The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  It was still dark when I woke on a bench outside the morgue. My father sat on the ground against the seat where my feet were. He rubbed the sleeve of his jacket across his face. When he turned to me, his eyes were red and inflamed. If he’d been crying it would have been the first time I’d ever seen it. A distant expression pinched his brows close together. Resignation, perhaps. When he saw my eyes open, he shook his head.

  “I found nothing inside. Your mother is going to be worried to death. We have to at least get you home safe. At least you,” he said again.

  We crossed the bridge out of the city and looked for someone who would drive us all the way back to Delfzijl.

  We found another shop to wire a message. My father looked at me as we stood at the counter. “I have no idea what to say to her.”

  I thought of my mother then. My poor mother waiting for heartbreak.

  Late on the evening of the fourteenth, we found someone to drive us home. It was getting dark outside, and despite all the houses the driver passed in his old Fiat, almost none of them had their lights on. The world had gone dark and I sensed then that the world and I moved in different directions—separated by complicated crosscurrents, soon to be strangers.

  “I don’t want you thinking this was your fault. This is bigger than you,” my father said while we drove. He tried to be kind but his words confirmed my own conclusion, that this was completely my fault. I had made Edwin leave the hotel. “Much bigger than you,” my father said, his familiar hand reaching out to cup the back of my neck.

  The Germans were going through with their invasion.

  By the time we reached the outer limits of Rotterdam, it was pitch-black, and we heard what sounded like a large machine engine digging into the road ahead of us. The driver pulled the car over at the easternmost side of an expansive field. We all got out of the car and listened to the sound getting louder.

  “Let’s find cover,” the driver said.

  We followed him to the tree line as wave upon wave of airplanes swooped over our heads, barreling toward Rotterdam. Then suddenly we heard the sounds of firebombs exploding in the distance. We hid away from the car in the trees and watched the fiery, orange glow in the west, rising out of the pale darkness where Rotterdam—where we—had been. From the edge of the field the subtle percussions in the distance, I felt like the world shifting to make some great change.

  The sky emptied of plane noise. Then, leaving behind the angry, red gloaming of the firestorm, we started the car back up and headed east without our lights on to avoid whatever else might be coming. We headed east, back to our home, our lives, missing one.

  6

  When we arrived in the village of Delfzijl, my father and I had the driver drop us off in the harbor so we could see if Uncle Martin’s boat was in. The Lighthouse Lady was moored to several other boats. All of the fishing fleet was now docked. A group of fishermen talked by the pier. My father went up to them.

  “What’s the news?” he asked.

  “Didn’t you hear,” Dieter Clapson said. “We surrendered this morning.”

  They all kept talking over one another.

  “Germany wants our country for our airfields.”

  “Soldiers crossed the River Meuse at Maastricht on the eleventh.”

  “Luxemburg went right away. The Belgians had help from French and Brit soldiers, but couldn’t hold up. Louvain was destroyed.”

  “I have a cousin there.”

  “They rolled through Flanders.”

  “Are you okay, Hans?” Stevens Von Heller, a fisherman and one of our neighbors, asked. “We heard about some excitement up at your house last night.”

  My father pulled my wrist and turned me toward home. We walked quickly but with a mounting dread of facing my mother. I wanted to run ahead, to keep going past our house, even past Hilda’s family farm, out of town, anywhere to avoid being there when she found out about Edwin. I didn’t want the conversation to land on who persuaded him to leave our hotel.

  In the driveway we crossed the stepping-stones from the side of the house to a square frame used for beating carpets clean. The front door of our house opened and my mother ran out to us. I stepped toward her and instinctively knew, but could not articulate then, that this was the first step on the trail that led right out of childhood. Right behind her was Fergus, who sprinted past her and headed straight for me. Then Uncle Martin appeared in the doorway.

