“And here you are, an actor,” I said.
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Cordelia. I was twenty and all I’d known was Loosewood Island and Vietnam, and those two worlds sure as shit didn’t come together with what I was learning at Williams.”
He rarely just mentioned Vietnam casually, as a place where he had once been, and I wanted to take the opportunity to ask him about it. He talked around Vietnam all of the time, what it was like at basic training, what it was like to go to Hong Kong on leave, what the hospital was like after he was shot in the leg, the flight home, but he almost never actually talked about what it was like when he was there: what it meant to be gone from everything he knew, what it felt like to be scared and only a year or two older than I was at that moment. Walking through the jungle with a bunch of other boys who were eighteen, nineteen, carrying machine guns and all the other paraphernalia of war, each one hoping that he’d make it back to wherever it was he came from. And other than that one day on the boat, when he shot Second, he never talked about Bill Sweeney, George’s older brother, who went over with Daddy but never made it home.
I didn’t think about any of that at the time. What I said was, “So why did you come back to the island?”
He studied me, like he didn’t even understand the question, and after a second I realized that he didn’t understand the question. “Don’t you know? I thought of all my daughters, you were the one who’d understand. I mean, have you even been listening? Didn’t you just ask me about your name? Cordelia? You’re the one, true daughter, the rightful heir.”
“Because you couldn’t do anything else. Because of the sea.”
He nodded and sat back down, picking up his beer. “Because of the sea. I loved acting, and it was fun, still is fun during the summers, but I could never fully imagine myself as being anywhere other than Loosewood Island and working on a boat. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been a better actor. A failure of the imagination. I like to think of it as something else, something mythical and primal, like the sea just pulls at me and will never let me go. We’re connected to the earth and the earth is connected to the sea, and once you’ve had a taste of the ocean—if you’re a true child of the ocean—nothing can keep you away.”
I raised my eyes at him and he leaned back in his chair. “Wow, Daddy. Very moving. I guess you’re trying to be an actor and a poet? Or maybe you’ve been drinking?”
“You know, just because you and your sisters are all teenagers doesn’t mean you have to mouth off.”
Even though I was only seventeen, I wanted to call bullshit. I wanted to say that I knew his talking, his joking, his willingness to say things that other lobstermen wouldn’t—his frequent professions of love for me and my sisters, the way he admitted he was afraid of drowning, afraid that the catch would dry up and we’d go broke—covered all of the other things he didn’t say. That his talking was meant to be an ocean in and of itself, so that we’d be washed away by the words and never wonder about the things he didn’t talk about: Scotty, my mother, Vietnam, his own father. And most of all I wanted to call bullshit because he’d only been back from the loony bin for a year since then, and we never talked about the way he’d gone blank in the face and taken a hammer to that cunt Al Burns’s hand. We never talked about the way that he had left my sisters and me to fend for ourselves while he swallowed pills and wore a bathrobe in the psych unit. We never talked about what it was that had bent him enough to grab the hammer in the first place, whether it was Scotty or Momma, whether it was something to do with Vietnam, or whether it was something more disturbing to me: that he believed his own stories about Brumfitt Kings, that he actually thought that Al Burns was a dragon circling the dark and waiting to strike. I wanted to call bullshit on all of that.
But I was only seventeen. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that I can only think about now that I’m older and past the age of thirty, but either way, I let him steer the boat back to where he had always wanted it pointed.
“It’s a tragedy, Cordelia. There are Shakespearian comedies and there are Shakespearian tragedies, and Lear is a tragedy.”
And then he did something that surprised me, because he’d never done more than say, “Sorry I was gone,” never said anything about his recent trip to the loony bin. He said, “You don’t have to worry, Cordelia. I’m not going to end up crazy like Lear did, wandering around on the heath. I’ll never, ever, ever leave you and your sisters again. I’ll never leave you, okay?” I looked down at my hands and was suddenly unsure what I should do with them. I could feel my shoulders slumping, knew that I looked like a sullen teenager, but it was all I could do not to start crying, not to jump up and wrap my arms around him, to curl up in his lap like I had when I was a little kid. I could feel him staring at me, and finally, I nodded.
“Did you know I wanted to name all of you girls after the daughters in Lear?” he said.
“Reggie and Goneril?”
“Regan. And yes, I thought it was romantic, but your mother decided otherwise. She pointed out that Goneril might be too close to gonorrhea. Well, that and she also reminded me that the other sisters were evil bitches.” I started to open my mouth to make the obvious joke, but he shook his finger at me. “Don’t,” he said, but he was smiling. He reached up and slid his glasses down onto his nose and then picked up one of the bills on the table before him. “Jesus. We should turn down the thermostat.”
“I’m already wearing wool socks and a heavy sweater, Daddy, I’m not sure how much lower we can turn it.”
“You’ll just have to wear wool underwear as well,” he said.
