by Devin Murphy
Earl and I were the last to walk back into the holds that night. In the crew mess room, the majority of the passengers were awake, tired, and sickly from the motion of the ship. I sat with them and listened to them talking. A child cried in the holds. Her voice was a golden echo. I looked around and saw in their faces how their lives were in shambles. Watching them made me deeply ashamed, to have never thought of what parallel dramas of suffering were unfolding alongside my own.
I wanted to go back and shield everyone who felt sick with danger, to rescue everyone who needed saving. There were so many, I knew, who were trapped and lost and without hope, waiting for something to change. I had the training to be a boat runner, and if Holland could no longer be my home, the water would be.
It occurred to me I should have written something on the message board in Southampton, but I knew the odds were stacked against me that anyone I loved would have ever found it.
That night, in the galley, I did not yet know how I would spend my life—all the ships I would board, all the names I would assume, all the people I would take from one tumultuous place to somewhere new. Hundreds of trips. Thousands of people. A life spent working for Captain Fernandes, then Peter as captain, then for Uncle Martin, who showed up unannounced on a dock in Buenos Aires after tracking us through the Southern Hemisphere a year after the war ended.
Uncle Martin.
Uncle Martin standing at the end of a pier.
A miracle of sorts.
It was Uncle Martin who years later helped me pay for my first ship. It was on that first ship where I became a captain, a smuggler myself, ferrying lost souls from Xiamen, China, to Taiwan with Kuomintang members fleeing the mainland; from Pusan, Korea, to Fukuoka, Japan, before Seoul was occupied; from Berbera, Somalia, to Cape Town with those desperate to escape Ethiopia’s Red Terror; from one great upheaval to another.
I did not yet know how right Captain Fernandes was: how steady business would be.
It would be much later that the dreams of my father walking into the heart of our own ruined town would begin. Standing at the lip of the rubbled factory. Seeking out the gravestones of his family. Only finding one, his wife, my mother’s, whom Uncle Martin decided not to bury at sea after I left him. If my father was alive, he would have had to go back. Any man would go back. I did. I saw my mother’s solitary stone in a field of names separated by grass and clover.
I try to imagine what my father does then. Why he doesn’t go home and start again. Pick up the tools he’d once made a life with.
I’ve asked everyone I could if there was a trace of the man. “Such a tall man,” I’d say. “Perhaps at the edge of town. Trying to stay out of sight.” But no. No one knew.
I could not ask Hilda either. I found her name printed on a plaque flush to the ground in the same field as my mother. I knelt and traced each letter of her name with my fingertip.
H I L D A.
I could not ask Ludo. Both his name and his mother’s were etched into a masterfully carved wooden cross in that same field.
All of their markers held the same date.
I try to make peace with the names in that field.
I try to make peace with the names that are not in that field.
I try to make peace with my father. The industrialist, the businessman, the teller of stories, an oar over his shoulder, looking for a new place to begin again.
In the cargo hold of Captain Fernandes’s ship that first trip, I only knew I had lived long enough to have my own story to tell, and that night in the galley, under the mess hall lights, manically, with great energy, I told those people, tired old men, displaced women, and seasick children, a purged story in my native tongue, something I’m not sure all of them could understand. But in the rocking dark, they sat wrapped around every word.
25
Thump-Drag’s mother died giving birth to him, so he was raised in the town’s orphanage. As he grew, he developed a giant hunchback and a dead clubfoot that he would swing ahead of himself, and it made a heavy thumping sound before he dragged it over the ground, churning up dirt and gravel as he walked. The other children in the orphanage gave him the nickname, and it stuck even after they had all been adopted, leaving him behind newly christened.
“The old lady who ran the orphanage took pity on Thump-Drag and let him sit with her as she sewed in the evenings. Eventually she taught him how to sew as well. But when he was old enough to work, he was sent out to the gas pits. The gas pits were inside the town walls but far from all the homes, and were where everyone went to get their fire for the night. The pits sat where the land leveled out and was too arid and dry to grow crops. They were far enough away from the village that Thump-Drag had to leave early, clopping his way each evening out to the old gas mine.
“The gas mine was covered by a large piece of stone with several long ropes and chains attached to it. As it got dark, everyone in the town came out with their long, unlit torches propped over their shoulders. They talked about their crops, their families, their lives, and what news they had of the great army to the east that had begun marching in every direction. Thump-Drag heard them whispering to one another all the while set on his nightly task. He took up the chains and ropes, tossed them over his shoulder, that large knot of muscle, and started to pull the giant rock, which slid away from the open mouth of the gas well. As the giant rock slid off the geyser, a steady whoosh of gas flowed up into the air. The people with their unlit torches saw the shimmering vapors, billowing between them and Thump-Drag, who grew wavy and distorted. Now they could only hear the steady thrum of the gas and then the thump-drag of the clubfoot approaching the open mouth of the geyser.
