The Wings of Morning (2 page)

The bishop waited a moment and then walked over and touched the top wing of the plane. He ran his hand over the coated fabric and nodded. “A beautiful buggy. Pulled by horses with wings, eh? How many, Master Whetstone?”

Jude was trying not to look at Lyyndaya for help, but did anyway, and she was making sure she did not look at him or offer any by keeping her eyes on the stubble directly in front of the toes of her boots.

“There are—” Jude stepped away from the crowd pressing in on him and Lyyndaya and turned around to look at the plane behind him as if he were seeing it for the first time—“there are—” He stood utterly still and stared at the engine as if it did not belong there. Then he looked at Bishop Zook’s thick black beard and broad face. “Ninety. Ninety horses.”

The bishop nodded again and kept running his hand over the wing. “More than enough. There is the problem however—if God had meant us to fly, Master Whetstone, wouldn’t he have given us wings, hm?”

He took his hand from the plane and looked at Jude directly. Several of the men and women murmured their agreement with the bishop’s question and nodded their heads. Most remained silent, waiting for Jude’s answer. Jude stared at the bishop, trying to gauge the look in the tall man’s blue eyes. He thought he saw a flash of humor so he went ahead with the answer he had used a hundred times in their own Amish colony as well as in dozens of the ones around it.

“Bishop Zook,” he responded, “if God had meant us to ride a buggy he would have given us wheels and four legs.”

“Ah ha!” shouted the bishop, slapping his huge hand against his leg and making most of the people jump, including Lyyndaya. “You have it, Master Whetstone, you have it.” He clapped his hands lightly in appreciation and a smattering of relieved laughter came from the small crowd. “So now take me up.”

“What?”

“As bishop, I must make sure it is safe for Miss Kurtz,
ja
? After all, who has ever had such a horse and buggy in our colony, eh?” He gave his hat to one of the men and climbed into the front of the two cockpits.

“I only have a little time before I must head back to Philadelphia—” Jude began, again glancing at Lyyndaya for help, who had gone so far as to raise her gaze to stare fixedly at the bishop and the plane, but still refused to make eye contact with the young man.

“Five minutes,” said the bishop with a gleam in his eye. “That is all I ask. I am not the one you are courting, eh?”

The people laughed again. The thought passed through Jude’s head that the bishop was enjoying a lot of laughter at his expense. Then he shrugged and climbed into the rear cockpit. He saw his father in the crowd and gestured with his hand.

“Papa, will you give the propeller a turn?” he asked.

“Of course, my boy.”

As Jude’s father, a tall, slender man with a short beard and warm brown eyes, walked toward the plane, Bishop Zook leaned his head back and asked, “Now, before the engine noise, tell me, what is the name of this aeroplane and where do they make such things?”

Jude handed the bishop a leather helmet and goggles. “It’s a Curtiss JN-4, the Jenny, and they’re usually made in Buffalo, New York. But our flying club outside of Philadelphia was able to purchase these at a very good price from our Canadian friends just across the border. They are built there by Curtiss’s Canadian associate, the Canadian Aeroplane Company, so we call them the Canuck.”

“But they are the same as the New York ones?”

“Almost. They have one great advantage. I use a stick, a joystick, to control the aeroplane in these. The old American ones have a wheel that is not as good.”

“Why don’t we put the stick in ours then?”

“We will. The next model has the stick, the JN-4D. But they have only brought it out this month. There are not enough of them. Besides, it’s 1917 and they are all going to the army. Civilian clubs will not be able to purchase them while the war is on.”

Jude’s father, in his brown summer shirt and straw hat, was standing in front of the plane and smiling. Jude played with a switch on the control panel in his cockpit. Then he pulled down his goggles and smiled back at his father and made a circle in the air with his hand. His father nodded, put both hands on the top blade of the wooden propeller, and swung it downward. The engine coughed twice and roared. His father’s hat went spinning into the sky with the prop wash.

“Contact,” Jude said loudly. “Please buckle on your harness, Bishop Zook.”

“Ah. So we truly do have something in common with the horses.”

Jude’s father had caught up with his hat. He looked back at his son and pointed east. Jude turned the plane in that direction.

“What is your father telling us?” shouted Bishop Zook.

“The direction the wind or breeze is coming from. We take off into the wind.”

“Why?”

“It gives us lift to help get the aeroplane off the ground.”

The craft moved ahead, slowly bouncing over the field, then gathering speed and rising into the air. Jude took it to a thousand feet and made sure he flew over the entire town of Paradise and especially the bishop’s dairy farm on the west end. The sun was still an hour or two over the horizon and covered the plane in light. The bishop began to laugh and slapped one of his hands against the side of the Jenny.

“Too beautiful, too beautiful,” Jude heard him call out. “
Mein Gott
, what a gift you have given the birds, such a gift, such a world.”

When they landed again and the propeller had spun down to a stop, Bishop Zook climbed out, pumped Jude’s hand like an excited boy, and then beckoned to Lyyndaya.

“Come, come, my dear,” he smiled, “your buggy awaits.”

Feeling every eye on her, the skin of her face burning, she stepped up to the plane and the bishop helped her into the front cockpit. She used one hand to manage her dress and the other to grab onto parts of the plane. When she was finally in her seat, the bishop gave her the helmet and goggles and showed her how to tighten the buckles of the shoulder harnesses. Then he walked to the front of the plane and bent his head at Jude’s father.