“How’d you end up with Carly and Rena’s names, then?” I wanted to steer the conversation back to what he’d just said about never leaving me again, but I knew that we’d passed that point. Sometimes you can’t turn a boat in time. It was all I could do to ask him about Carly and Rena. I couldn’t even make myself ask him about Scotty’s name; it wasn’t that we never talked about Scotty, but it was just that I hated that hitch I always heard in his breath if someone other than Daddy was the one to say Scotty’s name. He sometimes brought Scotty up himself, said “Scotty would have liked that,” or “Scotty would have done this,” and we had pictures up in the house, but it was different when somebody else said Scotty’s name, when my father wasn’t expecting it.
“I’ve never told you?” He looked genuinely surprised. “Carly’s Carly because your mom liked that singer, and Rena was the name of one of my great-aunts. Or maybe one of your mom’s great-aunts.” He looked down at his feet and gave Third a nudge. “Damn it, Third. Quit your farting.” He looked back up at me and gave a shy half-smile, the kind I associated with little boys hiding behind the legs of their mothers. “Doesn’t that beat all to hell? I can’t remember if it was my great-aunt or your mom’s great-aunt. Well, it was somebody’s great-aunt, that’s for sure.” He reached down, grabbed Third’s collar, and then hauled the dog out from under the table. “I’m going to take her down to the boat with me for a bit, at least let her stink up the ocean instead of the house. In the meantime, why don’t you make yourself useful and start putting dinner together? What are we having?”
I stood up and left the chair sitting next to him. I didn’t want to bring it back into the dining room, to tuck it under the round table. We only ever kept four chairs there, neat and ready for their four occupants, a defining limit on the number of people living in our house now. I knew Daddy would put it back. “Lobster,” I threw back at him over my shoulder as I left the kitchen. It’s what I always said, what all of us always said to his question of what we were having for dinner, and it never failed to elicit our intended response: a quick, deep chuckle that sounded more like a coughing dog than a man’s laughter.
I remember that, from my room, I looked out on Daddy and Third climbing down the steps to the wharf. Third was a girl, and small for a Newf, which meant that she topped out at about 110. I remember her as a puppy, though I know that she would have been four or five the year
I was seventeen. Walking next to Daddy, she could have been a version of his shadow.
I knew I’d missed my chance. When we were sitting at the table and Daddy said that I was named Cordelia after the king’s one true daughter, that I was named Cordelia because I was the rightful heir, what I should have done was asked him if he was sure of that, if he’d known that for sure when Scotty was alive. I should have asked him if he’d always known that I was going to be the one to follow him onto the water, to take up the mantle of the Kings.
I should have asked him this: If he could go back and make a bargain with the ocean, would he have traded my life for his son’s?
Our waters stayed clear of James Harbor buoys for nearly fifteen years after Daddy destroyed Al Burns’s hand, but nothing lasts forever.
There’d been trouble the year I got back from university, and Daddy had taken me and George and a couple of other men to James Harbor, and we’d marched right into Al Burns’s office. I’d made sure Daddy wasn’t carrying a hammer, but all it took was for Daddy to say, “Your boys are fishing our ocean again,” for Al to clamp things down. Still, that had been more than a decade ago. More than fifteen years had passed since Daddy smashed Al’s hand and headed to the loony bin, and things had changed. There was a new generation of boys who were working the boats, and the story of Daddy flattening Al Burns’s hand with a hammer was just that to them: a story. There were rumours that James Harbor lobstermen were planning to make a push for our waters again. The fact was, generations of overfishing in their waters had taken their toll. There were rumours, too, that something uglier was going on than simple lobster poaching, that James Harbor had gotten run-down with drugs—meth in particular.
With Daddy’s history, a resumption of our fishing wars with James Harbor should have left me nervous—his trip to the loony bin had left its mark on my sisters and me—but the truth was that I was preoccupied with something that felt more pressing than my worries about James Harbor: in the fifteen years since Daddy smashed up Al Burns’s hand, he’d started to get old.
He’d been aging well. He was trim from decades of hauling lobster traps, and at fifty-seven he could probably still have fit into the same suit that he was wearing in his wedding portrait, though that suit didn’t have a particularly fine fit even at the time. When he did wear a suit, which was rarely, only to weddings and funerals, he looked good, the silver in his hair like the cut of a fast boat through the water, his skin worked over by the sun and the wind, leaving him looking rugged. Put him in a tuxedo and it would be leading man looks from Hollywood before Technicolor came along.
But the rest of him wasn’t holding up. His dizzy spells had turned to fainting spells: I’d gone over to Daddy’s house for our weekly dinner and found him out cold on his kitchen floor. His dog—Sailor V, Fifth—was curled up beside him, like the two of them were just taking a nap. He claimed it was nothing. Low blood sugar or just standing up too quickly, Daddy said, the sort of thing that could happen to anybody, nothing to worry about, but of course I worried. He’d been in the middle of prepping food. There was a loaf of bread, a pot of stew simmering on the stove.
I set him down on the couch while I finished getting our meal together, and after I badgered him for a while he admitted that his energy had been down the past few weeks.
“Nothing to mind, Cordelia. A flu bug or something like that. Another ten days until pots go back in the water. I’ll maybe just take an early bedtime tonight.”
I put the tray with our dinners down and slid the coffee table closer to the couch. The broth in the stew trembled. “You’ll do more than that,” I said. “You’ll be going to the doctor’s tomorrow.”
