Two Men in the Snow

In a couple of minutes, when this road swings south, the trees on your left are going to open, and you'll be looking out over Frenchman Bay. Up toward the head of it, on the far shore, is the town of Hancock. And on a snowy night in the last autumn of the Second World War, that's where the war came ashore. It was about eleven o'clock on November the twenty-ninth, nineteen forty-four. A German submarine, the U-twelve-thirty, slid up into this bay in the dark. Two German seamen rowed a rubber raft to the shore, and out stepped two spies. One was a German named Erich Gimpel. The other was an American from Connecticut, twenty-six years old, named William Colepaugh. In their suitcases they had a radio, secret ink, sixty thousand dollars in cash and ninety-nine small diamonds. Everything about that plan had been thought through, except Maine. Up the road through the snow trudged two men, underdressed, with no boots on. Harvard Hodgkins saw them first. He was seventeen, driving home from a dance. Mary Forni drove by on her way home from cards, and she saw them too. They just weren't like normal Mainers in November, she said. You never saw anybody walking without boots in snow like that. She said it was a wonder she didn't stop and offer them a ride. Now Harvard Hodgkins was a Boy Scout. He doubled back and followed those tracks through the snow to the shore. And he says that at the end of them he found a little rubber raft, bobbing at the water's edge. The two men got as far as New York, and they didn't get farther. They were sentenced to hang, and Harry Truman let them live. Young Hodgkins was flown to New York, where seventy-three Boy Scouts met him at the airport and he got introduced to Babe Ruth. Mary Forni got a hundred-dollar war bond from the people of Hancock, and lived to ninety-one. That's where most folks quit telling it. I won't. That submarine wasn't finished. Four days after it left those two on the beach, it put a torpedo into a Canadian steamship called the Cornwallis, bound for New Brunswick from Barbados with sugar and molasses. She went down in ten minutes. There were forty-eight people aboard her, and five lived. Nobody knew where she lay until July of twenty twenty-six, when volunteer divers found her at last, nearly four hundred feet down. One of those divers calls her a grave for those forty-three sailors. He says he'd like to bring back something small for the families. Where the trees open, it's all out there. Up the bay, a boy with his eyes on the snow, following two lines of footprints. South, past the last island, out where it goes dark. A hold full of sugar, four hundred feet down, that never got home.