10

My mother went to work at the factory every day that winter after my father left. That first Sunday, she showed up to church and played her organ for the people who came. In my father’s absence, she played louder and harder, and for once since Edwin left, she was animated, and wailed on the keys and pedal, giving a wild concert. Her song trailed off into its last echoes, each note coming to silence like a dark bird piercing a silver cloud. Week after week she showed up to play the organ, letting the voice of those pipes clear and sing whatever mourning or worry she had locked in her, but fewer and fewer people came.

During the rest of the time she was frantic with worry, pestering me about where I was going and when I’d be back, pacing around the house, saying, “I can do this. I can do this.” She did this until she crested some new height of fear, and then in an act I will always be proud of, she got herself dressed.

“I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t wait,” she said. “Martin is doing everything he can, but I can’t wait.” She decided she was going to go find my father. She bundled herself in three sweaters and an overcoat and marched from house to house all through the town and looked into the eyes of the people who lived there.

“Please. Have you seen or heard from my husband?”

I accompanied her on the first several rounds through town.

For me, my brother was always present, floating in a blue underground river. I imagined my father, who belly-crawled through the frozen woods with his cheek to the ground, had heard some trace of that current, that he was rubbing his body over it to understand where to go next. I glommed onto that image of my father, driven by a purpose and not merely a deserter. Though how I thought of him shifted and spun like the Devil in his story, coming out of each dance turn in a new disguise. The businessman. Storyteller. Drinker. Inventor. Coward. Saboteur. Runaway. The Missing. The Gone.

Sadly, my mother, who was very much present, I tried to dismiss as a stranger. Her worry poisoned me. It compounded my hurt and anger. I was angry with my people for releasing the dams and flooding my brother away, with the Germans for pushing forward with their wild expansion, and most with my father for breaking the rules and being forced to run away. For my mother, I was angry with her for her obvious and glaring pain, as it kept me from going numb.

At home, rock piles by the pit in our backyard looked like they were placed in the forms of arrows, pointing toward my father’s hiding spot. Everything became some indecipherable clue. Because of this, I avoided going home as much as possible. I started going to the woods behind Hilda’s house to watch for movement behind lit windows or to the docks to help Uncle Martin on his boat. My options were very limited. After my eighteenth birthday, the Germans would make me join a labor crew in the German factories, the Heer, or the Waffen SS, and probably send me to the eastern front. For a while that winter, I was actually eager to leave.

On a warm morning, Hilda came by our house.

“Will you come watch me ride?”

“Sure.”

We walked up the road between our houses.

“Thank you,” she said and reached over and held my hand.

My body felt so tight I didn’t dare turn and look at her. For a moment I thought things might begin to get better.

I climbed and sat on a wood split-rail fence as she saddled and led a black-and-white quarter horse into the paddock.

“Here we go,” she said. “You ready?”

“I’m watching.”

She eased the horse in a circle close to me and then picked up speed and started doing fast jaunts about the field. I tried to memorize the way her body moved on the horse’s back through that beautiful wooded meadow.

When we were children, Hilda’s father had a white horse that he let be used by whomever in town dressed up as St. Nicholas that year. So on St. Nicholas Day, December 5, the parade started from Hilda’s house and worked its way down our road into town. When we still believed, we waited in our driveway and joined the procession of St. Nicholas and his gang of boys in blackface called Black Peters. When we were old enough to understand what was happening, we went to Hilda’s first thing in the morning every December 5. Hilda’s mother, a redheaded woman who smelled like dried flowers, painted all of the kids’ faces black with shoe polish, and gave us bags of candies and gingersnaps to throw at people once we got into town.

“Don’t eat all of this yourself,” she’d say, giving us a soft smile, knowing we would eat our fair share.

One year, when Hilda was nine and we were dressed, and our skin blackened, we ran around half wild until the adults readied the horse and St. Nicholas. It was during that intermission some of the kids knocked over Hilda’s wooden dollhouse. She dropped her bag of candy and knelt next to the large house and picked up the far wall that had broken off.

“Don’t worry, Hilda,” Ludo said, “We’ll get my dad to fix it.”

