It was that fall, nearly four years after Scotty drowned, that James Harbor made a play for our waters, dropping traps in Loosewood Island fishing grounds. I remember tense men crowded into our kitchen, talk of guns and fists and cutting traps. I was old enough to be around the fringes while still being too young to be in the thick of things, but I remember the way that every time I heard somebody talk about the kingpin of James Harbor, Al Burns, his name was prefaced with the phrase, “that cunt.” The only person who didn’t seem worked up over the poaching was Daddy. He’d let the men grumble and flame, and then he’d tell them that these things had a way of working themselves out, that “Brumfitt Kings claimed these waters for Loosewood Island, and that cunt Al Burns can’t change that.”
Out on the Queen Jane, with James Harbor buoys floating thick in our waters, it seemed like Brumfitt Kings was just a piece of ancient history. When I said that to Daddy, however, he snapped at me.
“You spend too much time looking forward, Cordelia. It would do you some good to look back more often.”
I lifted a trap onto the rail and dropped it into the water. “I just think that we need to do something.”
“What do you want to do, Cordelia? You think we should be cutting traps? You think we should sink a couple of their boats?”
“There are worse ideas,” I said. I swallowed the words into a mumble, and Daddy either didn’t hear me or decided that he didn’t hear.
“You’re thinking about this wrong. This isn’t about us against James Harbor. This is like Brumfitt and The Sea Dragon.”
I knew enough not to groan. Daddy’s only response to me complaining about getting yet another lecture on our family history was to tell me more of that history, as if by weight alone he could get me to understand its importance. And he always told me the stories about Brumfitt as if I had never heard them before, as if I hadn’t read the same journals he had. I’d never actually seen The Sea Dragon in real life—it hung in a national museum in Denmark—but I’d seen reproductions and heard the story dozens of times. None of which stopped Daddy.
“There be dragons,” Daddy said. “That’s what they used to write on the edges of maps, in the undiscovered waters, and they weren’t just words. We’ve got mermaids and selkies and the merrow, and those are still in the waters off the island, but there was a time when there were dragons, too. Sea serpents, some men called them, but doesn’t matter what you called them, Brumfitt knew they were real. And you’ve got to understand that Brumfitt was alone when he painted The Sea Dragon. This was before he had a wife. It was just him, in a cold cabin, drawing and painting and trying to keep warm despite the winds coming off the ocean.
“And you’ve heard the winds yourself, but they were different then. They carried traces of Ireland, reminding him of the home he’d left behind, but they also carried crystals of ice and salt that worked their way through the cracks in the walls of his shack. Sometimes, at night, when Brumfit was trying to sleep, he heard the sound of a harp: it was a merrow trying to sing him to the deeps. He stuffed his ears with greased rags and sketched with charcoal to keep his body from wandering to the water.”
It was a Saturday. We’d left the house early, keeping normal fishing hours. I wasn’t sure if Rena and Carly were still sleeping, or if they hadn’t bothered sneaking back into the house yet. It was a grey, cold piss of a day, and Daddy had spent all morning working at his thermos of coffee. Despite the weather, he seemed lazy, almost dreamy, as if we had all the time in the world to take the lobsters from the ocean. And after three hours of lackadaisically pulling traps, here we were in a stretch of water that was polluted with James Harbor buoys, a stretch of water that was supposed to be ours and ours alone, and Daddy had decided it was story hour.
“You can picture it, can’t you?”
Of course I could picture it. The Sea Dragon, despite its title, mostly shows the interior of the shack that Brumfitt lived in during his first few years on the island, and it shows what a mean existence he lived. Even at sixteen, I understood how a man who lived like that could wake one day and suddenly realize he was in want of a wife. The painting shows the raised board with blankets that Brumfitt used for a bed, the stool and table where he worked, the poorly vented hearth that served both for heat and cooking, smoke glazing the room. The room is dark and crackling with shadows from the fireplace, and you have to look closely to see that buried in the blackness is something twisting and scaly.
