by Sarah Blake
I could say that one foot put in front of the other has led me here, but that would be a lie. If there is a plan, it is one we set in motion—we put our hands out, reach for something, and that sets the ball silently rolling down its track toward what will happen. My father put down his sword and shield, Emma, simply gave up, and I cannot answer why. I picked it up. I carried it forward. I left Franklin, went to college, became a doctor, and then one winter afternoon, I walked into a room where you were. Oh my love, nothing has been sweeter in my life than loving you, but I am leaving. And I cannot answer why.
In fairy tales, my darling, the dead watch over the living. But right now, you are reading what I am writing and so we are together, here. It is no tale. I am right here, my pen on the paper scratching out your name, Emma Emma Emma. And oh, how I loved you, Emma. You were my home.
But this is what I want to say—look up, right now. Take your eyes off this page, and look up. Miss James, I think, will be right near you. She will give you this letter and, from what I know, will wait for you to read it. She will wait. She will keep watch. And others, too. You are not alone. We are all around you, dead and living.
Look up—.
Will.
Frankie shivered.
I’m not going home, he’d said, just after he’d looked at Frankie and said, it all adds up.
When she looked up, Emma was watching her and smiled. And it was with a shock of relief that Frankie realized she was never going to tell. She was never going to hand the letter she had brought to Emma. She had carried it up here, and she would carry it away. The news had come. Will Fitch was dead. Iris had given Emma this last letter, the letter he had meant her to read when he died. Frankie had nothing to add but Will’s happiness that night beside her in the dark, and she would not pass that on. She crossed the room, sank down beside the slight woman in the chair, put her arms around her, and held her.
And the seed that had lain curled in Frankie’s heart all this while unfurled. Petal after white petal opened slowly from her heart and started reaching up and out. Some stories don’t get told. Some stories you hold on to. To stand and watch and hold it in your arms was not cowardice. To look straight at the beast and feel its breath on your flanks and not to turn—one could carry the world that way.
They sat together, the four of them, a little longer, before Harry rose slowly to his feet. It was Thursday. It was the end of the afternoon. It was time to pick up and carry on to the other side of the day.
AND THOUGH SHE KNEW Harry was going to go back down the hill and to his watch, and that she’d see him later, Iris didn’t want him to leave; she wanted him to stay a little longer here and then to come and sit in the back room of the post office, and then when it was time to close, to take down the flag and walk her home. She wanted him near and followed him out onto Emma’s porch.
He had turned around at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at her, and she smiled down at him and nodded very slightly, made shy by the women in the quiet room behind her.
All that he loved in this world stood there above him. And as he looked at her, the word Always came into his head and stopped there. “See you tonight,” he called as he opened the door of his truck and climbed inside.
It was five-thirty on a Thursday afternoon. Across the green, the lights were on in Alden’s store and along the shuttered street the yellow bands glowed through the slats. Harry climbed up the town hall stairs quickly, without thinking, urging his body upward as though he were going to meet someone. At the top, he paused, winded. The bells above his head struck the half hour, and as the clamor died away Harry closed his eyes.
He thought of Will Fitch gone. He thought of Emma. And he watched the grocer’s daughter come down the post office steps—annoyed to see it closed—stop and tuck her hair inside her scarf before she started away swiftly along Front Street. He followed her all the way to the break in the fish houses where the harbor appeared. The waves in the window’s old glass shivered her form so she seemed like water walking on water. Her red scarf appeared and disappeared between the dark green of the beeches. He followed her, like a lighthouse keeper, to the end of Front Street and all the way out of sight.
He skimmed his gaze back across the roofs of town and toward the center and the harbor beyond and paused. Then Harry stood up and marked the thirty feet down the town hall attic to the window facing out to sea.