“Everyone watched as Thump-Drag took a piece of flint rock and threw it very hard at the base of the geyser. They were all still talking among themselves, taking for granted that moment Thump-Drag was so tuned into, when that first spark rose against the shale rock, followed by the swallowing sound of a giant flame igniting. Then the giant plume of fire shot out of the ground. The people in line came up and each handed a torch to Thump-Drag, who stuck it into the pillar of flame and handed the lit torch back, until everyone had a touch of fire.
“Then Thump-Drag lugged the stone by the chains over the plume of fire so the fire was put out. He turned and watched as the line of people walked away with their burning torches. Their line of flame cut through the dark and split the night in half. The individual flames spread out so he saw the layout of the small village in the distance, and how each person took their fire into their own homes, and how their walls lit up with orange shadows from their freshly lit hearths. He gathered his own burning torch and walked back to his small hut, strangely happy that all those people who had ignored him or shunned him for so long could make it through the night, seeing in the dark, finding some warmth by the light he helped bring them.
“By his own fire, Thump-Drag sewed quilts and tapestries and elegant shawls. He sewed family crests onto uniforms and blankets that people brought to him; sewed baby clothes for little children whose parents would never let him touch, wedding dresses for women who never looked at him, and military uniforms for men who could easily slay him. They would come one by one to his hut in the afternoons, wait at his doorway and tell him what they needed or wanted, and they’d watch for a while as he began to sew. They’d tell him what they wanted their sewing for and, as if under some trance in the doorway, they’d tell him their most secret hopes and deepest fears. In this way, Thump-Drag became intimate with the very marrow of his village. He heard too of the encroaching army’s desire for the village’s gas wells, for their nightly soft burning light.
“The next night, everyone in line was talking about what they should do to defend themselves. Many wanted to fight, but they would be outnumbered and likely slaughtered. Many wanted to surrender, but there was no guarantee they would not be enslaved. Everyone was afraid. Everyone had heard whispers of what the army had been doing as it crossed the map.
“That was
when Thump-Drag told them he had a plan, but would need their help. No one wanted to listen to the town curiosity at first, but he was honest with them, and told them that there was no harm in trying what he suggested. So, they did what he asked and brought him all the material they could. With the gathered cloth, he started sewing a tremendous quilt to cover the whole town. It took everyone working through the days and nights to complete the giant, seamless cover. When it was finished, Thump-Drag had them drag the beautiful cloth over the walls so that the entire village was draped by it.
“‘We are doomed,’ some of the villagers said once they saw what their plan had led to. The city now looked like a false hillside. ‘We have let this idiot convince us that his harebrained plan of hiding our city will work. The invaders will see it is not a hill.’
“But Thump-Drag was not through yet. He persuaded each of the people in the town to sew themselves a pouch and bring it to the gas well. When they had done so, Thump-Drag removed the stone, but did not ignite the plume. He took each pouch and held it over the tower of leaking gas. The sacks filled with the gas, expanding taut, and once filled would have lifted into the air if he had not tied them off into a knot at the bottom and tied a little string to each. He then tied each string to the wrist of the person who sewed the pouch, so it floated above their heads as they walked to the center of the town. Thump-Drag had to hurry as the army was closing in on the covered gates of the city. The first ranks of their divisions lined up around the front gates, while the rest filed in behind.
“Once everyone had their pouch filled, Thump-Drag closed the well and met them in the middle of the town. Thump-Drag went around and whispered to the townspeople a fragment of a story he had heard them speak, one they had inadvertently told him over the years. Thump-Drag would move on as each townsperson found his own voice and strength, and spoke of her own life.
“Then he used a dagger to cut loose the gas pouch attached to that person’s wrists, which then floated up against the giant quilt enveloping the town. As Thump-Drag continued moving from person to person, sound infiltrating the spaces between, their stories filled with fear and longing as they spoke. The vibrations from each voice pushed each person’s pouch upward, only to come down again from the weight of the tarp. Up and down, up and down, the pouches jumped.
“The approaching army demanded that whoever was speaking come forward or that they would burn the entire city down. The first townsperson Thump-Drag had approached crawled out from under the cloth. He was a young man with a lame arm who continued to tell his story, until his fellow townspeople heard his death scream.
“Upon hearing the scream, yet another person presented herself to the army—speaking of what she had known: the taste of cherries, the feel of a horse’s mane brushing the soft skin of her wrist. Others joined, a chorus of stories chronicling every human emotion and fault they knew. The army kept demanding that the speaker come forward, and as the townspeople heard the second, and then third death scream, they spoke even louder. Every voice that was silenced outside the tarp brought dozens of more voices from under the tarp forward. Each story pushed at the pouches levitating overhead.
“These stories sank into the soldiers’ ears, and with each swing of their swords yet another story emerged: it was as if the voices were multiplying with each attempt the soldiers made to silence them. This made the soldiers wonder if what they were doing was wrong and they became more and more confused, and more and more anxious.
