Waves of Mercy

by Lynn Austin

  “I know. I know you need to stay here and run the shop. But I need to be with Arie. Help me get there, Maarten. That’s all I’m asking.” I held my breath and waited as Maarten thought it over in his slow, deliberate way. I wanted to remind him of how much Arie had already suffered in his short life, how he’d lost his parents at the age of three, how he’d nearly died of malaria along with them, how we’d nursed him through a host of bruises and falls and childhood ailments. I wanted Maarten to remember how we had held Arie close through the very worst of times and dried his tears, so he would understand that I needed to do it all over again. “If the Almighty decides to take Arie away from us, Maarten, I want to hold him one last time.”

  Maarten must have recognized my fierce determination. He nodded slowly and said, “If that’s what you need to do, I’ll see about purchasing a railroad ticket for you.”

  “Thank you.” I went to Maarten and held him tightly in my arms. The weight of his sturdy body, the feel of his bones and muscles and arms, and the strength of his embrace were wonderfully familiar and comforting to me. In that moment, I think I loved Maarten more than I ever had before.

  Chapter 29

  Geesje’s Story

  Holland, Michigan

  36 years earlier

  Maarten began making arrangements for my trip to Jefferson General Hospital in Port Fulton, Indiana, the next morning. I went with him to the railway office, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that I couldn’t speak or read English well enough to travel all that way by myself. I would be in trouble the moment the southbound train left Holland’s village limits. “Maybe I should take Gerrit along to help me,” I told Maarten as we walked home from the station again. Gerrit was nearly eighteen, and as worried about his brother as the rest of us.

  Maarten heaved an enormous sigh. “I need Gerrit’s help in the print shop, Geesje. We are shorthanded as it is with all the young men away fighting in the war. That’s why I had to say no to you the first time you asked to go.”

  “What about Jakob, then?” He was almost sixteen.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t spare him, either. If I don’t get my printing orders finished on time, my customers will take their business someplace else.”

  In the end, Christina decided the issue for us. “I’m going with you, Mama,” she told us at dinner that evening. “I’m the one who needs to take care of Arie. You know I have to go. He’ll get better when he sees me. He will.” If anyone could charm Arie and make him smile or restore his will to live, it was Christina. “Besides, my English is just as good as Jakob’s and Gerrit’s,” she said. In fact, it was probably better. It seemed as though Christina had done more talking during her eleven short years than all three boys combined. She had overheard Maarten and me worrying about the cost of the trip, so her final argument seemed most convincing: “You’ll save money on my train ticket since I’m only eleven.” She was a tiny little thing with thick, golden hair and deep blue eyes and a determination that was as fierce as my own.

  Christina and I left together a day later. It was the first time I had been out of the state of Michigan since arriving here with my parents nearly twenty years earlier. Christina had never traveled outside of the Holland area in her life, let alone ride on a train. We began the three-hundred-fifty-mile trip south with a great deal of enthusiasm and energy, and although my fear for Arie still made my stomach churn with worry, it felt good to finally take this step.

  The journey was long and tiring, our passenger train often side-tracked and delayed to allow the more important army supply trains to pass through. We nibbled food from the bag we had brought with us and slept on train seats and in stations along the way that were crowded with soldiers in transit. We passed through broad stretches of farmland in Indiana, dotted with barns and wood-frame farmhouses; through villages and towns with tiny railway stations and single main streets; and through the prosperous city of Indianapolis with its tall brick buildings and church steeples and paved roads. The trees were just beginning to change color from green to vivid shades of yellow, orange, red, and rust. Their beauty was mostly wasted on me. A powerful sense of urgency propelled me, and I never stopped praying, all along the way, that Arie would be able to hang on until we arrived.

  We traveled the entire length of Indiana and arrived at Port Fulton on the Ohio River just as the sun was beginning to set on the second day. Christina helped me hire a carriage to take us to Jefferson General Hospital. I only understood snatches of the conversation as she talked with the grizzled driver, but from his grim look and wagging head, I gathered that he didn’t think the military hospital was a proper destination for a delicate lady and her young daughter. “Tell him I need to see my son, Christina. . . . Tell him!”

