He glanced over at me and put his hand on my shoulder. “I can look behind me at the generations of my family, and I can look next to me at Cordelia and see what’s coming. We do well by the island, but there isn’t space enough for the James Harbor boys to come along. Does anybody doubt that?”
It was an odd pause, and for a moment nobody seemed sure if it was a question or not, and then there was a half swell of “No” and grunts before Daddy nodded and then took a sip of his beer.
In the small murmur of voices, I leaned in toward him. “Daddy? Are you sure—”
“Don’t question me, Cordelia,” he said. “I’m still in charge of this family.” His voice was quiet enough that nobody else could have heard him, but there was no brooking it. He let go of my shoulder, banged his beer down on the bar, and raised his voice again. “There isn’t much to it, then, is there? We cut them out, we run them out, we fight them out. See a trap that isn’t Loosewood Island and you cut it. See a boat that isn’t Loosewood Island and you get on the horn and call us up and everybody drops what they’re doing and hauls ass over so that we can run them out. Nobody confronts a boat on his own. Nobody plays a hero, because if we have to, we’ll fight them out, fist or gun, and we’ll do it together,” Daddy said, raising his beer up. “To Loosewood Island.”
And there was no hesitation there, no pause at all, just a room full of fishermen and their families, a wave of sound, a thrust of arms.
I walked back to the house with Daddy. It took a while to get clear of the Fish House. The boys wanted to talk with Daddy, were running hot on the idea of forcing James Harbor out of our waters.
It was the kind of night that is rare on Loosewood Island, with the heat staying past the setting of the sun. I was wearing a smocked peasant dress that I’d ordered just before Kenny left the island and that arrived just after he’d fled, and I thought that it was as good a night as any to wear it. It was cut lower on the top than I usually wore and fit off the shoulder, but I looked good in it, the hemline high enough that my calves were out in the open. I don’t spend a lot of time in front of the mirror, less than Rena and less than Carly, but I have a good sense of what clothes flatter me. I’d even worn a pair of wedges so that my legs had a little extra shape, and I’d spent a few minutes with my hair, leaving it down instead of pulling it back in a ponytail. Rena hadn’t said anything when she saw me, just shook her head. Other than my week with Otto, I hadn’t put any serious effort into my looks since Kenny had disappeared, and Rena didn’t ask. But Kenny said something. He put his arm around my waist and pulled me to him at the bar and said, “Glad to be back with the prettiest captain on the island.”
He’d showered—which wasn’t a given for the boys at the bar—and was wearing wrinkled khakis and a T-shirt with a band name on it. He was wearing some sort of cologne, or maybe it was his shampoo. It was barely enough for me to get a whiff of it when he leaned in and past me toward the bar to order a beer, and even then I couldn’t concentrate on it because as he was leaning in, he said, “That’s a pretty dress, Cordelia.” The din of the Grumman Fish House, with all of the boys and everybody else packed in to hear George’s story, was enough that he had to press his mouth up against my ear to say it, and when he spoke, I felt the words as a warm air that travelled down my body. But it was only a moment, because once the beer was in his hand, he turned back to his conversation with Petey.
Still, walking home with Daddy, I was glad I’d worn the dress. I wasn’t quite as thrilled with my shoe choice, and I’d taken them off, holding them by the straps in one hand, my other arm through Daddy’s arm. The air was warm. The slight dampness of the night settled on my skin. It wasn’t particularly late, but the island had gone mostly dark. We kept to one of the trails, and the crushed shells held a slight glow from the moon. With my bare feet on the crushed shells and the darkness of the night, even with the familiarity of the island, we walked slowly together.
“Everything all right between you and Carly?” he asked. “You two didn’t seem too warm toward each other tonight.”
“Getting used to living in the same place again,” I said, deciding that I didn’t want to bring up Momma’s necklace. I changed the subject. “Is George going to be okay, Daddy?”
