by Devin Murphy
There was nothing gentle about what she was doing, and I kept thinking about putting my hands down her pants. Do it. Reach down. Reach down. Grab her there, now, but before I was fully hard, I crumpled over and came into her hand. She still had not opened her eyes or looked up at me.
The sun was on us still. It was the first time a girl had made me come. Though it hurt enough to feel like she’d dismembered me, the whole moment bloomed into a vivid flame and seared itself intact onto the underside of my skull. Always afterward, when the thought of touching anyone arises, it’s Hilda’s hands reaching into my pants. The promise of her touch.
The light caught Hilda’s hands and the pearly sheen on her palm and fingers as she pulled them free. She bent down and wiped her hand on the grass. Then stood up, and still, without looking at me, leaned in again.
I walked her to the barn and held the hand she hadn’t wiped in the grass and rubbed my thumb against her knuckles, noticing how soft her skin was. Back and forth. Back and forth, like I was making sure she was real. In the barn I watched her take off the horse’s saddle and scrub its back and along the sides with a large sponge like it were a final ceremony. I do not recall talking as she did this. I was looking at the corner of the barn as a place for Hilda and me to fall together again. I imagined her bed. My bed with her in it. Us crashing into each other and toppling over again and again. Her hands all over my body. Mine all over hers. The whole world was now a place to be with a girl. The whole world hammered with potential.
Now, I see that what I was witnessing was a sad girl who had to give her horse away. I did not take that in at the time. I did not take in the hurt that made her reach for me.
11
Uncle Martin had arranged for me to help him out on the docks for my own ration card. And he kept appearing with food, money, and supplies that he traded fish for. He started taking me out on his ferry trips between Germany and Holland. Before that, the periphery of my world had been edged by the bend of the ocean in the harbor and the egg-shaped border of the town. Everything beyond that had been too enormous and threatening.
On the docks the wood boards creaked beneath my feet, and guilder-sized wharf spiders climbed up from between the cracks and disappeared between other planks. Uncle Martin taught me how to tie bosun’s and bowline knots. I enjoyed the fresh air from being out on the water. Out there, my mind opened to the grace of seabirds gliding over the rolling water and beating their wings back slightly to rise on the wind. I’d see a glimmer of silver scales tuck and dive headlong beneath the surface.
Thinking I was alone on the deck, I reached for a fish from the aft hold. I pulled out a giant sturgeon by the gills and ran my hand over its rounded nose and down its markings, which looked like fallen leaves and tiny chevrons bleeding into one another.
“Find that one attractive, do ya?” Uncle Martin said.
“What? No. No.” I dropped it back in and he must have known he embarrassed me.
“I’m teasing. I used to do the same thing. Stare at them like that. I’d take them apart too.”
“Filet them?”
“No, like peel the scales off. Carve away the skin and muscle. Try to figure out the bones like I were a surgeon. Teaches you about them. Makes you better at cleaning them.” He knelt down and pulled the sturgeon back out. “Let’s do it to this one.”
He handed me his scrimshaw blade.
“I have my own,” I said and pulled out my camp dagger.
“Go against the grain to take the scales off.”
“Why do you take the scales off?”
“No practical reason. But if you’re a fisherman you should know fish. That’s what I think. My dad once caught me doing this when I was younger than you and smacked me across the deck for wasting a fish. The knife I was using slit my fingertip apart like a snake’s tongue. Look at this.” He held out the tip of his pointer finger and there was a white wedge-shaped scar I’d never noticed before.
“Start down by the tail,” he said. “Do it like short strokes of a comb.”
I started shaving off the bronzed scales. “What did you do when your dad hit you?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the fish, and feeling like my words were each a finger, reaching into a fire.
“I balled up like a runt,” Uncle Martin said. “But I ran off soon after that.”
“That’s when you went to sea?”
“Yeah. Now I wish I’d have stood up and popped the old bastard. But he passed away soon after I left and I never got the chance. Would have done me a world of good if I’d have done that though.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He was mean but had a hard life so I sort of understand him now. Though then, he used to tell me what to do and when to do it. Drove me batty. Couldn’t handle that. Still can’t.”
We took the fish apart and when he had the steaks cut off, he cubed them and put them aside to fry for dinner that night.
“Why do you think your father was the way he was?” I asked.
Uncle Martin took a small translucent bone and used it to pick his teeth, then flicked it away like a butt. “Who knows,” he said, then went back to the wheelhouse.
Uncle Martin had gained the Germans’ trust by doing whatever he was told and by entertaining them whenever he was around. He was somehow casual, despite the recent losses of his own family members. Though at night on the ship he was solemn, and drank Bols from a brown clay bottle and studied his navigational charts.
At night on the Lighthouse Lady, I’d lie in my bunk and think of Hilda. The high arch of her eye sockets, her cheekbones, which capped off at her rounded chin, her freckles, her soft lips, her strawberry hair, and how everything about her had the look of being from the coast. She gave off a sense that the ocean would precede and follow her everywhere she went.