  They talked some more then she turned to me again. “He says it’s an enormous place with nearly thirty hospital buildings. He thinks we’ll get lost inside.”

  “Just get us to the main door. Someone will help us find our way.” The driver finally agreed, and the carriage lurched forward as the horse began to move. I rummaged through my bag as we rode through Port Fulton’s streets and found Arie’s letter with the return address and building number on it. When we arrived at Jefferson General Hospital, it was indeed an enormous place with dozens of long, white-painted hospital wards radiating from the central buildings like the spokes of a wheel. Later we learned that it housed nearly one thousand patients in various stages of recovery. I remember wondering how much longer this terrible war was going to last, how many more young men would end up maimed and wounded in hospitals like this one—or worse, in their graves. I still believed that slavery was wrong and needed to be stopped—hadn’t we come to America ourselves for freedom? But what a terrible price the young men of America were paying for that freedom.

  The sun had already sunk below the horizon when I walked through the hospital’s main door carrying our bags in one hand and holding Christina’s hand in the other. The outside of the complex had been daunting enough, but the inside was overwhelming, with the sound of chattering voices and the bustle of urgent activity all around me. I stopped the first person I saw and said in my clumsy English, “Are you able to help us?” I showed him the envelope with Arie’s address on it. When the man mumbled something in return then walked away, I looked at Christina.

  “He said he’ll find someone to show us the way.” It turned out to be a young man not much older than Gerrit, wearing a torn undershirt and dirty Union trousers. His arm was in a sling. He led us back outside the building and across the broad hospital grounds in the center of the “wheel” to one of the long, white buildings. The moment we entered Arie’s ward and faced row after row of men, pale and maimed and skeletal, Christina began to cry. Tears sprang to my eyes, too. The smell of urine and sickness and rotting flesh so overpowered me that I whirled my daughter around to lead her back through the open door, deeply regretting my decision to bring her to such a dreadful place. “We need to leave, Christina. I had no idea—”

  “Mama, no!” She yanked her hand free and squirmed away to prevent me from pulling her through the door. “We can’t leave. We have to find Arie. We have to help him.”

  “Are you sure, lieveling?”

  “I’m sure.” I took her hand again, and we continued on. I longed to hold my handkerchief over my nose and mouth as we walked down the long, narrow ward together, but Christina didn’t cover her eyes or look away. With tears still streaming down her face, she slowed her steps so she could look each man in the face and offer him a smile. “Hello,” she said again and again. “Hello, I’m Christina de Jonge. Do you know my brother, Arie?”

  After wandering among the rows for a time, our guide finally halted beside Arie’s bed. I thought he had made a mistake. This frail, hollow-eyed ghost wasn’t Arie. Christina stared in disbelief, as well. He was asleep, and his large, square hands were the only things I recognized. I could see that he was gravely ill. He looked as though he hadn’t eaten in weeks. He lay on his bac
k, his body covered with a gray sheet that showed all the contours of his thin frame. Below his left knee, Arie’s leg and foot were missing.

  He didn’t wake up when Christina sat on the bed beside him and lifted his hand, holding it between hers. An hour passed, but she didn’t move, didn’t let go, staring at Arie’s face until he finally opened his eyes. He blinked at her in the ward’s dim lamplight. “I wondered how long you were going to sleep, lazy bones,” she said with her teasing smile. “It’s very rude of you to take a nap after we came all this way to visit you.”

  “Christina?” he whispered. “Is that really you?”

  “Of course it is. And Mama is here, too.”

