Abe Portman

Abe Portman’s importance at the novel’s close rests on two connected legacies: he passed knowledge of the peculiar children to his grandson, Jacob, and he shared a past with Emma that she can now show Jacob in a photograph. Though absent from the children’s departure, Abe remains present in both the danger that brought them together and the history Jacob carries away.

Knowledge of the Children

When Jacob confronts Enoch after the children accuse him of betrayal, he acknowledges that he told his grandfather’s stories to a stranger and says Abe must have known he was peculiar, even while letting him think he was not. Enoch insists that Abe had told Jacob everything and shown him pictures of the children. Jacob answers that Golan knew how to find them only because Jacob led him there; Bronwyn points out that Golan had tricked him. The exchange makes Abe’s stories and photographs part of the chain of knowledge that brought Jacob to the children, while distinguishing his grandfather’s disclosures from Jacob’s unwitting role in exposing their whereabouts.

Abe and Emma

As the children prepare to leave, Emma produces a snapshot she has kept in a small wallet at the waistband of her dress. It shows her with Abe when he was young: Emma’s attention is fixed on him, while he appears elsewhere. Jacob reads the image as sad and beautiful, a concise record of the little he knows about their relationship. Emma explains that the photograph was taken just before Abe left for the war, and asks whether Jacob’s father will recognize her. Jacob replies that she looks unchanged.

Legacy at the Departure

The photograph gives the children’s departure an intimate connection to the family Jacob is leaving behind: Abe’s past with Emma joins the extraordinary world Jacob has discovered to the history of his own grandfather. At dawn, as ten peculiar children and one peculiar bird are loaded into three rowboats, Jacob recognizes that leaving his parents, town, and once-best-and-only friend will not feel like simply casting off a weight. The memories he carries are tangible and heavy, and his old life is as impossible to return to as the children’s bombed home. Abe’s story therefore reaches forward into Jacob’s own departure, linking inherited knowledge and remembered attachment to the uncertain journey ahead.