The Wings of Morning (36 page)

The other three men looked at one another. Finally Ross shook his head and raised his eyebrows.

“I guess one of us should have tried to stand up,” he said.

T
ake me home
, he had said to her.
Take me home to my father, to my people
. After three more days under observation he was declared symptom-free and safe to travel by one of the doctors. Lyyndaya shaved off his beard, cut his hair, and had one of the orderlies give him a thorough bath. Then she dressed him in new clothes, plain clothes, which she had purchased at one of the downtown shops. She had health certificates for both of them and white masks she insisted they wear.

“I feel like a train robber,” he mumbled.

“There is nothing on a train to Lancaster County to steal,” she said with a smile, her arm through his.

“You’re not acting very Amish.”

“Why? Because I’m touching you?” She hugged him until his back popped. “I’m never going to let you go again. God does not often give a person miracles like this more than once in a lifetime.”

More than once before he was released from the hospital she had told him,
I do not understand, I do not understand
.

And every time he had patiently told her his story again, sometimes adding new details or dropping old ones.

“
I got out of the wreckage. No matter what they tell you, the German soldiers did not shoot at me. I know some of them saw me climb free and crawl away and yet they didn’t raise their rifles. My head was throbbing and my mouth was full of blood and I was disoriented. Which way was east? Which west? I was certain I was making my way toward the Allied lines, but I kept running into heavier and heavier concentrations of German troops. Finally I was worn out, and I found an abandoned trench, where I kept out of sight. There were dead men near me, and I slept among them so I would look dead too. But few troops were near as night fell and I doubt anyone looked while I slept
.

“
The next day I didn’t move. But that night I crawled toward a cluster of farmhouses and hid in a barn. The owners found me, but you must have been praying a great deal. This family had no love for the Kaiser and his army. They fed me, cleaned my wounds, put me in a spare bed, and it was there I remained until the Armistice. Of course everything on the German side of the lines was in chaos by then. Soldiers were even more trigger-happy. So I stayed put another week and then said goodbye—not easily done, they had saved my life—and made my way back the few miles to the lines. I wanted to get to my aerodrome, but the French picked me up and took me to Toul. I wound up all the way north at the Marne and Chateau Thierry. They dropped me off with the Americans there
.

“
The wound in my mouth had broken open again and made it difficult for me to speak clearly, so they put me down as Jules Witsun. I didn’t find this out for a long time. I think it was in England an officer kept bellowing for Captain Jules Witsun, U.S. Army Air Service, and I ignored him until someone said, ‘That’s him over there,’ and he was pointing at me. I tried to correct the error, but it just made the spit-and-polish military types suspicious so I let it go and stayed Jules Witsun. I knew that if I could just get someone to believe me, the news would reach you and my father and the church. But I never had the chance and then I came down with a bad fever
.

“
I didn’t have the Spanish flu. How could I? I was still alive three weeks later. But they wouldn’t put me on a steamer until late January. Lost my appetite on those winter seas—how I wish they would have let me try to fly a plane across the Atlantic! With almost no food I lost the strength I’d built up and I was as weak as a kitten when we disembarked in New York. They sorted us out and of course anyone from Pennsylvania or further south got shunted by rail to Philadelphia. Doctors examined me and decided I might be showing symptoms so into the hospital I went. Still Jules Witsun. I made one final effort to get it straightened out, I tried to tell them my serial number, but no one was interested. They all thought I was off my head
.”

“And then what?” Lyyndaya always asked, knowing the answer.

He smiled at her. “Then I heard the voice of
der Engel
and woke up. I looked over and saw that,
ja
, it was the angel with golden hair and eyes green as sunlight on emeralds. You left, but I was certain you would be back. So I pushed myself to my feet. I knew you had no idea I was in the room, no idea I was behind all that hair. I had just enough strength to hold on until you noticed me. Then—I was in heaven—oh yes, heaven, for the angel was holding me and kissing me, something this angel had never done. And it was better than all the daydreams that had sustained me for so long. Much better.” He sighed. “I thank God the epidemic is over.”

“Ah, no.” Lyyndaya stroked his face. “How I wish that were true, my love. The disease has come and gone many times and I’m certain we’ll see more of it before it’s finished with us.” Then she hugged him. “But the war is over, that is true, and for that I’m very grateful.”

Jude’s father and Lyyndaya’s father both met them at the station in Paradise. Jude had sent a telegram ahead. Mr. Whetstone was standing by his horse and buggy. When Jude and Lyyndaya stepped off the train he did something he had not done for twenty years or more. He ran.

Pulling the mask off his son he kissed him and hugged him with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible. Tears poured down his cheeks. He kept murmuring praise to God in Pennsylvania Dutch. Then he held his son at arm’s length.

“Jude,” he said.

Quietly waiting his turn, Mr. Kurtz also took Jude in his arms and held him a long time. “Welcome. Welcome home.”

They took the buggy back to the Whetstone house. It was a crisp, bright January day with snow glistening on the fields and the sky a deep luminous blue over their heads. Jude had not thought he would experience any strong emotions other than what he knew he would feel upon seeing his father. But once he stepped down from the carriage and walked around back to look at the smithy he found it difficult to control himself. He placed a hand on his father’s face and another on Lyyndaya’s and said, “I was certain I would never see either of you again—or you, Mr. Kurtz. When the plane was going down, never, never did I think I would survive.”

