by Tracy Groot
“It’s good to see you as well, Father Fitzpatrick,” she said civilly. It was anything but. Did he see her throw the pillow and burst into tears? “I’m sorry I can’t sit up yet.”
“I can’t imagine you could,” said the American vicar, returning the trash bin and pulling up a chair. “Had my appendix out years ago, couldn’t move for days. Then again, clergy and doctors make the worst patients.” He nodded to the table at the foot of the bed. “I’ve brought you some cake. What’s left of it, anyway. It’s very good. I also brought something you might like to take a look at, before I bring it back to the States. Mr. Butterfield thought you would.”
He produced a gray-green folder and handed it to her.
She started to open it but got a funny feeling. She gave him a swift glance. “This isn’t . . . ?”
“It is. Cleaned up a bit. Still smells moldy.”
Her heart picked up pace, and tears began before she even saw the papers for which Arthur Vance died.
Every item was a photograph of an original. She saw copies of ledgers with columns of names and dates and diagnoses and treatments. She tried to act as though she read every word, but the tears blurred them. She saw again Waldemar Klein, and Grafeneck Castle, and Erich von Wechsler. She saw pictures of children and adults with deformities—physical deformities or, by the looks on their faces, mental.
The last picture was a thin, naked child about nine or ten years old. The backdrop was very dark to show his malady clearer. His hips were out of alignment, his right leg hung curved and shortened and shrunken, but that wasn’t the most pitiable; on his white and thin and lucid face was terror and confusion as he either stared at some spot he had been commanded to look, or at a spot that caused terror and confusion.
“I wanted you to see the reason Arthur Vance died.”
It was the worst picture she’d seen in her life. Worse than the crying baby in Shanghai.
“Sometimes we need to see why we fight,” said the Burglar Vicar gently. “We need to see what God sees. Then we can understand a little better his wrath, and his justice, and his love.”
He slipped the photograph from her hand, put it in the folder, slipped the folder from her. She pulled the pillow over her face and wept.
She’d not forget that image, not for the rest of her life.
She cried herself deaf for the child, and for Arthur Vance; for Murray, whose Rocket Kid did not save this child, and for William, because she finally understood how it felt to be eviscerated.
She wept that she could not go and die for this boy. That sprightly Maggie, anchored at dock, missed her chance to continue Arthur Vance’s heroic exploits.
“I’m utterly useless!” she screamed into the pillow, and finally came to her defeated senses. A good cry, and she did not feel better.
She blotted her face with the pillow, and pushed it away. She wiped damp hair from her face. Her ears were plugged, her face felt puffy.
“You are hardly useless,” said the Burglar Vicar.
“Oh really? I can’t even sit up.” Lovely—her voice had gone nasal and pinched.
“You can pray.”
“Pray!” she said in disgust. “I can’t think of anything that feels less like pulling a doomed soldier aboard Maggie Bright.” She glared at the ceiling, a blank white landscape with which she’d grown far too acquainted. Blank as her life.
After a few seething moments, she realized the priest sat quietly. She slid him a look.
“Your king called your nation to a day of prayer. At the police station, the desk sergeant came to my cell, and I had the privilege of leading a collection of prison guards and inmates in prayer, anyone who wanted to, and most did. I sat feeling pretty useless for weeks. The inmates feel useless, and so do the guards. Yet we prayed.”
“How do you know it does any good?” Clare said.
“It’s better than moping, which does no good at all.”
Surprised, she said nothing for a moment. She wasn’t moping. Was she?
“Well . . . that was a bit abrupt.” And refreshing. He was as forthright as the Shrew.
She supposed it would be better to pray than to mope. The Shrew said prayer held them to their tasks. She said she saw before her eyes that it worked.
“How do I pray?” She tried to sit up, but bother the sutures, couldn’t. “I don’t have practice.”
“Why don’t you start with the Lord’s Prayer?” He took the Bible from her bedside table and opened it on his lap. He paged through it, found what he was looking for, and marked the place with the radio program. He closed the book and replaced it. “Read it over, pray it a few times. Then go off on your own. And get specific. I think God likes it when we’re specific.”
