Island of Saints: A Story of the One Principle That Frees the Human Spirit

by Andy Andrews

  The old man—the captain of the boat—had retreated into the tiny cockpit and peered out of the window. Josef looked up at the conning tower hatch. Hans still had not appeared.

  Then, the Nazi draped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close. What was this?

  “I have always hated you, Landermann,” he hissed.

  Josef shifted his feet to free himself from Schneider’s grasp, but the taller man gripped him even tighter. “Do you remember the afternoon at Oxford when you helped pull me from the Jew professor? You were right to do that . . . for I would have killed him and might have been arrested. Even though I hate you, I owe you my thanks.”

  Josef wrenched himself free from Schneider’s grasp and stepped away. Not frightened, but angry, he looked again toward the tower hatch. Still no Hans. Schneider laughed as Josef looked back at him in bewilderment. “Your friend is not here to help you, Landermann.” Josef was truly puzzled. Help me what? he thought. What is this lunatic up to? Then he found out.

  Schneider stepped slowly toward Josef. Maintaining a smile, he spoke in a calm manner, just loud enough to be heard. “You are not fit to wear a uniform, Landermann. You disgrace the Führer and his ideals. You embarrass the brave men who have the courage to preserve the purity of our blood. Let me ask you a question. Are you a Jew?”

  Josef retreated a few steps, but didn’t answer, unsure about what Schneider intended as he continued to approach. “I said, ‘Are you a Jew?’” Schneider stopped beside the cleat where the supply boat was tied. Josef was no more than ten feet away.

  “Landermann . . .” Schneider began again with a sigh. “Landermann . . . it is my duty as a representative of the Third Reich, the Fatherland, and my Führer to identify those in opposition to the lofty, yet achievable goals we have before us.” Schneider paused and raised his eyebrows dramatically. “Josef Bartels Landermann, I believe you to be one of those in opposition. Are you a Jew?” He paused and cocked his head. “Still no answer? Well, it doesn’t really matter . . . because you certainly act like one.”

  And with those words, Schneider pulled a Walther PPK from the folds of his jacket, extended his arm, and pulled the trigger, shooting Josef, then firing at him twice more as he tumbled from the submarine’s deck and into the dark water below.

  CHAPTER 8

  HELEN’S EYES WERE WIDE OPEN. SHE HAD DISCARDED HER pillow and kicked off the sheets more than an hour ago and now lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. It was a warm night, humid, and would have been more uncomfortable if not for the breeze blowing through the open window. An occasional cloud passed over the face of the moon, creating odd shadows in the cottage’s only bedroom.

  She was unable to sleep, not an unusual situation, but irritating nonetheless. Helen replayed the afternoon’s conversation with Margaret in her mind. She had surprised herself, crying like that. Helen hadn’t cried in a long time, having been, she felt, “all cried out.” She was numb. Her days were marked only by degrees of anger.

  But she had been blindsided by the realization of how much she loved and appreciated Margaret, Billy, and especially Danny. And she was embarrassed—horrified was a better word—to hear herself admitting that she was angry with them as well.

  Helen looked at the alarm clock. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. Picking the pillow off the floor, she doubled it and placed it behind her head, thinking for a moment she might read, then deciding against it.

  She thought about the way Margaret had rubbed her back while she wept and tried to remember if her own mother had ever touched her like that. She wasn’t sure. Helen recalled Margaret’s question about her anger when she had at last regained her composure. “How long do you intend to stay mad?” she had asked. What a ridiculous question, Helen thought as she turned onto her side. As if I have any say in the matter!

  “It’s not good for you,” Margaret had said. “Holding on to all that anger . . . it’s like taking poison and waiting for everyone else to die. There are no hopeless situations, sweetheart, only people who have grown hopeless about them. You still have choices you can make.” Helen had begun sobbing again and told the older woman that so many things had been taken from her that she feared anger was all she had left . . . that and pain. So why should I give up my anger? she thought. Then I am left with nothing but pain.

