The Wings of Morning (5 page)

“Lyyndy?”

“Yes, Papa.”

She looked up. He was smiling at her.

“Come, have some fresh buttermilk. We will talk in the kitchen.”

“I just have Bella here to finish and then Trinket.”

“All right. Join us when you are done. Are the children still in here?”

“No, they finished about ten minutes ago. I think they went to check on the robin’s nest by the stable.”

Her father lingered in the doorway. He removed his straw hat and held it in his hands, turning it. “My girl. You know I have a temper. May God forgive me. I know that Jude Whetstone is not a wicked boy. He is just young and full of dreams.”

Surprised, Lyyndaya watched as her father sat down on a milking stool nearby.

“I build up steam like a locomotive,” he went on. “It drives me forward too quickly. Then I am out of steam and I sit on my tracks and I go nowhere. I think what it is for me, when it comes to Jude, is that I once thought as he does now. Oh, yes. When I heard that the Wright brothers had made a plane back in 1903 I knew the whole thing would get much bigger. And I myself wished to soar among the hawks. But there was the question of whether to join the Amish faith or not. I was certain then, just as I am certain now, that the Amish will not permit their people to fly the planes. They are still considering the matter, but that is what they will come to in the end. So I turned my back on my dreams of flying so that we could be a good Amish family. I suppose that’s what irritates me about Jude, my girl. He is living what I forsook for the gospel’s sake and I resent it. God forgive me, I resent it.”

He stood up and put his hat back on his head. “He is not a bad boy. Forgive me for treating him as such. But he has no future with the Amish people if he continues to fly. He is not a man who can ever be a husband for you.” His face was sad as he walked out of the barn.

Lyyndaya rushed through milking Bella and Trinket, emptied her pail, then half ran to the house, taking her apron off her dress as she did so and wiping her hands on it. The kitchen table was crowded and noisy, Daniel and Harley half-shouting about the robins and Sarah scowling and arguing with them, disagreeing about everything they said. Ruth sat beside Mama and had been talking to her when Lyyndaya came in, but then she abruptly stopped. Papa and Luke were speaking about mowing the second hay field in a week if it did not rain. Ruth beckoned with her hand and Lyyndaya took the empty seat by her sister. A glass of cool buttermilk was waiting for her.

She sat and sipped the fresh buttermilk and tried to decipher her sister’s mood. Ruth’s blue eyes, framed by her oval face and raven black hair, flashed with annoyance as she told Sarah to calm down. Then she asked Lyyndaya how the cows had been, especially Vivianne, and her blue eyes softened. She patted Lyyndaya’s arm gently.

“All right, good,” Papa finally said. “Everyone outside. Luke, we will go to our third hay field after I am finished in here. Please get the horse ready. We’ll take the gelding.”

Luke quickly got up from the table and took his glass to the sink. “Yes, Papa.”

The kitchen soon emptied, leaving Ruth and Lyyndaya and their parents. Papa did not waste any time. He lifted his thick eyebrows at Ruth.

“So, my girl, what did we find out?”

“I said hello to Jude at the station,” Ruth replied, “and told him I had a letter to give him. He asked where Lyyndaya was, and I told him the letter was from her and that it would explain. That worried him a little, I could see, but he had no time to think about it for so many wanted to talk to him.”

Father’s brow creased sharply. “What do you mean so many?”

“Well, a good number of the colony were there to welcome him back. All the leadership and the bishop as well. The children were all over him.”

Lyyndaya felt a pang. So many there to greet her young man, to touch his hand, make him laugh, but not her. Papa was rubbing his hand over his mouth and beard at this news, no doubt worried that the Kurtz family might be looked upon in a bad light for not being there with the old families.

“Well, but then you followed him back to the house?” Mama spoke up.

“Yes, I followed him and his father. They invited me in and we chatted a bit about the warm weather and how hot that made the work at the forge. They asked after our dairy herd.”

“
Ja, ja
,” said Papa impatiently, his rough, squat hands playing with the empty buttermilk glass.

Ruth’s blue eyes snapped with an inner light. “I gave him the letter and he got up from the table and walked to the window to read it.”

“And what did he say?” pressed Father.

“He said—”

“Did he write a note?” asked Mama looking worried, glancing at Lyyndaya.

Ruth shook her head. “There is no note. He simply came to me, thanked me for bringing the letter, wished our family well, said he was making up several dozen horseshoes, if we needed any now was a good time to let him know, he’d be happy to serve us, and then—”

Ruth hesitated and in a gesture just like Mama, bit on her lower lip.

“And then what?” demanded Father.

Ruth closed her eyes and let her words out with a deep rush of air. “And then he said, ‘Tell your father and mother, and Lyyndaya, that I am very sorry to have been a burden and a trouble to them. It was not my wish.’”

Father spread his hands as Lyyndaya felt her throat and eyes burn. “That is all he said? Nothing more?”

Ruth’s eyes flew open and the blue in them flamed. “What did you expect him to say? His mother is in the grave, we cut him out of our lives, cut him off from the girl he loves, all because he flies an aeroplane—you’d think he were a murderer the way we treat him!”

Father rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. “That is enough, young lady—more than enough.”

