by Devin Murphy
“What happens when we get to shore without them?”
“No one’s expecting them. I did the paperwork. The people in Emden think these guys were headed for a patrol for a month along the North Sea shore. And no one at home knows they were supposed to be coming. It’s all taken care of.”
On the deck, the soldier I had spoken with was on his side, and his scalp hung off his head like a ghastly lid. His Hitler Youth dagger had the same inscription as my own, Blut und Ehre. My eyes snapped to the RZM number. The dagger felt weighty as my fingers wrapped around the handle. It could sink into flesh—slip between rib bones, pierce a lung, or slice a kidney.
When the last of the backpacks were loaded into the hull, I didn’t want to go back on the deck to see what Uncle Martin would have me do next. The boat was still in idle. Martin had maneuvered all those men to the back of the ship so he could gun them down when they weren’t looking. My hands shook.
On deck I stood above him and looked into the pit above Aldrich’s eye.
“That’s the man that tried to take your father away,” Martin said. “He’s part of the reason he’s gone. Do you get that? Do you get what they’ve done to your father?”
Until that day, to me, the soldiers were untouchable. It seemed only a matter of time before they would take over all of Europe. It had never occurred to me that their authority could be anything but absolute, unwavering.
“Help me with the pockets. Get the papers, the papers are the most important part,” Martin said. “These are what we want. Soldburchs.” He held up a little paper booklet. Each soldier carried the ID booklet with their unit information, orders, and equipment issued to them.
We sifted out the papers, money, and food and stashed it all in a large burlap sack. When we were done, we put the bag below deck. We took their oilskin jackets and playing cards with naked women on them. One of the men had a typing machine exchange element, an acorn-sized metal ball with the German alphabet stamped across the surface of the sphere. I cupped it, all the possibility of their language contained in my hand for a moment. The pads of my fingers ran over each letter, each the start of some grand story. I put it back in the dead man’s pocket as it seemed too personal a talisman to take from him.
Martin stripped the unsoiled uniforms off several of the soldiers killed by shots to the head. Their pale white skin scratched against the sand painted into the deck for traction. Martin took the uniforms below deck.
“Now, here’s what we do with those cinder blocks and sections of rope you brought aboard.” He dragged one of the soldiers he’d stripped off the pile of dead and laid the man straight out. With one of the six-foot-long sections of mooring lines he tied a harness around the man’s shoulders that also looped his neck. He tied the extra rope of the harness through two cinder blocks.
“Are you watching?”
“Yes,” I said, but I meant Yes, I am always watching. It felt like my eyes would never close.
When he pulled the corpse up to a sitting position, it looked like a pale flesh puppet with a messy borehole in his forehead wearing a cinder-block backpack. Uncle Martin draped a large rubber mat over the port gunwale of the ship, then lifted each of the blocks and tossed them over the rubber mat so they dangled off the side without scraping the paint.
“Grab an arm,” Uncle Martin said.
We picked up the stripped-down soldier from the deck and slid him over the rubber mat where the weight of the blocks pulled him down into a white roil of water. The shape of the body sunk away. The chest was concave as the blocks pulled it downward and the soldier’s rubber-stamped boot soles sank anonymously out of sight. I thought of my father’s story, about the drowning wolf with a belly full of stones, with all the little goats dancing on their hind legs, standing erect like animal spirits.
“Twenty more to go,” Martin said.
“What have we done?” I managed to ask, watching as my uncle dragged another soldier over.
“Look at them, Jacob. They swarm like locust. They’ll spread out and chew on everything, leaving only the pulp of their dark shit behind them. I’d shoot all of them if I could.” Martin cupped my face again. “I’ll drag the body over, and you bring me two blocks and a length of rope for each, then we’ll toss them over together, okay? That way the knots are tied right and none of these buggers come floating up to talk about what happened.”
“They’ll know.”
“No one will know. No one is expecting them.”
