I’d gone to college, too, and raced through four years in three so that I could come home and start working my own boat. I was on the island when Kenny moved here. The first time I saw him was down at the docks. I was working on the engine of the Kings’ Ransom and tied up two boats closer in than the Queen Jane when he came walking toward me, Daddy at his side. I was struck by the way Kenny moved. This was before Kenny had worked a day on the Queen Jane, before he’d done anything but take a pleasure cruise, but he came toward me with his knees tilted out, the sway that you get from spending years on the ocean. He was taller than Daddy, broad across the chest and shoulders—something that I learned later came from time on the crew team when he was in college. Each step Kenny took was solid, his hips open, his boots ticking against the wood of the dock. He had his head tilted down, listening to something that Daddy was saying, and I remember that as he came over to me, he gave a small smile. I don’t remember what we talked about that day—it was probably nothing more than an exchange of names and a few pleasantries—but I remember the way he looked at me.
The island being as small as it is, it took maybe twenty minutes after I met Kenny before I figured out he was married, and that he and his wife had bought a small two-bedroom Colonial one road up from Gull Street. I decided to go over there and welcome her. I hadn’t been up there in a few months, hadn’t even realized the house was up for sale, and as I walked up the street I could see that Kenny and Sally had painted it blue. There was a wheelbarrow on the lawn and the freshly turned dirt in front of the porch where they’d planted bright flowers: black-eyed Susans, asters, and blue flags. It looked like a hopeful little house.
I’d gone with a cheap bottle of white wine. Sally was sitting on the front steps, a bottle of beer in her hand. She had a pair of gardening gloves next to her and a small smear of dirt on her legs. She had makeup on and her hair done up. She looked like she expected Kenny to take her away from gardening and out for a fancy dinner. Even though she was sitting, I could see that she filled out her clothes nicely. Not to say that I don’t have a good body, but I take after Momma. I look taller than my five-seven, and I’ve got breasts, but they’re not like Rena’s or even Carly’s; I eat like a horse, but with all of the time I spend out fishing, I don’t have any extra meat on me. Or maybe it’s just a good metabolism. Either way, while nobody would mistake me for a boy, I’m definitely built for speed.
As I came up the walk to her I held the bottle of wine out in front of me, but she didn’t make a move to get up or do anything other than simply watch me come to her. I handed her the bottle of wine and said, “Welcome to Loosewood Island.”
“Thanks.” She reached out and took the bottle. “It’s cold.”
“Straight from the fridge.”
She put it on the step next to her. “I’m not going to open it now,” she said. I suppose that I must have flinched at that, because I saw her try to recover. “I can offer a beer.” She sighed and shook her head. “Sorry. I’m just still trying to wrap my head around the idea that I moved back. I always swore that once I left Lubec I’d be gone for good, but Kenny wanted it.”
“Well, Loosewood Island isn’t exactly Lubec.”
She laughed and then finished her beer. “No kidding. At least in Lubec I could drive somewhere if I wanted.”
“I’m Cordelia. Cordelia Kings.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s a small island.”
“Well, looks like your husband’s going to be working as a sternman for my father.”
“You fish, too, right?” I nodded. “Early mornings, I guess.” She pushed herself to her feet and then bent down and picked up the bottle of wine. She tipped it in my direction. “Thanks for the wine. I’m Sally. And now I’ll go put this bottle back in the fridge. I’ve got some unpacking to do.”
She didn’t slam the door behind her as she went inside, but she might as well have, for the impression it made on me. I don’t think it took that long for her to put other people off, even the boys who were taken by her looks at first. It’s not that she was deliberately nasty or cold. There was just something tight about her. I don’t think she was aware of the way she was acting, but she never stopped complaining about being on Loosewood Island. She didn’t get along well with any of the women I knew, and she was never more than indifferent toward me. Despite that, I felt bad for her at times, particularly after she started having miscarriages.
Over the years she had three. Kenny told me about them, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could keep hidden on a place as small as the island anyway. And for a couple of years she had a drinking problem, too, which made me feel bad about giving her a bottle of wine for a housewarming present. Ten years on and we all thought we knew everything there was to know about Sally Treat. Gossip got around the island quicker than a divorcée spending a week’s vacation on the rock.
Maybe if Sally had been a different woman we’d have become friends and I’d have looked at Kenny differently, or maybe if I’d known from the first moment that Kenny was married I wouldn’t have gotten the thought of him as somebody to be attracted to, but those twenty minutes of meeting him were just enough to turn him into a splinter lodged under my skin. Of course, once I actually got to know Kenny, it got even worse. As Daddy’s sternman, he was somebody who was in my constant orbit, and then, five years ago, when Tucker and Rena moved to the island, Daddy took on Tucker, and Kenny moved on to the Kings’ Ransom with me.
