The Lobster Kings Read Online Free PDF Page A

six-thousand-square-foot “cottages” and who think that buying into the island means that they’ve bought the island. Those are the ones who try to tell lobstermen whose families have been fishing the same spot for fifty or a hundred years or longer that they don’t want their view spoiled by lobster boats. Those things work themselves out.
    Those other kind of summer tourists, the wealthy ones, can be a bit much sometimes, thinking that Loosewood Island’s a sort of fishing theme park, but they are mostly bearable. The ones who come to the island for Brumfitt Kings are almost always easy to deal with, however. For some of them, the trip to the island has been a lifelong dream, and for others it’s something they do every summer.
    I think that Daddy and I both look kindly on the Brumfitt tourists because we understand the pull. For Rena and Carly, the idea of the family legacy, of being the descendants of a famous painter, is appealing, but there isn’t any urgency to it. A few years ago, when the Met installed Brumfitt’s most well-known painting,
The Catch
, neither of my sisters were interested in making the trip to New York with Daddy and me.
    “I’m happy to go to the city if Tucker wants to watch the babies,” Rena said, “but I’m not making the trip just to see a painting that I’ve already seen.”
    Daddy raised his eyebrows and then put down his beer with an exaggerated slowness and theatricality that made Rena start smiling even before he began his lecture.
    “And where, exactly, have you seen
The Catch
?”
    “It’s in every Brumfitt book ever. Plus, all I have to do is head to the west side of the island to get the same view. Seems a lot quicker to take a walk over there than to drive to New York City,” she said.
    She was teasing, and she indulged Daddy and me in going to museums when we used to take vacations as a family, but she just didn’t understand. Brumfitt painted the island, but in some of his paintings he saw a different island than the one my sisters did.
The Catch
was one of those paintings. The paintings that got Brumfitt “discovered” in the 1950s are menacing portraits of Loosewood Island: men drown, a body floating in the water is one that is ravaged by the seas, and a man in a boat is a man who despairs of ever getting home. Brumfitt also has his share of what I like to call “restaurant and hotel lobby paintings,” even though that pisses Daddy off almost as much as when I say that Brumfitt is what you’d get if you combined Andrew Wyeth and Winslow Homer: paintings of birds caught on the wing, fish brushing against the surface of the waves, the ruggedness of the coast with all menace removed. My favourite works, however, like
The Catch
, are the ones that remind me of the stories Daddy likes to tell about Brumfitt: paintings where hands snatch at you from the ocean, where birds I’ve never seen before cover the air, where sailors beat back monsters from the waves.
    The Catch
shows the purpling skies of dawn, a lush light coming over the horizon, but enough shadows to make the ocean seem sinister, and a small, single-masted boat overmatched by the watersand the waves breaking on the rocks. There’s a pair in the boat: a seasoned man and a boy who could be ten or eleven. The man is struggling to pull a single fish from the water. It’s not clear what kind of fish it is—where the rope meets the water there is simply the froth of water—but the man’s back is bent and his muscles and sinews seem to jump from the canvas, and the thing that
is
clear is that this is a large fish, and that this man with his son, and presumably a wife and more children at home, will use this fish to feed his family.
    Despite the strain of the man, the movement of the catch in the water, the menace of the ocean, it’s the son, however, who caught my eye as I stood in the museum with Daddy, and who always catches my eye when I look at prints of
The Catch
. The boy is smooth and delicate,