When it was only Uncle Martin and me onboard, I’d ask him where he thought my father was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve asked about him everywhere.” He ran his hands over the top of his head as if scrubbing his hair. “I can’t stop thinking about him either. It’s making me a bit crazy.”
We sat until we heard a dogfight over the Ems River. The German fighter planes sounded like the steady hammering of a typewriter.
Uncle Martin had me load a cart full of cinder blocks and about forty two-meter lengths of thin mooring lines. I carried the ropes to the boat and stacked them along the stern like a tangle of giant hemp snakes.
“What do we need all this for?” I asked.
“Someone on the other side wants them.”
When everything was loaded, I untied the mooring lines from the pier and jumped aboard the stern. Martin aimed the bow toward the open channel and set out to cross the Ems over to the German side. The water was calm, and there were no other boats once land was out of sight.
On the German side there was a large base along both sides of the river mouth where the Ems cut south through Emden. The soldiers waiting there were the young men who had commandeered Martin and the Lighthouse Lady. They stood on the dock.
“Guten Abend,” Martin yelled to them. The men waved back and watched me jump off and tie the boat to a cleat on the dock. They looked happy to see us. Martin was the jovial ferryman to them, this giant man full of sea stories, who could barter for things from across the water. He had worked well for them so they started letting him work the logistics of transfers across the Ems, sign the papers on both sides of the water, be in charge of who was coming and going, and they stopped sending a supervisor along.
“What do you think about this?” Martin said to one of the men. Martin handed the man a small cigar box, patted his shoulder, and smiled. “You boys will like these, I bet.”
“Very good. Thank you,” the soldier said. “But how’d you get your hands on these?”
“Ah. I have a habit of losing property. Tricky paperwork. Faulty radio calls.”
“Huh. Thank you. But you’ll want to be careful with that sort of thing from now on.”
“Why’s that?”
“All kinds of havoc was happening with the supply chain in Delfzijl. We’re sending new management over.”
My uncle’s face reddened. “Are you still going to be in charge?”
“No. General Halder.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. He travels with a whole platoon. I imagine you’ll be very busy.”
“He’s going to bring all those people to our port?” Uncle Martin asked.
“We have to get everything running smoothly.”
“I see,” my uncle said.
That my uncle could work so well for these men signaled an ability to segment parts of his life, keeping each separated by unknowable chasms.
“Stay here, Jacob. I’ll be back.” He followed the soldiers to a building on shore. There were triangular cement pillboxes along the river to station big guns. Stiff-looking soldiers scurried about the base. Large red ribbon flags with swastikas on them hung limp from flagpoles. More flags stretched taut on the sides of the buildings. The soldiers working on the docks all looked official, stood straight, and seemed to work with purpose. There was something inspiring about their efficiency and productivity. The image left me no doubt that the Germans would win their war.
When Martin came back, he led twenty soldiers. Each soldier had a flailed-out metal helmet that covered his ears, knee-high black boots, and a thick black belt cinched above his hips that wrapped his wool jacket shut. On the shoulders of each jacket were lapel buckles, and down the chest line were a line of coin-sized buttons. They were armed with truncheon-shaped potato masher grenades dangling off of backpacks, and carried either Karabiner 98ks, five shot bolt-action rifles, or chrome black MP40 submachine guns. A few had Great War Lugers or Walther P38s.
“This is my nephew, he’ll help us across,” Martin said to the soldiers, who climbed on the boat from the stern. They swaggered aboard and spread out on the decks. Half of them sat on the cinder blocks and half went up and rested on the bow. They leaned against their own packs or rested on the mounds of fishing nets to get warm. The SS officer to whom Martin had given the cigar box jumped onboard as well.
“Jacob, this is Aldrich. He’ll be taking the trip with us tonight,” Martin said, pointing to a flat-headed man with a croupy laugh. “Will you go west with them tonight?”
“Yes. I’ll have you drop us off after dark at Delfzijl and we’ll move out together from there,” Aldrich said.
The soldiers on the boat sat among the scatter of lines and nets. By the time the boat was out of sight from land, it was dark, cold, and overcast, with enough cloud cover to keep out any moonlight.
Some of the soldiers looked domestic—soft faces, clean hands, alert, scared eyes. Even the calm seas shook their stomachs as the pallor of their cheeks altered from bright red to dark moss green. Others had clearly been on boats, crossed borders, and fought battles before. They let their bodies move with the motion of the water. Their uniforms had patches over frays on the knees and elbows, their packs were lighter, but wrapped in more ammunition rounds. They seemed content and impatient all at once.
One of the soldiers closest to me had a knife attached to his belt. The knife was the size and shape of the Hitler Youth dagger.
“Do you know what this is?” the soldier asked me when he caught me looking at it.
“I think so. I have one like it,” I said.
“That’s good. You’ve been through the trainings.”
And there was the truth of it—of what my summer in Germany with Ludo and Edwin almost three years before had really been. These soldiers were not that much older than me, and it was clear to me then that the whole camp system must have been one of the most cunning military maneuvers in history. The camps took every boy in a nation, filled them with a passion for their country, the ideas of what their unified country stood for, and under the guise of games, taught them how to become an army. An army that believed wholeheartedly in the Fatherland—an army that worked its way across the channel and encamped on Dutch soil.