“I can help. My dad can help too,” I said, wanting to be the one to do it.

The next afternoon my brother and I carried the dollhouse on a cart to my father’s lab.

“What do we have here, Jacob?” he said, looking at the dollhouse, then at me. “Think we can get it back together?”

“I hope so,” I said.

“Sure we can.”

He used industrial glue and tiny clamps to repair the broken wall, and when that was done, he bent down with his hands on his knees and peered into the house.

“You know what. I think we should spruce up the old place for your special friend, Hilda.”

“How?”

“I’ve got some ideas.”

He spent the next three hours installing tiny lights, wiring, and a light switch, which Hilda flipped on when we brought it back to her. She stood at the front door laughing as the tiny rooms became illuminated.

Each room of the dollhouse had miniature polished pine furniture. Beds with headboards, rocking chairs, and coffee tables. From one of the bedrooms, I stole a small chest of drawers and kept it hidden under my mattress. At night I’d open and shut the little drawers and imagine Hilda in her house. I’d see her walking from room to room. Taking a snack from the pantry. Reading by a window. Her feet tucked under her legs. Nothing special. Just her going about her day.

I was thinking about the dollhouse while Hilda rode the black-and-white mare, nearing to where I was on the railing. The sun caught her eyes, which were wet from crying.

Without wiping her face, she swung off the horse, removed her helmet, led the horse to the fence I sat on, and tied the rope to the post next to me. I sprang down to stand in front of her.

“Are you okay?”

“We have to sell her,” she said. “The food’s getting too expensive.”

Her cheeks were blotched as crushed roses. The light silvered her upper lip, where tears and snot slicked her skin. She walked up to me, like she was trying to walk through me and tucked her body into mine. I hugged her. She smelled like horse sweat, hay, and Hilda. She always had her own scent, which came off her in waves. Crushed flowers. Soaped hair. The sun. Hilda.

Her shoulders heaved up and down and her hands made one fist at the small of my back.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Of course I did. My mantra.

Before she finished crying she tilted her head up, closed her eyes, squeezed me closer, and kissed me on the lips. Her tongue jammed inside my mouth and surprised me. I pushed myself into her. I did not shut my eyes but she did. She kept hers shut as we kissed, even as she loosened her hands from behind my back and pressed her palms and fingers downward flat against my stomach and slid them into my pants.

It was the middle of the day. The sun was on us and I thought, Sweet merciful Christ, finally. She must have felt me swelling when she leaned against me, which was more a bodily reaction than a courageous act on my part, but before I dropped my arms from holding her she had her hand on my half-erect penis. She leaned her forehead into my chest and I looked up at the sky.

There was nothing gentle about what she was doing, and I kept thinking about putting my hands down her pants. Do it. Reach down. Reach down. Grab her there, now, but before I was fully hard, I crumpled over and came into her hand. She still had not opened her eyes or looked up at me.

The sun was on us still. It was the first time a girl had made me come. Though it hurt enough to feel like she’d dismembered me, the whole moment bloomed into a vivid flame and seared itself intact onto the underside of my skull. Always afterward, when the thought of touching anyone arises, it’s Hilda’s hands reaching into my pants. The promise of her touch.

The light caught Hilda’s hands and the pearly sheen on her palm and fingers as she pulled them free. She bent down and wiped her hand on the grass. Then stood up, and still, without looking at me, leaned in again.

I walked her to the barn and held the hand she hadn’t wiped in the grass and rubbed my thumb against her knuckles, noticing how soft her skin was. Back and forth. Back and forth, like I was making sure she was real. In the barn I watched her take off the horse’s saddle and scrub its back and along the sides with a large sponge like it were a final ceremony. I do not recall talking as she did this. I was looking at the corner of the barn as a place for Hilda and me to fall together again. I imagined her bed. My bed with her in it. Us crashing into each other and toppling over again and again. Her hands all over my body. Mine all over hers. The whole world was now a place to be with a girl. The whole world hammered with potential.

Now, I see that what I was witnessing was a sad girl who had to give her horse away. I did not take that in at the time. I did not take in the hurt that made her reach for me.