On Wings Of The Morning

by Marie Bostwick

  And, like him, I’m trying to make up for that. Maybe it is too late. Maybe you can’t forgive me. Maybe you’ll find the truth of my family history so shocking that you can’t love me. Or maybe you never loved me to begin with. It’s a chance I had to take.

  I’ll be in the hospital a few weeks. I’m not sure where they will send me next, but they’ll forward my mail. I really hope to hear from you, Georgia. And if I don’t? I guess that means one of the maybes was true.

  Love,

  Morgan

  “I love you, too, Morgan.” I whispered. I read the closing again and wiped tears from my eyes. “I just pray I haven’t figured it out too late.”

  44

  Georgia

  Waukegan, Illinois—May 1945

  Stubbs squared his shoulders and planted his feet, looking as imposing and resolute as it is possible for a five-foot-four-inch man to look. “I don’t care if you are the boss, Georgia! I am not letting you fly that rattletrap of a trainer all the way to Oklahoma. You’ll get yourself killed!”

  “Not if you go and tune that engine like I told you to, I won’t!”

  We stood toe to toe for a long minute. This time I didn’t blink.

  “Fine!” Stubbs grumbled. “But it’ll take me three or four hours. Maybe”—he sneered—“you’ll have come to your senses by then and we can forget the whole thing.”

  I laughed. “Stubbs, I finally have come to my senses. That’s why I’m flying to Oklahoma in that rattletrap of a trainer, and I’m doing it in one hour. Do you hear me? One!”

  His tone changed from sniping to pleading. “Georgia, be reasonable. I can’t have it ready in an hour, not even close. You’ve got to—”

  “One hour!” I turned on my heel and strode off toward the office to pack, wondering if the overnight kit Roger used to keep for emergencies and late nights was still in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet.

  It was, but I hadn’t even opened it when I heard the sound of engine noise. I walked to the window of the office and looked out just in time to see a plane, a brightly painted Stearman Katydet trainer, older than my Ryan but in much better condition, come in for a landing. And somehow I knew, even before he landed, Morgan was flying it.

  And suddenly he was on the ground and I was in his arms, kissing him and crying. “How did you know? After all this time. How did you know?”

  And he was grinning and confused but kissing me anyway. “How did I know what?”

  “That I was coming to find you today! If you’d come an hour later you’d have missed me because I’d have been on my way to Oklahoma.” I laughed and cried all at the same time. “I got your letter ...”

  “My letter?”

  “The one you wrote from the hospital in New Guinea. The post office must have lost it. I only got it today, but as soon as I read it, I knew I had to go to you! Oh, Morgan! I love you! I always did, but I was just so afraid, and after I met your family ... Well, I just thought they were so perfect. Your dad’s a minister and your mother is so sweet. I just thought they’d never be able to accept someone like me and ...” But before I could explain more, he kissed me again, sweet and soft on the mouth, and I kissed him back. Words could wait. I didn’t need to talk or explain anything, not just then.

  There were problems to be solved, I knew, apologies to be offered and accepted, plans made, and arrangements to be executed, but there was no hurry. Nothing in our past, present, or future would ever come between us again. We had time, time to share our stories, to share our hopes and our fears, our disappointments and our dreams.

  Morgan and I had all the time in the world.

  Epilogue

  Morgan

  Hana, Hawaii—August 26, 1975

  When you are young, the old people nod sagely and tell you not to be in such a hurry, that time flies quickly enough without you searching for a tailwind, and you nod back and listen politely even though you don’t believe them. But, of course, it is true. Life speeds by in an instant, rushing like wind between your open fingers. If you’ve been fortunate enough to find your happiness, it goes even faster.

  It’s been more than thirty-one years since I woke in my bed in Liberal, Kansas, decided that my mother was right, that I couldn’t give up on love, and flew all the way to Waukegan in search of it. It’s thirty years to the month since Georgia and I were married, and one year to the day since my father died.