  “Hans, you had me terrified this whole time,” she said as she ran across the lawn. Fergus jumped at my feet. She hugged my father and reached out to pull me into her. She grabbed both sides of my face and looked right into my eyes. Fergus’s frenetic body crashed into my legs.

  “Where’s your brother?” she asked.

  I lifted my hand and covered her eyes so not to see them the moment she heard. My throat constricted from the full burden of the last five days; from not sleeping, not eating enough, the crushing blow of guilt and loss that had been wracking me since Edwin slipped below the surface of the road.

  “Drika,” my father said. “Drika.”

  She turned to him. His eyes welled up and he shivered. Then he shook his head.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “What does that mean?” She looked back at me. “Where’s your brother, Jacob? Where’s Edwin?”

  Uncle Martin walked across the lawn. Fergus ran circles around me, sniffing at the ground, the reddish brown gloss of his coat in constant motion. Our house, so big and well placed in the center of all our land, looked peaceful. The monument of success my parents had intended it to be, with dark tar panels of roof layered on top of one another, as neatly pleated as feathers on a wing.

  “Oh god, no!” my mother screamed.

  The little yellow and blue cloth cap she wore wrapped tight over her hair had a strap that squeezed her skin forward into a second chin. Her eyes widened as she knelt down in front of me. The faint smell of cinnamon carried on her breath. Tears gathered at the corners of her hazel and gray eyes, each a bowl of seawater after a storm. She grabbed both my arms and squeezed to the bone. I watched her face redden and thought she might have a heart attack as she let go a piercing cry: a hand in open flame, a brutal wind on a rotten tooth, the last breath of a pained creature. Then she clutched her fingers at the hem of my shirt, buried her head into my stomach, and began heavy, uncontrolled sobs that shook both our bodies.

  I went numb.

  I became a stranger to her and she to me. Everything settled into my mind like a stack of photographs of each second, but something inside of me went cold—the deepest part where language and feelings form. If I looked at her, her pain would have sunk me and ended me in that driveway. I didn’t want anything to be mine: no love, no longing, not hurt, nor disappointment, guilt or responsibility; just to live beside strangers or nobody at all.

  I ignored her nose tucking into the soft middle of my stomach, ignored Uncle Martin and my father picking her up and leading her to the house. I stood in the driveway for a moment, a cold, unfeeling creature. Then, when they were all inside, Fergus doubled back and barked, which snapped me out of it and all those feelings of shame and endless hurt rushed back in.

  Inside the house Uncle Martin sat my mother on the couch in the living room. As soon as she was down, she shot up and started screaming at my father.

  “What happened? Tell me what happened!”

  Fergus had followed me inside but now ran from the room. Uncle Martin kept his giant hands gripped on my mother’s shoulders. “What did happen, Hans?” he asked. “She deserves to know.”

  My father leaned against the mantel and rubbed his palms over his cheeks, drawing the skin down. He seemed impossibly tall at that moment, though his spine had already started to curve.

  “There was a flood the first day of the attacks,” he started.

  I leaned into the old ottoman as he told them about Edwin being lost underground. It was where I’d often sat and watched my mother dance with the men of our family. When everyone stop
ped talking, my mother curled up fetal on the couch. Uncle Martin’s teeth clenched so tight the muscles in his jaw bulged. Blood flamed up from his neckline until his skin went scarlet.

  “And did you get your account?” my mother whispered. “Did you get your precious Volkswagen account?”

  “Drika.”

  She stood up and screamed into his face. “Volkswagen. Volkswagen. Volkswagen. Is our family all set up for the future, Hans?”

  “Drika, please.”

  “Please nothing,” she made a deep warbling sound like swallowing vomit from her throat. Bilious is the word, I thought.

  My father took a step closer to her and she reached up and slapped him hard. Her handprint spread like sunburn across his jaw and cheek. My heart was a rush of sparrows, as for a moment, I thought he was going to hit her back, though that was not my father. My giant father stood where he was without moving, as if inviting her to strike again. Neither said anything. My father stood dumbfounded in a dust-mote-filled shaft of light by the piano, and stood there like a statue long after she turned and left the room.