“Brumfitt knew it was there,” Daddy said. “He’d seen it circling in the waters, found the bones of deer and the feathered carcasses of fowl. At night, when the merrow wasn’t singing for him, he could hear the slither and the scrape of the beast’s scales and claws on the rocks. The night that it came into his shack, he heard the door groan open, could feel the whisper of the dragon creeping across the dirt floor, but Brumfitt didn’t turn to look. Can you imagine that, Cordelia?” Daddy said. “Can you imagine how hard it must have been to know that there was a monster in the room with you, a monster come to eat you whole? And yet, Brumfitt didn’t look. He didn’t look, Cordelia, because he knew that the sea dragon could feast upon his bones if it wanted to. That’s the thing about dragons. They can kill a man. They’ve got scales that coat their bodies like armour, teeth and claws, and a man who faces one will be left a bag of bones. And Brumfitt knew that he’d been marked, that this dragon had decided that he looked like easy prey.”
“So, what?” I said. “Loosewood Island is Brumfitt, and James Harbor is the dragon?”
“Smart girl,” Daddy said. He lifted his coffee mug to me, an acknowledgement.
James Harbor was bigger than we were, and they were already pushed hard against the limits of their waters. Even back then, when I was sixteen, before meth had taken a firm hold in James Harbor, they were nastier than we were. A place for drunks and men who left their women with bruises and plaster casts on their arms. Small compared to the world, but big compared to Loosewood Island. James Harbor was a place where just living felt like having your back against the wall. “We have to do something.”
“If we fight James Harbor, if we go in mindless and stupid, they’ll turn us back beaten and bloody.” He leaned back against the console. “I thought you knew this story. You know this story, right?”
I shrugged. I knew it didn’t matter what I said, he was going to tell me the story the way he wanted to.
“So he knows it’s there, but Brumfitt waited,” Daddy said, “keeping bent over the canvas he was working on, sketching the inside of that shack with charcoal. But when the dragon sprang, what it didn’t realize was that in Brumfitt’s other hand he held a blacksmith’s hammer. Even a dragon has an underbelly,” Daddy said, “a place where you can hurt it. And Brumfitt showed no quarter. He beat at that dragon until it fled, never to return.”
He pushed himself back to a full standing, letting out a small grunt and then sauntering over to the rail. He leaned on his elbows, contemplating the water as he told me the story. I was cold and put out. I liked spending time with him on the Queen Jane, but Daddy’s dreamlike spell that day meant that there was never a rhythm to our work; it was like dancing with a boy who can’t keep a beat. I waited for him to say something when he finished the story, but after he said, “He beat at that dragon until it fled, never to return,” he just stared at the water. After what felt like several minutes, I cleared my throat.
“Why didn’t he kill the dragon?”
It seemed like a good question to me, and I realized that it had never occurred to me to ask it before. It must have seemed like a good question to Daddy, too, because he stood up and looked at me. “Well, I’ve never thought of that. I suppose that a dead dragon is just that: a dead dragon. But a live dragon, one you’ve beaten and caused to flee, is so much more than that. It’s a message to all of the other dragons to stay the hell away from Loosewood Island.”
“And I guess Brumfitt was never bothered again?”
“No,” he said. “Not by dragons.” Da
ddy took a sip of his coffee and then looked out over the water again. “I think we’ll call it a day, Cordelia. I’ll drop you off at home.”
“So you want to wait until James Harbor really comes after us? We just wait around until then?”
“No.” He shook his head, and then, almost bewildered, he said, “No,” again. “Every man is a dragon when he’s threatened in his own home.” He turned to the wheel and kicked the throttle forward.
“That’s it?” I said. “What about the rest of the traps? You want to at least cut their traps?”
“No. I think I’m done with that. I’m going to go have a talk with that cunt, Al Burns. This water was given to the Kings. You know the story of Brumfitt Kings as well as I do, and I don’t think this needs to be going on anymore. Burns is going to have to get his men out of our waters.” He glanced at me and then smiled. “There be dragons. Well, there are dragons in these waters. Remember that. ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath.’ Shakespeare. All of the good lines are from Shakespeare.” He paused and was about to say something, but then shut his mouth as if he were reconsidering, before opening it back up. “ ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath,’ ” he said again. He shook his head, clearly pleased with himself. “You want me to drop you off at home, or you want to come along to James Harbor?”
