The Wings of Morning

by Murray Pura

  “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.

  She heard him laugh out of his chest. “What a crazy girl you are. You should be hollering for me to land.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because that’s what the girls do who we take up for rides at a dollar apiece in Philadelphia. We no sooner get them up than they scream they want to go down again. What a waste of a dollar. At least you should try to get your money’s worth.”

  “Is that how much this will cost me? A dollar?”

  “I had something else in mind.”

  She smiled and shouted, “Oh, yes? And what was that?”

  He yelled something at her, a single word, she wanted it to be kiss, but she wasn’t sure if it was kiss or hug or what it was, because just as he said it he flipped the plane upside down again, let her hang by the straps and feel her hair almost touch the earth once more, then swung her upright—Almost, she thought, as if he swung me in his strong beautiful arms.

  Now the sunset was all around them—the sky was red above, below, in front, and behind. They were flying in vermilion. She pulled the red into herself in great big lungfuls, opening her mouth as wide as she could, opening it as wide as a tomboy, not an Amish woman. Her fingers and toes tingled. She let one arm dangle out of the side of the cockpit as if she were in a boat and trailing her hand in the water.

  “Still doing well?” Jude called.

  “Very well.”

  “Aren’t you cold with just that little dress on?”

  “No.”

  The dress was short-sleeved and goose bumps ran up and down each arm.

  “We have to head back.”

  “Yes, I was afraid of that.”

  “I think well of you, Lyyndy.”

  “Think well of me? Whatever for? All I did was sit here like a sack of oats.”

  “I think well of you because whatever you’re afraid of you face head on and conquer.”

  “I’m not—” Lyyndaya began, and she was going to finish the sentence with “afraid of anything to do with flying,” but she knew that was a lie, and knew Jude would know it too. So she decided to let his sentence stand, unchallenged, not only because it was the truth, but also because she liked the idea of brave and wild and beautiful Jude Whetstone thinking well of Lyyndaya Kurtz.

  The plane banked to the left as Jude headed the Curtiss Jenny east. The movement felt as normal to Lyyndaya now as a sailing vessel heeling to port in a stiff breeze or a cart full of vegetables for market leaning heavily to one side as it took a sharp turn in the road. The town and the people who stood watching rushed back at them. The green corn, the green hay, the black fields, and the earth jumped up. They hit and bounced and the engine cried and the propeller spun like the Chicago Ferris wheel and stopped.

  Her mother was at her side immediately, face creased with lines of worry. “Lyyndaya Kurtz, just look at you. You are as red as a beet. Your hair is a mess. Pin it back up. Where is your kapp?”

  “Oh, Mama, I feel fine, it was—”

  “And your arms. Like ice.”

  “I’m fine, honestly, it was wonderful.”

  “And what have you done to your finger? How did you cut it?”

  Lyyndaya looked down at the finger she had bitten till it bled. “Just a scratch. A grass cut.”

  “A grass cut? Where is the grass when you are a hundred miles in the air where man was never meant to go?”

  Lyyndaya’s mother began pulling pins from a pocket under her apron and hurriedly tidying her daughter’s windblown hair.

  Her father loomed up, dark and stocky and frowning in his beard. Lyyndaya thought he looked like a papa bear robbed of its cubs. “That wild boy will be the death of you,” he rumbled.

  “Oh, Papa, he was a perfect gentleman.”

  “Upside down,” her father continued to growl, “sideways, spinning like a top. This is a circus? You are on the trapeze? What is to keep the plane from falling? What if God stops holding you up?”

  “Papa, the wings and the engine and the air hold us up—”

  His hands were grasped tightly behind his back. “We are the laughing stock of Paradise. You could not hear what the people of the colony said while you fooled around up there as if you were in your own little world, but we could hear them. Oh, ja.”

  “Papa—”

  He clenched and unclenched his teeth and his beard moved up and down with his jaw. “We are converts to this community. Only ten years we are here. It is important that we be accepted.” He lowered his voice as the engine noise died and people crowded around the plane to touch it and talk to Jude about the barrel rolls. “This idea of you courting that—young man—you can put that from your head. It is out of the question.”

  “Papa, that was just something Bishop Zook said—”

  “I do not care what Bishop Zook said. You will not see that boy again. There will be no buggy rides. And there will certainly be no more aeroplane rides.”

