The Boat Runner

by Devin Murphy

  Then the last piece of the puzzle for me was research, which I did a lot of. Almost everything I discovered, story I heard, or event I learned of that took place during the war became something I held up and asked, "Would this show the impossibly complex and ethically messy reality of one Dutch family's life during the war?"

  Yet, even after all this, my editor challenged me to go back and revise with an eye for moral and personal dilemmas for Jacob. It was with this in mind that I wrote the scene where the boys at camp lead Jacob to the burn pits to toss rocks at the rats. One of the boys makes an offensive comment, comparing the rats to a Jewish propaganda poster, and, both desperate to fit in and relieved not to have been the focus of these boys' menace, Jacob agrees. He is immediately reminded of his beloved Jewish teacher who called out, "Yeladim," to gather him and his classmates, and he is flooded with guilt. This is this scene that troubles me the most. This scene arrived from my own children's teacher calling to them, "Yeladim," this word that breaks my heart with the love and care it sings out. It has become my favorite word, and after writing that scene, and knowing it was right for the book, it hurt, and still hurts. It makes me uneasy to include those anti-Semitic sentiments, something I feared readers would judge both Jacob for allowing and me for writing. But I felt that I needed to push all cowardice and self-censorship away when writing The Boat Runner. These events were ugly, to be sure, which is why we must look and look closely at them.

  This is very much a work of fiction, but it is built upon a historical and personal scaffolding of real people and true events. Now, I hope others will read this book and see this family's impossible situation, and how the circumstances that create great upheavals have morphed through time, jumping borders, races, and oceans. I hope this book does its job and entertains, evokes empathy for others, and leaves you more alert to those around you and the unique depths of their lives. But more than anything, I hope this story connects some unknowable reader to the receding shadows of our past, especially those of the darkest times, which is where we learn how essential it is to find the power of our own voice.

  Read on

  Devin Murphy's Short Story Off Dead Hawk Highway

  The older Girl Scouts kick out the screens of their bunkhouse at night and wander the open fields at the back part of the ranch. They often walk down the dirt road my cabin is on to get to the horse pasture. I can see them in the dark. They move like timid deer—taking quick dashes ten yards at a time and stopping to assess the night around them. They betray themselves by laughing when one bumps into the other. I keep my porch light off so I can see the stars. The girls never pay attention to my cabin tucked along the tree line or me on the deck as they line up along the fence, stepping on the first plank to lean over the top and coo to the horses. They wave carrots and apples they've hoarded from the mess hall. I like watching them—the slow saunter of the horses approaching and nuzzling the girls, their movements breaking the stillness of the night, fireflies touching the space around them like thin blue flames.

  By morning, the undertow of the mountain will have pulled the girls back to their bunks, and the horses will be slick with dew and honey-colored in the pasture. The bear grass will bloom like fists of light pounding up the hillside, and by afternoon, rainstorms will darken the sky and strike the ground with lighting before blowing over and leaving a calm I have only ever felt in these mountains.

  My boss, Joe, rents the horses from an outfit called Sombrero that lets them free-range in the mountains during the fall and winter. The horses are all starved and half wild by spring when they come to the Girl Scout Ranch. Joe had us wait by the horse trailers when they arrived to send back the ones we thought were too sick. If we could fit a dime between its protruding ribs we wouldn't let it off the trailer. The ones we kept had to spend two weeks being retrained by the wrangler girls.

  So when a wrangler calls this morning from the stable and says an old horse has died, Joe says, "You fellas misjudged one," and we have to go out in the rain to get the dead horse before the campers see it.

  Joe drives us to the pasture. The pasture runs along an incline with a large cup of earth surrounded by lodgepole pines with rainwater pooling over the roots. My coworker, Kurt, says that later in the summer the rain washes away the topsoil down to the clay, "and the clay gets slicker than snot."

  Kurt and I take the tractor into the pasture. It's slow going—the wheels can hardly catch in the mud. In the trees lies a dark brown quarter horse. Its head is sloped downward enough to see a row of yellow headstone shaped teeth embedded in the gums. Its unfurled tongue lies on the ground like a dull pink ladle.

  "We'd be better off just letting the mud swallow the damn thing," Kurt yells over the engine noise.

  The other horses are in the open part of the pasture. But the one they call "Ail-But" is watching us through the trees. Ail-But has everything but one eye. The eye he has is a piercing cloudy blue. That blue eye is on us as Kurt ties a sheep-shank knot to bind the dead horse's back legs together. He hooks a chain to the knotted rope and loops the chain on the back of the tractor where I stand as Kurt drives. He eases the tractor forward slowly so he won't tear off the legs. When the chain is taut, he leans on the gas, and the old horse pivots from the pot of earth it died in. Once we get it out of the trees it starts sliding easily over the wet mud. As it runs over jagged rocks I notice chunks of the hide and meaty patches of the horse's side left behind it. Joe holds the gate open for us so none of the other horses can get out.

  "Drag it as far into the woods as you can, and toss some brush cover over it," Joe says. He has on a mesh baseball cap and the beads of rain are running down the back of his neck. The cold does not change his posture or his directness. He seems like he's done everything a hundred times. Kurt drives past the horse barn towards the woods, away from the little girls' cabins. On the gravel and root path going east on the mountain the horse's body gets caught on a broken root that gouges under its ribcage and snares it like a fishhook. We change the knot and tie another one to its front feet to drag it loose. Dragging it by the front leaves the head swinging backward at an awful angle. I watch the neck snap as we drive. A quick pop breaks through the steady tractor noise.

