That Tuesday afternoon, when Father Heard had called everyone in his congregation together, my father and I were the last two people to arrive. Inside the church, the windows had not been repaired since that first dusting of bombs dropped over Delfzijl. The large stained-glass window above the altar of three dark crosses on a jade green hill was now a yawning hole with glass-shard teeth, jagged and translucent. The smell of incense and smoky wool rose off the congregation as we joined them, huddled together in wet coats and hats. Steam rose off their heads as they tucked themselves further into their clothes.
A wave of chills rolled down my spine. I was always cold then, always breathing into cupped hands to warm them. Father Heard had swept all the glass debris off the floor, but there were still pieces lodged in the organ pipes, shifting inside them as my mother played. It was a subtle sound the other people in church would not have picked up on, but I’d been listening to the smallest nuances of her playing for years, ever since my father donated the money to Father Heard to first install the organ. In the front of the church, the organ pipes now seemed like they lifted out of my mother’s body, like it was her breath that set the timbre of each wailing tube of alloy. Since we lost Edwin, the songs she played had been slower, more morbid. Even the standards she played during the Mass had a different tone to them. They were the same songs everyone knew, but it lacked her clarity of rhythm, as if she had plunged her hands into a clear stream but her fingers mucked up a cloud of silt and dirtied the water. Her mournful sound made its way out from under the rafters into the immense, open sky, where the dark essence of her dirge drifted over all of Holland.
My father and I stepped to the side of the back door and listened to my mother play. Father Heard walked out from the door off to the side of the altar, keeping his shoulder to the wall. He walked to the back of the church and leaned in close to my father.
“Please don’t do this,” my father said.
“Hans, Samuel is missing,” Father Heard said.
The news made no sense to me. Samuel, the air-writer, had been a fixture of our town my whole life, furiously scribbling out his thoughts above his head. I could close my eyes and see him feeding pigeons, hear Ludo mocking his spasms.
“The vendors who provide him with food spoke to one another after the bags went unclaimed. This was yesterday. They let me know this morning, and he wasn’t in his apartment.”
I imagined Father Heard trying to find a trace of Samuel, wanting to read the writing that must have filled the air between those apartment walls.
“Should we go look for him?” my father asked.
“I had people out all morning. He’s gone.”
“What do you think happened?” my father said.
“What do you think happened!” Father Heard spit back.
The people in the back rows all watched the priest and my father exchange animated whispers.
“You both can help me look after I read this letter. You see why I need to read it now, don’t you?”
My father blankly nodded to Father Heard.
“Okay,” my father said. “Okay.” He leaned in to hug Father Heard. “We’ll look for him.”
Father Heard returned the embrace, then walked down the center aisle to the altar. My mother stopped playing. As Father Heard read the letter, his voice was calm and steady. His deep-set eyes narrowed and scanned the room to single each of us out. His right hand wrapped around the podium, his knuckles were white where he gripped the edge, and his left hand chopped the air in front of him in rhythm with the enunciation of his words. He was once again the familiar authority figure our little church knew him to be.
“We must protest this abominable persecution.” His voice boomed out over the room. The shoulders of the men in front of me scrunched up beneath their heavy jackets each time he uttered the word strike.
My mother turned on her bench to face Father Heard. The organ pipes rose up behind her to the exposed wooden rafters of the A-frame roof. My father sat in the back row of varnished pine pews. Ludo and Hilda were sitting in the front with their parents. Men from the factory and their children filled the rest of the pews. A random smattering of fishermen sat among them. From behind, the whole congregation looked like rodents peeking out of holes. Their spines arched forward, their bodies doubled over either for warmth or to hide, perhaps, from the call for ethical action to be taken.
“Lord, please keep your finger on our shoulder to protect us during these trying times,” Father Heard concluded.
Then the children in the church walked out of their pews and gathered in the back corner, like it was a regular Sunday Mass. They all looked at my father. It was striking to not see Samuel sitting among them. Once my father stood up, the children sat in a half circle. He walked by me and put a hand on my shoulder. He chewed the inside of his lip, causing his left cheek to suction in and out.
He walked to where the children waited, sat in the chair one of the little boys put out for him, and started telling us a story.
“Behind Thump-Drag’s cabin in the woods there was a giant open pit that he could not see the bottom of,” my father began. “When he walked to the side he looked down and saw only a pool of darkness. Every morning when he woke, he walked to the lip of the pit and peered inside, tossing pebbles and stones down and listening for them to land. Townspeople knew of the pit too, and they brought their wagons full of trash, dead cows, and piles of stones they unearthed from their fields, and they dumped everything off the edge and were happy to be rid of it.
“‘We have never had to dig a hole to bury our dead or to dispose of our waste because of this pit,’ an old woman told Thump-Drag.
“Thump-Drag could not keep from thinking of the bottom of the hole and all the mess people had let fall down there. He stood beside it late into the evening, peering into the dark and seeking out the bottom. He did this until he imagined himself sinking into the mouth of the hole, weightless and descending into the cup of earth, sinking away from the surface of the world. When he could no longer withstand not knowing where the hole ended, he built himself a chariot out of ropes and an old claw-footed bathtub. He stood in the tub and held a torch with several unlit torches at his feet. He had the town’s people help him by lowering the tub with him into the pit.