“Well, I wouldn’t trust it if it was just coming from George’s mouth, but Mackie said so. Eyes tested fine, but the skin around them is nasty. The bandages are just for a couple of days. He’s lucky. A few pellets in the eye and there isn’t much you can do. It’s just a ball full of jelly.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing with James Harbor, Daddy,” I said.
“Me, too, darling.” He reached across and patted my hand where it rested in the crook of his arm. I thought for a moment about telling him how reassuring it was to hold his arm like this, how solid he was beside me, how lucky I was, but I didn’t want to get sidetracked.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea to get the boys riled up like this instead of going to the cops? Somebody’s liable to get hurt.”
“Cordelia, I’m sorry I snapped at you back there when I was talking. There will be a time when you’re in charge of things, but it isn’t now.” He sighed. “But to answer your question, yes. Somebody is probably going to get hurt, but I’m hoping that what I did will stop somebody from getting killed. You hear about one of the Warner boys getting roughed up last week?” His entire life he’d known Mr. Warner, had watched Chip and Tony growing up, and he could still never seem to remember who was who.
“Seems like the sort of thing I should have heard about, but no, Daddy, I didn’t.”
He nodded. “That’s because I worked hard to keep it quiet. And, obviously, he wasn’t hurt too bad, or it wouldn’t have stayed a secret, but one of the Warner boys was in James Harbor, on a date, taking a girl to the movies, and he got jumped by a pair of James Harbor boys and took a beating.”
“He’s lucky all he got was a beating. Go out with a James Harbor girl and you’re likely to get syphilis.”
“Laugh it up, Cordelia, but want to take any guesses as to who it was who jumped him?”
“Well, if it was Chip, knowing him, he was probably taking out a girl who already had a boyfriend.”
“Eddie Glouster.”
The name made me stop walking. Daddy stopped, too, and then looked down at my bare feet. “I’ll never understand why you girls insist on wearing shoes like that. What’s wrong with a comfortable pair of boots?” He pulled his arm lightly, giving me a tug.
“Eddie Glouster?”
“And one of his friends. Ozzy or something like that.”
“Oswald,” I said. “Isn’t Eddie supposed to be in jail?” Petey Dogger’s brother had busted Eddie for trying to sell meth in James Harbor only a couple of days after we’d burned Eddie’s house down. Was he out already?
“Obviously, Eddie is not in jail. But it might not be too long before he’s back again. I did some asking around, and it sounds like Eddie is trying to move up from selling dime bags. Wants to be an operator.”
I couldn’t stop myself from snickering. “Dime bags?”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Cordelia.”
“Oh, Jesus, Daddy, come on.”
“But you can see why I tried to keep this quiet. Word gets out that one of the Warner boys got jumped in James Harbor, and nobody’s going to be asking if maybe he had it coming.” I started to speak but Daddy held up his hand. “I’m not saying Eddie is on the side of the angels, or that I think you all did the wrong thing running him out, even if I didn’t like the way you went about it, but it’s sort of understandable that Eddie might want to put a beating on the Warner boy. But the Warner boys are tough, and even if Eddie had a buddy, it didn’t work out too bad. Just a chipped tooth and a few bruises that could be covered up. When he got back to Loosewood Island he came straight to his father instead of spreading the news. Anyway, Mr. Warner and I talked it over and brought George in. We figured, let’s see if we can stop word of this spreading, try to keep thing
s from getting out of control. But then there’s today, with Georgie, so yeah, I’m trying to keep things tamped down.”
“That speech of yours tonight is your idea of keeping things tamped down?” I gave him a smile to show that I was just teasing. “I’d hate to see what it was like if you were trying to start a fire.”
“Truth is, Cordelia, we actually got lucky. Eddie or his buddy could have had a knife or a gun on them last week. George could have been blinded or worse.” He paused for a moment and looked up at the sky. There were no clouds, and I looked up, too, taking the chance to remind myself that the sky wasn’t like this everywhere, that not everybody got to see the sheer depth of stars that swam through the night. “I think there’s already a fire,” Daddy said. “All we can do is try to keep it under control. It’s kind of like a controlled burn, you might say. You heard me talking down some of the younger fellows who wanted to head to James Harbor tonight—”
“Jessie and Matty? Don’t take them too seriously, Daddy. They’re sternmen. They don’t even have boats of their own. What are they going to do, swim over to James Harbor?”
