by Murray Pura
Perhaps it was my pride. Wanting to be so good as an aviator. Wanting to show off to Lyyndaya last summer. Wanting to outsmart the pilots that jumped me at the July picnic. Suppose I had let them win? Suppose I had deliberately flown poorly and let them trounce me? Then they would have flown away happy and left me alone. They would have considered me a mediocre pilot and left me to myself. The army would never have come to call or schemed how to pressure me into enlisting. My Amish friends would never have been put in harm’s way. I would never have had to intervene to save them by giving the army what it wanted. My pride has been my undoing.
Jude groaned and lay back on his bed. He felt trapped. God, I am so sorry, he prayed. I don’t know how to do anything that is not my best, whether I’m at the forge or at the controls of a Curtiss Jenny or a Nieuport 28. I don’t know how to be less of what I am, less of what has been created in me. I’m sorry I’m not more humble. I’m sorry I didn’t perform more poorly when the occasion warranted it. Yet here I am, Lord—here I am in the middle of this terrible war. What shall I do? Is it possible, is it in any way possible, that in my small life, here and now, blemished and sinful though I might be, you can make all things work together for good? Can you? Will you?
SIXTEEN
Lyyndaya stepped down from the buggy and walked into the post office. She could never avert her eyes from newspaper headlines these days and now she noticed one in a rack that said Doughboys Push Germans Back at Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood. Nearby was an article in smaller print about a flu outbreak in Kansas that she promptly ignored upon reading a line of type with the words American Aero Squadrons Score Victories. She waited a few minutes for another woman to finish her business and then approached the window with, “Good morning, Edward,” handing him an envelope and some coins.
“Tuesday, June eleventh, and here you are, just like a grandfather clock,” announced the clerk, taking the envelope and money.
“I hope not like a grandfather clock, Edward.”
“Well, they don’t make princess clocks, do they?”
She lowered her eyes. “You are quite gallant today. What’s the occasion?”
“Our boys are putting a licking on the Huns land, sea, and air. You’ll see. With our army over there it’ll all be done within a matter of months. Which means you’ll see your beau again before you know it.”
Lyyndaya considered the thin, balding man’s cheerful face. “Are you going to make a prediction, Edward?”
“Sure. Why not? It’s the eleventh today, right? Three, four—” He paused to count on his fingers. Then looked up. “All done by October. Or maybe November or December. On the eleventh. Not the tenth or twelfth. Right on the eleventh.”
“Surely you can’t be that precise, Edward.”
“Care to make a wager?”
Lyyndaya smiled and shook her head. “You’re well aware of the answer to that. Only God knows the future, Edward. If he has imparted that information to you we shall soon find out. Please recall that those who got their predictions wrong in biblical times were stoned to death as false prophets.”
“Ha!” Edward drew back in mock terror. “I’ll be sure to wear a suit of armor. But, somehow, I believe my hunch is right. Home for Christmas!”
Lyyndaya was turning to leave, when she paused and looked back at the clerk. “Edward, would there be anything wrong with you telling me if I have any letters from Jude?”
“Not as far as I know. You’ve got two. One from May and one from a week ago.”
Edward watched her eyes turn a brilliant green and thought, not for the first time, what a fine-looking woman Lyyndaya Kurtz was.
“Thank you,” she said.
To keep her in the post office a little longer, Edward blurted, “Miss Zook had two from Jude Whetstone as well, but she told me to throw them out.”
Lyyndaya stopped and returned to the clerk’s wicket, her eyes large. “What did you say?”
“I didn’t want to do it, but she insisted. Had me show them to her and then had me rip them up right in front of her eyes.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t say why. Had me hand over the letters to him she’d posted with us as well. Six or seven of them. Took them all and walked out.”
“And when was this?”
“Last Friday.”
Lyyndaya went out the door quickly and into her buggy, snapping the traces and putting Trillium into a fast trot. What was Emma doing? What sort of thoughts could be running through her head to make her destroy Jude’s letters? When she pulled up in front of the Zook home she saw Emma in a sunbonnet working at a large flowerbed of roses. Once she had climbed down and walked over, Emma looked up, read her face, and tugged off her white gardening gloves.
“Hello, sister,” Emma greeted her, but she didn’t smile and her green eyes were a dark jade.
Lyyndaya didn’t waste any time with the usual pleasantries. “They told me at the post office you had destroyed the letters Jude sent you.”
Emma met her eyes. “Edward or Henry Jacobs had no business saying so. But it doesn’t matter. I would have told you.”
“They also said you asked for the return of the letters you’ve written, the ones they have been setting aside since April.”
“Yes.” Her face was defiant.
“Why, Emma? Why are you turning your back on Jude right now, when he needs our friendship the most?”
Emma’s eyes softened slightly. “Come, Lyyndy, walk with me a few minutes.”
