The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  “Heinkels?” Ludo asked.

  “I think they’re Messerschmitts,” I said. “They have a deeper growl when they fly at those altitudes.”

  Most of the fishing boats in the harbor were iced over and looked like they hadn’t been used in a long time. Three kids skated on the frozen canal, but the channel itself was open and clear of ice as the Germans used the port. A constant, streamlined movement of soldiers cleaned and painted the military boats in the harbor, loading and unloading even more soldiers and supplies from the pontoon dock.

  Before the Germans’ arrival, when the cold came and froze the water, everyone would sharpen their skates on their whetstones. They’d skate the canal, carving looping alphabets across the ice, some of the adults and older kids going on for dozens of kilometers.

  “People drown under the ice every year,” our mother would say. “Don’t trust any patch of ice unless there are already many people on it. Be careful at the edges and under bridges. Those don’t freeze properly.”

  But on the occasions she went out herself, she enjoyed gliding over the ice as much as we did and took long, graceful strides that appeared effortless as she cut down the canal, past the row of hollow post windmills, calling after us, “Keep up boys, keep up if you can!”

  It had been six months since the soldiers had come to my house and left with Uncle Martin. They had him operating as a ferryman since then, and it turned out he was often back in Delfzijl, navigating his own boat across the water, delivering soldiers, equipment, and supplies. He was due back again that afternoon, and as we got to the docks we could already see the Lighthouse Lady off in the distance narrowing in on the shore. The boat cut straight toward us and shone in the sun like a jewel. We waited, tucked into our clothing, surrounded by little clouds of our own breath until the boat crossed the break wall.

  We could see Uncle Martin on the steering station on top of the wheelhouse. He wore a long dark jacket and a twin-peaked hat with the red and black German insignia on it. Once he tossed mooring lines to the shore man and the boat was cleated to its berthing spot, he cut the engines. He hadn’t seen us yet when he stepped off the ship with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and a giant wooden bucket in one hand. He patted the man who tied off the lines of his boat and said something to him, and the man smiled and sort of shrank away from my uncle’s giant presence. Martin spotted us and walked over. It seemed everyone knew his name and he smiled or winked at them all as he passed, tall, wide, lumbering back home.

  “You’ve gone native,” my father said when they shook hands on the shore.

  “Playing along,” he said.

  He put his bag and bucket down and hugged my mother, picking her up and giving her a full-circle swing. Then he did the same thing to me. I was sixteen then, and embarrassed to be engulfed in front of Hilda. He took a swat at Ludo’s head and shoulders and then rustled his hair.

  “Hello, Martin,” Ludo said, making a show of straightening his hair back down.

  “Little lady,” Uncle Martin said and bent down to kiss Hilda’s hand, which made her blush.

  Inside the bucket was a commotion of leaf-sized crabs with shimmery blue-brown alligator spiked shells jostling on top of one another. Beady black eyes were set wide across the ridge of their broken shale backs. Every time one tried climbing up the side, the others pinched onto it and pulled it down into the clump of shells.

  “You think you can boil these up for our dinner, Drika?” Martin asked.

  “I’m not sure I want to touch those.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” Hilda said.

  “Come on. Boiling water isn’t beyond you, is it?

  My mother tucked her body into him for another giant hug.

  Martin had been told to stay on his boat or in the soldiers’ bunks when on shore, but by that winter he’d worked with the Germans long enough that they trusted him to do his own paperwork, run his ship by himself, and come home for a meal with our family. My father had made bread the night before because he couldn’t sleep. He was nervous about the repercussions of Father Heard’s reading. He didn’t even bother going into the factory that day. The Germans were maintaining all of it by then anyway.

  We walked up our road without speaking. The bucket of crabs swung at my side and Ludo held Martin’s duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The familiar blaze of blue ink rose up from Martin’s collar just below his left ear. The briny scent of gasoline fumes fell off his coat, which was so long he looked like a giant bat from behind. When we got home, everyone, even Ludo and Hilda, started asking him questions about what was happening in Germany and what they had him doing.

  “There’s a complete naval blockade around the country,” Martin answered, “so there’s no escaping by sea.”

  My parents wanted us to leave as soon as possible, and I’d convinced them to at least talk to Ludo and Hilda’s parents about letting Ludo and Hilda come with us if it came to that, but my mother could not bring herself to imagine leaving without final news of Edwin.

  “You and Ludo will get drafted when you’re eighteen,” my father told us. He and my mother were anxious to think of ways to get us clear of that.

  “Why is that so bad?” I asked.

  “Wake up, son,” my father said. “Ludo’s arm will ensure he’s sent to a work camp. God knows what will happen to you.”

  “We were there. We know,” I said, my feelings hurt. I was trying to act smart in front of Hilda.

  “You weren’t really there, and you don’t know. We’ve kept you from knowing what’s really happening.”

  “Well, you did send them to camp, Hans,” my mother said.

  “Not now, Drika.”

  My mother curled over on her side on the couch, the wind taken out of her questioning. She reached over and took my hand in hers. “You have to carry your family in your heart, all of your family,” she said, “and make it out of this nightmare.”