“If it was only them I wouldn’t have been worried, honey, but I already talked about it with George and Harly and Paul.” I wasn’t surprised that he’d talked to George and Harly—Timmy’s father—but I hadn’t expected that Paul Paragopolis would be part of the conversation. Paul did a swell job with the co-op, but he wasn’t a lobsterman. Wasn’t a fisherman of any kind. “Thing is, there’ve already been a couple of other things that have spilled over. You know the Tulip boys?”
He paused and glanced at me, and I realized that he wasn’t sure if I knew Frank and Dave Tulip or not. Even on an island as small as Loosewood, it was a fair enough question. There were two thousand of us, and the Tulip boys were young enough that I wasn’t friends with them, but old enough that they weren’t the children of people I was friends with. They didn’t fish, either. Their dad was out of the picture, down in Massachusetts or New Hampshire or something working as a welder. In tourist season, they worked at the hotel, like their mother did, and they spent the off-season mostly drinking and getting into the occasional fight. They weren’t long for the island, I figured. Most of the girls their age had already matched up with a boy who had better long-term prospects or had spent enough time with the Tulip boys that they knew they could do better. I didn’t know either Frank or Dave that well, but I knew them enough. I actually thought they were okay, the kind of boys who could have turned out better in different circumstances.
“I know that they have too much time on their hands,” I said.
“Well, this afternoon, they went over to James Harbor and jumped the first lobsterman they came across. Young kid. Twenty, twenty-one. Put him in the hospital. Broke his arm and kicked out a couple of teeth.”
This actually made me stop walking again. I slipped my hand out from Daddy’s arm. He took another two or three steps and then turned to look at me. He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He shifted, and his boots crunched against the crushed shells underfoot, a sound that bothered some people but always seemed familiar to me.
“You going to keep stopping every time something comes out of my mouth?”
I sighed and started walking again. “How come I haven’t heard about this, either?”
“You’re hearing it now. And not everything gets run by you, Cordelia.” He didn’t look at me when he said it. “The boy they jumped never saw them, didn’t know them, didn’t even know it was somebody from outside James Harbor. Good thing, too. That’s the sort of thing that escalates. The Tulip twins went looking for trouble and they found it, and you know how things are. If they go around bragging about it, word would make its way back to James Harbor soon enough that it was an island boy who’d put one of their boys in the hospital, no matter that Chip or Tony or whichever one it was got himself beat up last week.”
“What about Al Burns, does he—”
“Al’s old, honey. He’s old, and he tried, but there’s a new group of boys out of James Harbor. He’s not the only one, Cordelia. I’m getting old, too.” He put his hand out like he was ready to interrupt me, but I hadn’t started speaking. “I’m getting to the age when things start going wrong, old enough that the beer I just finished back at the Fish House means I’m going to have to get up two, three times tonight to go to the head. How’s that for making me feel like an old man, having to piss all the time? And there will come a day where I’m pissing myself. Things move on. There was a time when I just would have taken care of things, but all I can do now is try to nudge it best I can.”
“Yeah, but—”
“There’s no ‘but,’ here, Cordelia. I thought we could keep a lid on things, handle this easy, but after what happened last week with the Warner boy, after this morning, after George nearly gets blinded, after the Tulip twins’ stunt this afternoon, it’s clear that things are going to come to push and shove.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “The only question is whether or not it’s a couple of drunk kids doing something stupid, or if we can keep it about business, keep it about lobster traps and this being our land, our waters. We’re trying to keep a lid on things best we can.”
I tried to figure out how to say what I wanted to, which was that he may have talked it over with George and Harly and Paul Paragopolis, but why didn’t he think to talk it over with me? I had the words ready to come out, but then he stopped walking. He was breathing heavily and he pulled his hand out of his pocket and put it on his stomach.