“What will happen when the new German troops arrive?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Martin worked with a content silence, as if we were skinning fish on the foredeck. Body after body went over in the darkness and disappeared. It took us a couple of hours to dump them all. I pictured the bottom of the Ems with twenty-one full-grown men anchored upside down at the depths, all their bodies moving with the current and swaying together like seaweed. Fish would eat away at them. At their eyes. The open skin around their wounds. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had eaten such fattened fish.
Martin handed me a bucket on a rope. “Start washing down the back deck.”
I dipped the bucket overboard, hauled it up by pulling at the line hand over hand, and splashed the water on the deck. When Martin came back up he had a bucket of paint and small welding patches. As I scrubbed the run-off gutters, he started to caulk the bullet holes. When he finished with that, he pulled out his welding tanks and a torch. He put an arc welding helmet on, started welding patches over the holes, and bent into the shower of molten orange sparks bouncing off the dark faceplate.
“When you’re done with that start painting over what I’m doing,” Martin told me. “But don’t touch the metal. It’s still too hot to touch. Do a coat over each patch and then do the whole bulkhead.”
Whatever he asked, I did, as if I’d lost any free will I had. The bulkhead was pocked with little circular scars like chicken pox scabs that had been picked off. There were already welding patches all over the sides of the ship that had been painted over before. Each joint of the beaded melding points of the patches somehow melted into the bulkhead in rough but intricate curves.
Martin checked my work, then ran his hand over the outside of the boat to see if there were any puncture holes from his wild spray of bullets. He swept up the shell casings scattered around the wheelhouse and ladder to the back deck.
“Make sure you check the drainage grates too. Hair gets caught inside those.”
A tuft of dark blond hair attached to a chunk of wet bloody scalp was stuck in the grate. I held it up by a strand and flung it overboard. When the boat looked clear of any atrocity, Martin started back toward Delfzijl. I sat on my knees and watched the back of my uncle’s head as he drove the boat.
“I’ve taken on the job of thinning the herd,” he said. “Let the fuckers get a bit nervous when their peers start disappearing.” It was clear he was a master at hiding his apoplectic rage, and muting that other language that was written now all over his body—something instinctual, submammalian.
We didn’t talk the rest of the way back to the Dutch side.
Martin pulled the boat to a pier jutting out of the woods adjacent to my house and let me off there. He tossed a pillowcase he’d tied off on the dock at my feet.
“You did good tonight, Jacob. Take that bag home to your mother. Don’t tell her or anyone else about tonight, and meet me at the docks in the morning, okay?”
I watched his boat pull away. The shore was calm and I wanted to lie down in the surf and let it pack me into the land where I could be alone and quietly whole.
Inside the sack was a large loaf of dense, black bread, a small pile of chocolate bars, canned meats, crackers, and a wad of both Dutch guilders and German marks. It would be enough money to feed me and my mother for two months, but seeing the food made me nauseated. I was caught in my own silent tragedy, not understanding my place in all of it. The tide washed ashore shards of glass and seashells that scattered and caug
ht the moonlight so it looked like the coast had a thousand sets of beautiful eyes. That must be how the dead see us, I thought, that’s why we feel their presence so near.
I ducked into the trees and ran north past my home to Hilda’s house. In the dark, I crossed over the spot in the pasture where she had touched me and felt the soft pull of the soil. I stashed my bag and snuck up to her home with a stack of chocolate bars to give to her.
At her house I walked around the side to be below her window. I tossed pebbles up at the glass. Whispered her name. I wanted to tell her everything, feelings I’d never given voice to. I wanted to lie down next to her. After several tries, I walked around the dark house to see if I could find her sleeping on a couch. But there was no open curtain to peer through, so I went and got my bag and headed home, walking beneath the cracked branches of elms and rankled old clouds outlined by a sliver of the hidden moon. At the wood fort I peeled off forty guilders and stuffed them into the lining of the weather-worn pack, the one I had taken out to my father the night he went away. For him, I left that feeble offering.
