in here and there—he was never the kind of man to be squeamish about folding sheets or washing dishes or even changing a diaper—but there’d be months of the year when he’d be gone before dawn and come home after dark, times when it seemed like he’d be gone on his boat for days. He was around more in the summer, when lobsters peeled themselves from their shells and scuttled deeper into the rocks to protect their newly soft flesh, when the industry on the island was tourists, and in the late winter and early spring, when the season was closed or when storms and ice made it so he’d only head to sea a few times a month. But when there was fishing to be had, Daddy was gone.
On the nights when Daddy was working the water late, Momma used to pile the four of us into her bed and sing to us before bedtime. Their marriage bed was small, particularly by today’s standards, but it was sized to fit their headboard, which had been passed down for long enough that it might have belonged to Brumfitt himself. I’m sure that back when it was just a woodstove heating the house, the cold salt winds murdering their way through the slits in the siding, it was good to be snuggled close to your husband or wife in such a small bed. The full-sized mattress was separate from the headboard itself, which was attached to the wall and carved like a shell, the base wide and then cut in before flaring out and scalloping over the top. Around the edges, scrollwork ivied up and around, meeting at the top in a royal, gold-leafed clamshell. In places, the gold leaf had been worn down almost to wood by the touch of generations of Kings hands. Once Momma had us ready for bed, our teeth brushed, pyjamas on, hair still wet from the bath, she’d turn the lights down low and place Scotty, Rena, Carly, and me underneath the quilts; with the gilded headboard above us, we looked like nothing more than the Kings upon their throne. I remember the way that my sisters and Scotty would snuggle in and wait for her to sing, but I could never seem to get comfortable there; I always wished that I was out on the water with Daddy instead of stuck inside the house.
I know that other mothers read stories to their children, but Momma sang her stories to us: she sang “Mermaids of Dover,” “Tall Ships and Tall Sails,” and “Mulroony Goes Courting,” and we sang along with her; she sang “The Fishgutters,” “The High Wave,” and “MacAuley’s Lament,” and we listened quietly to the high, gentle tides washing over us; she sang “The Boatman,” “Nine Ships for Nine Daughters,” and “The Rocks of Wailing,” and she’d sing those to us in Gaelic, halting here and there to search for a word or a phrase that she couldn’t remember, telling us how her grandmother used to sing to her like that when Momma was no older than we were. She always ended with “Thief of the Ocean”:
The thief of the ocean,
A king with his head held high.
Steal a fish from the ocean,
Repent not when you die.
I used to think that the king with his head held high meant Brumfitt Kings, and I remember one of the nights when I was eight or nine, all of my siblings had fallen asleep in the dark room, Momma’s voice lulling them under, and I asked her about the song.
“No, honey,” Momma said, as she led me down the hall to my bedroom, “it’s not the Kings, just a king. Any king.” She left Scotty, Rena, and Carly in her bed, for Daddy to carry to their own rooms when he got home from pulling traps. “The Thief of the Ocean isn’t Brumfitt, it isn’t Daddy, it isn’t even Scotty. It’s any man or boy who works the sea.”
“Or girl,” I snapped. I was ferocious at times with Momma. I had to be, to stay out of her grip. Even with Daddy pushing for it, saying that if I wanted to be out on the boat then I belonged out on the boat, she resisted. Oh, but Scotty belonged out there, she said. Momma sent him out on the Queen Jane when he was four, five, six, even though he would have been just as happy at home with Rena and Carly, up in aprons and mixing flour and eggs. When it came to me, I had to claw my way out of the house, had to fight for my birthright as a Kings.
Momma didn’t answer me, but she didn’t kiss me on the forehead when she tucked me in, either. As she stood up, however, I realized that I had another question. “What happens if the ocean catches you?” I said.
She took a breath to stay even, a sign I recognized to mean that she was ready for me to go to bed. On the nights when my father was not in the house, she did not have much left that she was willing to suffer by the time Carly, Rena, and Scotty were asleep. “If the ocean catches you … what?”
“If the ocean catches you stealing,” I said. “Does it steal you back?”