“May I?”

Jude’s father stood back from the propeller. “Of course.”

“I just pull it downward?”

“
Ja
, just a sharp tug and then let it go. Do not hold on.”

“Yes, yes, all right—when?”

“My son will tell you.”

Lyyndaya sat in her cockpit feeling an odd mixture of embarrassment, excitement, and fear. Suddenly Jude’s hand squeezed her left shoulder from behind.

“You will be all right, Lyyndy Lyyndy Lou,” he said.

She could not turn all the way around to see him, but she knew he would be smiling just as his use of the childhood nickname had made her smile as well. Now, ten years later, without having had a chance to discuss it between themselves, the plane ride had become a buggy ride and they were courting, thanks to Bishop Zook. Well, it would give them something to talk about besides the weather and the crops when he came back to Lancaster County from Philadelphia in a few days.

She could not see what Jude was doing, but the bishop all of a sudden nodded, swung down on the propeller with his enormous hands and arms, and the engine burst into life. They began to roll across the ground faster than she had ever traveled in anything before, faster than galloping her mare, Anna, bareback. She felt her heart hammering and her mouth go dry.

“Hang on!” shouted Jude.

The wind was rushing against her face and body. The earth streamed past brown and green. The sky was a streak of blue and silver. Then the plane lifted into the air and her stomach seemed to turn inside out and upside down. She looked down and the men and women and children were like dolls and the wagons like toys and the houses like tiny boxes. Suddenly the plane banked to the right and she felt herself falling out of her seat. The leather flying helmet, unfastened, was torn from her head, her hair exploded in the rush of air, and as her arms dropped over the side into empty space she could not stop herself and started to scream.

W
hat is it?” shouted Jude, straining his head forward as far as he could. “What’s wrong?”

She had grabbed onto both sides of the cockpit. “I feel like…I’m falling out of my seat…”

“You are strapped in, aren’t you?”

“Yes—but they are very loose—”

“Because Bishop Zook was sitting there. Pull on them. Tighten them.”

“He showed me, but I’m not sure how he held the straps.”

“Grab the open ends.”

Jude leveled the plane out while Lyyndaya struggled. She tugged and tugged and finally they snugged up against her shoulders. Closing her eyes, she whispered a prayer of thanks.

“Do you want to go back down?” Jude asked in a loud voice.

Lyyndaya opened her eyes. They were flying right into a sunset of crimson and amber. It was as if they were going toward a huge bright flower in the air. The green land spread underneath them for hundreds of miles. She could see the rivers, the forests, the villages, all as if they were part of some miniature play set. Her lips parted. This was what it was like to be a robin or a lark or a dove. She closed her eyes again.
God
, she prayed,
calm me so that I can take in more of this, enjoy what you have created, celebrate a gift of wings
.

“Shall I land?” Jude asked again.

He couldn’t see her face, of course, but when she opened her eyes again they were narrow and emerald and sharp—what her brothers and sisters called “Lyyndy’s cat eyes” and which usually meant trouble.

“No, I don’t want to land, Jude Whetstone,” she called back, “I want you to take me right into the sun.”

“What?”

“Fly me into the greatest amount of light possible.”

Lyyndaya could feel him grinning in the irresistible way he had, feel it the way she could sense it when his eyes rested on her during a Sunday meal.

“How fast are we going?” she asked above the sound of the rushing air and the engine.

“About 60 miles per hour.”

“How fast can we go?”

“Oh—73 or 75.”

“Do that.”

“Do what?”

“Go as fast as you can.”

“Are you serious?”

Lyyndaya took a deep breath and blurted out the very thing she was most frightened of. “Go into the sun as fast as you can and do a barrel roll.”

“A barrel roll? I’ve only done a barrel roll two or three times.”

“Do a barrel roll for me—please.”

She leaned her head back and heard the engine take on an aggressive snarl, like a wild animal pouncing. Red and purple light swooped into her eyes as Jude hurled the plane west.
Like a smooth yellow stone
, she thought,
from his boyhood slingshot
. The light came on and on and filled her vision and filled up everything that was inside her, heart and soul.
I have wings
, she repeated to herself over and over again to fight down her fear of the speed and the roll Jude would do at any moment,
I have wings like a swallow, like a hawk, like an archangel
.

The plane flipped upside down. Lyyndaya’s breath burst out of her. She might have screamed again, but she pressed a hand over her mouth and bit into a finger. Her whole body was hanging down toward the ground, held in place only by the seat harness. The hair on her head, completely free of any pins now, fell loose and thick and golden like a flame burning out of the cockpit. Both hands gripped the sides of the plane until they were white as bone. She arched her neck, saw the streams and barns and farm fields below, wrong side up, thought it looked ridiculous, as if she were walking on her hands, began to laugh, and then Jude flipped the plane to the side for a few moments so that her hair streaked out from the plane as if a wing were on fire, and she laughed even harder. When the biplane swung right side up once again, completing the roll, Lyyndaya thought,
Why, it’s like doing a cartwheel, or riding the Chicago Ferris wheel, only we’re doing it in thin air
.

“How was that?” Jude called.

“Wonderful!” she shouted, and she did feel wonderful.

“Shall I do it once more?”

“Yes, please, yes!” she almost screamed.