He took a deep breath after he said this, and in the moment of quiet I remember thinking how that sounded both like and unlike Daddy: “to bring a punishment down upon the earth.” That sounded like the man I’d seen doing Shakespeare in summer stock plays, taking the part of Henry IV, Caesar, Coriolanus, and Iago, it sounded like the man that I knew from home, his voice roaring through the house when he read aloud a section from a novel that seemed to sing to him. But it didn’t sound like the salt-grooved man who squinted over the water, who fished and hauled and never left anything undone.
“Billy died and we, in turn, killed. George and me and all of the boys who were with Billy when he went down, we killed until there was nobody around to kill and all that was left to us was Billy and the pieces of his body and the understanding that there are times when it isn’t about what you want or don’t want, about right or wrong, but only about what needs to be done.”
He looked down at the pistol in his hand and his voice dropped into something quiet and falling, like the snow that kept coming down over the water and the Queen Jane. “Do you understand, Cordelia?” Second barked again, and whatever spell Daddy had fallen into seemed to break. “Of course you don’t. You’re just a kid,” he said. There wasn’t any scorn in his voice. Just fact. “I did what I had to do. And if I could do it again, if I could go back then, to when I was a kid myself, maybe I would have been able to tell myself, tell George, tell all of the other boys, that this wasn’t what we needed to do, that Billy’s dying was senseless and bad luck and bad decisions, that spilling more blood wouldn’t do anything for what happened to Billy, but that’s not the way it was. Not the way it is. And maybe in some later year I’ll look back on now and think this isn’t what had to happen.” He took another heavy breath. I wanted to believe, in that momentary pause, that he was going to change his mind, but even then, even as a girl, I knew better. “Right now,” he said, “right here, it’s all I know to do. When everything is over, when everything that can be said is said, when everything that won’t be said is swallowed down, I can’t just do nothing. I wish I could just howl, that I could scream loud enough to make it right.”
He looked down at his hand and seemed almost surprised to see the pistol, and then he cocked it. The sound was softer than I would have expected, nothing like the breaking click that I would have expected at that moment, and it was perhaps that quietness that made the sound pass through me with the impact of a bullet that hadn’t yet been fired.
He swallowed hard and then his voice turned hard as well. “But all I know is that I’m not heading back to shore with that fucking dog.”
I thought about Brumfitt Kings and his wife rising from the ocean, about what it meant to be a Kings, about the price we had to pay for being able to haul fish out of the ocean like they were called by our voice, and maybe Daddy was thinking the same thing, because when I said, “It’s not his fault, it’s not Second’s fault,” the broken glass in his voice smoothed over.
“You’re right, Cordelia.” He reached out like he was going to put his free hand on my shoulder but then let it drop. “It’s not Second’s fault. I should have taken care of the traps myself or helped Scotty out. I should have kept Second away from Scotty. I should have kept an eye on him, kept the throttle down until he was clear of the ropes. It was my fault, Cordelia, and it was Scotty’s fault. He knew better than to leave the warp such a mess, connected to the bridles, to leave the traps tied together.” He paused, coughed, glanced down to the gun in his hand, and then stared at me again.
“And you. It’s your fault, too, Cordelia. You knew better than to kill the engines, kill the hauler, so I was pulling line by hand. Could have gotten him up faster, out of the water. Might have made the difference. And you should have been helping him. You should have been there to make sure your brother was safe. I thought he was going to be the heir to these waters, the next generation of the Kings men to work as a fisherman, but no. No. He’s gone forever, and instead, I’m left here with three daughters and Scotty to be buried once the light comes up on the morning. It’s my fault, it’s Scotty’s fault, and maybe you don’t deserve as much blames as I do, but it’s your fault, too, Cordelia. You should have helped him, but you didn’t. And what am I left with now? What am I left with?”
Me, I wanted to scream, You’re left with me.
But I was choking down a sob, and he answered his own question.