  Helen rolled onto her stomach and put her face in the pillow. The corners of her mouth turned down as she determined she would not cry again. She had not wanted to offend Margaret as she walked out of the café that afternoon, and she had not reacted, but Helen had been appalled at what the woman had suggested she do. “Forgive,” Margaret had said. “It is truly your only hope, honey. To forgive is to set a prisoner free . . . and discover the prisoner was you.”

  When Helen had not responded, Margaret added, “Take a pencil and some paper. Write down all the things that have happened, all the people who have hurt you—including God if you feel that way—and forgive them.”

  Helen had nodded and left at that point. She drove home madder than ever, and now here she was in the middle of the night, awake again. Awake and thinking about how crazy it would be to actually write down the things that had gone wrong and who had offended her.

  She threw her pillow back onto the floor. Crazy, Helen thought. Crazy and impossible. There’s not enough paper in the world.

  WAN HAD NOT SEEN A VEHICLE FOR ALMOST TWO HOURS. HE was parked in the back lot of Snapper’s Boat Yard on the corner of Keller Road with a view of Highway 3. It was a quiet night, but Sundays, the one night every week Wan worked, were always quiet. When the radio squawked, it startled him so badly that the deputy almost poured his third cup of coffee all over himself.

  “Dangit!” Wan said aloud as he tried to lift himself up from the patrol car seat. The hot liquid was burning a track down the bottom of his pants as he sloshed more coffee on his lap, scrambling to set his thermos down.

  Finally he grabbed the radio and keyed the mike.

  “Cooper.”

  “Wan?”

  “Doris?” Wan frowned. “What’re you doing there? Where’s Roger?”

  “He got sick. I mean sick, sick. He ate a whole bag of dried apricots. Agnes Wilcott pitted them and dried them herself. I could’ve told him they’re just like prunes. Sheriff had me come in. Like I didn’t already work all day. I told him I’d do it, and you know I don’t mind, but if the county thinks I’m . . .”

  “Doris,” Wan interrupted. “Doris!”

  “What?”

  “Is there something going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You radioed me. You’re the dispatcher. Is something going on?”

  There was a pause before the woman answered, “No, I was just checking on you.”

  Wan silently fumed. Doris was almost seventy years old and had worked at the sheriff’s office since before the county bought radios. She smoked unfiltered Camels, had a voice like a steam wrench, and was the only dispatcher still working who had hollered instructions out the window to whatever deputy was sleeping under the oak tree behind the jail.

  She was also the best friend of Wan’s grandmother, which always left him with the distinct feeling that he had better not ever “talk back.” Everyone knew Doris was a bit of a dingbat, but Foley was a small town, and, well, she was their dingbat so they just put up with her and never really gave it much thought. It could occasionally be tough, however, to keep her on subject, a trait that frustrated Wan and the other deputies to the point of cussing, screaming fits—but only in the privacy of the squad car and with the radio turned off.

  “What’s your twenty?” Doris asked with a hacking cough.

  “Snapper’s.”

  “Anything happening?”

  “Nope. Pal and them boys get their paperwork filed?”

  “Yeah. Filed it with Roger ’fore I came in.”

  Wan thought a moment, then asked, “Do we know anything yet?”

  Doris cackled. “Yeah, we know the sheri
ff’s madder’n he’s been since the last one. Roger said he called Pensacola, called Biloxi . . . them navy boys still ain’t saying nothing.”

  “How can they say nothing?” Wan asked. “I can’t believe it’s not in the paper. None of the sinkings have been, and we’ve had, what, four cargo slicks—all with bodies in ’em—on a thirty-mile stretch of beach in the past four weeks? I mean, I don’t get it.”

  “You by yourself?”

  Wan shook his head. Of course, he was by himself. It was the middle of the night in a boatyard. Who did she think would be with him? “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, this is just for you, but Dr. Ferguson’s nurse, Elenia, told me something about Jarret Delchamps.” Delchamps was the local reporter for the Mobile Press-Register, the largest newspaper between New Orleans and Tampa.

  “Go on,” Wan prompted.

  “Elenia said she heard Jarret tell the doctor that his big boss had put the ‘quietus’ on anything about submarines.”