Clare felt a little better. It was something to go on. Felt good to do something. Better than nothing at all.
“Right, then. What sort of prayer shoots straight to the top of the pile?”
He chuckled. “No idea. If you find out, let me know. But I’m not sure that our prayers jockey for position. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some prayers help others make it to the top. Maybe some prayers give others a leg up.” He shrugged. “I don’t know how it works. I only know we’re supposed to do it.”
Just sitting with this man made her feel better. She knew Maggie liked him. She looked at him anew.
He was a medium-size man with a thinnish build, thinning hair. But there wasn’t anything medium or thin about him. Instead there was something clear-eyed and purposeful that provoked a galvanizing surge.
Which brought her full circle to uselessness.
“All I want to do is leap from this bed and run for Maggie.” Her lips trembled. “We’d fly across that Channel and scoop up as many brave soldiers as we could, then fly for England like Pegasus. But she’s as useless as I am.” Clare added blackly, “Yes, yes—I can pray.”
The Burglar Vicar tilted his head. An uncertain look came to his face. “But . . . Miss Childs, you know that Maggie has gone over, don’t you? Oh. No. I suppose not. Are you all right?” He poured a glass of water and handed it to her. “Mr. Butterfield found his partner’s car at the boatyard. Then we found a great pile of Maggie’s things on the dock, but no Maggie. No Murray, either.” His face softened. “He’s gone over with Mr. Percy. Captain Elliott has gone, too.”
She sat up, not minding the pain. “Truly?” she breathed. Her eyes smarted, and her nose ran fresh. “Well, if they’ve gone . . . then some of me went, too. Oh—thank you.” She seized his sleeve. “Thank you! You have no idea.”
She sank back, but what played across the blank white landscape was not a heroic Maggie bashing the waves, but a shatterer who snapped the picture of a terrified child, who now fell upon England’s army, who now fell upon men she knew and loved. Fear rolled over her in weakening waves, and tears spilled.
Father Fitzpatrick leaned forward and took her hand. “Let’s pray, Miss Childs. It is not the least you and I can do. It’s the best.”
THIRD-WATCH SAILING BECAME sunrise sailing, and the skies promised a clear day—perfect for bombing boats, William noted grimly. But so far, the skies were empty of malicious intent, though as they traveled west, closer to Dunkirk, the ominous sounds of malicious intent began to grow. He hadn’t slept all night, just on-and-off dozing, but those distant, muffled sounds felt like the jolt of a hundred cups of coffee.
The convoy had rounded the Kwinte Buoy an hour before without incident, no lurking U-boats or German battleships ready to blow them to the afterlife. They moved steady on course with the tug in the center of the configuration; the tethered Thames fireboat lay on Maggie’s starboard stern, the other two tethered vessels on her port; the fishing trawler ahead lay off her port bow, and the other yacht moved farther out on her port beam.
The entire convoy had fallen into a good rhythm of careful navigation so that the tethered boats rarely touched, and the untethered boats minded manners. The armed Dutch scoot sailed a hundred yards out on Maggie’s starboard beam, while the armed t
ug lay ahead off her port bow. The untethered six cruised in or about their flanked presence, and all felt tight and trim.
All felt tight and trim when William was at the helm, that is; it became quite evident—at least to William’s eye, and no sailor can help sizing up seamanship—that Smudge, Royal Navy or not, had not spent much time on the water. His movements were not fluid. They were correct, but as stiff and careful as if he had just finished a sailing course and was minding his p’s and q’s for the examination. He knew what he was doing, and one day promised to be a good sailor, but for now clearly lacked practice. William wondered how he’d do in Dunkirk.
“We’re coming up on the Zuydcoote Pass,” Smudge announced, after a glance at a chart.
“Whatever that is,” said Murray, standing near the top of the companionway ladder, leaning on the hatch. He stood with his feet apart, easily wedging himself stationary. His movements about Maggie were unconscious. He knew his way around a sailboat.
“Look, there’s a buoy,” said Smudge, an edge of excitement in his voice. “I’m sure it marks the pass. Won’t be long now.”
