Free The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner Page A

when Daddy told them all that there had been an accident, that he had gone out on the
Queen Jane
just to clear his head, that Second had gone into the water and gotten tangled up in the propeller. Rena and Carly wailed for a while, but Momma just bowed her head, like she was all cried out. Daddy didn’t look at me. Afterward, we cleaned up, ate our breakfast, and put ourselves into our black dresses for Scotty’s funeral.
    And past that, it wasn’t something we talked about. Sailor II was gone. Scotty was gone. The ocean gave us our life and it also took life away.

T he funeral was behind us when school started up again after New Year’s. I turned thirteen in February, Rena turned twelve a few days later, and Carly made eleven in April. In the spring, sometime in May, Daddy took a day off of lobstering to make a run to the mainland and when we came home from school there was a Newf puppy running around the house, Sailor III. Third. We taught Third to carry a beer from the kitchen to Daddy’s recliner in the living room.
    And then, in June, around what would have been Scotty’s birthday, and about the time Daddy pulled his traps for molting season, Momma put bricks in her pockets and walked off the edge of the dock, leaving Rena, Carly, and me alone with our father.
    I don’t know what Brumfitt Kings would have painted if he’d been looking out over the water and watching Scotty, Daddy, Second, and me on the boat that day, but the only thing he would have had to paint was the ocean. No monsters from the deeps were necessary. The water takes enough away on its own.

W hat Brumfitt did paint was a series of three paintings commonly referred to as
The Drowned Boy
paintings.
    If you head from the village toward the school-house, and then turn at the end of Coral Avenue, there’s a path that leads up the hill toward the west side of the island. The Brumfitt Kings Museum has a donation box specifically for the upkeep of “Brumfitt Trails” on the island, and this is one of the most well used trails. There’s even a small brass marker on the trailhead post that labels it THE DROWNED BOY PATH . During the tourist months, when the population of the island more than triples, there’s a steady stream of people making their way along the path. It’s about a ten-minute walk up a soft grade, and it doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere because the trees grow heavy, and even on a sunny day there’s not much you can see outside of the woods and the path in front of you. It’s best in the winter months, because when you finally come to the top of the trail, the leaves are gone and the trees are bare; the trail suddenly bursts open in front of you, and you realize that you are standing on a sheer cliff a couple hundred feet above the sea, and you can see the same thing that Brumfitt Kings must have seen. In the winter, the waveshit the rocks sitting a hundred yards off shore differently. What in the summer is a rolling, smooth whiteness has become something ferocious and energetic. The waves smash against the rocks and send spumes of water into the air, a mist that carries across to shore if you take the shore path. The light falls differently, too.
    There’s a bench at the top of the path near the guardrail, and if you sit on it, you are sitting more or less in the same spot from where it seems like Brumfitt painted the first two paintings in the series. The paintings are large for Brumfitt—each one is seven feet wide and five feet high—and they are clearly a series; he dated the back of his canvases, and these were completed respectively in January, February, and March of 1740.
    In the first painting, Brumfitt captures the waves and the spray of the water off the rocks, but nothing of the actual coast; it’s as if you’re only fifty or sixty feet from the boat. The boat itself is small against the waves, and the boy, maybe nine or ten, is at the oars and clearly struggling with the wind and the wash. The mast is