12
Working on the water for months with Uncle Martin had tattered my hands, cracked my lips, and weathered my skin. My hands rubbing over my face caked up the salt grime in waxy little worms along my jaw. Most nights I slept in a spare bunk on board. In my sleep the sensation of floating, being levitated, always brought me back to Edwin. My dreams were spent chasing after a figure who was always ahead of me, until I woke to the noises of the boat rubbing against the dock, the lines groaning from being stretched with the tides, and my uncle snoring in his own bunk. I’d daydream of him garroting men with mooring lines, shoving heads into the moving propeller of his boat, and nailing minnows all over a body and dragging it behind the boat so large ocean birds would pick the corpse clean, the bones dropping loose and fluttering to the bottom of the sea. His country had not chosen sides, but Uncle Martin blamed the Germans for the loss of family and had made his choice.
When we didn’t sleep on the Lighthouse Lady, we went home to visit my mother. Ludo and Hilda, who were both still working at the lightbulb factory, would join us as well. The five of us would spend our evenings in the living room with Fergus crawling between each of us looking for attention, his soft brown eyes reflecting the yellow light and a bare, honest pleading.
Ludo was terrified of us turning eighteen; we’d been told I would be joining the German army and he’d be assigned to a work crew. Each of us shipped to somewhere we had no say in. My mother couldn’t handle talking about it and always wanted us to divert the subject. She had exhausted her voice pleading with us to run away. She wanted Martin to take us by ship, but he swore the whole North Sea was blockaded and that he had no way to pass through it.
“Give me time,” he said. “I’ll work something out for us. I swear.” So we sat together and held our fears in our laps, letting the evenings wear down.
On a night when I walked Hilda home, we held hands. We stopped several times to kiss. I stopped to kiss her or let her kiss me. I kept stopping us like it were a new game. Before we got to her home, I hugged her, bent my mouth to touch the top of her head, and smelled her hair.
“I love you,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, but hugged me tighter. Then like before, she pushed her forehead into my chest and slid her hands into my pants. Wordlessly, and with a fierce, fast grip, she made me feel like a god breaking loose of my skin, and then all of sudden like a raw, new baby spilling out into the world, quivering and weak. She said nothing, reached up and kissed me, then ran into her house.
By the next morning there was a scab browning over the tip of my penis where she had rubbed me raw against the fabric of my pants. I looked at the scab and felt I should not have told her I loved her, yet was happy I did. I would say it again. I knew I would say it again. Next time I would ease my pants down too. Already all I could think of was the next time, and then the next.
When I wasn’t on the boat with Uncle Martin, I passed the time at home doing the domestic chores to keep up the house. My mother cooked on our two burners as best she could, but there wasn’t enough gas to use it for more than a half hour a day. At night we played card games. Uncle Martin did card tricks. He shuffled a deck taken from the soldiers, fanned out the cards, and then ran the edge of one card along the row of face-down cards so they rose up like a wave traveling back and forth beneath his fingers. Though we all used the same cards, they looked like something living in Uncle Martin’s hands; they had a measure of grace plied from his touch. When it was dark, I went outside and did a lap around the house to make sure there were no unwelcome guests. Then we pulled our radio from the loose floorboard and turned on BBC to listen to the war news. The war so far had consisted of planes and ships bombing one another, but there was talk of the Allied invasion that made us all lean in closer, trying to swallow the words.
My mother finally wanted to talk about a plan before they came for me.
“What if he didn’t have a trigger finger?” she said.
We stopped and looked at her.
“Well. I refuse to lose anyone else. That way, they couldn’t send you to the eastern front to be fodder.” She scrunched up her face and shut her eyes like she realized what she suggested. “Well, even if they didn’t make you fight, they’d take you and work you into the ground. You might as well go into hiding. Go underground like your father.” Her thumb made little circles against the inside of her fingers like she were kneading a tiny glob of dough.
