“The pit’s walls twitched with shadows in the light of his torch as he descended, deeper and deeper, until the last of the rope pulled tight and he still had not yet reached the end. He dipped a torch into the pit and watched it fall, then fade into an orange pinprick until it disappeared altogether. He swung there in his tub and cursed the dark abyss. So he got out his knife and yelled good-bye to the people above, and he cut loose the rope and fell down the hole.
“And still, he is falling, being swallowed by the slow darkness and beginning to fear that it is, in fact, a bottomless hole.”
I was choked with sudden emotion. It was clear that my father was saddled with the endless burden of wondering where his other son was, a burden that bubbled up through his stories, and I felt it too, the pressure of being responsible for Edwin, for the loss of him.
The children leaned in close to my father, expecting the rest of the story, what was at the bottom, what adventures were to be had down there, and how Thump-Drag gets out. But my father stood up. It was the first time in all the years of telling stories he got up from his chair before the children around him did, before they were satisfied with the experience he’d given them.
“Dear god, Hans,” my mother said as we left the church together. Her face was red and grimy. She’d been crying. “You’ll give them all nightmares.”
“A taste of darkness won’t kill them,” he said.
After a fruitless night of searching for Samuel, my father looked very near collapse. But instead of getting some rest, he holed himself up in his lab again. When I went there to see him, he called out, “Not now,” so I left him alone.
Three days later, my family and Ludo and Hilda went to the harbor. Soldiers stood nearby around a fire they’d made in a steel drum. They’d punched holes at the base of the drum for air to get in, and the flames looked like fiery eyeballs and reflected off the snow and all the polished, black boots. It was still strange to hear the guttural German language spoken everywhere in my own village. Other soldiers loaded and unloaded boats on the dock. They pushed little lorries and wobbly wheelbarrows up the icy path toward waiting trucks.
There was a loud roar from planes flying overhead. The hum of German planes on maneuver sounded like a quickened thunderhead from a great distance, and was followed by the high whine of their propellers sucking the air off the ground as they hammered across the sky.
“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.