We stopped and looked at her.
“Well. I refuse to lose anyone else. That way, they couldn’t send you to the eastern front to be fodder.” She scrunched up her face and shut her eyes like she realized what she suggested. “Well, even if they didn’t make you fight, they’d take you and work you into the ground. You might as well go into hiding. Go underground like your father.” Her thumb made little circles against the inside of her fingers like she were kneading a tiny glob of dough.
It was the first time I’d heard her use the word underground regarding my father. I had been so consumed by my own struggle with his hiding that I hadn’t thought of the ways my mother was trying to make peace with his absence. His absence angered me. More so because it dismantled the impossibly high regard I once held him in. The towering shadow from my youth. The giant in the hallway. At times I had pictured him cowering like a small animal—hushed in terror; a pile of orange rinds and artichoke leaves heaped in front of him; and even cloistered away in a monastery. To couple all of that with what my mother must have conjured him doing meant he was living so many other lives than one at home with me.
I didn’t like those nights, sitting in the living room, getting a good look at what my family had become.
“I need your help tonight, Jacob,” Uncle Martin said one evening in July at the house. He had on his rubber fishing boots, a heavy pullover sweater with a knitted collar and patch pockets, and a pop-tent cloth German hat. “Tonight is going to be a big night.”
I knew the answer he expected and gave it.
“What time do you want me at the docks?” I asked, as if agreeing to such a thing had no weight to it. My hands were squeezed into each other. My nails left little pink crescents against the skin.
“Ten tonight,” Martin said.
I went to my room to be away from my uncle then. Fergus came running in after me and slid across the floor into Edwin’s bed, shifting the mattress. I went to put it back but instead lifted it off to see if Edwin had hidden anything the way I had under my mattress. There was nothing there, but it gave me the idea of looking through the rest of his side of the room, which I proceeded to do. And in a small box of colored pencils, I found a tiny spiral notebook full of etchings of disembodied breasts. All shapes and sizes, with different colored and shaped nipples, protruding from the page, seeming three dimensional. Page after page, he’d drawn them. I remembered Timothy from camp and how he’d described performing virginity tests, and how those words must have sunk like a little bomb into Edwin’s mind. I flipped through the pages, and felt sad for my brother, who had all the same maddening bodily desires hidden away like I did. Though in a way, I was proud of him, as despite those impulses—which to me felt like a drain on any strength—he was still driven, determined to be every moment an artist.
In the same box as the catalog of breast etchings, I also found a miniature polished pine ottoman that matched the chest of drawers I’d stolen from Hilda’s dollhouse. I held it up and tried to imagine all that we’d hidden from each other, then pushed that aching thought out of my head.
By the time I reached the dock that night there were several PT boats tied off. Traffic in the port had begun to increase.
“Do you think they’re all here because of you?” I asked Uncle Martin.
He looked down at me and didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I hope not.”
“That guy Aldrich said the general and his platoon were coming here because of problems.”
“I remember. I heard him.”
There was a large, covered German truck parked by the water. A bald officer with a graying military mustache, wearing a long black trench coat and a stiff-brimmed gray and black hat, leaned against the truck’s passenger side door.
“Martin,” the officer said, “these two men will help you load. We leave at midnight.”
“That will work fine,” Martin said, knocking on the side door of the truck, so the two men would get out and help us. “This is my nephew, Jacob, who will be helping.”
The two soldiers unlatched the back hatch of the truck, and we started unloading food and toiletry supplies into wheeled carts that they pushed to the side of the Lighthouse Lady. Once everything was piled up on the dock, the two soldiers handed it over to me, and I handed it down to Martin, who stacked it all belowdecks.
The two soldiers talked about all the good food that was in the boxes and how they wished they could take a box or two for themselves, but when we finished they went back to their truck, got in, and drove off.
Uncle Martin and I sat on the deck. We looked out at the German tents, which ran all the way up the harbor to the schoolhouse, which the officers had taken over as their headquarters and bunkhouse. During the day townspeople sauntered among the soldiers. They lined up outside the few shops to get whatever they could with their ration cards. It struck me then how much food and supplies we had loaded aboard, and how we could feed most of the town for a month if we passed everything out. My giant uncle in a Nazi uniform could play Robin Hood.
People in town distrusted Uncle Martin and called him a collaborator. They spat out his name because they saw him in the uniform, and that was all they needed to judge, even though he had been a Dutch Marine. They couldn’t have known how ashamed of Holland’s surrender Martin was and how it burned him up so much that he wasn’t done fighting. But the people in town had no idea what he was doing in secret. Being called a conformer meant nothing to him. He was above all of that. This was a gift his ruthlessness provided.
From the boat’s bow I could see where the Germans had hung a poster by the pier about what would happen to locals who protected Jews or downed Royal Air Force in hiding. I’d seen smoking bombers dip out of the sky and watched for the gossamer fabric domes of parachutes dipping to the ground. All the children in town would race out to the fields to try to find the wreckage, but never found anything more than the burnt bodies in the charred fuselages of the downed planes on the outskirts of Delfzijl. The Germans would have seen the same planes landing and scooped up whomever they found floating down.
“A bad lot for them,” Uncle Martin said about downed RAF men. “The Germans know that any German pilot floating to English soil is going to get a farmer’s pitchfork up their ass, so they aren’t too inclined to be nice to those RAF men.”
“That explains the chocolate bars.”
“I guess so,” Martin said.
A few weeks before, low-flying planes dropped V-shaped chocolate bars over the town so that the Dutch people would take more kindly to any RAF men that crash. The chocolate bars clanked on rooftops and slid over the street, and people went crawling on the stones to snatch as many as they could. The wrappers said, Compliments of the RAF.