  I turned away. Out the window I saw a giant crater of upturned earth in the backyard.

  My uncle saw me staring out there. “That happened last night. Some plane must have dropped it by accident. A few landed in town. One knocked out all the church windows.”

  The pit appeared to be about a meter deep and twelve meters wide. There was a twin-trunked sessile oak tree in the backyard that Edwin and I climbed on. My father had tried to take a picture with us sitting in the two wedges, but neither of us could sit still long enough to get a good photo. There were a few blurry photos of us when we were younger looking squeamish while cradled in the oak. The bomb’s blast had snapped one of the limbs off from the thick trunk and it lay across the yard. I pictured myself walking into the yard and lying down in the middle of the pit so my family could bury me there, suddenly longing for the pressure of earth to pack me away into some long, quiet darkness.

  In the days that followed, Uncle Martin went to Rotterdam to hunt down any traces of Edwin. My father walked around handicapped by guilt over the loss of his son. Some part of him shriveled up like a salted slug and he no longer walked as tall. He went those first days home without sleeping, and then he collapsed across the bed and fell asleep, his clothes still on, one long arm dangling to the floor.

  Father Heard came to our house every day. “I’m so sorry, my friend,” he said and hugged my father, then my mother, then me. Despite all his efforts, he brought little comfort.

  When my mother urged my father to talk about what happened, probing for more details, he gave the facts, stripped of any emotion as if he pulled some birdcage down over himself to lock that all away. Though parts of it bulged out between the iron gating. His voice cracked. His eyes glassed over.

  “The road flooded. The water knocked a manhole cover loose. The boys were . . .” He paused and glanced at me for a moment. “They were trying to find me. I should have gone to them. To the hotel.” As soon as he finished repeating the story, he left the room.

  My mother screamed after him. “You were supposed to protect them. Keep them safe.”

  She and I remained sitting in the big, vacant stillness. The large wood-burning stove inhaled and cracked, breaking the silence; it seemed as if the house was already opening its doors to ghosts who moved in the distant corners of each room.

  Over the next week, she threw a bowl against the wall, then pulled a blanket over her head. She walked up to my father, silent as a knife, and he braced himself to be hit, his body straightened for a moment and went hard, but she reached up and wrapped her arms around him.

  “You poor man,” she whispered.

  Later she walked into his office and I could hear her curdling voice. “To hell with you and your lights!”

  At night my dreams were of my brother’s last breath before he slipped under the water, and how it was so giant, it sucked up all the air around him, and he was now adrift in some underground river, immersed in water, shifting somewhere under Rotterdam, or under the country, his fingertips rubbing against the underside of the continent. His eyes wide open. Edwin never sang, but in my dreams, he had gills, sang, and his words bubbled above him and soaked into the soil roof of the river. The rhythm of his song shifted the earth. His words rose and whispered softly up through the grasses. In my sleep my brother was very much still alive. So each time I woke clutching a pillow into my hollows, the deep fear and guilt of having lost him or having left before he resurfaced descended all over again.

  When the red flare and glow of the German bombs on Rotterdam entered my mind, I pictured my brother tucked safe beneath the streets, or carried off to some floodplain or leach field clear of the city’s firebombed limits, where he worked his way home.

  When we got back from Rotterdam, the papers said that Germany had dropped one thousand paratroopers on Den Haag and several units on Rotterdam on the night of May 10, all dressed as Dutch Marines in an attempt to capture our royal family and government. Then, when that didn’t work, they issued a warning that they’d bomb Rotterdam if we didn’t surrender. It was only the day after they bombed us that we did surrender. Queen Wilhelmina and her family had been put on boats and escaped to England, but she swore on a public address over BBC Radio that her government would do its duty for us, for Holland.