  We untie it in the woods at the end of the camp's property. The hide has been scraped raw and the last ten yards of mud we moved it through are blood-smeared. This high up, there is too much bedrock to bury it, so we use jigsaws to cut away at the surrounding trees' lowest branches and pile them over the horse until we can no longer see how mangled it is. Part of me feels like we should light the pile on fire.

  I ride on the back of the tractor as we return the way we came. The rain washes the copper-red blood marks and clumps of horse fur away from the trail. There are already turkey vultures flying in wide spirals above the slope we left the horse on, the black finger of their beaks tracing the mountainside. The birds cut through the sky like they are scrolling something on the mountain's thermal updrafts—a language of nature's neatness, its cycles of wind, that I am hoping will tell me how to start my life over.

  * * *

  When I was young, my father, who was from the mountains of Montana, left our family and went back west. Since then, the west has always loomed in the distance like a place you could disappear. That's why I came, and when I first arrived and started working last winter at the ranch, I spent my off-time staring out my cabin windows at the white loneliness of that mountain field. It was too cold to go anywhere even if I had a car, and that trapped feeling had me so cooped up I'd want to wander off on the snow-covered mountainside and disappear. The only thing in the cabin to occupy me was a bunch of old books about how to be an outdoorsman that categorized all the trees and animals.

  There was a book called Pertaining to Sparrows written by a woman who must have loved those birds more than anything else in the world. She even wrote about the sparrow's predators as if she were afraid of such birds herself. She described a small falcon called a kestrel, with its rusty blue-gra
y cap, lightly-spotted breasts, and the way it beat its wings before swooping down on smaller birds or insects, making a shrill, killy-killy-killy noise. There were other books that spoke of the migration cycles and showed pictures of Steller's jays, purple martins, rock wrens, goldfinches, and grackles. I sat looking out that frozen window trying to imagine all those birds returning, calling to each other through the canopy of the subalpine forest. Shee-e-e-e, C-Ough—C-Ough, killy-killy-killy.

  During the days, the only way I could settle down was to keep my hands busy, and keep my mind focused on plowing the road or cleaning the facilities center. Then we started rewiring the electricity in the camper cabins, installing a new furnace for the activities center, building new partitions for the horse barn, and by May, I had passed the winter immersing myself in any project Joe had for us. If I was lucky, I would have worked hard enough during the day to be content and sit on the deck at night. I could ease back into the rocking chair and let the night settle around me— listen to the new language of daily work, silence, and the wind speaking of life on the mountain.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the product of having many wonderful people in my life who I will always be thankful to.

  My deepest gratitude to my agent, Rayhané Sanders, who is a fierce, smart, lovely visionary. Her belief in me will always be one of the greatest gifts in my life.

  My editor, Laura Brown, whose intelligence and grace is as clear as mountain water. Thank you for bringing this book into the world. It’s so nice to be in such good hands.

  Thank you to everyone at Harper Perennial who made this book happen and to Trent Duffy for helping get it all right.

  Steven Schwartz who shaped my writing life and personal life for the best. Thank you for setting such a high bar for me to strive for and cheering for me along the way.

  Jonis Agee whose radiant goodwill and support always lifts others closer to their distant goals. You were one of my favorite people the minute I met you.

  Special thanks to my great teachers, Rick Simpson, Charles Gannon, Stephanie G’Schwind, Judy Doenges, John Calderazzo, Leslee Becker, Todd Mitchell, Judy Slater, and the late Gerald Shapiro. To all my friends and colleagues at St. Bonaventure University, Colorado State University, University of Nebraska—Lincoln, and Bradley University and all points in between including: Thomas Coakley, Jennifer Bryan, Theodore Wheeler, Clarence Harlan Orsi, Karin Babine, Jill McCabe Johnson, SJ Sindu, Ben Lumpkin, Mike Nett, Nick Theodorakos, Tom Cullen, Kevin Gilligan, John Wright, Lee Newton, Rob Prescott, Kevin Stein, and Thomas Palakeel. Also Chris Harding Thornton who swooped in and saved this novel. Jonathan Starke, my most trusted set of eyes, thank you for everything. To all my students who make my work a joy.

  Hans Jonker and everyone that came after.

  Michael and Debbie for opening your home and hearts to a creative writing graduate student. A big risk, I love you. To David, Jori, Allison, all the Sheades, and Herb Miller for becoming family.

  Sabrina and Chantal who sang to me when I was a child. To Jamie, Quinn, Tessa, Brynn, and Kendall, my heart is always with you.

  My parents, Tony and Mariette Murphy, for your holy and wild spirts that showed me how to find beauty in all things and loved me unconditionally. Thank you for filling our home with books and covering the walls with joyful visions of the world.

  Hyat, Nora, and Jude. I had no idea how special the world was until you entered it.

  Becca, after all these years of swimming in words, I’ve found none as beautiful and pulsing with life as you are. I’ll love you forever.

  COPYRIGHT

  THE BOAT RUNNER. Copyright © 2017 by Devin Murphy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  P.S.TM is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  FIRST EDITION

  Print ISBN 978-0-06-265801-2 (pbk.)

  EPub Edition September 2017 ISBN 978-0-06-265802-9

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