  “What?”

  “Unh-huh. He said some navy officer had come to Mobile—in person—and talked to the head man at the paper. Told ’im the navy was taking care of it and didn’t want to panic folks . . . said it was a matter of national security. Practically ordered the paper not to print anything.”

  “And they’re going along with it?” Wan asked incredulously.

  “Seems like,” Doris said with a smile in her voice, then coughed loudly, several times, right into the microphone. “You ain’t reading about it, are you?”

  She has a point, the deputy thought, though it really doesn’t matter whether the newspaper prints anything or not. Everyone knows what is happening. Ain’t like a big dang secret, he mused. Bodies float up five or ten at a time . . . people just naturally seem to talk. Wan turned on his flashlight to check his pocket watch. It was 12:15 . . . just past midnight.

  HELEN SWUNG HER LEGS OVER THE SIDE OF THE BED AND SAT up. She drank from the glass of water on the night table, straightened her cotton nightgown, and ran her hands through her hair. Feeling with her foot, she located the slacks and work shirt she’d thrown on the floor when she had gotten in bed earlier, and slipped them on.

  Standing barefooted, she padded softly through the cottage to the front door and opened it, pausing for a moment to feel the wind in her face. Then, closing only the screen door behind her, Helen went down the cottage steps, with her hands in her pockets, and strode toward the beach.

  She carefully picked her way through the dunes, seeking to avoid the occasional cactus or sandspur that grew low to the ground. The sea oats waved toward the young woman, bowing at the insistence of the wind coming off the Gulf. It blew Helen’s blonde hair into her face and assaulted her senses with a pungent, heavy salt smell that, in someone else’s life, she knew, might be welcome, even pleasurable. To Helen, though, the wind was just one more nemesis, something else to fight, and that was why, when she reached the beach, she turned into the wind, walking west, against the unseen force that always seemed to be pushing against her.

  Helen walked the beach when she couldn’t sleep, which was almost every night, even making the trek when it rained. She ignored the seashells and pieces of driftwood that others found so fascinating, attempting instead to find exhaustion, hoping to escape in the sleep it occasionally brought into her life.

  Even at her most depressed, however, Helen was not totally immune to the beauty around her. She enjoyed watching the raccoons and foxes scamper in the tidal pools and was awed by the patience of the herons and the power of the ospreys as they fished along shore. Once, on a calm evening in early May, Helen had stood for more than an hour and watched a dolphin give birth in the deep, still water near Dixie Bar.

  Dixie Bar was an enormous stretch of sand extending more than two miles into the Gulf. Created by the outgoing tides of Mobile Bay as they boiled around the Fort Morgan peninsula, the monstrous sandbar was a peril to shipping, but a fisherman’s paradise. Functioning as an immense reef, it attracted sea life to waters marked by a pronounced shore-bound current. West or southwest winds fed that current and knocked the tops off the surf, making it easier for fishermen to reach their quarry as the Gulf swept everything in its grasp toward shore.

  The white sand squeaked beneath her bare feet as Helen leaned into the night. For almost an hour, she walked on the boundary of the surf’s highest reach, not in the soft sand or in the surf, but on the very edge of both. There was a hint of phosphorous in the water, she saw, giving the white foam of the breaking waves an odd, glowing tinge of blue. She smiled faintly at the beautiful sight. In the summer, Wan had told her, late at night the phosphorous was visible, sometimes dramatically so, more often than anyone knew. In fact, he had said, most people had never even heard of this phenomenon, and fewer were privileged to see it.

  Helen slowed her pace for a moment and frowned, squinting at a large shape that lay in the edge of the surf fifteen or so yards in front of her. A dolphin, she thought, trying to see through the darkness and smart enough not to rush immediately to the poor creature. If it was dead, that was one thing—she had experienced that twice before—but if the animal was only stranded . . . Helen had heard Billy talk about helping a group of men rescue a stranded dolphin. One of them had suffered a broken arm during the experience.

