The Wings of Morning (17 page)

Hosea’s face had gone white. He thought a moment and suddenly put a hand on Jude’s arm. “Is that what it is? You have not negotiated our release? No one has twisted your arm? You really want to get back into an aeroplane so badly you will shoot other men out of the sky to do it?”

Jude shrugged and went along with Hosea for the general’s benefit. “God has put it in me to be a good aviator. There is nothing more to it than that. I want to fly as God intended.”

“As God intended?”

“Yes, my brother. God gave me wings and I am going to use them.”

Hosea turned away from him and the trench-coated general with a broken look and headed back to the other four, who were slumped on the grass. The sky was a mixture of dawn and darkness as he walked. “May God have mercy on us all,” Hosea whispered, closing his eyes.

The five men returned to Paradise with a military police escort. Their families and friends were waiting, and the men had hardly stepped down onto the train platform before people swarmed over them, hugging and kissing. They were in new clothes and their wounds and bruises had been cared for. Yet it immediately became obvious that someone was missing.

“Where is Jude?” asked Mr. Whetstone. “Where is my son?”

“What has happened to him?” Lyyndaya demanded of Hosea.

Hosea had one arm around his young brother, John, who clutched one of his precious books, and his sister Annie, who had knitted a woolen scarf he wound about his neck. The easygoing smile dropped from Hosea’s face as he explained. “Jude enlisted in the army. He’s going to fly in France.”

“What?” Bishop Zook’s face crisscrossed with lines. “Impossible.”

“I’m sorry, Father, but it’s true. He’s in training camp right now and soon he will be going overseas.”

The bishop stood rooted while others swirled around him, laughing and praising God, unaware of what Hosea was saying, overjoyed to see the young men safely back.

Bishop Zook’s lips scarcely moved. “I cannot believe it. I cannot believe Jude would do this.” He looked sharply at his son. “There must be an explanation. What is the explanation?”

Hosea shrugged unhappily. “He wanted to fly, Father. That’s all. He wanted to fly.”

Lyyndaya found she could no longer enjoy the joyous occasion and returned to her buggy. What on earth had happened? Had Jude’s love for flying now become more important than his faith?

W
eeks and months passed until 1917 became 1918. No one heard from Jude or the army—not his father, not the bishop, not Emma, and not Lyyndaya Kurtz. The snows of January and February swept over Pennsylvania and the Lapp Amish prayed, unwilling to believe one of their own had gone off to war, hopeful they would soon receive news to the contrary, that somehow Hosea had misunderstood what had happened at the camp. Then it was March, and still not a word. Until one gray morning found Emma and Lyyndaya moving rapidly along the road in a carriage, heading toward town.

“And Mrs. Stoltzfus said there were two letters from Jude?” asked Emma.

Lyyndaya flicked the traces for Old Oak and nodded. “
Ja
.”

“A letter for each of us?” Emma’s eyebrows had come together in a dark line of anxiety.

“No. He wrote both letters to me.” Lyyndaya glanced at Emma’s troubled face and laughed. “Oh, you silly girl, of course he wrote you a letter. You know he has feelings for both of us. He has said so many times.”

Emma leaned her head back and closed her eyes as the buggy bounced and swayed down the road. A few snowflakes, like thin snips of paper, spun down out of the March clouds. “Men change their minds.”

“So do women.”

“Well, not these two women. Not yet, at any rate.” Emma opened her almond-shaped green eyes and looked at Lyyndaya. “If this were the time of King Solomon then Jude could marry both of us. We’d be like sisters.”

“We’re already sisters.”

“But not just Christian sisters. Oh well, it wouldn’t work, I’m sure. We both want Jude to ourselves, don’t we? Whichever one of us wins his heart, she’s the one who gets him all to herself. And that’s the way it should be.”

Both girls turned silently to their own thoughts about what might be in their futures.

As they passed another buggy headed in the opposite direction, Lyyndaya came out of her thoughts and asked, “Have you heard anything lately? Maybe through your father?”

Emma rubbed her temples with her hands. “Oh, nothing, really. There has been talk, meetings, but no decision has been made, if that’s what you mean.”

“What about your brother? What does he say?”

“Hosea says that Jude wanted to fly so badly he decided to enlist. Last night there was a meeting and I could hear their voices through the floor. Pastor Miller and Pastor King are very angry with Jude. They say he has not only betrayed the Lapp Amish but has also turned his back on God.”

Lyyndaya felt a stab of pain. “But he has done nothing more than enlist. As far as we know he is not even in France. Has not even fired a shot.”

“But he will.”

“Perhaps not.”

“How can he not?” Emma’s usually smooth brown face was creased with deep lines. “Or does he think the army will just let him fly one of those aeroplanes that takes pictures?”

“Reconnaissance aircraft?”

“
Ja
.”

“They may permit that.”

Emma made fists. “No, they won’t, Lyyndy, you know they won’t. He’s too good for that. He can do circles around robins and starlings and hawks. They won’t waste him flying a plane in a straight line. And what makes you think he would want to fly a plane in a straight line anyway?”

Lyyndaya had no answer.

Emma struck a fist against the side of the buggy. “Why did he join the army? Why is it in him to be so crazy about flying? If he had waited until the war was over he could have just flown a plane for somebody without having to shoot a gun. You can see there will be plenty of things to do with planes once the war has ended.”

“And when will the war end, Emma?”

Emma shot Lyyndaya a dark look. “How should I know?”