They had scarcely started down the lane to the road before Emma began to talk nonstop, like a green summer stream spilling over its banks. “It’s like a game, you know, Lyyndy, just as we played games when we were children. Jude writes us letters, but we never see them. We mail him letters back, but they never leave Paradise. In our hearts we say, ah, he will read them someday, and after he does, he shall choose one of us for a bride. But it’s a game. He will never read them, never see them, never know about them unless we get a chance to tell him we wrote them and he goes to the post office to pick them up. And if, God forbid, he doesn’t come back from Europe, it will have made no difference at all.”
“But, Emma,” Lyyndaya protested, “when you write them, you think about him, don’t you? And once you are thinking about him, do you also not start praying for him? This is what happens with me.”
“Oh, I suppose, but mostly it’s all a fantasy, Lyyndy. Something that goes on in our heads. He doesn’t hear us, we don’t hear him. He’s been gone now for how long? If you count the army camp as well as England and France? Eight, nine months? And how much longer will it go on? Another year? Two? What if he never comes home? Or what if he comes home and never confesses and repents?”
“Of course he will confess and repent!”
“Then why did he enlist in the first place? He could be here right now, walking beside us, teasing us, choosing me or choosing you to be his bride. But no—he chooses his aeroplanes and the war over us. What makes you think he will come back and repent? Why, he may even decide not to return at all. If the war ended next week he might not show up here. Why wouldn’t he stay in the army and keep flying their planes for them? He has already done it once and turned his back on you and me and on his faith, on his father, on the church. What makes you think he will give up flying just to be back in Paradise? He didn’t care about us in 1917. Why should he care about us in 1918 or 19 or 20?”
“I believe there’s more to the story than what we know. Something else happened to make him enlist and go overseas. He didn’t leave us on purpose.”
Emma stopped and looked at her in exasperation. “You’re always saying that. Your father is always saying that. My papa tells me it’s just wishful thinking. No one twisted Jude’s arm, he says. No one put a bayonet in his back. You simply won’t accept that he up and did this of his own free will. Instead, you insist that we believe in his innocence and goodness despite the fact he is now flying planes in a war and shooting at other men.”
“We don’t know that,” Lyyndaya shot back.
“Of course we know it. Remember how he defeated three or four planes here last summer, right over the Stoltzfus hay field? Do you imagine they have him peeling potatoes in an army kitchen in Paris? A newsman came to Papa last week, yes, a reporter from a big New York paper, can you imagine? He told Papa that Jude Whetstone was showing up in military dispatches more and more often. Why? Because he’s rescuing other pilots by chasing Germans all over the sky, shooting their wings off, knocking their planes to the ground. Yes, that is what he said. Papa didn’t have much to tell him, only that Jude had always been a good boy and had embraced the teachings of the Amish faith. He said to the reporter he didn’t understand why Jude had decided to fight in the war. ‘Oh, but it is an important war for America,’ this man tells Papa. Papa says to him, ‘I do not see that America is threatened or less free that we should fight in a war thousands of miles away.’”
They were standing by the side of the road in the bright June light. Emma’s eyes had grown darker and darker as they talked. Now she took one of Lyyndaya’s hands in her own. “I’m sorry, Lyyndy. I can no longer pretend to understand Jude. I can’t understand why he left us to kill people. Even if he came back tomorrow I could not…marry such a person. If you wish to keep waiting and hoping, if you believe there is some great secret that will be revealed one day and absolve him of his sins—well, I can’t stop you, can I, sister? But I myself, I must move on. I have invited other men to visit me, men from Intercourse and Bird-in-Hand, even from here in Paradise. No need to give you a list of names. You shall find out soon enough when the tongues start to wag.” She leaned over and kissed Lyyndaya on the cheek. “It’s not as if I’ll stop praying for him. And I do wish he would come home and say he’s been wrong to do what he’s done. But even if he did, that wouldn’t be enough for me. I want a man, a true Amish man, who is more…pure.”
They walked back to the Zook house in silence. Lyyndaya climbed into the buggy and clicked her tongue, and Trillium began to walk. When she glanced back from the road Emma’s tall frame was bent over among the red and pink roses once more. Her heart heavy as rock, Lyyndaya let Trillium take her time, in no hurry to get home and start on laundry or baking. Emma’s words had put darkness and a doubt into her. She noticed that though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, in herself they covered her mind and her soul.
Lord, have I been mistaken all along? Am I foolish to believe that somehow Jude has been wronged? But even if he were wronged, why should he take it out on others, on strangers he’s never met, on other human beings, and shoot their planes out of the sky? Why should he take brothers and sons and husbands away from their families? What if Emma is right about all this? It simply can’t be.
She noticed two buggies coming toward her on the other side of the road. The first carried Mrs. Stoltzfus, who smiled and waved and called something Lyyndaya didn’t catch. The second carriage was driven by her father, who was holding the traces to Old Oak. They stopped opposite each other.
“Good morning, Papa.”
He smiled. “It’s almost lunch. Where have you been?”
“I was at the post office, then I went to Emma Zook’s. Where are you off to?”
“I will break bread with Jude’s father.”
“Of course.” Her father had been visiting Mr. Whetstone several times a week.