  Helen approached cautiously. She had no desire to be hurt by the wild struggles of a panicked creature with no help nearby. Venturing closer, she saw vague movement, but the animal’s effort moved it several inches up onto the beach. The dolphin was going the wrong way . . .

  In that split second, Helen saw that the form, now only eight feet from her, was not a dolphin, but a human being . . . a man. She gasped and rushed to him. He was on his stomach with arms outstretched, his face in the sand and pointed away from her. As she fell to her knees beside his stricken form, Helen saw blood. It came from his right shoulder, the one closest to her. More blood was on his right leg.

  As Helen reached out to touch him, the man moaned, and she realized that she had no idea what to do. She was at least an hour from the cottage and from there, without a phone, almost another hour to help. He could be dead by the time she returned. Helen’s mind raced. Had he been in an accident? Was he one of the sailors from the group Wan had seen earlier that day? No, that wasn’t possible. Those men, she had heard, had been in the water for days. This man was still bleeding. He couldn’t have been hurt too long ago.

  Deciding she had no choice but to move the man, Helen first went around to his other side—the way his face was turned—in order to roll him over. He was conscious. Though he didn’t move his head, the man’s eyes blinked wildly, trying to focus as she came into view.

  “Hang on,” Helen murmured. “You’re safe. I’m here to help.” The man seemed to be clothed in black, she noted absently, though that was probably just because he was wet. A suit, she thought, or a uniform. Not navy . . . merchant marine?

  “Can you help me?” Helen said loudly into the sailor’s face. She was speaking over the roar of the pounding surf. “We need to roll you onto your back.”

  The man coughed and nodded slightly. Helen saw a comprehending look on his face as she got her left arm under his shoulders. She placed her right hand on the man’s hip, pushing and lifting with every ounce of her strength. The man shifted his weight with Helen and grunted with effort or pain as she succeeded in moving him onto his back. Immediately Helen, who was on top of him after the maneuver, felt the man draw easier breaths as he quickly began to inhale and exhale deeply.

  Spent, Helen raised herself from the man and fell back into a sitting position in the sand beside him. Her shirt hung soaking wet from her thin frame as she wiped sand from her face with a forearm. “Can you speak to me?” she asked, continuing to watch the sailor’s face closely. “What happened?”

  “I think so,” he rasped. “I am shot.”

  Helen dusted her hands, then reached to remove some of the sand from the man’s face and from around his eyes. “We need to ge
t you some help. I live down the beach three or four miles back that . . .” She stopped suddenly. Helen had gestured over her shoulder and glanced away as she had spoken, but a small . . . something . . . had interrupted her thought. Frowning, she looked back at the man on the sand before her and broadened her gaze.

  Something wasn’t right. Helen looked at the uniform, its ribbon and buttons. Her eyes narrowed, and hot saliva poured into her mouth. Breathing heavily, she said, “You are not an American sailor.”

  The man said simply, “My name is Josef.”

  Nausea threatened to overwhelm her. Helen asked flatly, “Are you German?”

  “Yes,” Josef confirmed.

  In that one word, at the precise second it was uttered, Helen experienced an avalanche of emotions raining down upon her consciousness. There were far too many sensations to categorize, or even recognize, so violently and abruptly did they flood upon her. Rage, caution, suspicion, revulsion, despair, opportunity, frustration, satisfaction, hatred, fear . . .

  It was amazing, really, with all the choices available to her in that moment that she would choose opportunity, but to Helen, it was the proper selection. After all, it might never present itself again. Helen balled her right hand into a fist, and with everything she had, she punched Josef in the face. Rewinding, she swung her fist into his wounded shoulder. “You filthy bastard!” she shrieked. “You killed my husband!” And she hit him again and again and again.

  Finally physically unable to swing and sobbing uncontrollably, Helen crawled off a few steps and threw up. She fell back into the sand and cried again until there was nothing left. Trying for a moment to think rationally, she looked over at the sailor who’d said his name was . . . ? Who cares what his name is? What do I do now? Should I kill him? Can I kill him? I don’t have a knife or a gun . . . I could get him back into the water and hold his head under, but I don’t have the energy.