It was the first time I’d heard her use the word underground regarding my father. I had been so consumed by my own struggle with his hiding that I hadn’t thought of the ways my mother was trying to make peace with his absence. His absence angered me. More so because it dismantled the impossibly high regard I once held him in. The towering shadow from my youth. The giant in the hallway. At times I had pictured him cowering like a small animal—hushed in terror; a pile of orange rinds and artichoke leaves heaped in front of him; and even cloistered away in a monastery. To couple all of that with what my mother must have conjured him doing meant he was living so many other lives than one at home with me.
I didn’t like those nights, sitting in the living room, getting a good look at what my family had become.
“I need your help tonight, Jacob,” Uncle Martin said one evening in July at the house. He had on his rubber fishing boots, a heavy pullover sweater with a knitted collar and patch pockets, and a pop-tent cloth German hat. “Tonight is going to be a big night.”
I knew the answer he expected and gave it.
“What time do you want me at the docks?” I asked, as if agreeing to such a thing had no weight to it. My hands were squeezed into each other. My nails left little pink crescents against the skin.
“Ten tonight,” Martin said.
I went to my room to be away from my uncle then. Fergus came running in after me and slid across the floor into Edwin’s bed, shifting the mattress. I went to put it back but instead lifted it off to see if Edwin had hidden anything the way I had under my mattress. There was nothing there, but it gave me the idea of looking through the rest of his side of the room, which I proceeded to do. And in a small box of colored pencils, I found a tiny spiral notebook full of etchings of disembodied breasts. All shapes and sizes, with different colored and shaped nipples, protruding from the page, seeming three dimensional. Page after page, he’d drawn them. I remembered Timothy from camp and how he’d described performing virginity tests, and how those words must have sunk like a little bomb into Edwin’s mind. I flipped through the pages, and felt sad for my brother, who had all the same maddening bodily desires hidden away like I did. Though in a way, I was proud of him, as despite those impulses—which to me felt like a drain on any strength—he was still driven, determined to be every moment an artist.
In the same box as the catalog of breast etchings, I also found a miniature polished pine ottoman that matched the chest of drawers I’d stolen from Hilda’
s dollhouse. I held it up and tried to imagine all that we’d hidden from each other, then pushed that aching thought out of my head.
By the time I reached the dock that night there were several PT boats tied off. Traffic in the port had begun to increase.
“Do you think they’re all here because of you?” I asked Uncle Martin.
He looked down at me and didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I hope not.”
“That guy Aldrich said the general and his platoon were coming here because of problems.”
“I remember. I heard him.”
There was a large, covered German truck parked by the water. A bald officer with a graying military mustache, wearing a long black trench coat and a stiff-brimmed gray and black hat, leaned against the truck’s passenger side door.
“Martin,” the officer said, “these two men will help you load. We leave at midnight.”
“That will work fine,” Martin said, knocking on the side door of the truck, so the two men would get out and help us. “This is my nephew, Jacob, who will be helping.”
The two soldiers unlatched the back hatch of the truck, and we started unloading food and toiletry supplies into wheeled carts that they pushed to the side of the Lighthouse Lady. Once everything was piled up on the dock, the two soldiers handed it over to me, and I handed it down to Martin, who stacked it all belowdecks.
The two soldiers talked about all the good food that was in the boxes and how they wished they could take a box or two for themselves, but when we finished they went back to their truck, got in, and drove off.
Uncle Martin and I sat on the deck. We looked out at the German tents, which ran all the way up the harbor to the schoolhouse, which the officers had taken over as their headquarters and bunkhouse. During the day townspeople sauntered among the soldiers. They lined up outside the few shops to get whatever they could with their ration cards. It struck me then how much food and supplies we had loaded aboard, and how we could feed most of the town for a month if we passed everything out. My giant uncle in a Nazi uniform could play Robin Hood.