It didn’t take long before I was trying to impress him. It’s not like I didn’t read much before Kenny, didn’t watch movies unless shit was being blown up, didn’t go to museums when I went to Montreal or Boston, but it was different after Kenny started working as my sternman. He’d mention a book he’d read and then when I said I hadn’t heard of it, a few days later he’d show up to work with the book stuffed inside a plastic bag. I’d read the book, and then later, back on the boat, as we were pulling traps, stuffing bait bags, slapping the brass measure against the backs of bugs, we’d talk about it. Same thing with a play he’d see in the city or a piece of art at a gallery. Next time I was in a big city—and I went every couple of months—I’d go where he told me. If there was a new band he heard, he burned me a CD; a magazine article he liked, he’d clip it out for me. We argued about some of the things. He made me read a novel that had won the Pulitzer, and even though I passed it on to Daddy and he thought it was brilliant, I had to tell Kenny the truth, which was that I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. He was enamoured with an indie rock group out of Columbus, Ohio, that sounded like two dogs fucking a cat in a garbage can, and after about the thirtieth time he put it in the boat’s CD player I threw the disc out into the ocean.
But what happened was that after a while I realized I wasn’t reading this stuff or going to check out paintings at galleries or online—living on the island, that was sometimes my only option—because Kenny had told me I should, but rather because I wanted to. Before long, I was bringing him my own book suggestions or telling him about some movie I’d read about that I thought sounded good. We couldn’t agree much on music, though he finally grew to appreciate Johnny Cash.
We probably spent the most time talking about Brumfitt Kings. Kenny had been an art history major at Yale, and he wrote his senior honour’s thesis on Brumfitt’s lighter works, arguing that they deserved an equal place to his darker works. There was no reason, he wrote, that a painting showing a mother and young son picnicking on a stone beach in clear weather was inherently less important than one that showed a mother and son in peril from a bank of black clouds. Since then, he’s come around to my point of view, which is that the Brumfitt’s paintings that show the Loosewood Island from Daddy’s stories are better than either his lighter pieces or his more menacing, realistic paintings.
I didn’t fool myself that it was romantic when we were on the Kings’ Ransom. We flirted at times, the sort of aimless brushing against the line of two people who are attracted to each other but know that nothing
can happen, because while Kenny may have been unhappily married, he was married. I missed the flirting in the off-season, but more than anything, what I missed was the regularity of having him with me out on the Kings’ Ransom, the intimacy of the two of us out on the water, the rhythm of working together. Sometimes, when things were going well on the boat, it was an odd sort of dancing. I saw him in the off-season or touched base with him on the phone, but it was different.
Still, he was the person I wanted to call to talk with about Daddy’s fainting spell, but it was too early. Waking up before dawn was a habit that was hard for me to break in the off-season, but it wasn’t something Kenny took too long to adjust to. Instead of calling, I decided to hop in the shower and see if Daddy wanted some company on the way to the doctor’s. By the time I made it down to the docks, however, the Queen Jane and Daddy were gone to Saint John. I was already slickered up and not interested in watching the rain through the glass doors of my living room, so I rowed out to the Kings’ Ransom instead. I didn’t have anything that needed to be done on board, but I decided that I could find something. We were barely more than a week out from the spring season and I was itchy to get started. Part of it was that I just loved being on the water, and that fishing meant spending time with Kenny, but part of it was the rumours that the James Harbor boys were going to make a play at our waters again.
But even without worrying about James Harbor lobstermen horning in on my grounds, I still would have been antsy. The way we ran the lobster fishing season worked well for us—we pulled the traps out of the water during the summer tourist season, for chunks of the spring, fall, and winter—but between our schedule and the weather, there were often days on end when the seas kept me at home. I should probably have been going over paperwork, but that had never been my strong suit. It drove Rena crazy. She ran the fish shop, but the fish shop was only ever busy in the tourist season, and with her accounting degree she handled the books for Daddy’s rentals and business concerns, for the Queen Jane and the Kings’ Ransom, and did all of our personal taxes, too. All that Rena asked from me was to handle my own day-to-day records, expenses, gas, daily catches, and she figured out the rest.
I poked around for a while on the Kings’ Ransom, trying to keep my mind off Daddy’s doctor’s appointment and going back and forth on whether or not I should call Carly down in Portland to tell her about Daddy fainting. Every time I heard a boat’s motor I’d pop my head up, like some fucker from James Harbor was going to just sail up to the Kings’ Ransom and tell me that he was going to try to poach my fishing grounds. I was both keyed up and bored at the same time. I tried mucking about in the engine, and then I pulled out my fishing rod and threw a few halfhearted casts. I sat on the bow in my slickers and let the rain wash over me, slowly working the lure through the water. Trudy stuck her paws up on the bow to see what was going on, and then curled up again on the deck. I didn’t have much of a thought to catch anything, which was just as well, because after ten minutes or so I hadn’t gotten a nibble yet and was done with it. Still, even with being anxious about the season being a week off and James Harbor getting pushy, there was something nice about being down in the harbour when nobody else was there. During the season, mornings are the busiest time of the day: lobstermen up before dawn, heading out with the throttle full-on, men readying themselves for a day at sea, a few wives walking down to see their husbands off.
