Something in this kept them both laughing. Ruth’s father and Mr. Angus Addams, who were excellent friends, called each other terrible people all that night long. Terrible! Terrible! As if it was a kind of reassurance. They called each other terrible, rotten, deadly people.
They stayed up late, and Ruth stayed up with them, until she started crying from trying to keep herself awake. It had been a long week, and she was only nine. She was a sturdy kid, but she’d seen a funeral and heard conversations she didn’t understand, and now it was past midnight, and she was exhausted.
“Hey,” Angus said. “Ruthie? Ruthie? Don’t cry, then. What? I thought we were friends, Ruthie.”
Ruth’s father said, “Poor little pie.”
He took her up into his lap. She wanted to stop crying, but she couldn’t. She was embarrassed. She hated crying in front of anyone. Still, she cried until her father sent her into the living room for the deck of cards and let her sit on his lap and shuffle them, which was a game they used to play when she was small. She was too old to be sitting in his lap and shuffling cards, but it was a comfort.
“Come on, Ruthie,” Angus said, “let’s have a smile out of you.”
Ruth tried to oblige, but it wasn’t a particularly good smile. Angus asked Ruth and her father to do their funniest joke for him, the one he loved so much. And they did.
“Daddy, Daddy,” Ruth said in a fake little-girlie voice. “How come all the other children get to go to school and I have to stay home?”
“Shut up and deal, kid,” her father growled.
Angus Addams laughed and laughed.
“That’s terrible!” he said. “You’re both terrible.”
2
After discovering that he is imprisoned, which he does very speedily, the lobster seems to lose all his desire for the bait, and spends his time roaming around the pit, hunting for a means of escape.
—The Lobster Fishery of Maine John N. Cobb, Agent of the United States Fish Commission 1899
NINE YEARS passed.
Ruth Thomas grew into a teenager, and she was sent away to a private school for girls, located in the far-off state of Delaware. She was a good student but not the firecracker she should have been, with her brains. She worked exactly as hard as it took for her to get adequate grades, and not one bit harder. She resented having been sent away to school, although clearly something had to be done with her. At that moment in the century, in the 1970s, Fort Niles Island educated its children only through the age of thirteen. For most of the boys (future lobstermen, that is), this was plenty. For the others—bright girls and boys with bigger ambitions—special arrangements had to be made. Generally, this meant they were sent to the mainland to live with families in Rockland and attend public high school there. They came back to the island only on long vacations or over the summer. Their dads checked up on them during trips to Rockland, when it was time to sell the lobster catch.
This was the system that Ruth Thomas would have preferred. Attending high school in Rockland was the normal path, and it was what she’d expected. But an exception was made for Ruth. An expensive exception. A private education was arranged for her, far away from home. The idea, according to Ruth’s mother, who was now living in Concord, New Hampshire, was to expose the girl to something other than lobster fishermen, alcoholism, ignorance, and cold weather. Ruth’s father sullenly and silently gave his permission, so Ruth had no choice. She went to the school, but she made her protest known. She read the books, learned the math, ignored the other girls, and got it over with. Every summer, she returned to the island. Her mother suggested other summer activities, such as going to camp or traveling or finding an interesting job, but Ruth refused with a finality that left no room for negotiation.
It was Ruth Thomas’s firm position that she belonged nowhere but on Fort Niles Island. This was the position she took with her mother: she was truly happy only on Fort Niles; Fort Niles was in her blood and soul; and the only people who understood her were the residents of Fort Niles Island. None of this, it must be said, was entirely true.
It was important to Ruth in principle that she feel happy on Fort Niles, although, for the most part,