  Reliving that first night when we ran into the streets, I flashed over the memory of my pleading with Edwin to go find our father. Edwin had cursed our country for releasing the dykes, which, in my mind at the time, computed to it being our government’s fault that that paltry section of road had flooded. I tried to make sense of it in my bed at night, but ended up listening to my mother getting out of bed and wandering the downstairs of the house. Soon after that, my father would descend the stairs, and they would both spend the dark hours of the night passing each other below my room. They did this nightly, until their footsteps and whispers became poisonous to me, setting off my stormy moods instead of letting me fall asleep.

  “I had to protect Jacob.” My father’s voice carried through the house. “I couldn’t stay there any longer without putting him in danger.”

  There was a long silence. In that silence I wanted to cry out my brother’s name. In every silence I wanted that.

  “I’ll go in the morning,” my father finally said.

  And in the morning after refusing to let me come along, he did go back to Rotterdam. He wired Uncle Martin to meet him at the train station that night. Uncle Martin had no news so far. My father went to the factory to make sure the shifts kept running, and then he took the train that afternoon. It rained hard as I saw him off. When the train left, I went to Uncle Martin’s boat in the harbor and imagined my brother on the deck, bossing me around or telling stories about our time last year at the youth camp.

  On the way home I stopped at the church, where the organ played. After we had returned without Edwin, my mother started going to the church every afternoon to play sad songs on the organ. She played the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder,” and Schubert’s “Wiegenlied,” which was about a mother singing over the grave of her infant. With all the stained-glass windows shattered from the bombings, there was nothing to keep the sound inside. Her music rose out of the building while she played, often improvising and making some new melody, a continuation of song. She was trying to call my brother home.

  I tucked myself along the back wall so the roof’s overhang would protect me from some of the rain. Her song reverberated through the walls and the notes ran link by link down the knuckles of my spine. I didn’t know what to do for my mother. I felt losing Edwin was my fault and if I said one word about him to her I’d tip us both into an abyss. Along the road behind the church, Stanislaw Heigel walked with his wife toward the lightbulb factory. The second shift was about to start. With their heads down in the rain they didn’t notice me.

  “That woman’s grief will c
ause her to lose her hearing,” Mrs. Heigel said.

  A senseless and sudden urge flared up in me to run after the older couple and push them face-down in the mud, standing on their backs until they flopped around like beached fish for making light of my mother’s suffering. My anger was an arrow that hadn’t yet landed.

  I walked to Ludo’s house, a three-level brownstone a few blocks west of my father’s factory. I hadn’t seen Hilda or Ludo since returning from Rotterdam, in hopes of avoiding having to tell someone else about Edwin. Besides, Ludo would have heard by now, and he hadn’t come over. Everyone by then had heard. Ludo’s mother opened their door. She was a sturdy brown-haired woman, short, with heavy thighs and extra weight around her bottom and hips. Her arms engulfed me and she made an exasperated cooing sound and patted her meaty hands against the middle of my back as she pulled me into her foyer.

  “You sweet boy,” Mrs. Shoemackher said. Behind her on the floor a scarlet and beige runner covered a polished oak table. I wanted to pick the fabric up and wrap it over my head so it would muffle her sympathies, swallow all noise.

  Mr. Shoemackher, the carpenter, came to the door then. He was a quiet, short, gaunt man, tanned and windburned, dressed in brown trousers and a soiled gray shirt. He walked up to me and put his rough, wood-scented hand on my shoulder. His eyes were pale blue and sympathetic, and I couldn’t look into them for long.

  “Let me get Ludo.” Mrs. Shoemackher turned and walked to the back of the house.

  When Ludo came out, he held his youth camp dagger and a block of wilding wood he had carved into. When he saw me his eyes dropped to the floor. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by yet.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “It’s okay. I understand.”

  Ludo rocked back on his heels, shy and unassuming like he always was. Being an only child had made him eager for friends, and as I was suddenly an only child, I felt the same longing for his company that he must have felt for mine and Edwin’s.