The boy in the nets is turned three-quarter profile. Standing close to the painting, you see that the face shows smudges, streaks, but take a few steps back and it resolves into what it is meant to be: the victim of a mermaid’s kiss. Despite the savagery of his flesh and the strain of Brumfitt and his son pulling at the nets, the boy looks peaceful. He appears to almost be reclining in the net, one hand resting languorously on his thigh, the other arm crossed up and bent high across his chest. He could be sleeping. For me, however, there are two things that turn the painting from a sad tableau into something heartbreaking and devastating. The first is that the boy is missing one of his boots. His small size, and his face, despite the ravages, are part of the reason we know he is a boy, but it is that missing boot that gives him an aura of innocence, that makes him seem so tender and vulnerable. Without having a child of my own, just looking at the painting, I can understand a mother’s impulse to cradle her child, to try to protect the child from what is impossible to protect against. The second thing that just destroys me about The Mermaid’s Kiss is that it is not complete. Brumfitt completed a triptych about the death of his eldest son, The Drowned Boy series, but it seems as if something about the death of his grandson broke him. He couldn’t hide behind his paints and his canvas. Perhaps fishing his grandson out of the water was what made him truly understand that the bargain he had struck when he married his wife was one that could not be broken, that it would carry on through the generations of his family as long as the generations of his family carried on through. And maybe because of that, at the bottom corner of the piece, next to where there is a girl standing with a look of horror on her face, where there is a soft bundle of clothing that I think can be nothing other than a sealskin coat, there is just a blank, unmarked space where I truly believe that Brumfitt’s wife should have been painted in.
By the time we finished eating and moved into the family room, the storm had gotten even worse. The rain seemed solid at times, like the ocean come to land, and lightning sheeted across the sky in an almost predictable rhythm.
“Did you know that old saw about counting between thunder and lighting is completely off?” Daddy said. He let out a small burp and tapped his hand twice against his chest before wiping at the sweat on his forehead. “Excuse me. Darn pie.”
“Yes, Daddy,” Rena said. She was sitting on the couch with both of the twins curled up on her lap. “You tell us that every time there’s a storm.”
Daddy didn’t let it faze him, turning to Tucker, who had heard it as often as we had, but who was happy to listen again. “Every second is about a quarter mile, not a mile, so if you’re counting one Mississippi, two Mississippi between thunder and lighting, it’s hitting awfully close.”
“And not much you can do about it if you’re fishing in this kind of weather,” Tucker said. “Just hope for the best.”
Stephanie came into the living room and sat down by the sliding door, leaning against the wall and staring out into the night. Rena had turned the lights off, so the room was lit by a pair of votive candles in the fireplace and the spillover from the kitchen. Kenny and Carly were still in there, finishing off the dishes, the music just loud enough to carry over into the living room and to mute their voices. George, as was his habit, had fallen asleep in one of the recliners almost as soon as he sat down.
“Okay, you two,” Rena said, squeezing her kids, “five more minutes, and then time for bed.”
I knew without having to look at the clock behind me that Rena’s warning meant that it was almost eight o’clock. There was a peal of laughter from Carly in the kitchen, and then another crack of thunder. Outside, the rain came in gusts, and the harder blows made the glass of the sliding doors ripple and shake. After a momentary lull, there was a prolonged series of sheets and strikes across the sky, and the door rattled enough that Stephanie involuntarily scooted back. The wind would do anything to get inside the house, I thought, and then I decided that I was ready for another half glass of wine.