“I’m left without a son, Cordelia. That’s what I’m left with.”
He turned away from me and I couldn’t keep it swallowed anymore, the tears and shaking coming out of me, but then he was turned back to me and taking me in his arms, and his voice had the air gone out of it. “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean that. You couldn’t have done anything. It wasn’t your fault. You did right. You did right by all of this, baby. Oh, honey, oh, sweetie. I’m sorry. You brought us around and lined us up, and we got him out of the water as quick as we could.”
I cuffed at my eyes. “But why—”
He cut me off. “I stayed on the deck and pulled Scotty out, and Second went into the water. And it didn’t matter, did it? I didn’t save Scotty, and Second didn’t save Scotty. But that’s what I had to do, that’s what Second had to do. And this is what I have to do now.”
He moved to step past me again, and this time I didn’t stop him. Maybe it was because I was still paralyzed by what he had said, by the way he had said it was my fault, with no doubt. Never mind the apology. I had already pointed at myself, already wondered if my mistake had been what pushed Scotty past the point of reclamation, but it was different when my father said it. To have a father like that, and then to have him say it was my fault, my fault that Scotty died? No matter that Daddy said he was sorry, that he was wrong, because I knew the truth: my father didn’t make mistakes.
I walked to the cabin and sank into a chair, trying to dry my face with my sleeve as I turned to watch him. He stood alone and solid on the deck of the Queen Jane. The lights of the boat washed around him and made him seem like an absence against the snow that fell over the boat and the waters. He raised his arm and pointed it down and out over the water, like an accusatory finger.
And then, a lick of fire.
The shot came sharp and stark against the night. The only sounds were the lapping of the water and the hum of the motor in idle. The crack of the gunshot snapped against me like I’d been shot myself. There was barely a pause between the first and second shots, and then again between the second and third shots, one, two, three, and then there was silence, but in the space of that silence, it felt like the sound of the bullets echoed from every wave around, bouncing in and around the cabin and filling the boat. I tried to keep my crying to myself, but I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a gasp and then a few sobs.
I saw Daddy’s head drop, his whole body seeming to sag against the effort, like the snow that had started collecting on his shoulders was weighing him down. And then he began to howl and rage against the night, screaming like it would stop the snow and the waves. The snow streaked down and over him, breaking out of the darkness and framing him in the white. He lifted his arm and fired the gun out into the distance of the ocean and the dark that lay behind the curtain of reflected snow from the ship’s lights, the last three bullets in the gun flaming into nothingness. His voice died in the night, leaving us again with only the hum of the motor and the constancy of the ocean, his screaming and the sound of the gunshots already fading to memory. He grasped the rail of the boat with one hand, and then, with the other, almost casually, he spun the gun out into the air and over the water. The metal soaked up the lights of the boat and the darkness of the sky, turning around and around, lost to my sight before it hit the water. By the time I heard the heavy splash, Daddy had already turned back toward the cabin, his hands empty, the gun sinking into the deeps.
We didn’t speak on the way home, and I looked through the windshield out into the night. I was crying hard enough that things kept coming in
and out of focus. Daddy tied us up to the mooring buoy and then we reversed our trip across the bay, a thin coating of snow sticking to all of the surfaces of Loosewood Island. When we got to the dock, I stepped out of the skiff and tied us up, but Daddy didn’t move. He sat hunched over in his seat, his hands still on the handles of the oars. I let him stay there shaking for a few minutes, and then he wiped at his face and got out of the skiff, the two of us making our way through the snow and up to the house.
In the vestibule, he cupped his hand around the back of my neck. I didn’t know what to do and wasn’t sure what to expect. I think that I thought Daddy was going to say something, either to justify his killing Second, or something to comfort me about Scotty, or Second, or even just about his love for me. I wanted him—needed him—to say that he understood that he wasn’t left with nothing, that despite the death of my brother, he knew that he had me, had my sisters, but he didn’t say anything. He leaned over and kissed me on the top of my head, his breath warm through my hair, and he held me like that for an uncomfortable amount of time.
