The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  I looked at him and started to speak, but couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt an odd and welling sorrow, as if he’d peeled back the skin, red muscle, and porous bone of how I had constructed a part of the world in my mind. What was beneath all those teachings of Father Heard was a savage and raw pulsing heart, full of longing and lust and void of any ethereal or divine spark.

  Late one evening, after my father returned yet again empty-handed from his trip to Rotterdam, Fergus barked at a car that came up the driveway. Two German soldiers got out, straightened their jackets, and marched to the house. One of them looked up and saw me in the window. He nodded and pointed at the front door.

  “There are soldiers here,” I yelled.

  My father, Uncle Martin, and my mother came into the foyer as our buckle-shaped ironworks door knocker shook the whole frame.

  “Open the door,” my father said.

  The two soldiers stood side by side in the doorway. Both men were very young, probably twenty at the oldest. Weapons bulged in their pockets. The sudden urge to salute them came over me.

  Fergus strained against his collar to say hello to them, but my mother held him back.

  “We are looking for Hans Koopman,” one of the men in the doorway said.

  “That’s me,” my father said.

  “Come with us.”

  “What do you want with him?” my mother jumped in. The soldier seemed taken aback by the leap to urgency in her voice, her tone signaling a fierce protectiveness to keep the family together he couldn’t have guessed at. He straightened up. The one closer to me stepped inside the frame of the house. My uncle eased closer to the men, but my mother reached out her hand and placed it on his forearm, a subtle touch that was not one of affection, but of a brief caution, telling him to wait, wait until she told him to act.

  “You had orders to get a machine up and running. To get shipments of lights out.”

  “I had to go to Rotterdam to look for . . . ” He didn’t finish his sentence.

  “You were given many opportunities to get that work done. Too many.”

  “I can still do it,” my father said.

  “No. We have something else for you now. We need you and your boat, Mr. Koopman,” the soldier said. “We are commandeering all the boats in the harbor and we need people to run them for us. Seeing how you like to travel so much, you can travel for us now.”

  I was both scared my father had done something wrong and strangely proud they wanted him.

  “Wait,” Uncle Martin said. The crimson flush of blood painted his neck again, and I knew then it would be impossible to know the true topography of his inner life. “Hans runs the only factory in town. You need him for that.”

  “We will have someone look after that. Right now we need boats and pilots.”

  “Well, you don’t want his piece-of-junk boat. That thing hasn’t run for a long time. And he’s a crappy pilot.”

  “We need Mr. Koopman.”

  “I’ve got the boat you need and I’d be happy to go instead.”

  “Oh, Martin,” my mother whispered. Words meant for him alone.

  “We came for Mr. Koopman,” the soldier said.

  “Yes, but look, he’s got his nice family here, and you’ll see that you need him for the factory. Besides, if you want boats, mine works. It’s bigger, and I’m your man.” Uncle Martin gave a full smile to the soldiers now. He had switched into his charming Dutchman mode of speaking. “Look at me, boys. I’m a bigger catch than this one anyway. Let me get my coat.”

  “We need Mr. Koopman,” the soldier said.

  “Well, you’re getting one better,” Uncle Martin said as he walked to the closet to get his coat. Fergus lurched to get close and sniff the men.

  My mother reached up to my uncle and hugged him around the neck. “Thank you, Martin,” she whispered.

  I felt sick with uncertainty.

  “Let’s go, men,” Uncle Martin said, moving his giant body into the door frame so both soldiers had to step back out of the house. By force of his will, the two men turned when he had their shoulders under each arm and they didn’t turn back as he walked with them to their car.

  My uncle, without hesitation, sacrificed himself so my father wouldn’t have to go. Part of me wanted my father to go with them though, wanted him to be needed. Then the soldiers pulled down the driveway and the back of my uncle’s head rocked back and forth in the car, still talking to the two men in the front, like they were now the best of friends. When the car rounded the corner, the quick flash of the headlights blinked along the trees as they pushed down the road and out of sight.

  THE LIGHTHOUSE LADY

  7

  Father Heard came to our house one Sunday night.

  When my father opened the door, the two men hugged in the vestibule.

  “Come in. Come in,” my father said.

  They stepped into the living room, where I sat with my mother. She stood, pinched the blue bathrobe tight around her neck, waved, and walked out of the room. Several minutes later she came back in after changing into black slacks and a loose, button-up gray sweater that she held tight at her waist. Her hair was still tangled and flattened from lying on the couch. She held a plate with a cut-up pear and cheese slices.

  “I need to speak with you, Hans,” Father Heard said.

  He had received a letter that the Dutch archbishop had sent to all the priests in the country with the order to read it aloud to their parish congregation that Tuesday. Father Heard placed the letter on the coffee table next to the untouched plate of cheese and the pear slices, already browning.

  The simultaneous reading of the letter was meant to inspire a general strike of workers in Amsterdam. The news from the rest of Holland, funneled in by commuting workers, said the encroaching Germans had removed Jews from all public functions, including universities. Protests had begun in Leiden and spread throughout the country. The Germans sought control and were met with violence. Jewish sections of Amsterdam had been fenced off and non-Jews were blocked from entering. They rounded up over four hundred Jewish men and took them away, to where we didn’t know.

