The Wings of Morning

by Murray Pura

  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 Ju
de 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.”

  “Ha. Well, two German girls did.”

  Lyyndaya had spread out her own two pages in her lap. Where Emma’s letter had dozens of small rectangular cuts that had eliminated words, phrases, or sometimes whole sentences, she saw only three or four in hers. As they began to read, often speaking lines out loud to each other, it became clear why, at least to Lyyndaya. Emma was constantly being told about units of the American Expeditionary Force that Jude had spent time with, where and when he had met other Americans from Pennsylvania and what units they belonged to, the sorts of planes he had been able to train on, and all kinds of information about the soldiers and sailors and aviators where they were training in Britain. To Lyyndaya, he went on and on about what he was thinking and feeling, only mentioning aeroplanes or when they might be sent over the Channel to France in a few places. She had no intention of reading his long intimate meanderings to Emma, who was more than pleased that her entire first page was taken up with his apologies for not writing sooner and for not discussing joining the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps, with her.

  “So he is thinking reconnaissance,” Emma breezed, “and look, his postmark is for early January—he wasn’t so late writing to me, after all. It’s just the steamer that was late. And he tells me he misses me and fresh strawberries.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said Lyyndaya. And it was wonderful because while he had kept his letter to Emma light and charming, the letter he had written to her almost smoldered in her hands. I can’t stop thinking about you. I dream about us flying together again and again. Now and then we get a sunrise green as jade here and whenever we do it is as if my plane takes me into the color of your eyes.

  She noticed where his thumb or finger had smudged the ink and left a print. In another place there was a dark ring from a cup of tea or coffee. She longed to get home and read his words over and over again while she lay in her bed, her covers snugged up to her chin. Or to pick up a pen of her own and respond.

  “I want to write him now, tonight—no, this minute,” laughed Emma. “Is it possible to ride in a buggy and use a pen?”

  “Come on, Oak,” called Lyyndaya taking up the traces, “let’s go home and get some oats. Or ink.”

  “Of course my father will want to know everything.”

  “What will you tell him?”

  “That Jude will be flying reconnaissance and not fighting.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Pastor Miller won’t give up.”

  Emma’s face grew stony. “That man. God forgive him. No, he won’t. Let us write and post our letters to Jude quickly before we’re told that is no longer permitted.”

  Lyyndaya didn’t find the privacy she craved for hours, not until the house was asleep, including Ruth in the bed beside her. Then, her candle still lit—something that did not bother her sister, who loved to fall asleep to firelight or candlelight—she read the letter three more times as she sat up in bed. She pressed her hands, one after the other, onto the ink smear of his fingerprint, then brought the hands to her lips and gently kissed them. How foolish I am, she thought, but God must be relieved to have a silly girl’s foolishness to gaze down upon now and then.

  From under her bed she brought out a small oak lap desk fashioned in the shape of a heart. Inside were pen, paper, envelopes, and a bottle of ink. There was a round hole to secure the bottle on the lid of the small desk.

  Dear Jude, she began to write, then thought better of it and placed the sheet of paper on the floor to clear away later. She began again. My dear Jude. She paused. Then decided to push on. He was her dear Jude even though Emma thought he was her dear Jude too. But suppose Emma began her letter My dearest Jude? Or My one and only Jude? Lyyndaya decided to lay this sheet of paper on the wooden floor as well. She penned, My dearest Jude, hesitated, thought about My dearest and truest Jude, heard the clock downstairs strike twelve and forced herself to press on.

  But there were greater obstacles ahead. He had mentioned her eyes. Should she mention his? Your warm brown eyes are like the spring earth. Or was that forward on her part? Too much, too soon? Is your hair still the thick curly mop I liked to pull on when I was ten? She laid this sheet on the floor and started once more. I miss you. I also long to fly again with you over Lancaster County and count the toy horses. She made up her mind to keep this phrase. It sounds like you have gained your weight and your strength back. Have you been eating well? Peas? Corn? Beef? How about sleep—are you getting enough of it? No, no, she sounded like an Amish mother nagging her boy at the kitchen table: Eat, eat, grow big and strong as a horse. This sheet of paper joined the others on the floor. My friend Jude, I miss you too. I wish you were here—everyone goes to Intercourse to get their smithing work done now. What a stupid sentence! Her letter was getting worse instead of better! Onto the floor it went.

