The Wings of Morning (35 page)

Ever since the news about Jude, she had been spending each week volunteering at one of the large hospitals in Philadelphia, with the blessing of the Amish leadership. Every Monday she took the train into the city and on Friday night she returned to her family in Paradise. Now and then the influenza reasserted itself in Lancaster County, but the cases were infrequent and Dr. Morgan didn’t require her assistance. In fact, Ruth was working closely with the doctor now and that was the only nursing help he seemed to need.

Philadelphia was another story. One outbreak of the flu would scarcely die out before another would take its place. The conductor may have been right. Since soldiers had begun returning to Pennsylvania in late November and December, Lyyndaya had noticed a surge in the number of cases. There had been weeks when there were so many dead that volunteers had been forced to stack them like logs in the hallway outside of the hospital’s morgue. There was nowhere to put them but in the ground, and she had been witness to more than one mass burial. Many times she had said to herself,
This is what I read in the newspapers about the war. These are the deaths beyond counting in the trenches
.

The whistle blew. The woman who had argued with the conductor had not made it on board. Lyyndaya glanced back through the window and saw that she had managed to find a policeman, but the officer, who was wearing one of the medical masks, was leading her away rather than insisting she be allowed to board. They pulled out of the station and were soon lumbering through the January countryside of snow and brown grass. Lyyndaya closed her eyes and leaned her head for a moment against the ice-cold of her window.

Everything is stiff and dead. Just like me
.

Near the end of December an army car had brought a box of Jude’s personal items to his father—a Bible, pens and paper, socks and shoes and clothing, a spare uniform, a toothbrush, the wooden model of the
Flyer
. Mr. Whetstone had found the letters his son had received from Lynndaya and had passed them on to her, along with a leather flying jacket. She never wore the jacket, but she kept it in the closet in her room. Around the same time a letter had come from an Amish woman who lived at Bird-in-Hand. She told Lyyndaya that Jude had written her a nice note after locating her brother Matt at an aerodrome in France. She knew Lyyndaya couldn’t receive letters from Jude, just as she couldn’t receive them from Matt, but she wanted to tell her that Jude had sounded cheerful and had lifted a stone from her heart with his good news about her brother who, thank God, had survived the war.

A final letter from Jude had shown up at the post office January fourth. Edward, who had taken every opportunity to remind her about his prophetic abilities since the war had ended on November eleventh, handed it to her in silence. Lyyndaya asked Ruth to sit with her while she read it through, something that was far from easy. The letter was short and had been written the day his plane went down. The ending broke her heart.

In Philadelphia, a horse-drawn cab took her to the home of Mrs. Henrietta Thorndike, who billeted several of the young women from out of town who were volunteering at the hospital during the crisis. A wealthy widow whose husband had invested in the Pennsylvania railroads but had died in the summer during the first flu outbreak, Mrs. Thorndike wouldn’t accept any payment for food or rent. It was her way, she told Lyyndaya, of helping others work against the disease that had taken her husband’s life.

“It’s my Christian duty,” she said. “You, an Amish woman, must appreciate that.”

“Of course I do,” Lyyndaya had replied. “I suppose, Mrs. Thorndike, you could say the same thing about me.”

The older woman’s eyes softened. “Did you lose someone to this pestilence, my dear?”

“I—lost someone I cared about very much—to the war.” Lyyndaya still found it difficult to talk about. “Perhaps, like you, I wish to save as many lives as I can. Whether they are civilians or soldiers. There has already been enough death.”

Several times over the fall and winter Mrs. Thorndike had sat down and patiently drawn out of Lyyndaya the story of herself and Jude. The shunning had angered her, Jude’s self-sacrifice in France for the life of one of his pilots had caused her to weep, a China teacup trembling in her fingers. Now and then both women would, by common consent, agree to pray together. Lyyndaya admitted to herself that their moments of prayer were one of the few things that gave her any lasting comfort.

“I am a good Episcopalian,” Mrs. Thorndike had pointed out, “and you have been raised Amish in Lancaster County. But our Lord God takes no note of such things when it comes to prayer and worship. We are the same in his eyes. And he treats us the same.”

At the Thorndike house Lyyndaya changed into her work clothing—a dark dress and apron that wouldn’t show the blood, a black prayer covering, her most comfortable shoes. Then a cab took her to the hospital. Sometimes she shared the ride with one or more of the other young women staying at Mrs. Thorndike’s. They were never charged cab fee from the train station or to and from the hospital. One young cabbie with a small black mustache spoke for his fellows—“We knows what you’re doin’ for our people and we thank you for it. One day it could be one of us or one of our own loved ones we’re countin’ on you to save. This we’re doin’ for you here is a small thing, a very small thing.”

Mondays were difficult. Patients Lyyndaya had been caring for and had left regaining their health on a Friday were often dead and buried by the time she returned. This Monday was no different. Old faces had vanished and new ones had taken their place. Shar Hayden, one of the young women who boarded at Mrs. Thorndike’s, handed her a basin of cool water and a stack of clean cloths as she appeared at her usual ward.

“Here, Fritzie,” she greeted Lyyndaya. “There are some new soldier boys at the end of the hall. You like soldier boys, don’t you? So this is right up your alley.”

Lyyndaya had long ago learned to ignore Shar’s jibes at her German accent. “Who are they?”

“I don’t know.” She tugged a folded sheet of paper from a dress pocket. “Timmy Cameron. Ross Campbell. Jules Witsun. Sam Irving. Sorry. None of your German boys to fuss over.”