“It could be years yet. How can we be sure the Lapp Amish will still allow him to fly in 1919 or 1920?”

“You think that’s why he signed up? It might be one of his last chances to really fly?”

Lyyndaya shrugged. “Put yourself in his shoes. You know how these things turn out. Electricity, telephones, the new motorcars…I can’t imagine it will be decided that aeroplanes are permissible. If aeroplanes, then why not motorcars?”

“But I don’t want to put myself in his shoes!” Emma almost shouted, startling Old Oak, who broke into a faster trot. “I want him to put himself in mine. He knew the trouble this would cause me—cause the two of us. It’s only a matter of time before they pronounce the
Streng Meidung
. Once he’s flying in France against German aeroplanes, that will be the end of it. My father will not be able to stave off Pastor Miller and Pastor King and others in the colony any further. The strictest shunning will begin. Jude
knew
this would happen. He
knew
it would hurt me, hurt our chance to have an Amish marriage and be an Amish couple. Yet he is so
verruckt
, so crazy in the head about being up in the air like a bird, he is thinking like one now.”

Lyyndaya reined Old Oak in and stared at the anger in Emma’s face. Her long hands, large for a woman, were still balled into fists, and strands of her dark hair had unraveled against her cheeks. She was glaring straight ahead.

“I doubt we know the whole story of why he enlisted,” Lyyndaya said in a soft voice.

“Of course we know.” Emma’s voice was harsh. “He got tired of cleaning latrines. He wanted out of the camp. He could have returned to Paradise and me—us—along with the others when they were released, but he wanted to fly more than he wanted to court either of us.”

Lyyndaya shook her head. “I know he loves to fly, but it still doesn’t sit right with me. There’s something, I think, that we do not know. It’s not like Jude to make a decision that flies in the face of everything that’s Amish and not even come home first to explain himself. Or at least write it in a letter.”

Emma leaned forward with her face in her hands. “The army changed him. Hosea says some of the soldiers were very cruel to them. He doesn’t go into details. But it was hard on all of them. Maybe something inside of Jude snapped and broke—like frayed leather.”

“It may be that he will tell us what made him do this in his letters.”

Emma’s voice came through her fingers. “If Mrs. Stoltzfus was correct. If there are letters at the post office.”

“Why would she not be correct? She is not that old.”

Emma sat up, her eyes a pale, washed-out green. “I feel old. Like I am forty! When the shunning begins we can’t even eat at the same table with Jude, or take rides with him, or accept gifts, or receive mail. We certainly can’t court.” She blew out a lungful of air. “Oh, well. There are handsome men in some of the other Lapp Amish settlements.”

Lyyndaya was surprised. “As handsome as Jude? Like who?”

“Benjamin Fisher over by Intercourse. He’s good-looking. And Noah Raber at Bird-in-Hand. He is very tall and manly.”

“Are you serious?”

“Well, I must pray and ask for God’s guidance, of course. But I don’t intend to become an old maid waiting for the war to end and Jude to confess and repent.”

“Are you giving up so easily?” teased Lyyndaya. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll run away with him?”

“The only way you’ll run away with him is if you both run away from the Amish altogether. Are you prepared to do that? To separate yourself from your mother and father and sister? From your people? Your God?”

Lyyndaya kept her eyes on the road. “I suppose not,” she replied.

“So I’m not worried about you running off with Jude. Or even flying off.”

Lyyndaya clucked to Old Oak and the buggy began to move again. After a long silence, she spoke up as they came into Paradise’s small downtown. “Perhaps his letters will tell us why he did what he did.”

Emma had worked herself up and didn’t smile. “It’s a long time coming if he does so. Why couldn’t he have written one of us right away before he boarded the steamer in New York? It is over three months now.”

“I don’t think the mail travels quickly between Europe and America. Sometimes I worry we have never received letters he wrote because they were on ships the Germans sank.”

Emma flipped a hand in the air. “
Ja, ja
, anything is possible. Now the U-boats are after us.”

“Well, he’s written us now. That’s what’s important.”

Minutes later, they were in the post office, where Mrs. Stoltzfus placed a single letter in each girl’s hand. The gesture seemed to calm Emma down.

As they headed back to their farms in the buggy the two young women agreed the right time to read their letters would be alone in their rooms or alone by the woodstoves in their kitchens. Or even in the barn or the attic, just so long as they were not being pestered by their brothers and sisters and parents. Yet as Old Oak jogged along and the snow began to fall thicker and thicker from fresh gray clouds banked against the sky, they both began to change their minds.

“My little sister will follow me around like a cat waiting for me to open the envelope,” complained Emma. “How can I concentrate on what Jude is telling me with her on the prowl?”

Lyyndaya nodded. “For me it will be my mother. She doesn’t want Jude and me to write back and forth anyway, but since a letter has come she will want to know how he crosses his x’s and rounds his o’s. Even if I hid with the cows in the barn she would come looking.”

“It’s exasperating.”

After another few minutes of quiet driving the two glanced at each other.

“Why not pull over here?” suggested Emma.

“All right.”

The top of the carriage protected them from the snowfall, and they tore at the envelopes as if the letters within had caught fire and needed to be rescued. Emma pulled out three pages and held each one up in dismay before reading them.

“Look at the holes!” she exclaimed. “Who does this?”

“The military censors,” said Lyyndaya. “Papa told me it would be so. In case Germans get their hands on the letters.”