I paused in the doorway of the kitchen. At the sink, their backs to me, Kenny and Carly were framed neatly in the window. Carly had one hand on Kenny’s arm, near his shoulder, and the other resting on the edge of the sink. They’d turned off the overhead lights and were washing dishes with only the fixture over the sink turned on. Past them, through the window and into the night, I could see the lighting rolling across the sky, an occasional bolt threading down to the ocean, close enough that the crackle spilled into the room and overpowered the single light fixture, casting shadows over their faces. I stood there, just watching the two of them. Their voices were low enough that I couldn’t understand what they were saying over the music, but I could hear Kenny’s rumble. I thought I heard my name, and then I saw Carly smile, shake her head, and then shake it again, for emphasis. She was wearing one of Momma’s old aprons, her hair pulled back, and for a minute Carly reminded me so strongly of Momma that it made me want to fall on my knees. And then Carly touched her neck the way that Momma used to, and I all I could see was Momma standing at the sink, wearing her pearls even as she washed the dishes. It was a quick thought, a blink, a flash of lightning before the vision was gone, but it was enough to make me gulp at the air.
The sound I made turned Carly toward me. “Cordelia?” She took a step away from the sink. Kenny looked up. “Cordelia?” Carly said again, and this time she took another step and then another, and put her hands on my shoulders. “Why are you crying?”
I hadn’t even realized I was crying, and I let her reach out and place her palms on my cheeks. She stared at me for a second and then glanced back over her shoulder. “How about you give us a couple of minutes, Kenny?” He nodded, put the towel on the counter, and went out the back of the kitchen toward the hall bathroom.
“Cordelia?” Carly said. “You okay?” I closed my eyes, and heard her give a small laugh. “Dumb question. What’s wrong?” Her voice got softer and she wrapped her arms around me. I let myself fold into her, putting my head down on her shoulder.
I stepped back from her and pulled the small cloth pouch from my pocket. I could feel the pearls through the thin fabric, rubbed the seeds between my fingers and thumb, and then pressed it into Carly’s hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Are—” she started to say, but then she closed her fingers around the pouch and felt the necklace. She looked at me and then down at her hand. “Are you sure?”
I wrapped my hand around hers and squeezed it tight. “I’m not going to be the one to tell Daddy you’ve had them all this time. That’s a conversation that the two of you can have without me. But as far as I’m concerned they’re yours. You’re so much like Momma.” I let go of her hand and wiped at my eyes.
Carly stuffed the pouch into her pocket and then stepped back into me, putting her arms around my shoulders and pulling me tight. “Thank you,” she said.
I heard the close of a door and then Kenny’s footsteps. He hesitated in the doorway of the kitchen.
“You go take a break, Carly. Sit with Stephanie,” I said. “Kenny and I will finish up in here.”
Kenny came to the sink and picked up a towel from the counter and slung it over his shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I pushed my sleeves up over my elbow and stood next to him, my hip brushing against his. “How about we do that thing when we both just pretend that I wasn’t crying, that nothing unusual happened?” I said.
“I like that idea better,” he said.
There was another crackle of lightning outside, and then, barely a full second later, thunder that rattled the windows. We both reached into the sudsy water at the same time. It was warm, like bathwater, the soap soft and slippery against my hands, a sweet smell of flowers drifting up. Our hands collided underneath the water, and he squeezed my fingers.
He was looking into my eyes, still holding my hand under the water, when the lights over the sink flickered and dimmed. They came back to full for a moment before finally disappearing, the house le
ft in darkness aside from the candles in the family room, where Fatty and Guppy were cheering the power outage. Lightning struck again, and the room was filled with sharp whiteness, the light matched only by the sound that accompanied it: a crash and rattle that made me jump. Something banged against the glass in front of the sink. There was a scream from the other room—Rena’s voice—and then others following it. Fatty and Guppy. Mackie. Stephanie.
It was Kenny who moved first, pushing past me as he ran into the living room, and I followed slowly behind him to see, in the frequent bursts and sheets of light from the storm outside, Daddy collapsed on the rug. My sisters were on their knees, over him, and I had the thought—and the thought lasted only as long as one of the strikes of lightning—that everything was going to be okay, that this was one of his fainting spells, but then I saw the way that he had his hand clutching at his chest.
Port in a Storm is held privately, and I’ve never seen the painting as anything other than a reproduction, which is a shame, because the size is something that everybody who sees it in real life can’t help but mention. Port in a Storm is Brumfitt’s smallest painting: it’s barely the size of a magazine cover. Not that Brumfitt often worked in a grand scale, but most of his paintings were large enough to, as one pissy art critic once said, “make for good kindling.” Clearly not a fan.