He raised the binoculars and anchored his elbows on the window ledge before him. The sun bounced off the chop in the near stretch, the tips of the waves like white kerchiefs waving. There was a record run on horse mackerel, and the trap boats were returning to the pier with fish so big caught in their weirs, the tail ends had to be sawed off and tucked inside the gutted bodies to fit the four-foot boxes stacked and stapled and bound up Cape. He slid his gaze off ten degrees to the east. Nothing. He leaned forward.
Far to the east, beyond the fishing boats, what looked like the gray shadow of a whale broke the surface of the water, waves pouring off its sides. It nosed forward slowly, the high wide turret of the U-boat climbing up into the empty air. Long and low along the water, the dark gray menace showed only its top half.
“Holy God,” he breathed.
The U-boat stopped forward propellers and the gray shoulders of the sub rocked, holding steady, its metal sail fifteen feet above the waves. The Germans inside must have no idea how far in they had come; any farther and they would beach. Harry lowered his binoculars, barely breathing.
He raised them again and watched as the head and shoulders of a man climbed onto the bridge at the top of the sail, followed by what looked like an officer.
Come on. His heart raced, nearly laughing at the joke—they had come and here he was. Far away and up here behind glass. Come on, you fuckers, his eyes on the German sailor who had swung himself onto the rim of the bridge and was lightly pulling himself to standing, settling his body against the roll of the submarine beneath him. The officer raised a pair of binoculars and started to scan the shore.
“Come on, come a little closer,” Harry whispered. “Come on in, you fuckers. You’re going to run out of water.”
A massive knock inside his chest made him drop his binoculars and grab for the windowsill to catch his breath.
Another knock came inside, and this one dropped him to his knees. He opened his mouth to shout—It is coming. They are coming. And a sound he’d never heard came from down inside him, came up through his throat, somewhere between a groan and a laugh, and the knock inside had spread sideways, and he closed his eyes to shut it away. He picked himself up from the ground, stumbling down the length of the attic where the rope to the tower bell hung. He could see it. He groaned again, the pain knocking his breath away, and grabbed hold of the line and pulled, grunting, not breathing. A feeble iron tap sounded. Another knock came at his heart, this time shutting out the light in the room. He pulled. Pulled with all his last life. Far away, there was a great clash. Again, one last time. Another crash. He had always known it. They had come.
28.
THE FUNERAL for Harry spilled out of the church—some came from as far away as Bourne. He had been a private man, and he left no one behind, but the people sitting in the pews for Reverend Vine’s eulogy felt the going all the more for the little said. He had been sitting up there in that tower so long, people couldn’t get used to the idea that he wasn’t still watching out for Germans.
Or that he had been right all along. When Harry had pulled the bell rope before he collapsed, several people had looked up toward the town hall tower but dismissed it as birds, the wind. But when Tom and Will Jakes, hauling far down the leeside of the back shore, caught sight of the U-boat surfacing, they’d tucked in their gear and sped home. And it was the two of them who stumbled on Harry’s body beneath the bell rope. They’d looked at him and grabbed the rope and pulled, and pulled, and pulled again—Harry Harry Harry. And the bells kept on ringing all afternoon. And when the winds changed in the late afternoon, the sound o
f bells from up Cape kept coming, right across the harbor.
Reverend Vine finished and Jigg Boggs and Johnny Cripps, Frank Niles, Lars Black, and the Jakes came forward and hoisted the coffin onto their shoulders, leading the mourners out of the church. Frankie followed Emma and the congregation out, and stood at the top of the stairs watching the coffin being slid into the hearse. Drawn along by the silent line of people, the two of them walked behind the car. The fog had come in and settled a pale, misting curtain gleaming on their shoulders and hair. Halfway to the cemetery, Frankie turned and retraced her steps.
In the middle of the perfect fog-heavy green, Iris had come out of the church and was standing alone. The town was pushed back. The postmistress stood at its center and tipped her head back to let the wet fall on her face. If Harry were looking, Frankie thought, he would see this dark figure at the center of the swirling damp commotion, the moving air, full of silence and her grief. Through the webbing of the bare trees, there was no light shining in the window at the top of town hall. The eye had shut.