He took a bite of his stew and grimaced. “Eh. You’d think I’d learn to let it cool down. Burned my tongue again.” He broke off a piece of bread and put it under the table for Fifth. “You planning on going to the mainland before the season starts? I’ve got a few odds and ends I need picked up. Nothing big, and I can ask George or one of the other boys, but I—”
“Don’t you change the subject, Daddy. You’re going to the doctor tomorrow.”
He grumbled and tried to weasel out of it, and after dinner he insisted on heading over to the Grumman Fish House for a beer. I’m not sure if he really wanted to get out or if he was just trying to convince me that he was hale and hearty, hoping I’d forget about him going to the doctor, but once we were actually at the Grumman Fish House Daddy had complained that I was treating him like he’d gone old and senile overnight. “Next thing I know, she’ll be taking the Queen Jane from me, telling me there’s only room for one of the Kings to be on the sea,” he said, but even if he told the boys about it with a smile on his face, there was something about it that didn’t ring funny to me, because I knew that there would probably come a day when I would have to drag him off of the Queen Jane, and I worried that he’d be out on the water past the point where it was safe. I’d be staring a long, long time if I looked to my sisters to say anything. Rena would kiss a squid to stay in Daddy’s good graces, and the only person Carly was interested in pissing off was me. But maybe this was an opportunity. Maybe this fainting spell of Daddy’s was a chance to broach the subject with him, to see what his plans for the future were, see when he was ready to step down.
I sleep better when I’m sharing the bed, but it had been a couple of years since I’d had a serious boyfriend, and that meant that there wasn’t anything keeping me tethered to the bedroom if I woke in the middle of the night. My dog, Trudy—a Newf, of course, and on the smaller side for the breed—was used to my restlessness and kept me company through the brutal hours. Mostly I read histories or biographies or the specialized fishing stuff that is only interesting to somebody in the business. I’d also gotten hooked on watching the cricket matches that my satellite dish picks up. I don’t understand the rules, but there is something in the pristine white uniforms, the ritual of the matches, that appeals to me. Sometimes, when a strange heat and lightning rolled over the island, I liked to head down to the water to wait for the night to pass.
But the night that Daddy passed out I slept straight through. I wouldn’t have thought it would be the night for it, not with worrying about Daddy, but the storm that had come in a few nights before had turned from a biblical torrent into a solid, cool, windless rain that tangled with the metal roof and kept me soothed until dawn.
With the rain, I hadn’t been much out walking or running—the gravelled tourist walks were the only paths that hadn’t gotten slopped out in the weather—and I’d been feeling cooped up in the house. I could only read or watch television for so long. I’d tried working on some of my paintings, but couldn’t concentrate with the greyness. Besides which, it felt like I was touching up things that didn’t need to be touched anymore, working on them for the sake of work. I was itching to take my pochade box out and start something new. Some of the other painters on the island could bring what they saw inside with them, used the winter and the grey and rainy days as a chance to paint from what they remembered, but I’d always been somebody who needed to stand out there and work with what was in front of me. Once I got properly started I could finish indoors, in foul weather, but I’d used that up a couple of days ago, and to start something new I needed to be in front of it. It meant I looked like one of the tourists during the summers: with my pochade box flipped open and attached to a tripod, if I was working somewhere that was of particular importance in the Brumfitt canon, I might be one of a line of a half dozen painters scraping away at the water and the cliffs. I couldn’t help it. I needed to be outside to capture that sense of being outside.
I didn’t have any illusions about my paintings: I was serious in my intent, but I knew I’d never be better than competent. It didn’t matter, because I enjoyed it, and on Loosewood Island, being an artist was almost as common as being a fisherman. Most of us did at least some of both. We had the history of Brumfitt, of course, and another half dozen or so minor artists who had either lived here or pain
ted works on the island, the sort whose work might seem familiar even if their name didn’t. We had the seasons, too, and with the weather and the way that lobstering tacked back and forth between brutal days and stretches of inactivity, you had to have some sort of a hobby. There were enough people who took up drinking or smoking pot, but arts and crafts came in a pretty popular second to self-destruction.
I’d started painting more seriously since Kenny Treat had moved to Loosewood Island nearly a decade before. Kenny hadn’t been born here, and even if his wife, Sally, who teaches kindergarten through third grade, had been raised close by on the mainland, in Lubec, most of the islanders still thought of them as outsiders: coming from off the island is something that longevity can’t change, but it was more than that. Kenny worked for Daddy for five years, and then moved to my boat, the Kings’ Ransom, once Rena’s husband, Tucker, took to the water and started working on the Queen Jane. Kenny went to college at Yale and everybody says he comes from money, but he never talked about buying his own boat, like he had no aspirations to do anything more than be a sternman and paint his pictures. That lack of ambition is the sort of thing that can only come with a safety net, and left some of the boys suspicious, despite my attesting to Kenny’s work ethic. I couldn’t imagine having a different sternman than Kenny. He was funny and kind and he saw lobstering the way I did: as a chance to prove that the sea can never beat us. Though, of course, it does sometimes.
The Lobster Kings Page 8