Size is one of those odd things about art, because it can change the way you view a painting. Monet’s Water Lilies, which is a pace or two longer than the Kings’ Ransom, feels, to me, intimate, despite its grand scale, while Port in a Storm is grand and sweeping despite its diminutive size. Maybe the compactness of Port in a Storm was a function of Brumfitt’s age; he painted it the second-to-last year of his life, in 1780, and I imagine that the smaller canvas would have been easier for him to deal with, something he could tuck under his arm if he felt like working out-of-doors.
The lines in this painting are less clear than much of Brumfitt’s earlier work, and I’ve often wondered if maybe his hands had started to shake. The cruel betrayal of age for an artist. That muddiness in the work is what makes it so hard to figure out if the brown daub of paint in the sea is supposed to be more than the swirling of darkened waters. I like to think that it is supposed to be something more. Brumfitt was eighty when he painted it. He must have known he was going to die soon. For me, the painting is about the voyage that Brumfitt knew he’d be taking, and the brown daub of paint in the sea is more than just a slip of the brush. I think it is supposed to be a seal, his wife, the selkie, returned to the water in order to guide him home.
Though, of course, sometimes I read too much into Brumfitt’s work.
I grabbed Kenny’s coat on my way out the door, but the rain soaked through my pants before I’d made it halfway down to the water; even with the choking stone in my throat, I still wished that I’d had my coveralls and boots to put on. Almost as soon as I saw Daddy lying on the floor, the lights came back on. His skin was white, like it had been treated with a thin coat of gesso; he looked dead, his hand clawed to his chest. The second Rena said that he was still breathing, I tore out of the room to get to the Kings’ Ransom. I didn’t bother waiting for Carly’s call to reach whomever it was on the mainland who was going to tell her that there was too much weather for a chopper to make it out to the island.
Down at the docks, I passed by my own skiff with its oars and got into the next one over. I didn’t care whose boat it was: a motor was a motor. When I primed the pump and yanked the cord, she fired up nicely. Even with a hand up over my eyes, I had to squint with the rain. I had the throttle turned all the way, and the boat skipped waves, landing like the water was concrete. The rain was already falling plenty hard, and with the speed of the boat, it felt like tiny nails of ice were being driven into my hand and face. The twenty or thirty seconds it took me to get out to where the Kings’ Ransom was moored seemed to last forever. Once I was on board, it was a relief to have some shelter in the cabin. I was already shivering, and I tried to remember if I had a change of clothes in the lockers. I knew I had a spare pair of bib overalls, and worst-case I’d put them on over my soaked pants and take the small amount insulation that they offered. At least Kenny’s coat hadn’t soaked to the skin yet. I turned the motor over and Mackie’s voice kicked through the radio: “—elia, soon as you can get to the dock. Please respond, over.”
“I’m here, Mackie. Got her fired up.”
“No dice on a chopper. Kenny and George are loading him in the truck. Your sisters will meet you down at the dock with him,” Mackie said. There was the white of lightning and then, close enough that I couldn’t tell if there was even a separation, the thunder that rolled with the strike. “Mainland said to meet at the docks in Blacks Harbour. They’ll have an ambulance waiting to take Woody to Saint John.”
“It’s a forty-five minute drive from Blacks Harbour to Saint John. What about James Harbor or Northport or Calais? That would be quicker.”
“Honey,” Mackie said, “it’s not much longer to Saint John than Northport or Calais. An extra five minutes. This isn’t a thing for the clinic in James Harbor, and Saint John has a much better hospital than Northport or Calais. Doesn’t matter if it’s a stroke or a heart attack or whatever. We’ll get him where he needs to be. Besides, if you’re worried about time, why don’t I hear your engine in the background?”