  We’d wanted to come to Hawaii for years and years, but somehow we never found the time. You know how it is—business is too busy or too slow, the children are too young or too old—in the busyness of life, you can always find some reason or other for putting off the things you’d really love to do. Not that I’m complaining. Georgia and I have built a wonderful life together. Our children, Janet, the oldest, and the twins, Carter and Clare, are all grown now and I couldn’t be prouder of them.

  Clare is in Arizona, working on her masters degree in aerospace engineering. She wants to design airplanes someday. Isn’t that something? Janet and Carter still live in Oklahoma. They both fell in love young, married, and have given us three wonderful grand-kids. All the kids learned to fly a plane before they could drive a car. Janet and Carter are instructors and help us run the business, which is lucky for us. I don’t see how we could manage it otherwise.

  At the end of the war, we didn’t have much. For the first two years of our marriage, until Janet came along, Georgia and I lived in Ruby’s old caboose in the backyard. The quarters were tight, but we were so happy we didn’t care. And it was nice to be so close to Mama and Paul. Mama and Georgia got to be real close, and, just as I’d feared, Mama turned Georgia into a quilter. There’s a bedroom in our house that’s supposed to be for guests, but it’s so filled up with fabric and sewing machines and quilt batting that you can’t get to the bed. We bought the place in ’47, and we’ve lived there ever since, but, like I said, at first we didn’t have much. We sank every penny into the school.

  Georgia and Stubbs Peterson had six thousand dollars each, and I had the same, money I’d saved from my service pay plus the proceeds of an account my father had opened for me years before but Mama had never touched. When we decided to pool our money and open a flight school with nothing but our collected savings and those two trainers, Georgia’s Ryan and my Stearman, none of us could have imagined that one day we’d eventually own the biggest private airfield in all of western Kansas and Oklahoma, but we do. Georgia and I fly every single day of our lives, sometimes together and sometimes separately, and every single flight is just as awe-inspiring as the first, like being born, opening your eyes, and seeing the world for the very first time. As I’ve grown older, many of life’s pleasures have faded for me, but flying? Never.

  Over the years we’ve helped hundreds of would-be pilots, male and female, find their wings. The first woman to graduate from Welles Flight School was Georgia’s best friend from grade school, Fran. Lately, we’ve had almost as many women coming through the door as men. Recently the government has been making noise about finally granting the WASP the full military status and benefits that should have been theirs to begin with, and all kinds of reporters have been showing up on our doorstep, wanting to interview Georgia. The stories have been run in newspapers all over the country, and now women from everywhere have been deciding they want to learn how to fly and insisting that Georgia be their instructor. I can’t blame them for that. They couldn’t ask for a better teacher.

  Our children know where and what they come from. We’ve told them about Roger, about Delia and Earl and Nathan, and about Mama and Lindbergh, too. Not that we go around sharing our private business with the whole world, but we don’t keep secrets anymore, not about the family or from the family. The good, the bad, the truth; it’s all part of who we are.

  When we opened the school back in ’45, we decided to call it Welles Flight School in honor of Georgia’s late husband. After Georgia told me about him, I thought it was only right. I never met him, but he was a good man and should b
e remembered. And though I’ve no reason to suppose it’s true, I can’t help but wonder if old Roger hasn’t been up there watching out for all of us in some way, or at least for Georgia. She was born with wings in her heart, just like I was. Roger helped her find them, just like my parents helped me. Every one of us stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before. I’m grateful.

  I always meant to tell my father that, but the years went by and I never did. When I heard he’d moved to Hawaii a few years back, I started talking to Georgia about going there, maybe to celebrate our wedding anniversary, and bringing the whole family along. She agreed right off, said she’d heard it was beautiful there, but talk of sightseeing aside, she knew why I really wanted to go. I wanted to see him one more time, to introduce him to his grandchildren, to let him know that, even though we’d gotten off to a rocky start, we’d turned out all right in the end. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d say it, though.