When he released me, he turned and walked into the living room, and it wasn’t until the click of the lamp sent the shadows leaning away from the doorway and I heard the compression of the sofa, the thin crisp of paper in his book, that I snuck back upstairs to my room. I stayed in my bed, in and out of sleep until I heard the stirrings of Momma and my sisters. I didn’t say anything when Daddy told them all that there had been an accident, that he had gone out on the Queen Jane just to clear his head, that Second had gone into the water and gotten tangled up in the propeller. Rena and Carly wailed for a while, but Momma just bowed her head, like she was all cried out. Daddy didn’t look at me. Afterward, we cleaned up, ate our breakfast, and put ourselves into our black dresses for Scotty’s funeral.
And past that, it wasn’t something we talked about. Sailor II was gone. Scotty was gone. The ocean gave us our life and it also took life away.
The funeral was behind us when school started up again after New Year’s. I turned thirteen in February, Rena turned twelve a few days later, and Carly made eleven in April. In the spring, sometime in May, Daddy took a day off of lobstering to make a run to the mainland and when we came home from school there was a Newf puppy running around the house, Sailor III. Third. We taught Third to carry a beer from the kitchen to Daddy’s recliner in the living room.
And then, in June, around what would have been Scotty’s birthday, and about the time Daddy pulled his traps for molting season, Momma put bricks in her pockets and walked off the edge of the dock, leaving Rena, Carly, and me alone with our father.
I don’t know what Brumfitt Kings would have painted if he’d been looking out over the water and watching Scotty, Daddy, Second, and me on the boat that day, but the only thing he would have had to paint was the ocean. No monsters from the deeps were necessary. The water takes enough away on its own.
What Brumfitt did paint was a series of three paintings commonly referred to as The Drowned Boy paintings.
If you head from the village toward the school-house, and then turn at the end of Coral Avenue, there’s a path that leads up the hill toward the west side of the island. The Brumfitt Kings Museum has a donation box specifically for the upkeep of “Brumfitt Trails” on the island, and this is one of the most well used trails. There’s even a small brass marker on the trailhead post that labels it THE DROWNED BOY PATH. During the tourist months, when the population of the island more than triples, there’s a steady stream of people making their way along the path. It’s about a ten-minute walk up a soft grade, and it doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere because the trees grow heavy, and even on a sunny day there’s not much you can see outside of the woods and the path in front of you. It’s best in the winter months, because when you finally come to the top of the trail, the leaves are gone and the trees are bare; the trail suddenly bursts open in front of you, and you realize that you are standing on a sheer cliff a couple hundred feet above the sea, and you can see the same thing that Brumfitt Kings must have seen. In the winter, the waves hit the rocks sitting a hundred yards off shore differently. What in the summer is a rolling, smooth whiteness has become something ferocious and energetic. The waves smash against the rocks and send spumes of water into the air, a mist that carries across to shore if you take the shore path. The light falls differently, too.
There’s a bench at the top of the path near the guardrail, and if you sit on it, you are sitting more or less in the same spot from where it seems like Brumfitt painted the first two paintings in the series. The paintings are large for Brumfitt—each one is seven feet wide and five feet high—and they are clearly a series; he dated the back of his canvases, and these were completed respectively in January, February, and March of 1740.
In the first painting, Brumfitt captures the waves and the spray of the water off the rocks, but nothing of the actual coast; it’s as if you’re only fifty or sixty feet from the boat. The boat itself is small against the waves, and the boy, maybe nine or ten, is at the oars and clearly struggling with the wind and the wash. The mast is broken, but that seems something that had happened before, since there is no evidence of sails or rigging, nothing other than the oars. There’s fishing line and some sort of oilcloth tarp, indication that the boy wasn’t out on a pleasure cruise, but had been getting food. Behind the boat, the sky is split between darkness and, if not exactly light, then not exactly dark, either; it’s clear that the storm has come in fast and hard, and the boy has been taken unawares. There’s a look of panic on his face. He’s glancing back over his shoulder, but you can see that no matter how hard he’s struggling to row, he’s not going to clear the rocks where the water is breaking.