“I’ll come along,” I said, thinking that maybe I could do some shopping while Daddy took care of his business, or that maybe there’d be some boys around that I knew. Daddy sounded a little weird, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. He always sounded a little weird, particularly when he was talking about Brumfitt.
“Brumfitt would have liked you,” he said. “You’re not afraid of anything in the ocean, are you?” I didn’t answer, even though Daddy stood straight and looked at me. Whatever I didn’t say was good enough for him, because he nodded and dumped the rest of his coffee overboard. He went to the wheel and drove the throttle hard until we were near the docks in James Harbor. Once the motor was quiet, he tied off and stood on the deck of the Queen Jane for a minute, his hands on his hips, staring at the building where Al Burns, who both fished and served as the buyer for James Harbor, which was a lot of how he got his power, kept his offices. “Cordelia,” he said, without turning around, “get me a hammer. There are two of them in the toolbox, but I don’t want the claw hammer. The regular one for whacking nails. Get me the ball-peen hammer instead. It’s got a flat head on one side and a rounded head on the other.”
“I know what a ball-peen hammer is,” I said.
“Of course you do, honey.”
“You going to smite the dragon?”
“Something like that,” he said.
I went belowdecks and got him the ball-peen hammer and then held it out to him. He took it, and he looked like he was thinking of taking a sleep. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Stay here.”
I watched him walk up the dock and across the parking lot. I was thinking that I had close to forty dollars with me, and that maybe I’d try to find a new pair of jeans. Even then, James Harbor was run-down, nothing like Halifax or Saint John or Boston, but there was more shopping in James Harbor than I could find on Loosewood Island. I thought I could convince Daddy to stay an hour or two, maybe even take me to the mall. I watched Daddy saunter toward the building. A pair of slickered men smoking cigarettes standing outside of the office building watched him as well. It was only when Daddy opened the door and disappeared inside that it fully hit me that I had handed him a hammer. An actual hammer. There was no reason he needed an actual hammer.
I ran.
By the time I got inside the office I could already hear Al Burns screaming. The two men who had been outside were hard on my heels.
Al was on his knees, his free hand scrabbling at Daddy’s arm, his other arm pinned at the wrist on his desk. Daddy was facing me, and he was concentrating fiercely on the task at hand, which was smashing Al’s hand into nothingness. Daddy had all of his weight leaning onto Al’s wrist, and he didn’t seem to notice the other man’s struggle. He kept swinging the hammer in the sort of rhythm that had been missing from our fishing, as if he were keeping the beat to a song. I watched him swing it once, twice, a third time, crushing Al’s fingers, before the two men tackled him, pinning him to the floor. Al Burns collapsed on the floor, cradling his destroyed hand against his body. I couldn’t look at the desk. It was a mess of blood and flesh and bone, but it wasn’t better to look at Daddy, either: beneath the two men pinning him down, he was staring at me, and even with a small grin on his face, the splash of blood flooding across one of his cheeks, there was a blankness that was terrifying.
He repeated it to me before the cops took him away: “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.”
He was gone for four months, to a psych unit in the Halifax hospital. Maybe it was something catching up to him, Scotty’s death and Momma killing herself, his time in Vietnam, or maybe it was something else entirely, but Daddy didn’t talk to me about it, and the James Harbor lobstermen cleared off well before he got back. When I picked him up in the Queen Jane we sailed through waters that were clear of James Harbor buoys.
Daddy wasn’t like most of the other lobstermen on Loosewood Island. Obviously, there was the trip to the loony bin, but it was more than that. For one, he’d been off to war, choosing the U.S. side of the border and enlisting with George and Billy Sweeney, but from there he made a four-year pit stop at college besides, and still he’d come back to the island: a barely noticeable limp a souvenir from Vietnam, and an undergraduate degree in theatre a souvenir from university. He joked about the little limp—patting the star-shaped scar on his calf—and was willing to make fun of himself for his degree: majoring in theatre didn’t help much out on the boats. Still, acting was a passion that stayed with him. He was usually given a leading role in the two summer stock plays Loosewood Island put on at the band shell on the commons, one a Shakespeare and one something more contemporary and light, often a comedy, and he once had a brief speaking role—“Watch out for those deeps, Captain Spindle!”—in a movie that was shot locally but stayed in the theatres only long enough to be a disappointment.
