“Hans wasn’t the only storyteller in the family,” Uncle Martin said.
The Lighthouse Lady’s stern had bullet holes fanned out across the bulkhead. Martin kept the engines in idle, and we drifted as we set to work. The weapons were piled in the ship’s lowest hold, the muzzle of the rifles faced forward, and potato masher grenades were stuffed between backpacks so they wouldn’t roll.
“What happens when we get to shore without them?”
“No one’s expecting them. I did the paperwork. The people in Emden think these guys were headed for a patrol for a month along the North Sea shore. And no one at home knows they were supposed to be coming. It’s all taken care of.”
On the deck, the soldier I had spoken with was on his side, and his scalp hung off his head like a ghastly lid. His Hitler Youth dagger had the same inscription as my own, Blut und Ehre. My eyes snapped to the RZM number. The dagger felt weighty as my fingers wrapped around the handle. It could sink into flesh—slip between rib bones, pierce a lung, or slice a kidney.
When the last of the backpacks were loaded into the hull, I didn’t want to go back on the deck to see what Uncle Martin would have me do next. The boat was still in idle. Martin had maneuvered all those men to the back of the ship so he could gun them down when they weren’t looking. My hands shook.
On deck I stood above him and looked into the pit above Aldrich’s eye.
“That’s the man that tried to take your father away,” Martin said. “He’s part of the reason he’s gone. Do you get that? Do you get what they’ve done to your father?”
Until that day, to me, the soldiers were untouchable. It seemed only a matter of time before they would take over all of Europe. It had never occurred to me that their authority could be anything but absolute, unwavering.
“Help me with the pockets. Get the papers, the papers are the most important part,” Martin said. “These are what we want. Soldburchs.” He held up a little paper booklet. Each soldier carried the ID booklet with their unit information, orders, and equipment issued to them.
We sifted out the papers, money, and food and stashed it all in a large burlap sack. When we were done, we put the bag below deck. We took their oilskin jackets and playing cards with naked women on them. One of the men had a typing machine exchange element, an acorn-sized metal ball with the German alphabet stamped across the surface of the sphere. I cupped it, all the possibility of their language contained in my hand for a moment. The pads of my fingers ran over each letter, each the start of some grand story. I put it back in the dead man’s pocket as it seemed too personal a talisman to take from him.
Martin stripped the unsoiled uniforms off several of the soldiers killed by shots to the head. Their pale white skin scratched against the sand painted into the deck for traction. Martin took the uniforms below deck.
“Now, here’s what we do with those cinder blocks and sections of rope you brought aboard.” He dragged one of the soldiers he’d stripped off the pile of dead and laid the man straight out. With one of the six-foot-long sections of mooring lines he tied a harness around the man’s shoulders that also looped his neck. He tied the extra rope of the harness through two cinder blocks.
“Are you watching?”
“Yes,” I said, but I meant Yes, I am always watching. It felt like my eyes would never close.
When he pulled the corpse up to a sitting position, it looked like a pale flesh puppet with a messy borehole in his forehead wearing a cinder-block backpack. Uncle Martin draped a large rubber mat over the port gunwale of the ship, then lifted each of the blocks and tossed them over the rubber mat so they dangled off the side without scraping the paint.
“Grab an arm,” Uncle Martin said.
We picked up the stripped-down soldier from the deck and slid him over the rubber mat where the weight of the blocks pulled him down into a white roil of water. The shape of the body sunk away. The chest was concave as the blocks pulled it downward and the soldier’s rubber-stamped boot soles sank anonymously out of sight. I thought of my father’s story, about the drowning wolf with a belly full of stones, with all the little goats dancing on their hind legs, standing erect like animal spirits.
“Twenty more to go,” Martin said.
“What have we done?” I managed to ask, watching as my uncle dragged another soldier over.
“Look at them, Jacob. They swarm like locust. They’ll spread out and chew on everything, leaving only the pulp of their dark shit behind them. I’d shoot all of them if I could.” Martin cupped my face again. “I’ll drag the body over, and you bring me two blocks and a length of rope for each, then we’ll toss them over together, okay? That way the knots are tied right and none of these buggers come floating up to talk about what happened.”
“They’ll know.”
“No one will know. No one is expecting them.”
“What will happen when the new German troops arrive?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Martin worked with a content silence, as if we were skinning fish on the foredeck. Body after body went over in the darkness and disappeared. It took us a couple of hours to dump them all. I pictured the bottom of the Ems with twenty-one full-grown men anchored upside down at the depths, all their bodies moving with the current and swaying together like seaweed. Fish would eat away at them. At their eyes. The open skin around their wounds. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had eaten such fattened fish.
Martin handed me a bucket on a rope. “Start washing down the back deck.”
I dipped the bucket overboard, hauled it up by pulling at the line hand over hand, and splashed the water on the deck. When Martin came back up he had a bucket of paint and small welding patches. As I scrubbed the run-off gutters, he started to caulk the bullet holes. When he finished with that, he pulled out his welding tanks and a torch. He put an arc welding helmet on, started welding patches over the holes, and bent into the shower of molten orange sparks bouncing off the dark faceplate.
“When you’re done with that start painting over what I’m doing,” Martin told me. “But don’t touch the metal. It’s still too hot to touch. Do a coat over each patch and then do the whole bulkhead.”
Whatever he asked, I did, as if I’d lost any free will I had. The bulkhead was pocked with little circular scars like chicken pox scabs that had been picked off. There were already welding patches all over the sides of the ship that had been painted over before. Each joint of the beaded melding points of the patches somehow melted into the bulkhead in rough but intricate curves.
Martin checked my work, then ran his hand over the outside of the boat to see if there were any puncture holes from his wild spray of bullets. He swept up the shell casings scattered around the wheelhouse and ladder to the back deck.