Matt realized too late that he had not thought carefully enough about his decision to feed lobster to Penelope and Bernadette. He knew he wanted something special (at least to him) and that it should be something neither of them would feel they needed to help with, or would be likely to cook for themselves. The season was open and there were live canners to be had at the wharf for a price that bit its thumbs at Toronto rates — even cheaper when the lobstermen discovered who he was. Everyone on the wharf had fond memories of Penelope and many could remember their parents speaking admiringly of Thora.
Late November, though, is a less accommodating time than late July for a lobster boil. There would be no problem with the cooking itself. That didn’t have to be done outside, although it added charm when it was. Penelope had a pot easily large enough for three canners and it would fit perfectly on the stovetop. It was the cutting and the eating he wished he had thought through. No matter how much you shake the lobsters out over the pot after cooking, there is always a gush of water when you plunge the knife in to open up the tail and body. The claws are often full too. Outdoors, none of this presents a problem, but in Penelope’s kitchen — forget the dining room — there was certain to be quite a mess.
As they were having their drinks and chatting, watching the trio of lobsters crawl around on the painted pine floor and waiting for the water to boil, he began to apprehend additional, more philosophical, problems with his choice.
“I heard on the CBC the other day that the Swiss have banned the boiling of live lobsters.” It wasn’t Bernadette’s fault. She couldn’t have foreseen how this piece of small talk would ultimately deliver them into discussions of pain, damaged brains, and death.
“Imagine that,” said Penelope, taking a long draught of her neat gin. “How would they police it? Surprise inspections?”
“Surveys? I don’t know.” Bernadette mimed filling out a questionnaire with a clawed hand.
“Are they advocating eating them uncooked? I don’t understand.”
“They say there are alternatives. The people the CBC interviewed. More humane alternatives.”
“Lobsters have feelings now?”
“Something like that, boss.”
“But it’s all rubbish, all that nonsense you used to hear about them screaming when they went in the pot. Just air escaping or something. What alternatives were they talking about?”
“They can stun them with an electric shock.”
“How is that more humane? The humane thing would be not to eat them at all.” She took another swig of her gin.
Matt wondered whether his mother was cooling to the idea of supper.
“I suppose you’re right,” said Bernadette, eyeing the largest lobster, which was climbing over the other two. He looked like he might be heading for the back door.
“But I love lobster,” said Penelope. “I can’t imagine giving it up. My mother used to hold them upside down.” With this, she picked the largest off the smaller and held it by the tail with its head toward the floor. “Then she stroked them. She said that put them to sleep.”
“I don’t think —”
“She made it up to make me feel better. I’ve always known that. As a very little girl I used to ask a lot of questions. About death and things. She made up a lot of stories.”
“A man on the radio — it was that call-in, what-do-you-call-it — said he believed in inserting a very thin, very sharp blade into the brain. He said that kills them instantly and then you can boil them.”
“What if you miss the brain, though? It’s not very large. Or what if you just nick it, make it go haywire? Where does that leave the poor lobster? Demented. Nope. I say just drop them in the boiling water. It’s a quick death. And, for all we know, painless.”
“Matt, the pot’s boiling over!”
He grabbed the lid, burned himself, swore, and scooped up a dirty dishtowel to protect his hand for a second try.
Penelope was still holding the lobster. She brought it very close to her face and whispered, “Would you like a last cigarette?”
Bernadette growled, in what Matt supposed must be her most lobsterish voice, “No thanks, I’m trying to cut down.”
Both women laughed until their faces were wet while Matt plunged the three crustaceans into the pot. They didn’t make a sound.
He had made potato salad and bean salad. Bernadette had brought rolls made by the new bakery on Water Street (they still called it new after ten years). It was a meal the three of them had shared dozens of times, but not for many years. Matt wondered whether the Lodge ever served lobster. Probably not. As he shuffled the salads from counter to table, he apologized for having to eat in the kitchen. He had chosen the deepest-rimmed plates he could find. “All the water, you know.”
“I’ll show you a trick,” Bernadette said, “when they are done. You hold them over the sink and twist the tail until it comes free of the body. Then you dump both sides out. It doesn’t look as nice on the plate, of course, but you’re going to take it apart anyway.”
“The claws are still a problem,” Penelope said.
“When are they not?” Bernadette yowled and hissed like a cat. And again, the two women dissolved in laughter.