  Now everyone was pressing in, laughing, asking Lyyndaya questions, and her father and mother withdrew. Lyyndaya smiled and answered the children and adults as warmly as she could, but inside her a heavy stone of darkness dropped and took al
l her good spirits with it. She felt like bursting into tears. Jude’s family are converts too, she wanted to shout after her parents’ receding backs as they walked stiffly home, and he has lost his mother, but look how the colony loves him. Of course, she said nothing. An older woman was wiping Lyyndaya’s finger clean with a damp cloth she had pulled out from under her apron. Lyyndaya took her eyes from her mother and father and thanked the woman, Mrs. Stoltzfus, whose husband, Samuel, was one of the colony’s ministers.

  “So, so!” boomed Bishop Zook, smiling and patting her on the arm. “How was the buggy ride?”

  She burrowed around inside her misery to try and find a quip. “Ah, Bishop Zook,” she finally said, “it was as if the horses flew.”

  “Ha, yes, so young love makes you feel, eh?” He leaned in closely to her and said quickly and quietly, “I see this is a difficult thing for your mother and father. Respect their wishes. Pray. Wait. You and young Jude, love, aeroplanes, this is still unfolding like a summer rose for our colony. Let us see how God will surprise us. It is necessary to have some rain before we can see the bud open.”

  Then he clapped his hands gently. “The night comes. It is time our young aviator was up and away to Philadelphia. You may speak with him when he returns by train in three or four days. In the meantime, we send him on his way in God’s mercy.” The bishop and the other men doffed their hats, the bishop prayed, the hats returned to their heads.

  “Let me try that propeller one more time,” the bishop smiled as soon as he had lifted his head and planted his hat firmly back on his head. “You have enough of the fuel, yes?”

  “Just enough, thanks,” said Jude.

  The sun was still above the horizon in the west, but only just. Jude would be flying east to the Atlantic and Philadelphia where a purple darkness was already rising from the trees and crops and ponds. It was eighty miles by train or horse and would take Jude over an hour. Lyyndaya gave Jude a crooked smile, feeling a new fear, of him going it alone into the black night. He saw her worry and shook his head.

  “I have flown under the stars before,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

  But it was not just the night of stars Lyyndaya was troubled about, it was the night of a future without him, without any possibility of being at his side to help move the stick and guide the flight. She gave a small smile she knew he would misunderstand as a nagging concern for the night flying. He winked and tugged the goggles over his eyes. She felt cold and alone as the bishop swung the propeller downward and the prop wash blew his hat off and the colony laughed.

  When Jude was in the air and gone, her two sisters and three brothers gathered around her, jabbering and asking her things she did not feel like answering. Her quiet and unease quickly communicated itself to her siblings as they all walked back to the house together. Everyone grew silent. The oldest, Ruth, as always, hit the nail on the head and linked her arm through Lyyndaya’s.

  “It is Mama and Papa,” she said in a sad way. “They do not approve of Jude Whetstone or of aeroplanes and now they will give our sister the talk.”

  As they came up the walk to the house the lamp in the kitchen was burning brightly. In the square of window, Lyyndaya could see her mother and father sitting at the table drinking coffee.

  “Mama and Papa are waiting for us,” chirped Daniel, who was nine.

  “They are not waiting up for us,” said Ruth softly, and she gave her sister’s arm a squeeze. “They are waiting for Lyyndaya.”

  THREE

  After milk and cookies had been consumed in silence, Mama shooed everyone to their rooms and came back to sit down with Papa and their second oldest daughter, Lyyndaya. Mama poured her daughter a cup of coffee and added the cream she knew Lyyndaya liked, but the girl did not drink from the cup. Her father picked up on her mood.

  “It is not the end of the world, my Lyyndy,” he said forcing himself to smile. “You are a beauty, our blessing, and many young men, good young men, will be asking for your hand. Why, only last week, wasn’t it, Mother, the Hostetler boy, young David, he was asking after you.”

  “He is a child,” Lyyndaya said quickly, in a voice like a pair of scissors snipping fabric.

  “He’s only one. There was the Beiler boy as well, Jacob, and Jonathan Harshberger—”

  “Hush, Father,” said Lyyndaya’s mother, putting a hand on her husband’s arm. “I know you mean well, but a young woman does not want to hear about other young men when she has her heart set on a particular one.”

  Lyyndaya’s father bristled, losing his good temper immediately and completely. “Heart set? Heart set? How can her heart be set? The two scarcely know each other.”

  “They grew up together, Father.”

  “Children’s games, childish antics. Now it is time to be an adult and put aside the toys of infanthood.”

  “He is very kind—” Lyyndaya started to say, but her father interrupted.

  “We are converts and we are trying to make a good impression,” he snapped.