  She stood to let me sit beside him on the bed. I gazed at my son for a long moment, then carefully gathered him in my arms, holding him as if he might break. If I could have let the life flow out of me and into my child, I would have gladly done it. I remembered the beautiful towheaded boy I had held in my arms this way years ago, and how he and Gerrit had slept beside me when they burned with malarial fever. I loved Arie every bit as much as the two children I’d given birth to, and that fierce mother-love helped me forget the horror around me and believe that my son would survive. “You’re going to get well now,” I told him. “I promise you.”

  In the days that followed, Christina’s method of cheering him included cajoling, pestering, and admonishing him. “You will get well! You will live! Don’t you dare go and die on me, Arie de Jonge! I forbid it!” She sat on his bed and held his hand while his fever raged and he tossed in delirium. When he was awake, she told him stories and sang Dutch songs to him and talked about all the things they would do together when they got home. Her happy chatter and bubbly laughter made Arie and all the other men in the neighboring beds smile. The hospital matron directed us to a nearby boardinghouse where the proprietress, Widow Jansen, not only rented us a room but allowed us to use her kitchen after the supper dishes were washed and put away so we could prepare some of Arie’s favorite foods for him. He longed for my homemade bread and Dutch pea soup.

  Christina and I stayed in Indiana with Arie for nearly a month until the color returned to his cheeks and the fever went away and the stump of his leg began to heal. The doctor assured us one bright October morning that Arie was no longer in danger. He would live. It would be another few months before he would be well enough to travel home, but it was time for Christina and me to return to Michigan.

  With worry and fear no longer clouding my vision, I gazed out of the train windows on the journey home, absorbing all the sights. As we slowly chugged through the city of Indianapolis, Christina pointed to the stately buildings. With all the passion and drama of an eleven-year-old she said, “Holland is so backward! Why can’t we live in a big city like this one?”

  “Your papa and I used to live in a pretty city in the Netherlands called Leiden. But we chose to move to America so we would have more freedom.”

  “But it’s free everywhere in America. It’s such a big country, and yet we never leave home!”

  “Why would we leave? We have everything we could ever need or want—a warm house, our pretty church, people who know us and love us. Why would we want to live in a place with so many strangers?” The train pulled to a halt at the station where crowds of people swarmed the platform, waiting to board or to greet arriving passengers.

  “I’m sure all those people are very nice, too, if we got to know them,” Christina insisted. “Wasn’t Widow Jansen at the boardinghouse nice? And look at all the Christian churches they have here. See the steeples?”

  “The people who live here come from different backgrounds than we do, with different beliefs—and some of them have no beliefs at all. They speak a different language, too.”

  “Not me. I speak English,” she said with the pride of youth. Christina loved the excitement of the cities we traveled through, and I really couldn’t blame her when I recalled how much I had loved city life in the Netherlands. Our journey gave Christina her first taste of the world beyond our tiny, sheltered community, and afterward, she was no longer content with our life in Holland. In the years that followed, she felt a mounting restlessness, insisting she felt deprived and isolated in our poky village with its old-fashioned ways. She longed to be part of America instead of remaining stuck in a backward settlement where the majority of people still spoke and acted like the foreign Dutchmen we were. As I reflect on that time and our journey together, I’m thankful that I made the trip. I credit Christina with saving Arie’s life. Even the doctors agreed that she single-handedly restored his will to live. Yet at the same time, I’m truly sorry we went. I saved one child’s life and lost another’s.

  Maarten and Jakob met us when we finally stumbled off the train at the station, hungry and weary and travel-worn. Maarten looked so worried and gaunt that I wondered if he had eaten at all since we left. His round cheeks were sunken, his broad forehead creased with worry lines. “We’re finally home,” I said, smiling to reassure him. I hugged him tightly. “Arie is going to be fine, Maarten. The doctors assured us that he would recover. You mustn’t worry about him. Christina cheered the life back into him.”

  “I know. You told me so in your letters. It isn’t Arie I’m concerned about, Geesje—it’s Gerrit. He left home a week ago to enlist.”