The casual way that one thing led to another, slick as a rope uncoiling and dropping silent into the sea, was proof positive that Death—if you could catch him—wore a smile. After all, it wasn’t why? It was that’s it?
That’s it? That was how Harry Vale died? That was the ending?
There was an odd, regular sound coming from the direction of the post office. Iris had left the spot where she ’d been standing on the green. At first Frankie thought what she heard was a tennis ball being hit against the side of the wall. Pock. Pock. She stood still, listening. Pock and then a pause. Pock. Pock. Iris was standing in the post office yard with an ax, leveling it at the flagpole. She raised and swung again.
“What are you doing?” Frankie cried.
If Iris heard her, she paid no attention.
“Stop!” Frankie started running toward the woman bent around the ax. The postmistress set the blade of the ax on the whitewashed flagpole again and swung. The wood began to split as the iron went past the midpoint and the sound of splintering ran up and down in warning.
“Stop!” Frankie cried from the bottom of the post office stairs.
Iris lifted the ax over her shoulder and swung it down again. The far rim of the pole was thinning under the blade. Soon it would topple. The job was nearly done, and she gave the ax a violent yank toward her. The wood groaned, just as the top of the pole wavered an instant in the autumn air before giving over. It was then that Iris saw that the flag was still flying—she’d never thought to pull it down before setting at the pole. The great cloth sailed behind the falling spindle, and seemed to Frankie like a maiden plummeting, followed by her streaming hair.
The flagpole cracked like a bone, the flag cascading across the post office steps as the top of the pole wedged itself in the iron railing. Iris was leaning on the butt of the ax catching her breath when she looked up and saw Frankie standing there. Without a word, Iris went to the spot on the pole where the halyards were cleated and began to untangle the lines. Frankie pushed open the gate to the yard and climbed to help, but Iris pushed her hand away roughly. Frankie didn’t have the courage to move away. Iris unhitched the flag and gathered it up in a bundle in her arms, passed Frankie on the stairs, and went with it into the post office. The door closed behind her.
Without the flag the fallen pole, cracked across the post office yard, looked obscenely bare.
The postmistress came back out and stood in the doorway, stood there staring at the toppled pole.
“Iris?”
Iris stepped across the fallen pole and walked down to the spot where she’d dropped the ax. Then without warning, she raised the ax and swung it down again.
Frankie jumped. Iris swung again, aiming for the same spot. Her strong arms swung and hit steady as a piston. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she didn’t show any signs of stopping. After five blows, the fallen pole had been severed in two. Iris shoved the top piece down the stairs with her foot, so that the two halves rested at the bottom. Then she came after them and began to chop the near one into halves again. Half and half again, half and half again, splitting the flagpole into kindling without looking up. The ax swung over her head and down, over her head and down again, in atonement.
Heartsick, Frankie turned away and began the walk out of town and up Yarrow Road. The lights of the houses strung her along until she reached the empty stretch of dunes at the edge where the three lights ahead were Emma’s, her own, and the outside light of the postmistress’s cottage up there at the very end. She stopped walking and turned around.
Through the gathering darkness behind her, the squares and pockets of home lamps shone. She pulled her sweater tightly around her as a truck engine grumbled behind her, climbing slowly up the hill, and Frankie moved into the grasses to get out of the way. Slowly it gained on her, and she stopped to let it pass. It climbed the hill on the road out of town, passed the Fitch house, where it shuddered and went quiet and then caught itself at the top. The gears shifted as it crested, gathered speed, and fled off and away out of town, the grumble growing higher and more distant until it had gone.
There in the quiet, in the dark, Frankie stopped.
Behind her in the town, the postmistress pulled open the door and passed through into the post office and snapped off the lobby lights. Ahead of her, the three roofs were commas on the line out of town.
Hssss. Hsss. Speak, speak into the tape, Frankie heard herself broadcast into the night through the open windows of the cottage.