The second painting in the series is more expansive. It shows the coast and the spit of pebbled beach, the water between the beach and the offshore break of rocks. Between the break and the beach, the water isn’t truly calm, but it doesn’t have the manic energy and whitewash of the waves on the ocean side of the break. Out there, on the other side of the break, the ocean side, the wind has whipped up the water into nothing other than spray and foam, and the waves make the boy’s boat look like some sort of a beach toy. And like a toy, the boat is caught up in a wave, turned at a three-quarter angle in the wave’s gutter, the stern smashing into the break of the rocks; it’s clear that if the painting were a filmstrip, the next frames would show the boat hung up on the rocks, tumbled end over end. The boy himself is already sliding from his seat. One hand is raised as if to ward off the rocks, the other still firmly fastened to the handle of an oar. That’s what the eye is drawn to, but it’s the figure on the beach that breaks my heart: at the edge of the picture, small enough that we know he’s too far away to do anything, a man runs across the polished rocks of the beach. He’s wearing a heavy jacket and boots. You can’t make out any other details, but you can see the urgency and you know it’s too late.
The third painting is from a different location on the island, and it’s a spot that seems to draw all kinds of tourists, not just the Brumfitt tourists: the cemetery. There is a man digging out a grave. You can’t tell for sure if it is the same man from the second painting in the series, but it’s hard for me to believe anything else. The sky has cleared, the storm from the first two paintings blown past, and the sunlight is achingly bright, so that the body lying next to the grave has no shadows to hide it. It’s the boy’s body, wrapped in oilcloth. A flap is turned over by his head so that we can see his face. If you stand too close to the painting, the picture is smeared and blurry. It’s only when you move back from the painting that it comes into focus and it’s clear that Brumfitt wants you to see the face of a boy who was smashed against the rocks.
The series probably wouldn’t have been considered so important if the dates and the events hadn’t lined up so neatly with Brumfitt’s own life: his oldest son died at the age of ten, in December of 1739, his boat overturned in a storm, his body broken against the rocks. The first Kings boy
taken by the sea.
We floated together as a family for more than three years after Momma drowned herself. Her body spent three days in the water, and when they finally fished her out, she went right into a closed casket. I’d like to think that she looked calm and peaceful resting on the silk liner, a clean dress and styled hair, closed eyes, but I knew too much about what the water could do after three days: bloated and bitten skin, soft features smeared by the fish that fed on the bottom of the ocean.
By the time I was sixteen, Carly and Rena were completely done with pulling lobster pots. I fished with Daddy on the weekends and after school, hauling lobsters on the Queen Jane, while Carly and Rena went off with friends, fucking boys in the back of cars and in dank basements. With Scotty gone, Daddy took me on for a full share of what he pulled out of the ocean, and in response, my sisters separated themselves from him with a violent absence that turned me into the bridge between them and Daddy; it was as if the only way they knew how to figure out who they were was to obliterate the ground around them, a teenage policy of scorched earth. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe it was Daddy responding to Rena and Carly pushing away by pulling me tighter.
Either way, it never occurred to me to worry about Daddy. He was always a self-contained man in most ways. That’s not to say that he was always quiet. I can’t think of a day that went by when he didn’t tell me that he loved me, but he was a hard man, and I also couldn’t think of a day when I felt like he needed me, needed anybody. Still, in retrospect, I should have been able to see that there were times when whatever it was that he was holding inside of him was beginning to leak out, that he was in danger of coming undone, but I couldn’t see beyond myself.
The Lobster Kings Page 6