“Stop barking,” Uncle Martin yelled at Fergus. A tragic tremolo floated at the end of his words. “Stop barking. Go dig a hole with all that energy. Help us out and dig a hole.”
Fergus ran to me, nudged my hand with his cold nose, and then went back to bark at my mother.
The shape of her body looked plastered to the floor, mummified with rust-colored puddles of her watered-down blood on the tile. Fergus whimpered at the doorway but wouldn’t go any farther into the room. I put my hand on the dog’s head and let my fingers scratch the velvet tips of his ears. Then I stepped into the bathroom, kneeled into the puddle, and felt the blood-water soak into the cloth and cool my skin. I put my hand on her chest and felt compelled to start pushing down, with all my strength, to make her heart beat again. But, once something was dead, it was dead forever. I knew this. The towels were still wet to the touch. I peeled the topmost one back to make sure it was really her. That this was not some awful mistake. When I looked down into her battered face, I knew there was nothing left for me, so I kissed her forehead, pulled out her left hand, kissed her on each fingertip, and covered her once more.
“What are we going to do?” Martin asked.
He ran a fresh wet cloth over her face. His own face was coated in grime. I stood up and walked out of the room. Out the window was the huge pit, which was now a sunken little ice pond, a jewel of frozen water.
“Where should we bury her?” echoed out of the bathroom when I went into the living room, the room she used to dance in, and curled up on the couch. I picked up a pillow. A hexagon patchwork with a thick blue chord sewn along the edge and port wine-colored tassels. Homemade. I held it. Touched by the care and delicacy of her work. I hugged the pillow and lay like that, listening to my uncle ranting and cleaning her off in the bathroom and Fergus’s barking choir until everything in me succumbed to exhaustion. The last vapors of the massive rush that had kept me going drained away. This was the day my mother died. There would never be another day like it. Still, I could not yet mourn, not yet cry, and had spent a quick and horrible burst of anger on Herbert Yarborough, and could do nothing else but fold inside myself and fall asleep.
I woke to my uncle standing over me. There was a hot, sweet smell on his breath, peat moss scotch, engine fumes, and burnt hair. Streaks of water cut channels down his filthy face. He had no reason to wash.
“Get your things,” he said. He walked into the kitchen where the pantry door popped open.
I lay back down and tried not to wade into the river of faces of loved ones who were now gone. I shut my eyes and tried to be Herbert Yarborough, loose in the sky cut by the white triangular whirl of propellers.
“Where are we going?” I called out.
“Get your things and I’ll show you.”
I packed my backpack with my identification papers, warm clothes, the German officer’s Luger, and Herbert Yarborough’s barter kit, jumpsuit, and papers. Then I went to the bathroom door. My mother was no longer there.
“Where is she?”
“Come on.”
I followed my uncle outside, where he headed through the woods. I could picture another chiseled rock laid out next to the headstone Ludo carved. But Uncle Martin walked past the upturned headstone toward the dock by the water.
“What’s happening?”
“We’re going to give your mother a burial at sea, Jacob.”
The idea of dumping my mother off the side of the Lighthouse Lady made me stop. The image of a heathen ceremony came to me then, as dumping her in the water was no different to me than if we torched her in a funeral pyre, or draped her from the limbs of a tree and offered her up to carrion birds.
The boat was tied to the old pier through the woods. He untied the line as we stepped aboard.
On the deck of the wheelhouse lay my mother. There was a clean sheet over her body but I could see he had cleaned and dressed her. He started the engines and maneuvered us into the heart of the Ems.
“What’s happening?”
“They’re sending a large group of soldiers over to check the wreckage. They called us to get them. We’re going to get all of them this time. We’ll bury your mother and then we’ll cause some real damage. Something real,” he said. “Real.” His eyes were red and spiteful—crazy spiteful, like he had no intention of hiding his true hatred tonight.
My mind flashed forward to what my uncle would have me do if I continued with him. He would smile and nod throughout the whole war to disarm the Germans, and then massacre them when they let their guard down. He would go on bigger and bigger missions, and take bigger risks with the hope that some Allied force would again step foot in Holland and defeat the Germans.
At the time I didn’t believe that would ever happen. I had seen the child army practicing at the camps and remembered the two thousand boys running to the beach and playing in the water. There were so many boys. There had been groups like that all over Germany. All trained to answer a unifying call. They were too plentiful and too well organized to lose the war. Uncle Martin would rage against this undying force and be killed, and there was nothing I could do. I knew all this. To me, the outcome was inevitable. Fire and ash and death would continue until the war was over. At the time, it seemed to me that to end it all as soon as possible was the only way to alleviate the suffering.
I kneeled next to my supine mother, lifted the hem of her blue, flower-print dress, pressed the collar to my nose, and smelled it. Breathed it in. Everything in my body pounded like I was touching my own heart. I thought of my father holding the empty burlap sack in the water thinking it was Edwin, and only now felt I could relate to that kind of emptiness. Tears burst out of me. I tried to catch them in my fists but they spurt through my fingers. The thought of my mother lost to the cold water was too much.
“I can’t do this.”
“The ground is too frozen.”
“No. Go out with you, again. I want this all to stop.”
“We’re already on our way.”
I looked over the side of the ship. We were a hundred meters from the shore. “I need you to take me back.”
“No going back now,” he said.
“Uncle Martin. I can’t do this.”
He did not say anything; either he was not listening or he did not care.
“Why do we have to do this?” I said. A burning lump lodged in my throat. “It was the RAF who did this. They destroyed everything.”
Martin looked back at me. So many different expressions crossed his face I thought it would split open. Wet light filled his eyes. He had caused enough trouble in town that the Germans had set up a whole battalion here, and it was probably that massing that caught the RAF’s attention. He must have felt that burning responsibility, only increasing his rage. Some devil sat up inside me and, again, I saw what lay ahead of us. More men gunned down and boats sunk. More atrocities. He would continue to fracture the world into more ruined shards. I was certain then that my uncle was wired to explode, and I wanted no part picking up the leftover pieces.