“Boy? You sure it ain’t a girl? Where do you get that? You Brits need a lesson in how to pronounce things.”
“Well, I don’t think mother is pronounced ‘mutta,’” said William pointedly.
“Lemme ask you this: queen is pronounced ‘queen,’ right?”
“Correct.”
“And quilt is ‘quilt’?”
“Brilliant.”
“Then how come you call a quay a ‘key’? Huh? Key? Where do you get that? There ain’t an e in it.”
“That’s La Panne, I think,” Smudge said, watching the shoreline on the left. Land was now only a few miles off. “Just west of that is Bray Dunes, and then it’s Dunkirk.”
“Yes, we can see that, thanks,” said William, eyeing the western end of their sight line. “I don’t know what other harbor would be burning.”
“We’re maybe an hour out.” Smudge lifted up in his seat, looking around. “Wind’s backing. My mate said they’re loading from the beaches but I shouldn’t wonder if today that won’t be a bit tricky.” He pointed. “Look at that line of surf.”
“At least the skies are clear for now,” William said.
Smudge squinted where he had pointed. “What’s all that in the water? Near the shoreline?”
“Bombing debris, perhaps, washed over from Dunkirk. Or maybe they’ve bombed right here.” He rose and took a pair of binoculars from a small shelf near the helm. He trained them on the surf, adjusted the surf into focus, and then answered carefully, “Yes . . . bombing debris.” He lowered the binoculars. It wouldn’t do to describe it more than that. He looked toward Dunkirk.
It came upon him, then, the enormous here and now. An enemy had taken the continent and crouched at the door of England. All the land his eyes fell upon—Flanders, France—last week it was friendly. Every tree, every housetop, anyplace you put down your foot. Now it was enemy held, every inch of coastland as far as he could see, save that shrunken patch far west and under siege. He shook his head. It was something out of a dusty history book. It belonged to an age when Shakespeare was new and people said, “My liege.”
Twenty-four hours ago he was on the way to the office, giving no thought to piled sandbags and gas-mask posters. He thought instead what rubbish it was that sugar was now taxed, that wartime rationing should apply to him, and that his cleaning lady wanted him to buy his own Hoover so she wouldn’t have to lug hers. He had arrived at the office in his usual state of ill temper, made worse with worry for Clare.
Twenty-three hours ago, for the first time in his life, he left the office without telling anyone where he was bound, without knowing it himself until he showed up at Elliott’s Boatyard. His car keys were still in his pocket, and no one at the office knew where he was.
They’d never imagine what came to his eyes through those lenses on shore—dead men, and women, and children. Wandering dogs and horses. The smoking wreckage of bombed buildings, bombed businesses, bombed homes—bombed lives. He was here to see it because Clare had gone spellbinding with Maggie must go, and so Maggie did, and William too. He was skimming along the coast of enemy-held France, realizing for the first time that they truly had an enemy, feeling its presence all around, land, air, and sea. They came in numbers no one really knew, but enough that they should rout not a company, not a battalion, and not even two—but the entire bloody army. To this shatterer of lives, Maggie Bright now went.
The incongruity of her name and of other boat names he knew—Lizzie Rose, Gracie Fields . . . the absurdity of tiny civilian ships marching forth to battle . . . He had a flash of a pink-bedecked Cecy holding a popgun to Waldemar Klein.
“Do you suppose I could get an autograph, Mr. Vance?”
“Smudge pie, lemme ask you this: Ain’t I your age?”
“I’m twenty-one.”
“Yeah? I’m twenty-three. A, you don’t owe me a mister ’cause the last time I called anyone mister and meant it, it was the president. B, he likes Rocket Kid and he had me over for these little spongy cakes with pink curlicue icing in crinkly paper cups, which I pocketed for my ma. Tried to do it on the sly, but old Frankie saw. And guess what? He slipped me some more when no one was looking. Swell guy. Slipped me an ashtray, too—a White House ashtray. Now that’s a souvenir. He gets a mister for it. But am I a president, Smudge pie? Did I give you an ashtray?”
He seemed ready to say more, but paused, listened, and swiveled to look at the southeastern sky. He shaded his eyes from the rising sun. “Bad news, fellas. Look who’s had their morning coffee.”