  Maybe that’s why every year, when Georgia would ask if we were going to Hawaii for our anniversary, I’d come up with some reason why we couldn’t, not just yet.

  Then, a year ago today, I sat down at the kitchen table to drink my coffee, opened the paper, and read that he was gone. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. Georgia didn’t say anything at first, just put her arms around me.

  When I finally found breath enough to speak, I said, “Somehow I always thought I’d see him again. I thought there’d be time, and that I’d finally figure out what I meant to say. Now it’s too late.”

  Georgia reached up and brushed her hand over my head, then traced her finger along the outline of my hair where it is beginning to recede, just like his did. She smiled, and the understanding and love of a lifetime together showed in her eyes. “Morgan, that’s not true. You of all people should know—it’s never too late to say you love someone.”

  So here I am, driving a rented Chrysler sedan along the narrow, impossibly winding road from Lahaina to Hana with Mama sitting beside me. I’d asked Georgia and Paul and everyone else if they wanted to go along, but they all claimed a sudden interest in taking a ride on a glass-bottomed boat. I guess they knew it was something Mama and I needed to do on our own.

  Mama is in her seventies now, but her eyes are still sharp. She spots the sign before I do. “There,” she points out the window. “Mile marker forty-one.”

  I turn down the road that I’ve been told leads to the Palapala Ho’omau church, and there it is. A simple white church constructed of limestone coral. It’s smaller than I had imagined. I park the car and go to open Mama’s door and help her out. The terrain is uneven, so I make sure she has a good grip on her cane before I hand her the big black bag she insists on carrying herself.

  There are no other visitors today. The only sound is the chirping of the brilliantly feathered birds that flutter through the trees like so many bright guardian angels and the soft shuffle of our feet as we walk slowly down the path.

  It takes me some time to locate the correct grave. The headstone is simple and dignified, modest and not at all out of place among the rest. A blanket of stones of uneven sizes but with rounded edges and shallow-cratered indentation, as if they had been tumbled together in the surf, surrounds the headstone. Mama and I stand at the foot of the grave, not saying anything.

  Our heads are bowed, as if praying, but I wonder if she is having better luck than I am when it comes to finding words. There is so much I want to say and so much I feel, but the only sentence I can conjure is, I’m here. I hope that is enough.

  After a few minutes, Mama lifts her head. I can see the tears in her eyes. She opens the black bag and pulls out the quilt, the one she stitched for me all those years ago, with Mama and me standing in shadow on the earth and the fluttering edges of an aviator’s scarf, the spirit of my father, looking on from a distance. She unfolds the quilt and lays it over the grave like she is tucking a child to sleep. I help her.

  We stand again and see, and think, and feel, and say our farewells.

  There is nothing on the headstone to indicate that the man who lies under it was one of the most famous men of his time, that he flew across oceans and made the world smaller, that during his lifetime, he was feted and hated with passion and vehemence by people all over the world. If you did not know his story, you would not have known any of that by looking at this stone. He designed it himself. I suppose that was how he wanted it. Before many generations pass, all that will be known of the man who lies here is his name, Charles A. Lindbergh, that he was born in Michigan in 1902 and died in Maui in 1974. And, eventually, worn by weather and time, the engraving on the stone will fade, and even this small biography will be lost to the living. Other than this, the only clue the headstone gives about the identity of the man below, of his life and loves, is a fragment of a psalm. I read it aloud: “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ...”

  Mama, the minister’s wife, completes what the stone has left unfinished, “Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

  “Do you believe that, Mama?”

  She smiles through her tears and nods. “Yes, Morgan. I do.”

  I reach out to squeeze her hand. “So do I.”

  A CHAT WITH MARIE BOSTWICK

  When my first novel, Fields of Gold, was purchased, my editor asked if I wanted to write a sequel. At the time the answer was no.