“Do they have battle wounds?”

“I really don’t know. Maybe the Kaiser missed these ones. Dr. Levy thought they might be exhibiting some symptoms. The last room. All crammed in together.”

“But the last room is so tiny!”

Shar shrugged and hurried off. “All crammed in together. No mattresses. Guess they aren’t war heroes.”

“Every man who suffered through that terrible war in Europe is a hero,” Lyyndaya said to Shar’s retreating back.

“Especially the Huns?”

Lyyndaya made her way in the opposite direction, passing nurses and orderlies and two men in masks who were carrying a dead soldier, still in uniform, out a side door. A gust of January air made her take in her breath sharply. She glanced through the doorway and saw a pile of bodies that had been stacked in the snow. One of the men coming back in saw the look on her face and snapped, “It’s as good as a morgue. Don’t worry, they don’t feel anything.”

Lyyndaya prayed for the man, who looked exhausted and ill himself, then went to the end of the hall to what had once been a storage room for buckets and mops and such. The four men were shoulder to shoulder, head to head, each with only a woolen blanket beneath them and the cold bare floor, and another on top. A couple of them looked up when she opened the door. One man grinned.

“Hey, boys. Wake up. This nurse is pretty. Not like the other.”

Another man craned his neck. “Yeah, but she looks religious.”

“She ain’t religious. You ain’t religious, are you, honey?”

Lyyndaya smiled and knelt by him. “I’m a Christian. Just like you. Yes?”

The man stared at her as she felt his forehead. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“You’re pretty warm. Sam?”

“Ross.”

“I’m Sam,” said the man lying next to Ross.

Lyyndaya began to wipe Ross’s face and neck. “How does that feel?”

“Very nice.” Ross had suddenly become polite.

“All of you could use shaves.”

“It was such a shambles crossing the Channel,” grumbled Ross, “and no better when we got back to England. I started getting the aches and chills and my unit embarked for the States while I was laid up. Lost my shaving kit. The four of us here are some of the odds and ends that got packed into the same steamer. I kept telling them I was better, but they drove me here anyway. Under guard.”

“Where’s home, Ross?”

“Idaho.”

“Well, you’ll need to be fit for a long train ride like that. Better let us keep an eye on you for a few days.”

“In a few days we’ll probably be dead. There’re more sick people in Philadelphia than there were in the trenches. Excuse me for saying so, but this hospital of yours is like a graveyard.”

“That’s why you are isolated here in one of our finest rooms. To keep the germs far away.” She wrung out her cloth and turned to the other man. “How about you, Sam? Any aches? Trouble breathing? Do you have a cough?”

“You sound like a doctor.”

She laughed. “Oh, I can’t help that. I spend so much time with them.” She felt the side of his face. “You don’t seem to have a fever.”

“I’m okay. Like Ross says, I was feelin’ real lousy in France so they left me behind. That was weeks ago. If I’d had the flu I’d be dead by now, wouldn’t I?”

Lyyndaya didn’t answer him. “What about the other two?”

“Don’t know them,” said Ross.

Lyyndaya glanced over at the sleeping men. Their backs were to her. She shook her head. “I can’t stand the sight of your beards. Heaven knows what is living in them. Will you let me take them off?”

“Fine with me,” said Ross. “I haven’t had a woman shave my face in my entire life.”

Lyyndaya patted him on the arm and stood up. “So then this will be a late Christmas present. Let me fetch a razor and some shaving soap.”

How strange that an Amish woman should be in this setting. But you would have me here, wouldn’t you, Lord? I do this for you, I do it for these poor men and for their families who wait for them at home—I do it for you, Jude, for you were one of them, you suffered, and you tried to give lives back, not take them away
.

She returned bearing a mug, a cake of soap, scissors, and a brush in one hand, and a razor in the other. When she walked in, one of the men who had been sleeping was up on his feet facing her. It was heartbreaking to see him like that, so thin, barely standing really, almost ready to fall over, hair straggling over his face and in his eyes.

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t think you’re quite well enough to be up and around.”

But the man remained on his feet and didn’t speak. Lyyndaya looked for help from the others.

“Why is he on his feet? He could hurt himself.”

Ross was propped up on an elbow. “I don’t know. He stood up right after you left the room. Then he started using your name. I guess it’s your name.”

She was startled. “How could he know my name?”

Ross shrugged. “He keeps saying something. Maybe it’s another word. Maybe it’s another person. Maybe he’s got the fever.”

“Len—Lin—La,” tried Sam. “Something like that.”

For the first time Lyyndaya looked closely at the man standing in front of her. Past the bushy beard and long hair his eyes pulled her in. The mug dropped from her fingers and broke.

“No!” she said.

The man tried to take a step, but almost collapsed. He steadied himself. He didn’t take his eyes off her.

“Lyyn…daya,” he said in a voice hardly stronger than a whisper.

“
Oh, mein Gott!
” she cried out. “
Oh, mein Gott in Himmel!
”

Everything else tumbled from her hands. She rushed to the man and held him tightly in her arms so he couldn’t fall. Her hands were pushing the beard back from his face and brushing the hair out of his eyes in a frantic way, as if both were on fire. Then she began to cry and laugh and kiss his cheeks, his eyebrows, his forehead, holding him with so much strength she thought she might be hurting him, but she couldn’t hold back, couldn’t stop herself, all the time calling out to God in Pennsylvania Dutch.