“Burning gas as we speak,” I said, and punched the throttle. I could hear the radio start to rattle with voices, but the sound of the motor drowned them out. The goddamned radio, even on Thanksgiving, was turned on in the background. It was the background of all of our lives on the island. I knew that there were families who’d stopped eating to listen to our private drama, crowded around the radio, volume turned up. I also knew that there would already be a crowd of fellows at Rena’s house, helping to get Daddy out the door, the wives inside finishing washing whatever dishes were left and getting ready to cook some more. By the time we got back from the hospital there’d be casseroles packed into the freezer in Daddy’s house, tucked into the refrigerator.
The Kings’ Ransom plowed through the waves, my knees grinding as I took each hit from the water. Even with the rain so hard that the wipers might as well not have been working, I knew where I was going. A lifetime of trips to and from the docks, a lifetime of being ready for this moment. I throttled back as I got close. I could see the headlights of Tucker’s truck moving down the docks, stopping halfway, where there was a halo of clustered lights. A crowd, I realized. Two or three dozen people milling around the docks, holding flashlights and lanterns. With their heads tipped forward so their hoods kept them covered from the rain, they could have been praying. Probably were praying, a few of them. The rain gusted. Through the sheets of rain I saw Chip Warner and Paul Paragopolis reaching out to take the rail of the Kings’ Ransom, holding her steady, while other men helped George, Tucker, and Kenny get Daddy out of the truck, helped carry him across the dock and onto my boat. Rena and Carly fussed at the edges, while Stephanie made herself useful on deck of the Kings’ Ransom, cleaning space, chucking the empty bait barrel, an odd trap or two, onto the dock.
They’d wrapped Daddy up in a blanket like a baby. Even when I’d lip-hooked him when I was a kid, even when he’d had the flu, even in the days leading up to his trip to the loony bin when I was a teenager, he’d never looked like this—like a man who would die someday, and I was afraid that day was today. In the yellow of the dock lights and the cover of rain, his face was pale enough that until he opened his eyes and looked at me, I was sure that he already was dead. His face sagged toward starboard, his left arm slipped loose from the blanket and flopping limply at his side. It wasn’t until the men tried to get him belowdecks that he showed some fire, his right arm shooting from the blanket and grabbing at a handle, the words, “No, no, no,” coming out like a moan. They settled him on the deck of the cabin, near my feet. His head was resting on a life preserver, and Carly sat on the deck, her legs turned sideways and behind her, her hand
grabbing the wrist of his limp arm and folding it onto his chest.
I turned to the men who were standing on the deck, looking at Daddy as if there were still something else to do. “Get the hell off my boat,” I yelled. I didn’t even see their faces, but they scrambled off the boat, taking the rail in stride, leaving me and my sisters with Kenny, Stephanie, and Tucker. “You all coming?” I said, and when they nodded, I called for George, standing on the dock, to let me loose.
Kenny stood by my side, his back braced against the console. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. I knew that the lights from the dock would disappear in the rain. There was only darkness behind us, darkness ahead of us. The boat caught a wave and slammed hard against the water.
“Watch it,” Rena shouted.
“Fast or smooth,” I said back, trying to keep my tone calm despite having to yell for her to hear me above the storm and the motor. “I can only do one in this kind of weather.”
The lights of the Kings’ Ransom came bouncing back against the rain, and I killed the spots, just leaving the running lights on, in the one-in-a-million chance that there was somebody else out on the seas with us. The rain hammered the glass of the windshield, burrowed around the edges of the cabin, misted and came after us like it was alive, like it was a cloud of mosquitoes. I glanced back and saw Tucker huddled out on the deck of the boat, unable to fit in the cabin, bent over and trying to disappear inside his slickers. Mackie was warm and dry right now, in Rena’s house, getting Fatty and Guppy into bed, but I knew that Tucker wouldn’t have done well staying behind. It was better to be here than to be sitting uselessly at home, waiting for some word. He was Rena’s husband, he’d been Daddy’s sternman, and I knew he cared for him like a father.
The Lobster Kings Page 24