At the kitchen table Jude and his father and Mr. Kurtz had coffee while Lyyndaya sipped a cup of hot cocoa. Jude told the two men what it had been like in England and France and talked about his Aero Squadron, things he had already told Lyyndaya in greater detail. He didn’t go into what had happened on various sorties or dogfights, but the men did want to know about the plane crash so Jude explained how he had pulled himself from the wreckage and evaded capture.

Knowing he would be telling all this many times over, he sketched out what happened with the family that had taken him in and how he had wound up back across the Channel and eventually on a steamer bound for New York.

“You come out of a war alive,” his father said, “yet this terrible influenza, this little germ, could have taken you from me as easily as a bullet.”

Lyynadya nodded. “That’s what is so sad. A boy makes it home from the trenches and dies in Boston or Philadelphia. It doesn’t seem right.”

“No, no,” murmured Mr. Kurtz, “all is not as it should be until Christ returns.”

Sunlight drenched the room and made Lyyndaya’s hair sparkle like the snow. Jude found he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. It seemed to him he was seeing her for the first time—not on a train, not in a hospital setting, not as a girl of eighteen but a young woman now almost twenty who had grown up a great deal in his absence, whose beauty was fuller and richer and more dazzling.

Lyyndaya was acutely aware of his gaze. She kept on quietly drinking her cocoa, but let the sensation of his undisguised attraction for her run like warm water through her body. At one point, as they sat making conversation, she decided they had been through too much, including almost losing one another forever, for her to play the modest Amish woman who pretends the man’s eyes are not upon her. So she met his gaze, her green eyes colored with the light from the windows, held it, and smiled with all the love for him she had within her. He didn’t break eye contact and they sat smiling and staring at one another, leaving Mr. Whetstone and her father to toy with their coffee cups, glance out the windows, and finally clear their throats almost in unison.

“Perhaps, my boy, you are wondering why we two were the only ones at the station?” asked Jude’s father.

Jude broke his gaze with Lyyndaya and looked at his father like a man who has just woken up. “I did expect to see the bishop or pastors. And all of Lyyndaya’s family.”

His father nodded. “They will be here. The leadership first. Then anyone from the church who wishes. It was arranged this way so that we might have time alone together.”

“That’s very kind of them.”

“It was our good bishop’s idea. If it were up to Pastor Miller or Pastor King they’d have been here an hour ago.”

Jude raised his eyebrows. “Lyyndy told me the
Meidung
had been lifted.”

“Only because they thought you were dead. Now it is a different matter.”

“So they will want me to confess and repent?”

“I think so,
ja
.”

Jude sighed and leaned back in his chair with his coffee, looking at the three of them. “It’s the big mystery, isn’t it? Why did a good Amish boy go to war? Even my commanding officer didn’t understand it. Well, I can’t explain it beyond this: it was necessary that I enlist. That’s all I can say. I did it to save lives. There is no more to it than that.”

His father was listening closely to his son’s words. He half-smiled. “It is enough for me. It will not be enough for Pastor Miller.”

Lyyndaya leaned forward. “But why not, Papa?” She had taken to calling him that since Jude had been arrested and taken from them in September of 1917. “Everyone knows the news stories. Even Pastor Miller. How Jude did not kill. How he took Germans prisoner and didn’t shoot them. How—”

Mr. Whetstone put up a hand. “It doesn’t matter. He put on a uniform and went to fight. That’s all they will see.”

“If he had not put on the uniform and gone to fight,” Lyynadya argued, “he would not have been able to save the lives he saved. Men would be dead who now shall live.”

Mr. Whetstone shook his head and stood up. “Your fight is not with me, my dear. It’s with the leadership. And they are here now. I will fetch more cups.”

Lyyndaya craned her neck to look out a window. “All four of them at the same time?”

“They were already meeting together and praying at the bishop’s.” He stopped a moment and watched them climb down from their buggies.

The bishop was first through the door. He swept Jude into his massive embrace and laughed. “My boy, my boy, praise God,
Gelobt sei Gott
, such miracles he bestows. You look well, very well.”

“The longer I’m here in Paradise,” Jude replied, “the better I feel.”

“Wonderful, this is wonderful, how good is our God.”

“
Danke
,” said Jude. “I’m sorry, truly sorry, for your loss of Hosea and John and Annie.”

A shadow flitted in and out of the bishop’s eyes. “Thank God, they are both safe in the arms of Jesus.”

Pastor Stoltzfus hugged him as well. “
Alle Dinge sind möglich bei Gott
. All things are possible with God, huh? Welcome home.
Willkommen
. God bless you.”

Pastor King shook his hand warmly. “Such a blessing, such a surprise, God continues to astonish us all. It is good to see you, Jude.”

Pastor Miller shook Jude’s hand briefly and nodded. “God is beyond our comprehension. That is why we honor Him.”

“Yes,” Jude responded.

At the table Bishop Zook and Pastor Stoltzfus asked Jude all sorts of questions about his health and his journey back from Europe. In time, Jude recounted what had happened on his final flight; how he had crashed, crawled free, and made it to the farmhouse in Lorraine. Pastor King listened attentively, but Pastor Miller sat stiffly in his chair, looking past Jude to the wall and windows. When Jude brought the story to Philadelphia and Lyyndaya and how she had found him, Bishop Zook nodded and drummed his fingers on the table.

“What was meant to be, God has brought to pass,” he said. “Clearly, you two will be together.” He smiled at Lyyndaya and Jude. “So you and your father may remain in the room, Lyyndaya.” He looked at Mr. Whetstone. “You must also stay.” He sat up. “There are important things to discuss. We should pray. Pastor Stoltzfus?”