Episode
The Watchman
- Podcast
- I Believe
- Published
- Jan 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1478
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/the-watchman
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Summary
Kansas. Summer, 1936. The bluffs above the Missouri. The river didn’t look dangerous. Wide and brown and slow. Trees leaning over the banks. A boy could stand on the bluff and think he understood what he was looking at. He was fourteen. Watching a man jump from the railroad bridge. Everyone did it. You climbed the trestle. Leapt. Hit the water. Swam to the bank. He’d done it himself, twice. The shock of cold. Hard swim to the shallows. You came up laughing. The undertow you couldn’t see. The surface looked the same everywhere. Brown and slow and safe. The man jumped. Hit the water clean. Came up once. Twice. Didn’t come up again. People were shouting. Someone ran for a rope. The boy took a step toward the edge. Stopped. His hands were shaking. He didn’t jump. They found the body two miles downstream. Tangled in the roots of a cottonwood, water still pulling at his legs. The man’s face looked surprised. There is the Leviathan. He moves in the deep, in the playground of God. He waits for his food in its season. God asks, Can you draw him out with a fishhook? Put a cord through his nose? Make a covenant with him? Act I. The Floorboard Copenhagen, spring 1945, three weeks after the Germans left. He talked too much. He knew it. The city was full of people who’d spent four years learning to be silent. How to walk past soldiers without being seen. How to keep their faces empty. Voices low. Thoughts locked behind their teeth. He moved through it like weather. Big hands, loud laugh, American uniform. They’d won. The Germans were gone. What was everyone so quiet about? She was sitting alone at a table in the jazz club. Blonde. Thin in a way that made him look twice. She held her glass like she wasn’t sure she had permission. He sat down without asking. “You speak English?” “A li…