“The townspeople, understanding that they were soon to die, started speaking in unison, their voices clapped together, their pouches rising higher becoming a force against the giant cloth Thump-Drag had made. Small pockets of the cloth rose, as if they were rising bubbles, and the whole cloth started to move and shimmy.
“The soldiers surrounded by the dead bodies were awestruck as they looked on. They heard an overlap of language that sounded like so many things, a creature at once foreign and familiar. They grew scared. They had awakened something awful, they realized, something beyond their abilities to destroy. They regretted what they had done and backed up from their prey, backed away from their leader’s orders, which had no purchase among this greater noise.
“The great army fled, having killed, having witnessed the sound of their killing, and having heard, still louder, the chorus of those stories when shared together. There was no denying the strength of such a thing, and no way to erase it from their being.
“From under the cloth this pulse echoed through every heartbeat, and whoever heard it understood that it is the little stories of our day that hold the only things of value in this world.
There once was a town where a nimble roof was raised by people telling their stories, powerful yet full of grace, set to the simple base rhythm of thump-drag, thump-drag, thump-drag.”
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About the author
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Meet Devin Murphy
About the book
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The Making of The Boat Runner
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Devin Murphy’s Short Story: Off Dead Hawk Highway
About the author
Meet Devin Murphy
DEVIN MURPHY is an assistant professor of creative writing at Bradley University. His fiction has appeared in more than sixty literary journals and anthologies, including The Missouri Review, Glimmer Train, and the Chicago Tribune. He lives with his wife and children in Chicago.
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About the book
The Making of The Boat Runner
I believe you have to grasp onto a wide variety of experiences and embrace all aspects of your life to write the book you're meant to write. Novels are gifts from one person to an unknowable other. It is why I'm an awful critic. I have nothing bad to say about someone who attempted the form, who lived the life to tell the story. Since writing The Boat Runner, I understand exactly what Gustave Flaubert meant when describing his infamous character, Madame Bovary. "It's me," he said. "C'est moi." You put everything of yourself into a book.
When I poured everything of myself into The Boat Runner, I was surprised the story centered on a character who morphed into a well-intentioned Dutch smuggler. But then I really began going over the details of my own life and this character emerged and seemed inevitable.
My mother, who is an artist, was born in occupied Holland in 1942. At twenty-one she came to the United States as a nanny to the Dutch Consulate in San Francisco, where she met and married my American father, who is a philosophy professor. They moved around the country for years until I was born near Buffalo, New York, where I grew up feeling distanced from a sense of family history. This meant everything about both sides of my family, especially the Dutch side, was a source of mystery.
The most fascinating, shadowy figure from my maternal family was my Dutch grandfather, Hans Jonker, who passed when my mother was nineteen. Hans was a Renaissance man who played the violin, bred new strands of orchids, and painted in his spare time. For the majority of his career, however, he was a head electrical engineer at Phillips where he ran a radio tube lab. During WWII, he was forced into hiding to avoid conscription by the Germans who wanted all engineers and scientists for high-level military work. There were rumors that he'd sought refuge in a monastery, fled to England, or was killed. This meant my Oma, while caring for my mother and her three other daughters during wartime, would go out looking for her husband. This story sat latent in my mind for years.
While I was in my twenties and working at sea, feeling farther from my own family than ever before, I started calling home from pay phones around the world to ask my family direct questions. Why were we so transient? Who were my relatives? What was Hans Jonker really like? As it turned out, my mother had old letters, paintings, pictures, and haunting stories from her father and her own life that I'd never heard. My mother shared memories of GIs giving her chocolate in the streets of l
iberated Holland that fascinated me. Most importantly, I found out she has scar tissue on her ears from bombings near her home when she was an infant. The damage to her ears went undiagnosed her whole childhood, and she spent her school years having a hard time hearing in classrooms. Paying attention was a challenge, so she took to entertaining herself, drawing and creating art. My mother would go on to become a career artist who welded giant sculptures from discarded steel, and painted the most incredible images with pastels and acrylics that hung on the walls of our home. This inspired the need for art and creativity in the Koopman family.
These nuanced understandings of my heritage snuck into my writing, and then strangely empowered me to employ events from my own life—specifically, the more than three years I spent working various jobs on a half dozen small international expedition ships. I love ships, living on ships, the sea, and traveling, and the spirit of that experience has very much informed this book. In my twenties, I saw shipping ports in every corner of the world, and witnessed how ships hold the potential to change the direction of any life at any time.
I later married into a large Jewish family in Chicago, and in doing so, became very close to my wife's two grandfathers, who are now both in their nineties. One lived on and off vessels as a frogman in the Pacific campaign of WWII, and the other had been a medic who helped liberate the camps in Europe. I've had long conversations with them and used their stories to understand different perspectives and religious backgrounds when writing about the war. At a family party, the medic, Joe Sheade, took out pictures the size of a stick of gum that showed heaps of pajama-clad bodies taken from the liberated death camps. He's kept these photos in his wallet for over seventy years. "So I don't ever forget," he said. His willingness to look directly at something so ugly to keep perspective haunted me.