  That Sunday, when we prepared for Mass, my father made more loaves of bread to bring to Father Heard and several other families in town. Food was becoming harder to come by, but because we still had a full larder, my father wanted to share. My mother had stopped cooking since Edwin was lost. The only thing she continued to do was play the organ at church. It was the only time she wasn’t in her blue bathrobe.

  I had been working in my father’s factory after school every day since the German occupation, and the floor was buzzing that week with talk about Father Heard’s letter. Everyone at the factory wanted to know what Father Heard was going to follow up with during his Sunday Mass; we expected his next service to be more crowded than usual.

  We got there early and my mother let us in with her key. She unlocked the door that opened below where the windows used to be; Ludo’s father had finally covered the holes with plywood the day before. My father and I sat in the back row, as we usually did, while my mother went to the organ and started to warm up. She struck each key once and let it dole out and fade. Across the ivory keys, the pitch of each note changed ever so slightly, so that listening to her warming up taught my ear how to detect deviations of noise. Ludo could never guess the exact type of plane soaring overhead, but I always knew not only what it was, but which country it belonged to, and thereby what level of threat it posed, all by the pitch of its engines.

  By the time she’d gone through the whole keyboard, and played a few partial songs to warm up, the church was already half full. She walked to the church’s back room, where Father Heard would get ready.

  Sitting with my father, I felt an overwhelming need to call out to Edwin. To speak his name and never stop calling out to him.

  “Dad,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?” he said. His mind had been elsewhere.

  “I’m sorry,” I started. I needed to tell him how sorry I was for Edwin. To let those words reach his ears. To confess how Edwin wanted to stay put. That I had forced the one person with the most potential to do somet
hing great with his life to his death.

  But then my mother came back out and jogged to the back pew, passed me, and sat next to my father.

  “He’s not in back,” she said. There was a quick tremor of nervousness in her voice. “He’s always here by now.”

  “Play some music for a bit then,” my father whispered. “Jacob, go to his house. See if he’s all right. Hurry.”

  Outside all the windows of the apartment buildings in the village were iced over. Several Heinkels zoomed in from over the North Sea. They echoed off the buildings as they crossed overhead. Father Heard’s small home sat several houses past the apartment buildings, a one-level cottage with an angled roof that helped the snow slide off. I wished Edwin were with me as I knocked on the door and waited. When he didn’t answer, I knocked again, then tried the doorknob. It was unlocked and opened into the foyer.

  “Father Heard. Hello. Father Heard?”

  The kitchen smelled like stale tea and sage. The living room had a bookshelf and a simple wooden crucifix nailed to the wall next to the large window that overlooked the street. I remembered the word garçonniére, a bachelor’s quarters. The faint scent of church incense and an older man’s musk filled the bedroom. The blankets on the bed were unmade. A comforter was crumpled and hanging off the side like it had been tossed in a hurry.

  “Father Heard,” I called out one last time before leaving.

  As I walked back across the center of town, I passed my uncle standing around a garbage can fire with several soldiers. One of the soldiers, with a charcoal-colored rain cape, spread his arms out to capture the warmth like a giant vulture. He breathed little white clouds into the billowing smoke. They all laughed at something Uncle Martin had said. Then Uncle Martin saw me and walked over.

  His heavy black boots left tremendous prints in the snow. His jacket was buttoned up to his neck and hung down below his knees. He had leather work gloves, worn black and smooth at the fingertips. “What are you up to?”

  “Seeing if Father Heard was at home. Have you seen him?”

  “No,” Uncle Martin said, falling in step with me.

  When we were close to the church, I could hear my mother playing J. P. Sweelinck’s “Polyphonic Psalms,” which was something she never played during Mass, which meant Father Heard was still not inside the church.

  I opened the door and everyone turned and looked at us. Hilda sat in the front pew with her parents. She gave me a small wave and I wanted to swim through the air to be beside her. Others let their eyes linger on Uncle Martin’s uniform. My mother kept playing. Uncle Martin shut the door behind him. People looked like they either were terrified of him or wanted to stab him. I sat back down next to my father and listened to the people in the pews around us, wondering where Father Heard could be.

  “I couldn’t find him.”

  My father bent over with his hands on his knees. “I feel sick.” He looked at Uncle Martin. “What if they took him? What can we do?”

  People whispered to one another. They began to speculate that Father Heard had been taken, and then they started to worry it was because he read the letter. Someone in the room must have told the Germans. People started looking at my father and me. We owned the factory. We owned the big house. Then they stared at Uncle Martin in his Nazi uniform. There was a feeling of shifting, uncertain loyalties. When several other dispatches came back without the missing priest, the entire congregation fell silent beneath my mother’s playing. The music had burrowed itself into the spaces between everyone and was now the common voice of worry. When she let her song fade, and then go to nothing, the silence in the room was absolute.

  “I have to do something,” my father said.

  Then he stood up, took the small chair that was always set out for him to sit and tell stories to the children, and carried it down the main aisle of the church, up the altar steps, and sat it down next to the lectern.

  “Maybe we’ll have story time at the front of church today,” he said. “Come on up, children, come on.” The bundled children came and sat on the floor around him.