My name is Thomas. I live in a village in Austria, in the mountains—
“Otto,” Frankie whispered.
He had walked out onto the porch, his arms crossed over his chest, as Thomas’s voice carried out into the wind replaced by the little boy saying Franz. Franz Hofmann, his mother whispered. Go on, Frankie’s voice sang out. Speak into here. Say your name. Inga? said the sister, shyly. Inga Borg? The brother laughed and took his turn. I am Litman. We have papers. The voices peeled in the sky, the surf behind them. Tell them, the man in the café at Mulhouse demanded, jabbing his finger toward her. Tell them what? Frankie heard herself asking. Tell America what? De moi, his voice raged into the air. Dites-le de moi. Frankie listened to the people she had listened to for months—Qu’est-ce qu’elle fait, cette madame? Elle entends, Papa. My name is Susanna, and this is my father. He is Lucien. Lucien Bergolas. There was the lower sound of the father speaking to his daughter. Oui, oui Papa. He wants to say he is Lucien Alexandre Bergolas de Maille—their voices catching in the wind, her cottage like a mouth, her cottage speaking, and Otto in front of them, daring anyone to interrupt.
Here—she turned and looked across the lawns to Emma’s house. Here we are. Here we all are.
WHAT HAPPENS TO a story around its edges? Will had asked. What happens after the part you gave us? If there is a question that falls at our feet, an unanswerable question, the one that we do not know we have picked up to carry forward through the years, then this was mine. A story like a snapshot is caught, held for a moment, then delivered. But the people in them go on and on. And what happens next? What happens?
The story knew. Didn’t I say that, long ago? Didn’t I hurl that at the postmistress as proof that her faith in order was amiss? An eyelid shutters open and shut, separating this moment from the next, inside from outside. What is remembered from what is seen. And some moments we are allowed to see it all, all at once. Our lives moving backward and forward—so we are one in a million—that phrase that annihilates or transcends, depending.
Did Will love Emma? I’m certain he did. The memory of his hand wrapped around my arm, and his whisper, this part of her makes you want to hold on, still made me shiver sometimes when others touched me there, because I remember the longing in his voice to touch his wife there where he was touching me. He loved her with all his heart. But he could not stay. His fight with the world meant he had to turn his face away from his home and his heart and walk into battle. Why?
It’s the mystery at the core, the thing that kept me walking up and down streets, in and out of people’s houses and their lives, asking questions. All around me, all my life, the glorious spectacle of human beings being.
And this vast, contradictory show I’ve reported, I’m leaving soon.
But not before I tell you the last part. I carried the doctor’s letter from London, across Europe, back home, and up to the door of the woman to whom it was addressed. I knocked and she answered and I looked at her and did not speak. I carried it but I never let it go. It lies unopened here in my desk. That’s all I have written, that’s all I have to tell. That’s what the story knew.
Note
Though there is no evidence of a German U-boat beaching in Cape Cod, there were numerous close calls. As early as February 1941, Germany’s Admiral Dönitz ordered a feasibility study of a surprise U-boat assault on the East Coast, and by January 1942, the first U-boat rose successfully, undetected, in the channel of New York Harbor. Throughout most of 1942, German U-boats ran so close to the Eastern Seaboard that they watched the dark silhouettes of people walking up and back along the beachside promenades against the lights of hotels, cars, and houses. The high hulls of the tankers steaming toward Europe with food and supplies were lit up as well, making them fantastic, easy marks. Of 397 ships sunk by U-boats in the first six months of 1942, 171 were sunk off the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Florida, some within view of people onshore.
Though she could not have had access to the portable disk recorder in 1941, what Frankie uses is a prototype of what came into common usage in 1944, ultimately enabling reporters to make live recordings from the battlefield. I took liberty with the date because World War II was the first war that was brought into people’s living rooms by radio, and I wanted to highlight the power of the voice to convey the untellable, the refugees speaking into an air into which they will vanish.