He took off his straw hat and mopped his face with a turquoise bandana from his pocket. “Like a stove, eh? But we may yet get some rain today.”
She looked at the perfect blue dome over their heads. “But Papa, there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Not even on the horizon.”
“I was thinking of the clouds there in the buggy with you.”
She dropped her eyes.
“So what did Emma say to you?”
She looked at her father in surprise. “What makes you think it was Emma? I could have spoken with someone at the post office about the war.”
He tucked the bandana away. “Sure, sure, but it was Emma. What does she say to you?”
“She will not wait for Jude anymore,” she blurted. “She doesn’t think he’s coming back and even if he does, even if he confesses and repents and the shunning is lifted, Emma doesn’t believe he’s worthy to be her husband.”
Her father’s dark eyebrows slashed downward in a frown. “Why?”
“She says he’s tainted because he joined the army and is flying a plane in the war. A newspaper reporter from New York told Bishop Zook that Jude was getting a name for himself because he had shot German planes down—and killed—”
She couldn’t speak any further. Brushing her fingers against her cheeks she stared at the stained brown leather of the reins in her hands.
“All right, listen to me,” she heard her father say. “Are you listening?”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Emma may do as she wishes regarding her choice for a husband. But she may not speak as she wishes regarding another of God’s children. I thought it would be enough for me to sit down with the pastors and bishop and Mr. Whetstone. I see now it’s important I give my news to you as well.”
Lyyndaya lifted her head. “What news?”
Her father sat hunched forward with the traces to Old Oak steady in his grasp, his eyes on hers. “I’ve heard from my former colleagues in Philadelphia, in the state office. I have made inquiries about our young man. I know there have been statements about our fliers and our Aero Squadrons in the New York and Philadelphia newspapers. So here is what I know for certain from those who know for certain. When they write about Lt. Whetstone, they cannot say he is an ace—no, because he has never shot anyone down. You understand what is an ace? A pilot who has shot down five enemy planes. Jude has not shot down one. Not one. Are you listening?”
What he was telling her was too good to be true. Would her father make this up just so he could help her feel better? No, her father was not the sort of man who would do that, even for his children.
“I’m listening, Papa,” she said.
“So why all the fuss about this Jude Whetstone? It’s because they reckon he’s saved six or seven of his friends from death, yes, death from the guns of the German planes. How has he done this? By chasing the German aircraft away. And how does this Amish boy chase them away? He fires over their heads. He fires under their wings. Knocks the tails off the backs of their planes and forces them to run for home and a safe place to land. All this he has done and killed no one. All this he has done and saved German and American lives.” He leaned over and gripped his daughter’s arm. “Never mind what Emma Zook does. It’s important you do what is right in the eyes of God.”
He flicked the reins and moved quickly along the road, Old Oak’s hooves and the buggy wheels raising small spurts of dust.
Lyyndaya could hardly bring herself to tell Trillium to move ahead. She was crying again, but this time it was out of relief. Jude was being honored not for taking lives, but for giving them back to God to make something more out of them. Perhaps some of these men, in America or in Germany, would survive the war, marry, raise children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren, and bless the earth. All because the man Emma had fallen out of love with had chosen to fight to save and not to destroy. Lyyndaya suddenly snapped the traces in her hands with a new determination.
Well, Emma Zook, you may have changed your mind, but I have not changed mine. I will write the letters, I will take them to the post office, I will pray for him, body and soul, I will every day thank God I have met him. For something is going on here that is greater than you or me, and I shall, by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, continue to remain a part of it—until the war is done and God’s will is done, and whatever light is supposed to shine out of the darkness gleams brighter and brighter until absolutely no one in Paradise or Pennsylvania or America can ignore the hand of God in Jude Whetstone’s life.
SEVENTEEN
Monday, July 8, 1918
Dear Lyyndy,
I have the last letter you sent, which I received, I think, in May. I know it sounds crazy, but I read it over every night before I turn in, right after I’ve read a chapter from the Bible. I guess there won’t be any more, it’s been months now, I don’t suppose the church lets you mail anything to me. They probably won’t let you have my letters either so I don’t know why I bother writing. Won’t they all end up in some dusty bin in Henry Jacobs’ post office? But I can’t help myself. I talk to you in the plane, I talk to you when I’m over France or German territory, I talk to you after I talk to God in the evenings. Crazy. And writing you letter after letter that you can’t read is even crazier. What can I do? I need to talk everything over with you. So I do it. But what I wouldn’t give for one real look from your eyes, one real touch from your hand, a laugh, a smile.
There was a knock on the door and a man with a large mustache and strong body poked his head in.
“Whetstone. Guess what?”
Jude smiled up from his bed where he was writing Lyyndaya a letter on the flat top of a book. The wooden model of the Flyer—“Kitty Hawk” his father had carved was resting on a nearby table. “What, Zed?”
“The new commanding officer’s been here—” he glanced at his watch. “Not even two hours? And he wants to see you.”
Jude made a face. “I heard his speech in the mess.”