“Daddy?”
“I’m okay, Cordelia.” He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths. “Little out of breath.”
“Your chest?”
“I’m not having a heart attack. Just a lot going on right now, and I don’t care to share everything all the time. The doctor’s got me on so many pills that I can’t hardly keep track of them.”
“You said it was just fibre pills.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “I say a lot of things, Cordelia. I’m fine, and you and your sisters don’t need to know all of my business.”
“Are you taking your medicine like you’re supposed to?”
“You hear me? I’m just fine, Cordelia. I’ve survived losing a son and a wife and raising you three girls the rest of the way. I know what I’m doing.”
He turned back toward the house and waited a beat for me to catch up with him and put my hand in the crook of his arm again.
“I sure hope so,” I said.
“And I hope that you know what you’re doing, Cordelia.”
“What do you mean?”
We turned the corner around the outside of the old Community Boat House, and I could see the lights up on the hill, the silhouette of Daddy’s house—of my house for the next couple of weeks.
“I mean with Kenny. I hope you know what you’re doing with him. You’ve got a good thing going with him as your sternman, and I know that he’s at loose ends now that Sally’s gone, but I don’t want to see you get your heart broken. You might want to give him time to settle down.”
“How …”
“You think I only worry about what’s going on with you when you’re out on the Kings’ Ransom? Just because you’re past thirty doesn’t mean I’m not always going to be watching over you.” His voice was warm, even if his words brought me to task, and he didn’t say anything else.
We walked in silence the last few minutes to the house, parted quietly, and went to sleep, but I wanted to ask him if he would have loved me as much if I didn’t work the water. I wanted to fall into his arms, and to tell him that I had no idea what I was doing with Kenny, but that it was too late.
By the week after Labour Day, things had settled into a pattern. Carly and I hadn’t hashed out what to do about the necklace—which was still tucked away in the back of my underwear drawer—but things between us had simmered down. She no longer looked like she wanted to claw my eyes out when she saw me, and I was kind of hoping we just wouldn’t
talk about it. As for Stephanie, she seemed to have gotten the hang of being Daddy’s sternman. She’d had a few rough days, Carly said, coming home too tired to get undressed on her own. A couple of gaffes, too, forgetting to rebait traps so that they went back into the water empty, not banding some of the lobsters’ claws so that they tore each other apart in the holding tank, simple things that I take for granted after a lifetime on the water and five years of working with a sternman like Kenny. She even accidently threw one trap—baited and weighted—into the water without a buoy on it, and watched it sink beneath the water without a trace, like Scotty had done two decades ago. But despite the difficulty of her first days, she’d gotten to the point where she seemed to have a handle on things. All things considered, I was happy for her. I was honestly a bit surprised that I didn’t feel jealous that she was on the Queen Jane, but maybe it was because it was Carly’s girlfriend instead of Carly herself. And if Stephanie wasn’t a natural, she was a quick learner. Daddy, who never believed in building somebody up just for the sake of building them up, said that Stephanie was ready to start earning a share, that she was contributing more than she was slowing him down. He also said that she was solid enough that I could take her on for a couple of days while he went to Saint John to see the doctor. Stephanie could be an extra crewman to help manage both my and his lines.
The day after Labour Day—or Labor Day for islanders who were feeling American that week—Daddy told me that I’d be waiting another two weeks before I could take over the rental house as my own, since the New York City couple renting it had decided to stay on a little longer. “Didn’t figure you’d mind much, Cordelia,” he said. “They’re a nice couple of fellows and I’ll put the extra rent money into whatever new furniture you want, to make the place the way you’d like it.”
Out on the Kings’ Ransom, Kenny and I had more or less fallen into our old routines in the way we moved in rhythm, keeping the talk going, all the while pulling traps, baiting, measuring, banding, dropping, motoring, and working the waters. The difference was that with Sally out of the picture, at least to me, when we flirted there wasn’t the same sense of there being a line we couldn’t cross.
The Lobster Kings Page 19