William raised the binoculars. Dozens of aircraft darkened the horizon, coming straight for them like a parading flight of mechanized birds. He wasn’t sure if it was the sight or the rising sound of them that inspired the most fear.
He adjusted the focus. “Well, good morning, Herr Hitler. How do you do? Looks like he wants to shake hands, and that makes me a bit uneasy.”
Murray chuckled.
“Here’s the problem with our destroyers,” said Smudge, looking about for one. “Look at that—we’ve got a rotten degree of elevation with our guns for fighting the dive-bombers. I know they’re trying to jury-rig for better firepower, but what good—”
“Let’s get ready to start the engine,” William said, eyes sharp on the stern of the tug. He shoved the binoculars back on the shelf, and glanced at the engine switch on the helm console. “Murray, get below and pull up the boards over the engine compartment. We’ll start it from below. Can’t have any stalls.”
“Aye-aye, bobs.” Murray swung below.
“Be ready to grab hold of something in case we have to dodge,” William called down. He looked again at the tug, and shouted down, “That would be now! Start the engine!”
Against the mounting sound of the planes, men on the tug sawed frantically at the tethered lines. William pulled Smudge out of the captain’s seat and took the helm, shouting, “Get forward and call it out!” He had to know which boat they cut loose first, so he could try to avoid collision. Smudge instantly ran forward.
He set the pieces in his mind: the other yacht, far to port on the far side of the fishing trawler; the fishing trawler, immediately on Maggie’s port side; the Thames fireboat on her starboard. Which will they cut first?
“Don’t cut us all at once!” he growled at the sawing men.
The bomber planes came roaring, and William looked up in time to see them directly overhead—then rectangular objects began to fall, and the sight was irresistibly horrific. Down they came, and compared to the roar of the planes they were eerily quiet in their descent, all the more terrifying for that.
Maggie’s tether line snapped and, for a second, floated high and white-snaked in the air, and then it plummeted, and all forward motion was arrested. Maggie Bright rose and fell on a backwash swell at the same moment her engine sputtered to life—and then everything happened at once.
“Tra
wler!” Smudge shouted back. “Hard to starboard!”
Maggie took a crashing glance off the trawler’s starboard stern, throwing Smudge to the deck, William against a cockpit bench. He lunged forward and grabbed the helm in time to see the Dutch scoot off Maggie’s starboard bow explode in a shower-burst of wood and water and crewmen. Maggie’s windows shattered and she rolled on the percussion swell—debris rained down, a chunk of something shearing down the side of William’s neck. Another explosion sent him sprawling once more, a wave came drenching down, whelming all.
He rose coughing, soaked, threw off splintered boards, and fought his way back to the helm, almost there, just an arm’s reach—but the other yacht cut free from the tug slammed Maggie’s port stern and sent him down once more, barking his chin, biting his tongue. He lunged with a growl for the helm, seized the stick, powered her up, and Maggie leapt forward.
“Smudge!” William shouted. He spat blood. But Smudge did not appear. “Murray, get up here!”
“We’re on paraffin!” Murray surged up the companionway. “Holy smokes, who got hit?”
William pointed forward. “Pull in that tether line before it fouls the engine! Then see to Smudge!” Murray raced forward, grabbing rail as he went, and William called, “It’s the Dutch boat—she’s gone.”
He tried to look for survivors, but the convoy was in chaos and he had all he could do to steer clear of boats and wreckage. Too much wreckage. Surely others had been hit. A swift glance about—the cockleboat from the mud flats was gone. The Thames fireboat.
She had to get clear, her props would foul, she’d be dead in the water—he peeled away toward the shoreline, veering round a lifeboat-size chunk of flotsam.
The side of William’s neck burned, from the back of his ear to his shoulder. He clapped a hand to it and looked to see blood on his palm.
Movement caught his eye, and he watched the squadron of mechanized birds fly west. They’d only dropped a few bombs, on a whim it seemed, unable to resist such easy targets. The real target lay ahead, precisely where they were going. But what destruction they’d left behind, on a passing whim.