He often took us fishing. Once the lightbulb factory started turning large profits, and our father could spend more time doing what he wanted, he began coming out with us on Uncle Martin’s boat. We’d cruise together into the Ems, past the Frisian Islands, and into the North Sea. Our father became so enamored with the water he bought a leisure boat for himself, which was the first of its kind in our town’s harbor.
“I have a gift for you guys,” Uncle Martin said as he walked into our home that night. He held out a dusty-looking bottle of liquor. “This is Prohibition-era American liquor. So good it was forbidden.”
“Where’d you get that?” my father asked. He held the bottle up to the light to study the label. Gray with black letters. Old Hermitage Sour Mash Rye. 62. Broad Street. Boston. They went into the living room and sat on the couches. I lay on my stomach and leaned down the stairs to see them. My father still held the bottle. “It’s contraband.”
“No, nothing to worry about,” Uncle Martin said. “Let’s give it a taste.”
My mother caught Uncle Martin’s eyes and nodded her head toward my father.
“You know. I came over because I thought maybe the boys could come out on the boat for the summer?”
My father turned the bottle so he could read the back. “I’ve made plans for them already.”
“Oh yeah?”
My father looked from the bottle to my mother. His jaw was set, and even from where I watched I could see the pounding of blood at his temple. “Yes. They’ll be working at the factory as well.”
“He’s worried about his Volkswagen account. Everything’s about Volkswagen.”
“Drika.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“That’s because it will set us up for the future.”
“That’s what you said about Auto Union.”
My father swung toward her. “Auto Union paid for this house. Built the factory. Go ahead and say something bad about that.”
“You have most of the country’s cars already, Hans.”
“Stop it, Drika. Just stop this. Like I don’t see you setting Martin on me like this.”
My mother turned and saw me at the top of the stairs. “Go to your room, Jacob.”
“Okay. I’m sorry,” I said.
My father looked up and anger melted from him at the sight of me, the way it always did. He hated being angry, coarse, or drunk in front of us and skulked around like a shamed dog after behaving so.
“Go study your words, Jacob,” he said and smiled.
From the heating vent, I heard them talking about the camp. Mostly my mother protesting sending us away and pestering Uncle Martin to help change my father’s mind.
“You could go out on the boat with them, Hans,” my mother said. “Spend some time with your boys.”
If my father heard her, he said nothing.
Edwin pencil-sketched a dark silhouette cutting through a stand of trees. The trees had enough depth to draw the eye into the suggested shadow. That was something he practiced. Shadows. I caught him after he put one of our mother’s dresses on Fergus and chased the dog around the house to study the way folds in the fabric played with light.
“You fancy dogs now?” I teased him.
He didn’t respond and acted like he didn’t hear me. I wondered if he registered any of the tension below the floorboards the way I did. That antenna of mine caught every shifting speck of frustration and pulled it into the endlessly burbling core of my body.
In the end, after my uncle left and my mother and father had a screaming match that felt like it would split the foundation of our home, but crested and fell into the long, apologetic chords of exhaustion, it was agreed that we would go out for a weeklong fishing trip with Uncle Martin, return home to pick up our father who would accompany us to the camp, then come home from camp and work in the factory until school started.
It was a compromise of sorts. A neat and orderly parceling of our time.
2
In early July, my father brought us to the docks to meet Uncle Martin’s boat, the Lighthouse Lady. On our way through town, we saw Father Heard, the parish priest, who was also one of my father’s best, if not only, friends. The two of them founded and kept afloat what seemed to be the only Catholic Church in the north. Father Heard led a man named Samuel to the church by his left arm. Samuel had no control over his right arm. It shot out over his head and frantically scribbled, as if writing some great, unknown sentence in the air. Everyone called him the air-writer. Samuel mostly wandered the town all day and lived in an apartment his father had set him up with before he died. His father had left money in his will to have Father Heard keep watch over his son. My father hired Samuel to clean the factory and the town’s church so he had something to do. My mother said Samuel had been touched in the head, but Ludo called him retarded when no one else was around.
Ludo lived with his mother and father in a row of brownstones three kilometers beyond the church. Ludo’s father was a carpenter. His mother worked at Koopman Light on the factory floor.
The morning shift was starting soon, and the town seemed alive with people flowing to the factory. Most of them I’d known long enough to pick out their gait at first light. There was Edward Fass, who was thick-chested, rough-hewn, and as scarred up as a cutting block. He worked the assembly line and was known for his loud mouth. Gerard Van Den Bosch and his wife, Annie, both worked as accountants for my father. They walked from the early morning café with an old widow, Maud Stein, whose husband was one of my father’s first employees. Most of the town had some connection to my father’s factory, which meant he was often treated with a sort of deference that came with an emotional remove from other families.
When we got to the dock we boarded the boat. Uncle Martin was going to bring us back in six days’ time to pick up our father and Ludo, who had persuaded his parents to let him come to camp with us. Then we would cross the Ems and board a train to the summer camp in Germany.
During our first morning on the Lighthouse Lady, Edwin and I set out long nets and spent the afternoon picking cod, herring, friar fish, hake, flounder, mackerel, and an occasional squid from the gill nets and tossing them down a chute to Uncle Martin who sliced them up and pitched the entrails over the side for the seagulls.
We started close enough to shore to see long-legged shorebirds run back and forth at the edge of the surf. Oystercatchers kept following the waves so they could dig with their beaks into the newly packed sand before they raised their wings and ran away squawking from the next incoming wash. All day they danced like that.
The estuary was eighty kilometers across at its widest point. Uncle Martin knew every ledge, sandbar, and current around the clock and tried to teach us about navigating a vessel. “You have to be able to picture the wind on the map too. How it works on water,” he said as I looked at all the charts.
He let me steer the boat straight across the channel where there was a shelf underwater that dipped to the deepest point of the Ems; we couldn’t see land on either side. To me, the Ems itself seemed alive and I wanted to keep going as far out to sea as possible.