By ten, about the time I turned to head back in, the rain had stopped. I stowed my rod, stripped off my slicker and hung it in the cabin, and then climbed into my rowboat. Trudy set up shop on the stern bench. She looked pitiful and soaked and smelled like what she was: a wet dog. I checked the knot on my mooring buoy, making sure the Kings’ Ransom was set in case something blew in, and started pulling on the paddles. Most of the men had five-horsepowers or nine-point-nines on their skiffs, but I’d bought this rowboat from Daddy when I was fifteen for two hundred and fifty bucks. I’d used it for the rest of high school, dropping my first set of double traps in the shallow water I could reach with oars, and eventually expanding to ten traps, which was a lot to work from a crappy old rowboat. More than fifteen years later, I was still using that rowboat for lobstering, even if just to get me back and forth to the Kings’ Ransom. It wouldn’t have hurt me much to drop three grand on a new nine-point-nine, but I liked the way rowing out and back from the Kings’ Ransom framed my day.
I backed in to the dock and heard Kenny’s voice.
“Where’s the Queen Jane?” he asked. “Woody told me he wasn’t going to be out on the water, for pleasure or otherwise, until the season started. Though your daddy’s been known to lie about what he is or isn’t doing with the Queen Jane.” He grabbed the rail of the boat and held it steady while I tied off the stern, and then reached down and grabbed the bow painter and cleated it off. Trudy jumped out and rubbed herself against his leg while she wagged her tail. Kenny stumbled a little and then scratched at her chest. “You’re a big, smelly darling,” he said. He looked up and winked at me. “Just like your mommy.”
“Working on that raise, Kenny?”
He grinned at me and stuck his hand out to pull me up and onto the dock. I would have bristled if any other of the boys had done it, but from Kenny it was somehow charming, just more proof that despite how hard he worked and the decade he’d lived on Loosewood Island, he still didn’t have what it meant to be an islander quite figured out. He was wearing a pair of paint-spattered jeans and a button-down that had seen better days, and he was carrying his portable easel and paint kit. Kenny was a good painter. There was some sort of emotional openness in what he painted; a way in which what was on his canvases took hold of you. Carly’s girlfriend, Stephanie, an artist herself, said that Kenny had a nice command of light. That’s what she said: a command of light. I didn’t have anything more intelligent to say. Kenny’s paintings were good enough to sell, and they did, not just on the island but in galleries in Halifax, Bar Harbor, and even New York.
“Well,” I said, “Daddy wouldn’t start setting traps without telling me. Besides, if he started setting traps today, he’d be out of his mind. Even if the season was open it isn’t worth any bother for at least another week. What do you think he’s doing, putting out the traps unbaited just so they can soak up some water? No, we’ll start fishing next week when the season opens, but it will be a few days past that when we are actually pulling anything up.” I’d wanted to call Kenny earlier in the morning, but right then I could feel my mouth staying closed. I don’t know why I didn’t want to tell Kenny that Daddy had gone to the doctor’s.
“All I can tell you, Cordelia,” Kenny said, “is that if Woody started setting traps on Christmas Eve, nobody on the island would be unwrapping presents the next day.”
“We’ve got the seasons all set. You’ve been on-island long enough to know that, Kenny. Nobody, not even Daddy, is going to fish outside the dates.”
“James Harbor would,” Kenny said. He stared at me and then nodded. “Yeah, me, too. The rumour’s going around. Everybody seems to think it’s a done deal, that the James Harbor boys are coming for us.”
“Well, it won’t change when we start our fishing. If the James Harbor boys are making a play for our waters, we’ll deal with it when the season starts.”
“You know, the season starts when your father says it starts. Woody is the island, Cordelia. He wanted to change the dates, they’d be changed. Maybe it takes somebody who wasn’t born here to point that out to you.”
He was right, and it annoyed me to hear him say it, so I tacked back to him. “Where you off to? Painting?”
“You feel like modeling?”
“I’ll get naked if you do, Kenny.”
He grinned and then shook his head. “Promises, promises. Maybe someday.”
That was what he always liked to say. Maybe someday. It let the flirting stay casual, but I don’t think Kenny understood that I wasn’t sure I was joking. If he wasn’t married, I might have wanted someday to b
e today.
“I’m going to set up at the end of the dock for a spell. Take advantage of the lull in the rain.” He glanced up at the village and then said, “You going up to the fish shop?” I could tell that he was itching to get on with things. “Be sure to say hey to Rena and the twins for me,” Kenny said.
“Paint me something beautiful,” I said, hoping he might make another joke about me modeling for him, but he just nodded back and headed out to the end of the dock to set up his easel.
I thought about heading up to the fish shop, like Kenny had asked, but Trudy had a mind of her own and had turned toward the house. Instead of calling her back, I followed behind her and then fixed myself a cup of tea and set myself in front of the phone. There was a brief message on it from Daddy: the doctor wanted him to spend the night in the hospital for some tests, and I wasn’t to worry. Not for the first time, I wished that he carried a cell phone with him when he was off-island.
I deleted the message and put the phone back down in front of me, trying to gather my energy. I knew I should have called Carly the night before, but I hadn’t been up for it. Calling her now, while she was at work, meant that she couldn’t be mad at me for not calling her. It also meant that I could just leave her a message. I hoped that by the time she was done teaching and called me back this afternoon I’d have some sort of better news for her.
The Lobster Kings Page 9