  “So is he,” Lyyndaya responded, “and he is already making a good impression.”

  “What? By jumping around in the air like some sort of—balloon?”

  Lyyndaya shook her head and sat straighter in the chair. “Didn’t you see the way they crowded around his aeroplane? How they smiled at him? Yes, I know not everyone is sure about flying, just as we are not sure about telephones and electricity and motorcars and photography. But the decision has not been made to exclude flying from the Amish, Papa. And even if some are not sure about flying machines they are sure about Jude. He is one of them. One of us. All the pastors agreed he should be allowed to learn to fly last year. All the pastors agreed he should be permitted to belong to a flying club provided he did not purchase an aeroplane and park it in his field like an object of pride.”

  Her father pointed a finger at her. “The colony may like him the way all parents like all their children. But he is still considered a wild one. Look at the stunts he pulled tonight, dangerous stunts, ja? If the engine had failed…”

  “I asked him to do the stunts.” Lyyndaya sat even straighter. She knew her green eyes were on fire by the way her mother looked at her.

  “No—not just the flying,” her father went on, “I mean these stunts, upside down, around and around—”

  “Ja, I asked him to do all of that. Otherwise he would have flown straight and level like an arrow.”

  “You did?” Her father struggled to grasp this. “You asked him?”

  “Ja.”

  He sat back in his chair a moment and stared at her. Then he began to nod, glanced at his wife, and looked back at Lyyndaya, still nodding.

  “It is his influence that changes you,” he finally said. “I should have put a stop to this years ago, when you were fifteen, sixteen. May God forgive me for being such a poor father.”

  “You are not a poor father,” Lyyndaya protested.

  “Too soft. I am always too soft.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “No more. There he is, off in Philadelphia, when he should be hard at work at the forge—”

  “Papa!” Lyyndaya exclaimed. “That is not fair. You know how he worked night and day to get plows ready for spring planting, to shoe horses, fix buggy wheels and suspensions, all so he could spend a few days developing his flying skills—”

  “A few days!” her father almost shouted. “Weeks among the English! Weeks!”

  “—and go to Philadelphia, something the bishop and the leadership approved of and gave their consent to. You make it sound like—like—he is some lazy gadabout with his head in the clouds—”

  Her father snorted like a horse. “What else would a flyboy be?”

  “—when he has always done his duty by this colony, always worked hard as our blacksmith. Don’t you remember the Widow Borkholder, her iron bed, she could not sleep on any other, and he was up twenty-four hours mending the frame so that she could rest. He took no sleep for himself for more than a day so he could—” Lyyndaya felt
the tightness in her throat and the burning on her face and stumbled for words. Looking like a twelve-year-old again, she appealed to her mother. “Mama, you know that what Papa says about Jude is not true—”

  Her mother waved a hand in the air. “The pair of you. I should have locked you both up in the corncrib years ago until you settled matters. You are too much alike—headstrong, determined, independent, clever with the tongue.” She looked at her husband. “You know, Papa, that we have said we will abide by the rules of the colony and the decisions of the bishop and elders.”

  He averted his eyes and looked at the wall on the other side of the kitchen. “Ja, ja.”

  “So then there is no argument when Jude is permitted to take flying lessons or go to the aerodrome in Philadelphia if the colony’s leadership have agreed to allow it, is there?”

  Lyyndaya’s father said nothing, but she could see his jaw working under his beard. Then her mother turned two tired but very dark eyes on her.

  “And daughter, I know you like this boy, this man, this Jude Whetstone. No, he is not old family, they came at the same time we did thanks to Bishop Lapp’s ministrations, may he rest with the Lord. But—perhaps—you are not right for each other. Perhaps—” She hesitated, gazing at her daughter’s broken face and the broken spirit it expressed, then bit her lower lip and plunged ahead “—perhaps it is like striking a match by a barrel of gasoline. The two should not mix. Not unless you want to blow something up. Or burn down a house.”

  “Mama—” Lyyndaya began.

  Her mother waved her hand again. “Let me finish. You are very young. So is he. Ja, some girls here marry at sixteen or seventeen, but that is not for everybody. Who knows what you will yet grow into? Who knows what you will become? Who knows how he will change, how the both of you will change? It is enough now that you respect our wishes and not spend time with him and certainly not let him court you. Your father and I are unsure about flying, but that is a debate the whole colony is having and it is not for us to decide for the colony what is right and what is wrong. But you are our daughter, and when it comes to you and your future then it is for us to decide what is right and what is wrong. We feel this young man is wrong for you and that what is best for you is a future that does not have him in it.”