After Matt had twisted and dumped and snipped and cracked, he lit the candelabra he’d brought in from the dining room. Penelope asked whose birthday it was, and he wasn’t sure whether it was a joke so he pretended not to hear as he made a note to himself to polish the silver one day soon. It was Grandfather Arnold’s. He knew that some of it, but not these candlesticks, had been brought from the States when the family fled. It had been in Birch Hall, always gleaming, when he was a little boy. He supposed that his grandmother must have maintained it, though she had never struck him as a silver polishing kind of person. They certainly didn’t have a maid. When Penelope had to sell Birch Hall and move into this house, she had let a lot of the Loyalist furniture go to the province, but she had kept the silverware and china and everything from the dining room. He supposed he should have it revalued. There might not be anyone local, but he could ask one of his colleagues at the museum for a name. If the house was going to sit unoccupied for any length of time, he’d have to see about updating the insurance. Not that anyone even locked their doors.
The meat was perfect: enough salt and fishiness that you knew it came from the ocean, but still mild, and well on the soft side of rubbery. Penelope began by sucking on each tiny leg, using her front teeth to squeeze the meat through the thin tubes. She had always eaten lobster this way. It had frustrated Matt as a child. He would have completely finished his claws and tail while she was still fussing about getting meat from all the less giving places before going on to tackle the main parts. Now, it reassured him that she had not changed in this small way at least.
“Tell us about your research project, Matt.” Bernadette had a tiny bit of coral stuck to her right cheek. She was the only one of the three of them who liked the eggs.
“Model villages,” he said through a mouthful of potato salad.
“You’re going to build some?”
“Possibly. To scale. Study them anyway, gather documents and visuals. Try to put together something for an exhibition. It will be a mix of some UK and some Canadian examples, I expect.”
“Successful and failed?”
“Well, yes.”
“They all failed in the end, didn’t they?”
He had not thought Penelope was following the conversation. “Well, yes, Mamma, I suppose in the end they all —”
“So you’re looking at Saint Croix Island,” said Bernadette, understanding dawning in her now.
“And even St. Andrews itself. The town plat. The Loyalists’ dream, all of that.”
“No Vikings, though. They left without a trace.”
“What Vikings, Mamma?”
But Penelope apparently did not hear. “And Chamcook,” she said. “He’s looking at the Sardine Town.”
“Not much to look at, is there?” Bernadette cracked her final claw. “After the fire and the blowing up.”
“Fire?” Matt had known that the army had blown up what remained of the sardine plant to make room for real estate development in the eighties. He had made his mother send him clippings. “I don’t remember anything about a fire.”
“It was a long time ago. Before you were born. Your gran was still working sometimes in the shop, when we could get her to; ’52, I think, or ’53. No, ’53 was the coronation. York House burned to the ground.”
“York House?”
“One of the dormitories. Hasn’t your mother told you about the dormitories? They were quite amazing. Almost like little hotels. They looked a bit like the old pictures of the Algonquin, how it looked before it had its own fire in ’14. Mansard roofs and dormers, all of that. Quite attractive.”
“I’ve seen a photo.”
“Then you’ll know what I mean. Burned right to the ground. They never found out why. Nobody was hurt, of course. There was a family living in one of the company houses at that point, but they weren’t in any danger. Anyway, it was one less thing for the bulldozers and dynamite thirty years later — more than thirty years. And that demolition was thirty years ago, a little more than, too. Tempus fugit.”
Penelope had eaten both claws, but appeared to have given up on the rest of her lobster.
“Shall I put it in the fridge for your lunch, Mamma?”
“You eat it, dear. You’re a growing boy.”
“You might feel more like it tomorrow.”
“Yes, it was quite a place, I guess, the old Sardine Town. They had electric lighting on the streets, which was really something in 1913. And a movie house and bowling alley, houses for managers, and cottages for married workers and dormitories for the unmarried. There were stores, too. And their very own jail. There must be lots about it in the county archives,” Bernadette said, eyeing the uneaten lobster meat on Penelope’s plate. “Your gran would have lived in one of the dormitories, I suppose.”
“Gran?”
“Sure, when she came out to pack sardines,” said Bernadette.
“She was a sardine packer? Mamma, you never told me about that.”
“Did I not? I must have.”
“I wouldn’t have forgotten.” He regretted the choice of word the instant it was out but he knew it was true. He had grown up on stories of the founding of Handworks and the marriage to Grandpa Arnold not long after the Armistice. The fable was always that Thora was an established businesswoman well before she married into the town’s elite. But now he realized there was never any mention of how Thora got to New Brunswick in the first place or where her nest egg came from. He had never thought to ask.
“It was York House. She lived in York House. She wasn’t very happy there.”
“You should run up to Blacks Harbour, too, Matt,” chirped Bernadette. “It might not fit your mould exactly, though Connors Brothers did its best. And you should look into the Quaker Pennfield colony. Maybe it’s Beaver Harbour. First place in British North America to ban slavery. 1784. That’s a kind of model community too, isn’t it?”
Matt had stopped listening. He was too busy revising so much of what he had thought he knew about his grandmother.