She stood straight and looked down at me. Her carriage was erect, like she practised walking with a cup of water balanced on her head, but she let her fingers drift to the pearls around her neck during the moment of time it took her to answer me. “Hush, dear. Time for sleep,” she said. “That’s enough from you.” As she lingered by the light switch, it felt like there was something she was waiting to say, but then she turned. Before I heard her feet on the stairs I was sitting up in bed and calling to her. I could hear how frantic my own voice sounded, but when she came back in, I couldn’t think of why it was I needed her back, so I asked for a glass of water.
She touched my arm and then reached onto my nightstand and picked up the glass of water that was already waiting there. “Cordelia, do you know what my grandmother used to say to me?” I shook my head and took a sip of the water. It didn’t feel like enough somehow, to simply sip at it, so I took few great gulps and then had to cough. Momma took the glass out of my hand and put it back on the nightstand. “Is i mhàthair bhrisg a nì ’n nighean leisg, which means, An active mother makes for a lazy daughter,” she said, but in a voice that made me know that she didn’t mind. She gently pushed me onto my back and brought the blanket up to my shoulders before leaning low and letting her lips linger on my forehead. I remember how safe, how warm, how dry I was, how there are moments of childhood that feel brief but last forever.
I slipped my hand out and wrapped it around the back of her neck, feeling the pearls rolling under my fingertips. “I’m sorry, Momma,” I whispered.
“Well,” she said, “maybe you can just look next time, to see if there’s already a glass of water waiting for you.”
I could feel her lips moving against my forehead as she spoke, but I didn’t bother to correct her. I wasn’t apologizing for calling her back to me, and I wasn’t even apologizing for the way that I’d gotten sharp with her when I’d said that a girl could be the thief of the ocean. I was apologizing because I knew that I had no choice: girl or not, I had the blood of the Kings ebbing and flowing through my body. Nothing could stop me from getting on a boat. I was born to it.
Brumfitt Kings wrote in his journal about seeing a mermaid, but his mermaid wasn’t something gentle out of a cartoon. She was pale and the fish part didn’t end neatly at the waist; scales climbed the mermaid’s body up to her shoulders, her eyes bulged, and her face flattened like a fish’s. When he reached for her, she showed teeth that made her look more shark than woman, snapping at his hand and drawing blood from one of Brumfitt’s fingertips. Brumfitt wrote that he stayed away from the water for nearly a week after seeing her. Daddy said that Brumfitt shouldn’t have been scared. His wife came from the sea, after all—which meant, I guess, that all his descendants have fish blood running through our veins—and that should have afforded him some protection from what he saw.
There are other stories
about mermaids, though none like Brumfitt’s. The rest of the stories described beautiful mermaids who sang to sailors and seduced them. The boys liked to joke that if you jumped in the water after them you’d at least get a chance to see whether or not mermaids actually wore those little clamshell bikini tops before you drowned.
When Daddy told his mermaid story, however, he never joked. It happened when he was six. He’d been playing on the shore, collecting shells or rocks or some such, and he’d turned his back to the ocean in the way that you’re taught never to do. A wave had curled over him and brought him out under the water.
He said that it hadn’t been at all like he’d expected. First there had been lung-searing blackness, and then he realized he could breathe underwater. The fish hung around him like birds strung from wires, seemingly oblivious to his presence. He walked across the rocky floor, heading down the slope and toward the dark of the deep water, and then he saw brilliant pinpricks coalescing into a great light before him. The light came from windows, and the windows were set into a castle that was unlike what he had imagined when he played war with his leaden soldiers. The castle was something more alive, as if it had been coaxed from the bottom of the ocean, the parapets pulsing with the movement of the waves. Daddy entered the castle, and even though light seemed to come from the walls themselves, there were dark and sad whispers swimming past him in the hallways.
He said he walked through corridor after corridor, but each door he came to was locked. And yet, he said that he never felt as if he were lost, and when he finally saw the entrance to the great hall, the wide doors thrown open, the light pouring out toward him, heard the tinkling of glass on glass, he was already half expecting what was in there: a lone mermaid waiting for him.
The Lobster Kings Page 2