  Holland, Michigan

  1897

  I lay down my pencil and close the notebook, remembering all too well the way my limbs turned to lead that day when Maarten told me the news about our son Gerrit. I clung to Maarten’s arm all the way home, leaving Jakob to carry my bag. Christina couldn’t hold back her emotions, and she sobbed as if her little heart would break. She had witnessed the reality of war at Jefferson General Hospital. She now knew better than to envy Gerrit’s adventures.

  For years I wondered if Gerrit would have run off and enlisted if I had been home to reason with him. Who can say? Maarten worried that I blamed him for not stopping Gerrit, although I did my best to convince him that I didn’t. Christina clung to her brother Jakob, who was nearly sixteen and begged him not to run off to war and leave her, too.

  Remembering those years brings a storm of sorrow now. Instead of indulging it, I decide to get out and go for a walk. My house is only a few blocks from the main street, which bustles with wagon traffic and people. I take my time strolling down Eighth Street, greeting several people I know along the way, stopping to chat with a friend for a while. My walk ends at the tidy brick building on River Avenue that houses the print shop.

  Arie is seated behind his desk when I enter, but he rises to greet me, leaning on the arms of his chair for support. “Moeder! What brings you here?” He envelops me in a hug. The familiar thump and whoosh of the printing press in the background, the smell of ink and fresh newsprint, always transport me back to my childhood days in Leiden. Arie’s assistants continue working while we talk.

  “You haven’t come to scold me for not visiting you, have you?” he asks with a worried look.

  “No, of course not. I know how busy you are.”

  “We’ve been working long hours on an order for the Hotel Ottawa. They need a steady supply of stationery and menu cards and advertising pamphlets and things like that. The hotel is very good for business, but it takes a lot of my time.”

  “I know, dear. Both my father and yours were printers, remember?” I shake my head as he offers me his chair. “No, I won’t stay long. You sit, dear.” He gets around well on his crutches, but I know he prefers to hide his missing leg behind the desk. Arie has never married. He lives in an apartment behind the print shop and looks much older than his fifty-three years, his light brown hair turning gray at his temples, the silvery strands spreading through his mustache and beard.

  “You were on my mind today,” I tell him, “so I decided to pay you a visit.”

  “Do I dare ask what brought me to mind?” he asks.

  “I dug out all the letters you wrote home to us during the war and spent the morning reading through th
em.”

  “You’ve kept them all these years?”

  “Of course. You know how sentimental I am about things like that. I’ve been thinking about the past a lot lately, ever since the Semi-Centennial Committee asked me to write down my memories of the early days when we first came over from the Netherlands to settle here. They’re asking all of us old-timers to tell our stories so they can put them in a book for the town’s fiftieth anniversary. I don’t suppose you remember much from those early days, do you? You were barely three years old when you came over on the boat.”

  Arie leans back in his chair, linking his hands behind his head. “I remember living in a log cabin with a dirt floor. And I remember walking with you and Papa through the woods every Sunday to go up to the old log church on the hill. I don’t remember the voyage across the ocean at all.”

  “How fortunate for you. Ours was a terrible trip. We were all seasick.”

  “I remember when Jakob was born.” His expression turns serious. “And Christina.”

  Hearing her name brings tears to my eyes. “I’ve been thinking about Christina a lot, too. I still have the last letter she wrote to us, saying she was coming home.”

  “The prodigal daughter.”

  “Yes . . . I often wonder what she was coming home to tell us. She said she needed to tell us in person, and that she would understand if we turned her away. But of course I could never turn her away. Not my own daughter.”

  Arie sees my tears and stands to embrace me again. “Losing her was one tragedy I’ll never understand.”

  I savor the warmth of his arms before pulling away again to look up at him, wiping my eyes. “I’ve always worried that you blamed me that she left. Maybe I was too hard on her, too strict. You and Christina were so close, and when she ran away—”

  “I never blamed you, Mama. Never. Christina was strong-willed from the day she was born. I don’t see how you could have done anything differently to make her stay. The same is true for Gerrit. They both would have left us no matter what any of us said or did.”