And I might as well get this out of the way, too, if it’s not obvious enough already: my name. Cordelia. Straight out of Shakespeare, and god thank my mother for exerting at least a small amount of restraint on Daddy for the rest of the children. Cordelia. The name was my father’s idea of a joke. We were the Kings, and so he’d give me the name of the king’s favourite daughter, the one banished but true. When I finally read the play, my junior year in high school, I went up to my father in a huff, pointing out that the play ended with me dead.
It was February. More than a year since Daddy had flattened Al Burns’s hand and taken his tour of the loony bin. There was enough weather outside that Daddy had spent the day tending to equipment and was now at his desk, a small shoved-into-the-corner-of-the-kitchen table that he used for paperwork. He had a pair of reading glasses perched up on his forehead, and he was fingering a bottle of beer and staring out the window at the sea instead of actually paying bills or writing letters or whatever he was supposed to be doing. Third was curled up under the table and my father had tucked his feet under the dog’s furry mess. I pulled a chair out of the dining room, moved it next to Daddy, and spun it around so I could sit on it backward and look at him.
“I see we’re working on appearing ladylike today, Cordelia.”
“Ah, go suck an egg.”
He didn’t even bother trying to suppress his grin, and I both saw and didn’t see the way the scar on his lip from where I’d hooked him thinned and lightened as his mouth spread into a smile. “Go suck an egg? Are kids still saying that? Or maybe I should ask, are they saying that again, because I think that even before I was a kid, ‘Go suck an egg’ was no longer in fashion.” He spun his pencil around in his fingers twice and then placed it on the table. “Are you saying that you don’t like your name? That there is something unwort
hy about being named after King Lear’s daughter? Are you saying that you are not a fan of the Bard?”
“I’m saying that I end up dead.”
“Never!” He shouted the word and I jumped back in my chair. He’d come home from the loony bin seeming like the same man that he’d been before things went wrong with Scotty, and that left me nervous: If I didn’t see it coming before, why would I see it coming again? His outburst left me all tilted, but the next words came out more softly. “Never. Never. Never. Never.” He shrugged. “The professor who taught me King Lear was a Shakespeare nut. He was losing his sight. Huh. Going blind. I guess I never thought about it in the context of the play before, but that’s kind of funny. He was going blind, and he’d decided to try to memorize each and every one of Shakespeare’s plays before he lost his sight entirely. He’d almost done it, too. He had all the ones we did that semester, and when he was up there in front of the class, he acted it out for us.” Daddy shook his head, a real smile on his face. “It’s unbelievable to me how clear that is, probably the thing I remember most from four years at university. This was in the first few weeks of my first term at school, and I still didn’t know what to expect from my professors, and here we go with him up in front of the class.” Daddy stood, and his voice dropped lower. “And my poor fool,” and back to his own voice, “meaning you, meaning Cordelia. Even if there is a fool in the play, he means Cordelia. Lear is overcome with grief, his kingdom ravaged, his one true daughter dead, madness descending, and you could hear it with my professor, too, that he had that same kind of grief.” He looked at the kitchen cabinets as if they were an audience, and let his voice change again. “And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no, no, life? Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all? Oh, thou’lt come no more,” Daddy said, and then let out a breath. “And here he goes, and the entire class was still. I had goose bumps on my arm, and I can tell you, every single student in that class was paying attention.” Daddy tapped the table with his finger each time he said the word: “Never, never, never, never.” He shook his head, and I could see how much Daddy was enjoying acting this out for me. “And then his voice got soft and you could see that he was almost ready to cry—this old, bearded, almost-blind man, about to cry because of some words from a play written four hundred years ago—and he lets out one more ‘never.’ The fifth and final ‘never.’ And it came out, that last ‘never,’ in an almost-moan. And that was the moment I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be an actor.’ Right at that moment. It was all that passion.”
The Lobster Kings Page 7