  “Jacob should go upstairs,” my mother said.

  “No, he needs to hear this,” my father said.

  Some part of me thought those missing young men had been taken to the training camps in Germany, that they would be shown movies and taught songs, and be returned champions. But I soon learned that the Germans had stationed machine-gun nests around the Jewish quarter, a fact that couldn’t fit into my understanding of things.

  The archbishop’s response to the current unrest was this letter. Father Heard said it contested the alleged mistreatment of the Jewish population by the Germans in the country. Though, of course, there was never any mention of it in the new German newspapers, which had started circulating in the town the previous fall, the archbishop had ordered the Catholic Church to voice its concern to the congregation, to draw light to what was happening.

  “I’m going to read it. I came to tell you because we’re friends, and I know it may complicate your relationship with the Germans in your factory.”

  “But, Father, this might not be safe for you,” my father said. “Let’s think about this. We can play it safer, I’m sure.”

  “Hans. I am going to call the congregation together. My mind is made up. Like I said, I’m trying to be respectful and give you fair warning.”

  “This sounds bad to me,” my father said, and I heard the tremulousness in his voice. For years, my mind would crawl back to this revelation, and I would blame my own timidity on the intense shadow he cast over my childhood. I come back to this conversation as the one that illuminated my father’s cautious and scared nature, which felt to me like my unfortunate birthright. It had slipped right past Edwin, who was certain about his life and how to carry himself, while it struck me clean on.

  “They’re trying to silence us,” Father Heard said. His upper lip rose over the jumbled line of his yellowed teeth. The
whites of his eyes engulfed the dark iris. Blood pumped to his large ears.

  “But we don’t want to stir up trouble. Make things worse.”

  “Hans. How is the status quo working for you? How has that been going?”

  “I don’t want to risk anything else.”

  “We have to. Look around you, Hans,” Father Heard spoke in his booming sermon voice. Then he lowered his tone. “Look around. Edwin’s gone. Look at Drika here.” He held his hand out to my mourning mother. “Your factory. And for heaven’s sake, Martin has now taken up with them. Seemingly in spirit as much as in body.”

  “Leave him out of this,” my mother spit out.

  Father Heard took a moment. “Security is off the table. Nothing is safe, and that’s why I have to do this.”

  My mother picked up a pillow, cradled it in her lap, and sunk her face into it. My father turned to look out the window.

  “I’m sorry to be so harsh,” Father Heard said. “But the archbishop’s letter is the voice of reason. The voice of pacifism in the face of all of this aggression.”

  My father held up his hand to stop him from talking. “Jacob. See Father Heard to the door please.”

  Father Heard picked up his letter and let me lead him out.

  “I’ll see you on Tuesday, I’m sure,” he said as he left the room.

  That Tuesday afternoon, when Father Heard had called everyone in his congregation together, my father and I were the last two people to arrive. Inside the church, the windows had not been repaired since that first dusting of bombs dropped over Delfzijl. The large stained-glass window above the altar of three dark crosses on a jade green hill was now a yawning hole with glass-shard teeth, jagged and translucent. The smell of incense and smoky wool rose off the congregation as we joined them, huddled together in wet coats and hats. Steam rose off their heads as they tucked themselves further into their clothes.

  A wave of chills rolled down my spine. I was always cold then, always breathing into cupped hands to warm them. Father Heard had swept all the glass debris off the floor, but there were still pieces lodged in the organ pipes, shifting inside them as my mother played. It was a subtle sound the other people in church would not have picked up on, but I’d been listening to the smallest nuances of her playing for years, ever since my father donated the money to Father Heard to first install the organ. In the front of the church, the organ pipes now seemed like they lifted out of my mother’s body, like it was her breath that set the timbre of each wailing tube of alloy. Since we lost Edwin, the songs she played had been slower, more morbid. Even the standards she played during the Mass had a different tone to them. They were the same songs everyone knew, but it lacked her clarity of rhythm, as if she had plunged her hands into a clear stream but her fingers mucked up a cloud of silt and dirtied the water. Her mournful sound made its way out from under the rafters into the immense, open sky, where the dark essence of her dirge drifted over all of Holland.

  My father and I stepped to the side of the back door and listened to my mother play. Father Heard walked out from the door off to the side of the altar, keeping his shoulder to the wall. He walked to the back of the church and leaned in close to my father.

  “Please don’t do this,” my father said.

  “Hans, Samuel is missing,” Father Heard said.

  The news made no sense to me. Samuel, the air-writer, had been a fixture of our town my whole life, furiously scribbling out his thoughts above his head. I could close my eyes and see him feeding pigeons, hear Ludo mocking his spasms.

  “The vendors who provide him with food spoke to one another after the bags went unclaimed. This was yesterday. They let me know this morning, and he wasn’t in his apartment.”

  I imagined Father Heard trying to find a trace of Samuel, wanting to read the writing that must have filled the air between those apartment walls.

  “Should we go look for him?” my father asked.

  “I had people out all morning. He’s gone.”