  The clock struck one. Dear dear Jude. No. She let the paper drop. Her pen needed to be cleaned. Once that was done she tried again. I remember resting my hand on yours when I prayed that day. I always think of it. I am glad you asked me to pray. She was going to let this one fall onto the pile too, but another part of her argued that she had not made this up, it was true, why not say it and let Jude decide how to respond? After all, what sweet delicacies was Emma Zook cooking up? So she kept it in and continued to fill the page with her smooth looping cursive. Now and then another sheet made its way to the floor.

  When Ruth awoke at half past four for the milking, she placed her feet on a carpet of white paper. She picked up a few of the sheets, looked at Lyyndaya sleeping with the lap desk still on her bed, read the half-finished sentences, and began to giggle like a twelve-year-old, quickly covering her mouth with her hand.

  Oh, sister, you are smitten.

  Lyyndaya mailed the letter in town after finishing her morning chores. Somehow completing four pages and handing them to the postal clerk in Paradise gave her an extra boost of energy that compensated for her lack of sleep. She was able to clean up alongside her mother in the kitchen following lunch and smile at various barbed comments about Jude instead of snapping back in response. Surprisingly, it was her father, sitting and drinking a second cup of coffee at the table, who kept sticking up for Jude and coming up with reasons why he might have felt it was important to enlist in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps.

  “You astonish me, Amos,” said Lyyndaya’s mother, turning from the sink with her arms up to their elbows in soapsuds. “You’re the one who has been against Jude and his flying all along.”

  He ran his fingers through his beard. “I’m not thinking so much about the flying, but about the boy himself. Our young men went through terrible persecution at that army base. How can I blame him for seeking a way out? Even a way out that offends the Amish faith?”

  “The others saw no need to join the army as a means out of the camp,” she retorted, still staring at him while she was scrubbing a pot.

  “Yes, and that’s what bothers me. He joins the army. The others are released. This happens at the
same time. Why didn’t he just leave with his friends?”

  “He didn’t want to come back,” she said sourly. “Flying was more important to him than the Amish way, more important to him than following Christ.”

  “That’s just it.” Lyyndaya’s father rapped his knuckles on the table. “That’s not the way he acted here. Ja, I was annoyed with the flying. But he respected our wishes with regard to our daughter, he made no fuss, he did not complain, he followed the Ordnung, remained true to the Amish faith. The horseshoes he crafted for me were impeccable, the finest I have ever seen—ach, I hate to put them on my horses’ feet.”

  “So what are you saying, Amos?”

  “That I’m not content with the explanation young Hosea Zook has given us. Jude up and enlists even though they are being released? He doesn’t want to come back to Paradise? He doesn’t want to see our daughter even though he could be killed in Europe? He expressed no desire to go and fight while he lived among us. In fact, he defended our position on war. And when did he ever speak to us of winning medals or shooting down planes or killing other men? Did he ever speak like that around you, Lyyndy?”

  Lyyndaya, still surprised by her father’s vehement defense of Jude, shook her head. “No, Papa. He had no interest in going to war, no desire for any sort of—military glory.”

  Her mother handed Lynndaya another pot to dry. “They say the cruelty in the camp broke him. Changed him.”

  Father raised his dark eyebrows. “Only he is broken? No one else? Yet he is one of the strongest of the bunch?”

  “Not everything in this life makes sense.”

  “Ja, and this makes no sense at all.” He stood up from the table. “I think there is a connection between our young men’s release and Jude’s enlistment. I don’t know what it is. But there is something there.”

  Mother kept her back to him as she drained the sink and wiped her hands on a cloth. “Hosea Zook says not, Father.”

  He grunted. “Hosea may have his reasons.”

  “So? You are saying he is lying? That all of them are lying? That crazy Jude Whetstone had a gun held to his head and had to say yes to the American army?”