  “Where is Father Heard?” someone in front called out.

  “He probably knows,” a woman named Anneke Gelen said and pointed to Uncle Martin.

  “He probably took him,” Edward Fass said.

  I wanted to step into the aisle between the congregation and my uncle, but Uncle Martin straightened his head up, and looked even more menacing in his long German overcoat. Something in him seemed to harden.

  “Let me tell everyone a story about the old goat, her seven kids, and the wolf,” my father said. This time he spoke to everyone, and we all listened like his was the only voice in the world.

  “The old goat went to the forest to get some food, so she called all seven of her kids and said, ‘Now, children, be on guard against the wolf. He often disguises himself, but you will know if it’s him by his rough voice and black feet. And remember that if he comes in here, he will devour you—skin, hair, and all.’

  “It was not long after that a knock came at the door, and a voice said, ‘Open up, dear children, it is your mother, and I have a treat for each and every one of you.’

  “But the kids said, ‘You are not our mother because your voice is too rough and we see your dark feet leaning against the window. We will not let you in.’

  “So, the wolf went into town and bought a big lump of chalk and ate it and made his voice soft. Then he went to the baker and had him rub his feet in dough. Then the wolf went to the miller and said, ‘Put white meal over my feet for me.’ The miller thought the wolf was up to no good and trying to deceive someone so he said he would not help the wolf. But the wolf threatened to devour him. Then the miller was afraid and made the wolf’s paws white.”

  My father paused there. He looked over the children’s heads and around the room and said, “Some men are like this.”

  “So, the wolf went back to the kids’ house and tricked them into opening the door.

  “Soon afterward, the old goat came home from the forest and saw that her house had been torn apart and her children were gone. She called each of them by name, but only the youngest child who was still hiding said, ‘Dear Mother, I am in the clock-case.’ When the mother found her child, she wept hysterically for her other lost children. In her grief, she wandered out of the house and her only remaining child followed her. That is how she came across the sleeping wolf in the meadow.

  “She looked at the wolf and saw something struggling in his gorged belly. ‘Oh my heavens,’ she said, then she sent her youngest child home to get her scissors, a needle, and thread. The mother goat snuck up on the sleeping wolf and cut open its stomach. Then all six of her lost children sprang out, and each was still alive and had suffered no injury at all. In his greediness, the wolf had swallowed them whole.

  “The mother goat sent them each off into the woods to get a large stone. When the children came back she placed all the stones inside the wolf’s open stomach while he was still sleeping, and then the mother sewed him up as fast as she could.

  “The wolf woke up because the stones settling into his stomach made him very thirsty. So he stood up to go to the well for a drink, but when he began to move about, the stones in his stomach knocked against one another and rattled. Then he cried out,

  ‘What rumbles and tumbles

  Against my poor bones?

  I thought it six kids,

  But naught it’s big stones.’

  “And when the wolf stooped over at the well for a drink, the heavy stones made him fall in, and there was no one to help him from drowning miserably. When the seven children saw that, they came running to the spot and cried aloud, ‘The wolf is dead! The wolf is dead!’ and they danced for joy around the well with their mother because evil, in its most cruel form, no longer belonged to the world.”

  8

  By that March we’d gone through all the supplies in our larder, and it became my job to do the shopping as my mother still very rarely left
the house. Bacon, sugar, tea, butter, and meat had already been rationed, and by the end of the month the ration on eggs was one per person per week. There were no more bananas. When shopping, there was little talk. We had to use our ration cards if we needed clothes as everything was directed to the war effort—everything. My mother made me darn my own socks and sew rags together into heavy blankets that we slept under at night. Paper, petrol, and washing powder were now limited, and only one bar of soap was allowed a month, so when we used a bar down to a nub, we squeezed it together in our fists with the previous month’s nub to get a few extra washes out of it.

  On the night of April 20, despite the blackouts, several stores placed lit red wax candles beneath new oil paintings of Hitler’s face behind their windows, as they had the year before.

  “Christ. Will you look at that,” my father whispered when he saw them in town.

  When he told my mother, she took all her handmade red candles and tossed them in the trash.

  Sometimes Uncle Martin showed up with a net of fish he caught by dropping a line off the edge of his boat as he ferried the Germans, and he had me trade the fish for extras.

  Before Mass on Sunday, everyone in the congregation spoke of what supplies they had and what was going to arrive soon. If some new shipment was expected, I’d stop by that shop before reporting to the factory to see if anything had arrived, which was clear by whether or not people lined up out the door.

  On Sunday, children huddled outside the main church doors before being called in. They showed one another shrapnel they collected from bombs or dogfights between planes that had fallen near their homes. They held each little jagged scrap up to the light and ran their tiny fingers along the uneven teeth of the edges. One little boy bit down on a charred hunk between his molars. The children swapped shrapnel like the adults traded ration cards inside the building.

  We had not had a Mass service since Father Heard disappeared in February, but we still met at the same time each week. My mother played the organ and the sounds rose out of the gaps in the plywood where the windows had been. People traded warnings, ration cards, and finally, the children would gather around my father so he could tell them a story. Except now they gathered around the front of the altar where Father Heard would have stood, and the adults listened too.