  “What do you think happened?” my father said.

  “What do you think happened!” Father Heard spit back.

  The people in the back rows all watched the priest and my father exchange animated whispers.

  “You both can help me look after I read this letter. You see why I need to read it now, don’t you?”

  My father blankly nodded to Father Heard.

  “Okay,” my father said. “Okay.” He leaned in to hug Father Heard. “We’ll look for him.”

  Father Heard returned the embrace, then walked down the center aisle to the altar. My mother stopped playing. As Father Heard read the letter, his voice was calm and steady. His deep-set eyes narrowed and scanned the room to single each of us out. His right hand wrapped around the podium, his knuckles were white where he gripped the edge, and his left hand chopped the air in front of him in rhythm with the enunciation of his words. He was once again the familiar authority figure our little church knew him to be.

  “We must protest this abominable persecution.” His voice boomed out over the room. The shoulders of the men in front of me scrunched up beneath their heavy jackets each time he uttered the word strike.

  My mother turned on her bench to face Father Heard. The organ pipes rose up behind her to the exposed wooden rafters of the A-frame roof. My father sat in the back row of varnished pine pews. Ludo and Hilda were sitting in the front with their parents. Men from the factory and their children filled the rest of the pews. A random smattering of fishermen sat among them. From behind, the whole congregation looked like rodents peeking out of holes. Their spines arched forward, their bodies doubled over either for warmth or to hide, perhaps, from the call for ethical action to be taken.

  “Lord, please keep your finger on our shoulder to protect us during these trying times,” Father Heard concluded.

  Then the children in the church walked out of their pews and gathered in the back corner, like it was a regular Sunday Mass. They all looked at my father. It was striking to not see Samuel sitting among them. Once my father stood up, the children sat in a half circle. He walked by me and put a hand on my shoulder. He chewed the inside of his lip, causing his left cheek to suction in and out.

  He walked to where the children waited, sat in the chair one of the little boys put out for him, and started telling us a story.

  “Behind Thump-Drag’s cabin in the woods there was a giant open pit that he could not see the bottom of,” my father began. “When he walked to the side he looked down and saw only a pool of darkness. Every morning when he woke, he walked to the lip of the pit and peered inside, tossing pebbles and stones down and listening for them to land. Townspeople knew of the pit too, and they brought their wagons full of trash, dead cows, and piles of stones they unearthed from their fields, and they dumped everything off the edge and were happy to be rid of it.

  “‘We have never had to dig a hole to bury our dead or to dispose of our waste because of this pit,’ an old woman told Thump-Drag.

  “Thump-Drag could not keep from thinking of the bottom of the hole and all the mess people had let fall down there. He stood beside it late into the evening, peering into the dark and seeking out the bottom. He did this until he imagined himself sinking into the mouth of the hole, weightless and descending into the cup of earth, sinking away from the surface of the world. When he could no longer withstand not knowing where the hole ended, he built himself a chariot out of ropes and an old claw-footed bathtub. He stood in the tub and held a torch with several unlit torches at his feet. He had the town’s people help him by lowering the tub with him into the pit.

  “The pit’s walls twitched with shadows in the light of his torch as he descended, deeper and deeper, until the last of the rope pulled tight and he still had not yet reached the end. He dipped a torch into the pit and watched it fall, then fade into an orange pinprick until it disappeared altogether. He swung there in his tub and cursed the dark abyss. So he got out his knife and yelled good-bye to the people above, and
he cut loose the rope and fell down the hole.

  “And still, he is falling, being swallowed by the slow darkness and beginning to fear that it is, in fact, a bottomless hole.”

  I was choked with sudden emotion. It was clear that my father was saddled with the endless burden of wondering where his other son was, a burden that bubbled up through his stories, and I felt it too, the pressure of being responsible for Edwin, for the loss of him.

  The children leaned in close to my father, expecting the rest of the story, what was at the bottom, what adventures were to be had down there, and how Thump-Drag gets out. But my father stood up. It was the first time in all the years of telling stories he got up from his chair before the children around him did, before they were satisfied with the experience he’d given them.

  “Dear god, Hans,” my mother said as we left the church together. Her face was red and grimy. She’d been crying. “You’ll give them all nightmares.”

  “A taste of darkness won’t kill them,” he said.

  After a fruitless night of searching for Samuel, my father looked very near collapse. But instead of getting some rest, he holed himself up in his lab again. When I went there to see him, he called out, “Not now,” so I left him alone.

  Three days later, my family and Ludo and Hilda went to the harbor. Soldiers stood nearby around a fire they’d made in a steel drum. They’d punched holes at the base of the drum for air to get in, and the flames looked like fiery eyeballs and reflected off the snow and all the polished, black boots. It was still strange to hear the guttural German language spoken everywhere in my own village. Other soldiers loaded and unloaded boats on the dock. They pushed little lorries and wobbly wheelbarrows up the icy path toward waiting trucks.

  There was a loud roar from planes flying overhead. The hum of German planes on maneuver sounded like a quickened thunderhead from a great distance, and was followed by the high whine of their propellers sucking the air off the ground as they hammered across the sky.