Ruth dropped her head and closed her eyes again. “I’m sorry, Papa. What’s done is done.” She looked at her mother. “It does not matter anyway. The women are all around him like hummingbirds at a flower. He will be courting one of them in no time. Anna Lapp, Katie Fisher, even Bishop Zook’s daughter, Emma—”

“Emma?” asked Lyyndaya in a weak voice. Despite her faith of a few days before, she suddenly felt she had lost Jude forever, lost him to Emma and all the other young girls who had been dying to get their hands on him—all because her father and mother thought flying was a sin, an unholiness, a wrong in the eyes of God. The tears erupted. She pushed herself away from the table and fled up the stairs.

“Lyyndy, please, wait!” called Papa. “We are not finished.”

“Papa, she has heard enough,” Mama said. “Let her be.”

“I wished to say I care for the young man. I do not hate him, Rebecca.”

She placed a hand gently on his. “That is very good. That is very kind. But try to understand that your daughter is eighteen and a woman and in love and in great pain because of a decision we made, Amos.”

Lyyndaya could hear them talking even with her face buried in her pillow. Then it was quiet and soon afterward the door to the room opened and Ruth sat on the bed beside her. She began to smooth Lyyndaya’s hair with her hand.

“I’m sorry,” Ruth said, “I didn’t mean for it to be so rough. I didn’t want to see you hurt more than you already are. I just wanted Mama and Papa to realize how wonderful everyone in the colony thinks Jude is—everyone except them—and that it is you he loves. I know he does. But if they will not let you have him then a dozen other girls are eager to take your place—with their parents’ good favor. Mama and Papa are wrong. I feel in my soul they are wrong, that this is not God’s will—but what can you and I do?”

Lyyndaya groaned in her misery and burrowed her face even deeper into her pillow. “You make it sound like the colony already knows Papa and Mama have forbidden me…to court him—”

“They do know. Whether Father said something among the men, or Mother among the women, or Luke or Sarah among the youth—who knows? I’m sorry, Lyyndy. We can only pray Mother and Father change their minds.”

“They’ll never change their minds.”

Ruth rubbed Lyyndaya’s back and then added, “Lyyndy, I have more to tell you. Are you listening?”

“What is it?” came a muffled voice from the pillow. “More glad tidings?”

“Actually, yes. Jude said more than I told downstairs. But, God forgive me, it is not for Mother and Father’s ears.”

Lyyndaya sat bolt upright on the bed. “What? What did he say you have not told me?”

Ruth looked at her sister’s unraveling hair, the redness and puffiness around her eyes, smiled, and shook her head. “Of course, no one could fault Jude if he changed his mind after taking one look at you now.”

Lyyndaya grabbed her sister by the shoulders. “Tell me! What did he say?”

Ruth brought a sheet of paper folded in half from under her apron. “Read for yourself.”

Lyyndaya snatched the note and, sitting cross-legged on the bed in her dress, read it with her mouth partly open.

“Oh!” cried Lyyndaya as she flung her arms about her sister’s neck. “Does he love me then? Is he telling me he loves me?”

“The words are fairly clear, my dear sister.”

“Is it true? That he won’t give up? That he doesn’t care about Emma or any of the other girls?”

“It sounds to me like he cares for only one woman—a golden-haired beauty named Lyyndaya Kurtz.”

Lyyndaya started to cry and laugh at the same time. “But can I believe it? How long will it take for us to be together? How can God make everything perfect?”

Ruth put her arms around her sister and they hugged each other and rocked back and forth. “I don’t know the hows and whens. I only know the Who. God is in love with love, I’m sure of it, and looks for every opportunity of cultivating it like a green field on this often barren earth.”

She patted Lyyndaya on the back. “I promised Mama we would see to the laundry before lunch. We should get on with it. At the clothesline we can talk some more.”

It was while they were hanging up Father’s shirts and pants, as well as the ones belonging to Luke, Harley, and Daniel, with wooden clothespins in their mouths, that Ruth asked, “Lyyndy, would you ever consider leaving the colony?”

Lyyndaya glanced over at her sister while she pinned up a large white shirt. “You mean, leave the Amish?”

“Well, something like that, yes.”

“No, never. I love this way of life.”

“More than you love Jude?”

“Why would I have to choose?”

Ruth shook out a pair of Daniel’s black pants. “Because we still don’t know what the colony will eventually decide about aeroplanes and flying. What if they forbid it like they forbid telephones? What will Jude do?”

“He would accept it.”

But Lyyndaya had stopped hanging clothes and stood still, thinking about Jude Whetstone and the clouds and the tall blue sky.

“Would he?” challenged Ruth. “Would he, really, Lyyndy? If you flew as much as he did and you saw it as a gift of God, would you give it up just like that?”

Lyyndaya looked down at the ground. “You give me hope and then you take it away again.”

“I’m sorry.” Ruth came over and held her. “I don’t mean to. I guess I’m asking these questions because I also wonder—would I leave the colony if I thought they were withholding a good thing that God meant for me to have? Would I leave if the man I love was forced to leave and I had to choose a husband among those I considered less than the right man?”

Lyyndaya leaned her head into her sister’s shoulder. “Why are you bringing up all this now?”

“So that you can pray about tomorrow.”

“What about tomorrow?”

Ruth pulled out of the hug and ran her hand down her sister’s suntanned face. “I overheard Bishop Zook telling Jude that he and the leadership wished to have a talk with him in the afternoon. That there were some concerns about flying and aeroplanes. Jude agreed to meet with them, of course.”