  If you haven’t read it first, (and don’t worry if you haven’t—I’ve worked hard to make sure you can read the books in any order and still keep up with the story), Fields of Gold focused on Morgan’s mother, Eva Glennon, and was told in her voice. I spent four years writing about Eva and in that time, came to feel very close to her, even a bit protective of her. By the end of the story she was in the land of “happily ever after,” which was just where I wanted her to be. But, at least in terms of fiction writing, happily ever after doesn’t make for very interesting reading. There didn’t seem to be much more to say about Eva’s life, so I decided to leave her in peace and move on to another character and another story.

  But one day, many months later, the galleys for Fields of Gold arrived. . . After I quit crying for joy, still slightly disbelieving that my dream was actually coming true and that my book was really going to be published, I sat down to read the story for the first time in over a year. That’s when I realized that while I knew everything about Eva, I had questions about the other characters, especially Morgan. What had it been like for him to grow up in such a small town with the label of illegitimacy pinned to his chest? What had been said in that first face-to-face meeting with his father? Was there a happily ever after in his future? I simply didn’t know.

  And then, after Fields of Gold was released, I started getting emails from some of you wondering the same thing. As much as I wanted to answer those questions and was beginning to formulate some thoughts on the subject, I didn’t feel I had enough upon which to base an entire novel. So I started working on a completely different story for my third book but questions about Morgan kept interrupting my train of thought. One day, as I was walking to nowhere on the treadmill in my basement, a place where some of my best ideas seem to form, the character of Georgia Carter became suddenly very clear. Morgan couldn’t carry the story alone, nor could Georgia, but together? Oh, yes! Though a third of the way through the other project, there was no doubt in my mind that I had to abandon it and get to work on Morgan and Georgia’s story that very day.

  If you’ve read my other historical fiction titles, you know that while I make no claims to being a historian, I do a great deal of research before writing and try to stay as close to the facts as possible. However, if need be, I do alter the historical record, or at least squeeze it a bit, in the interest of keeping the story moving while maintaining the sense of history and believability.

  My research for On Wings of the Morning began by reading some excellent books about the Women’s Air Service Pilots (WASP). As I’ve said, I try hard to stay true t
o the historic record, but this is a work of fiction so if you’re interested in the real, in-depth history of the WASP, I’d highly recommend the following nonfiction titles:

  *Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines: The Unknown Heroines of World War II by Sally Van Wagenen Keil

  *Yankee Doodle Gals: Women Pilots of World War II by Amy Nathan

  *Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II by Molly Merryman

  The first two titles are accurate and affectionate accounts of the WASP, filled with anecdotes as well as information. The third is a more scholarly work, loaded with resources and documents that give a thorough analysis of the social mores of the day and sexism, which the women of the WASP faced and that ultimately led to its demise. The WASP didn’t suddenly disband just because there was nothing left for them to do, but because their continued existence was threatening to a particular group of male pilots and those within the military, as Ms. Merryman’s book convincingly documents. This particular title heavily influenced the tone and plot of my fictional account of the WASP. All three books are expertly researched, worthwhile reading.

  Additionally, the WASP have a terrific web site at www.wingsacrossamerica.org with all kinds of documents, photos, interactive games, and videos of interviews with actual WASP pilots. This site has undergone considerable upgrading since I first began referring to it. It is well worth checking out and, if you can, supporting financially so the inspiring stories of the WASP can be recorded and preserved for future generations. One of the things that so bothered me while researching this book was that until very recently, I’d had no idea that the WASP even existed, let alone the extent of their influence and sacrifice in winning the war. Of the many injustices and slights heaped upon these brave women, this is the unkindest cut of all—that so few know about who they were and what they did for our nation. Hopefully, this book will serve, at least in some small way, to help right that wrong and fuel increased interest in the story of the amazing women of the WASP. Theirs is a story that needs to be told.