Two of the soldiers we were transporting sat on the stern of the boat. One lay on his side and let the other one light a paper candle and hold it up to his ear. The stick of fire burned in a smoky pillar rising from his head.
“What are those two doing, Uncle Martin?” I asked.
“The fire culls the ear wax out and wood ticks if you have them so you can use tweezers to yank them free,” he said.
I felt sorry for these men then. All of them were shipping out to join patrol parties or fortify the western front. I scanned the dark water around the boat and imagined myself in the Nazi uniform, the warm straight wool, the canvas loop of my rifle slung around me, rubbing into my shoulder like some hero running into battle.
“Hello, gentlemen,” Martin yelled in German to the men over the engine noise. “I need you guys to get in the stern for a few minutes while we pass this section. We need to weigh down the back to ride smoothly over the sandbar up here.”
“What is this about?” Aldrich asked.
“There’s a shallow sandbar up ahead. It’s better if there’s more weight in the stern. That’s why all those cinder blocks are there. You too, old Aldrich,” Martin said. When Aldrich and all the soldiers were in the stern of the boat, their flailed helmets in the dark looked like a fistful of obsidian steel balloons. Martin called for me. “Go down in the forward holds and check the manual steering gauges. Watch them until I yell for you to come up.”
I crawled into the holds, undid the floorboard latch, and lifted it off to lower myself into the forward cubby with the steering column axles. The sides of the holds were filled with backpacks similar to the ones the soldiers above decks had. Above the vibration of the engines, Martin yelled to all the Germans, “Now, I’m going to slow down here and you need to look over the aft sides in the back and tell me when you can see the bottom or any sand. It will look light yellow or white. Just call out when you know how much clearance we have. Jacob, are you down in the hold?”
“Yes.”
The mechanical shift of gears changed as the boat slowed down and settled into the soft hum of the lowest gear. I’d been hearing the music of boat engines my whole life and knew the speeds we were going, the weather, and current conditions by the sound of the engines and the hull against the water. Uncle Martin had told Edwin and me when we were younger that we came from a long line of North Sea men. “It’s in your blood, boys. Light and the sea are in your blood. Your ancestors have crawled through the golden guts of fish to give you their seed.” The slowing hum of the engines tucked inside the vibrating steel womb felt comforting to me. But there was no sandbar.
What peace I felt was shattered by the chaotic percussion of automatic gun fire echoing through the hull of the ship. There were two long spurts of a weapon being fired that moved from port to starboard and then back to port. After I ducked down farther inside, there was a brief but heavy flopping of something on the deck above my head. The water lapped at the side of the boat. There was the quick crack of several more lone shots, then the sound of the boat’s engines shifting into neutral. Not knowing what had happen terrified me. I had to do something, so climbed up and stuck my head out of the forward hatch and saw my uncle on the steering deck. He held a long gun out in front of him in his outstretched hands and waved it at the back of the boat. His posture was erect as he fired off another round. The action of the gun shook the muscles of his forearm and bicep, and he was strangely beautiful with the orange flashes shooting from the muzzle. He looked natural up there, as if he’d been practicing his whole life for this uncertain world.
Then Uncle Martin called to me, “Jacob, you can come up now.”
On deck, Martin grabbed the thick black belts of dead soldiers who hung slack over the gunwales and pulled them back to where they collapsed into a heap with the other dead. Aldrich’s head was at my feet, half of it missing, leaving a bright red cleft like a split watermelon rind. Thick bluish red blood poured down his temp
les and disappeared into his hairline. I kept looking from one body to the next without any real connection in my mind as to what happened.
When Uncle Martin had all of the bodies on the deck of the boat he turned to me. A German magazine-fed MP 40 submachine gun hung from his shoulder. Everything about him seemed electric as he stood above the large pile of bodies. Dead men were draped over the pile of cinder blocks. Several cinder blocks had shattered and dusted the soldiers’ clothing. Martin grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me right in the eye.
“Jacob.” He slapped at my cheek. “Jacob, here’s what I need you to do. Listen very closely. Can you do that?” He touched the side of my face again, “Can you do that?
“Go to the wheel and scan the water for any lights.” When there were none, he called me down to the stern. “Take all the backpacks and weapons off these men and put them below deck, down in the hold with the steering column. Did you see the other packs down there?”
I nodded.
“Good. Put them there,” he said. The quiet, easy control he had over his tone was frightening. “Then, help me go through all their pockets. Get any papers and money that they have, keep anything you think could be valuable or edible. Check to see if they stitched anything extra into the lining of their clothing.”
“There is no sandbar out here,” I mumbled.
“Hans wasn’t the only storyteller in the family,” Uncle Martin said.
The Lighthouse Lady’s stern had bullet holes fanned out across the bulkhead. Martin kept the engines in idle, and we drifted as we set to work. The weapons were piled in the ship’s lowest hold, the muzzle of the rifles faced forward, and potato masher grenades were stuffed between backpacks so they wouldn’t roll.