“Start down by the tail,” he said. “Do it like short strokes of a comb.”
I started shaving off the bronzed scales. “What did you do when your dad hit you?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the fish, and feeling like my words were each a finger, reaching into a fire.
“I balled up like a runt,” Uncle Martin said. “But I ran off soon after that.”
“That’s when you went to sea?”
“Yeah. Now I wish I’d have stood up and popped the old bastard. But he passed away soon after I left and I never got the chance. Would have done me a world of good if I’d have done that though.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He was mean but had a hard life so I sort of understand him now. Though then, he used to tell me what to do and when to do it. Drove me batty. Couldn’t handle that. Still can’t.”
We took the fish apart and when he had the steaks cut off, he cubed them and put them aside to fry for dinner that night.
“Why do you think your father was the way he was?” I asked.
Uncle Martin took a small translucent bone and used it to pick his teeth, then flicked it away like a butt. “Who knows,” he said, then went back to the wheelhouse.
Uncle Martin had gained the Germans’ trust by doing whatever he was told and by entertaining them whenever he was around. He was somehow casual, despite the recent losses of his own family members. Though at night on the ship he was solemn, and drank Bols from a brown clay bottle and studied his navigational charts.
At night on the Lighthouse Lady, I’d lie in my bunk and think of Hilda. The high arch of her eye sockets, her cheekbones, which capped off at her rounded chin, her freckles, her soft lips, her strawberry hair, and how everything about her had the look of being from the coast. She gave off a sense that the ocean would precede and follow her everywhere she went.
When it was only Uncle Martin and me onboard, I’d ask him where he thought my father was.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve asked about him everywhere.” He ran his hands over the top of his head as if scrubbing his hair. “I can’t stop thinking about him either. It’s making me a bit crazy.”
We sat until we heard a dogfight over the Ems River. The German fighter planes sounded like the steady hammering of a typewriter.
Uncle Martin had me load a cart full of cinder blocks and about forty two-meter lengths of thin mooring lines. I carried the ropes to the boat and stacked them along the stern like a tangle of giant hemp snakes.
“What do we need all this for?” I asked.
“Someone on the other side wants them.”
When everything was loaded, I untied the mooring lines from the pier and jumped aboard the stern. Martin aimed the bow toward the open channel and set out to cross the Ems over to the German side. The water was calm, and there were no other boats once land was out of sight.
On the German side there was a large base along both sides of the river mouth where the Ems cut south through Emden. The soldiers waiting there were the young men who had commandeered Martin and the Lighthouse Lady. They stood on the dock.
“Guten Abend,” Martin yelled to them. The men waved back and watched me jump off and tie the boat to a cleat on the dock. They looked happy to see us. Martin was the jovial ferryman to them, this giant man full of sea stories, who could barter for things from across the water. He had worked well for them so they started letting him work the logistics of transfers across the Ems, sign the papers on both sides of the water, be in charge of who was coming and going, and they stopped sending a supervisor along.
“What do you think about this?” Martin said to one of the men. Martin handed the man a small cigar box, patted his shoulder, and smiled. “You boys will like these, I bet.”
“Very good. Thank you,” the soldier said. “But how’d you get your hands on these?”
“Ah. I have a habit of losing property. Tricky paperwork. Faulty radio calls.”
“Huh. Thank you. But you’ll want to be careful with that sort of thing from now on.”
“Why’s that?”
“All kinds of havoc was happening with the supply chain in Delfzijl. We’re sending new management over.”
My uncle’s face reddened. “Are you still going to be in charge?”
“No. General Halder.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. He travels with a whole platoon. I imagine you’ll be very busy.”
“He’s going to bring all those people to our port?” Uncle Martin asked.
“We have to get everything running smoothly.”
“I see,” my uncle said.
That my uncle could work so well for these men signaled an ability to segment parts of his life, keeping each separated by unknowable chasms.
“Stay here, Jacob. I’ll be back.” He followed the soldiers to a building on shore. There were triangular cement pillboxes along the river to station big guns. Stiff-looking soldiers scurried about the base. Large red ribbon flags with swastikas on them hung limp from flagpoles. More flags stretched taut on the sides of the buildings. The soldiers working on the docks all looked official, stood straight, and seemed to work with purpose. There was something inspiring about their efficiency and productivity. The image left me no doubt that the Germans would win their war.
When Martin came back, he led twenty soldiers. Each soldier had a flailed-out metal helmet that covered his ears, knee-high black boots, and a thick black belt cinched above his hips that wrapped his wool jacket shut. On the shoulders of each jacket were lapel buckles, and down the chest line were a line of coin-sized buttons. They were armed with truncheon-shaped potato masher grenades dangling off of backpacks, and carried either Karabiner 98ks, five shot bolt-action rifles, or chrome black MP40 submachine guns. A few had Great War Lugers or Walther P38s.
“This is my nephew, he’ll help us across,” Martin said to the soldiers, who climbed on the boat from the stern. They swaggered aboard and spread out on the decks. Half of them sat on the cinder blocks and half went up and rested on the bow. They leaned against their own packs or rested on the mounds of fishing nets to get warm. The SS officer to whom Martin had given the cigar box jumped onboard as well.
“Jacob, this is Aldrich. He’ll be taking the trip with us tonight,” Martin said, pointing to a flat-headed man with a croupy laugh. “Will you go west with them tonight?”
“Yes. I’ll have you drop us off after dark at Delfzijl and we’ll move out together from there,” Aldrich said.