Hidden Mercies

by Serena B. Miller

  “They are helping their teacher, and you know that Rhoda will watch after them,” Levi said. “That girl is part mother hen. She’s almost worse than you at keeping track of her chicks.”

  “I hope Rhoda gets married when I turn sixteen,” Amy said. “I would like to teach at that school. I think I would be good at it.”

  “You would,” Levi said. “But I’ve heard that Bessie Mueller is next in line for the job, if Harold Keim doesn’t get around to proposing to her first.”

  Tom had forgotten this aspect of being Amish. They were so intimately connected and had so many people in their lives, it was nearly impossible for an outsider to keep track of all the names they tossed around as a matter of course. His head had begun to throb, and he rubbed his temples. He was starting to feel worse.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said. “Here we are, talking about people you do not know, and you are not well. Are you sure you do not want Levi to take you to the hospital?”

  “No. No hospital.” He tried to get up again. “A few more minutes, and I’ll . . . leave.”

  “You cannot drive. I am sorry, but you cannot. Where are you staying?”

  “I have a room at Hotel Millersburg.”

  “Well, then. Open up, please.” She surprised Tom by spooning a mouthful of hot vegetable soup into his mouth.

  “Were you headed somewhere?” Levi asked. “Or was Holmes County your actual destination?”

  “I—I used to live around here. This seemed like a good, quiet place to come while I heal.” At that moment, a young, pregnant woman burst through the door. She was about Levi’s height, with blondish hair twisted up in a clip, wearing a long, plain, maternity shift-like dress. He was no expert in pregnancy, but she didn’t seem to be very far along. A small, blond Amish girl trailed behind her with a half-eaten cookie in each hand. The little girl looked exactly the way he remembered Claire at that age.

  In spite of the woman’s matronly appearance, there was an air of professionalism about her. No doubt this was Levi’s wife. That would make her his niece by marriage. His family was getting larger by the minute, even though no one but him knew it.

  “Hello,” she said. “You must be the tourist my husband called me about. My name is Grace, and I’m a nurse practitioner. If you don’t mind, I’d like to check your vitals.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Good.” She dropped a specially made basket onto a chair, went to the kitchen sink, and thoroughly washed her hands. Then she pulled a clean dishcloth out of a drawer, dried her hands, reached into the basket, and drew on a pair of rubber gloves.

  “Levi says you’re military.” She bent to examine his face, touching the still-healing wounds with her fingertips. “Looks like you took some hits over there.”

  “A few.”

  “These are not completely healed. What did you do? Drive yourself all the way from Walter Reed?”

  “Yes.”

  She pulled a thermometer out of her bag and stuck it in his mouth. “Do you have a name?” He started to take the thermometer out to answer, but she hooked his dog tags out from beneath his shirt collar.

  “Captain Tom Miller,” she read. She glanced at his face. “I knew a Tom Miller once. A helicopter pilot. Were you stationed at Bagram by any chance?”

  He nodded.

  “I was there, too, for a while and I remember your name,” she said. “You flew on several medevac missions when we needed a gunship escort.”

  Now Claire and Levi’s tense conversation made sense. Levi’s wife had also been in the military. He could only guess at the drama that had taken place here before the marriage. Having an Englisch daughter-in-law was every Amish mother’s nightmare. Evidently, from what Levi had said to his mother, Grace had been involved in saving Claire’s life in some way.

  He tried to remember seeing Grace’s face, but there had been so many troops and faces over the years. Thousands.

  She took the thermometer out of his mouth and glanced at it. “One hundred two point four,” she said. A look passed between her and Claire.

  “He must have an infection,” Claire said. “That is not good.”

  “No.” Grace put the thermometer away and pulled off her gloves. “It is most definitely not good. I can get him some antibiotics, but I don’t think it’s wise for him to be left alone right now.”

  Strange. He knew he felt bad, but had not known he felt that bad. Perhaps the relief of being home again, or his nervousness over seeing Claire again, had kept him from realizing how sick he was.

  “Do you have any family here?” Claire asked.

  “No.” It was true. He had no family here—at least not in the sense that Claire meant—someone who would be willing to take him off their hands.

  Help from his father didn’t bear thinking about. The old man would never accept him back. Not unless he showed up in a windowless buggy with an untrimmed beard and a commitment to living the rest of his life in the 1800s.

  Grace came to a decision. “Levi, I want to put Captain Miller in the downstairs bedroom at our house for a few days. He needs care, but not badly enough to take him to the ER. At least not yet. He just needs someone to keep an eye on him.”

  Levi frowned. “You think taking a stranger into our home is a good idea?”

  “Yes, Levi. This man is no stranger. His name was well known to everyone on the base. He saved many lives with his skill and courage. One of them was mine.” Grace pulled off her gloves. “Probably more than once. Tom Miller could get into and out of places lesser pilots could not. Our medevac helicopter was not armed, and it made us sitting ducks more than once. When bullets started flying, we knew that pilots like Tom would come in with guns blazing, buying us those extra thirty seconds we needed to get a wounded soldier loaded. His crew laid down gunfire more than once to give us a chance to pull combat soldiers out without becoming casualties ourselves. Helping this man isn’t just the right thing to do—it is an honor and a privilege.”

  “I have a room in Millersburg,” Tom mumbled. He was feeling worse and worse. “I did not come here to be cared for.”

  “And how lonely is that?” Grace said. “You can be our guest for a few days and heal, or you can go it alone until you end up hooked to IVs in some veterans’ hospital. I know you’re a tough guy, Tom, but I strongly suggest you stay with us.”

  “Yes.” Levi rallied from his surprise at Grace’s making such a snap decision. “You must come home with us.”

  Tom no longer had the strength to argue. Staying with his nephew and his nephew’s nurse-wife for a few days would beat lying alone and unconscious on the floor of his hotel room.

  “I will pay you.”

  “No, you won’t,” Grace said. “But Levi will need the key to your room so he can gather your things and check you out. Do you have it on you?”

  He fished it out of his pocket and handed it to her. Even that small gesture took effort. No, it was evident that he did not need to drive back to the hotel.

  • • •

  “That poor man,” Amy said as soon as everyone had gone. “He has been hurt very bad. I think in many ways.”

  Claire agreed, and in spite of the annoyance she frequently felt toward her son’s wife, she was enormously grateful for Grace’s presence today.

  “What man?” Ten-year-old Jesse and his brother clattered into the kitchen, home from school.

  Claire was always amazed at how disheveled this particular little boy could get in so few hours. The clean clothes she had sent him to school in this morning looked like he had rolled around in the school yard all day instead of sitting at a desk and then helping the teacher pick up windblown limbs.

  “We had a wounded helicopter pilot fall down on our floor today,” Amy told him, all important with her firsthand eyewitness information. “Grace and Levi took him home with them.”

  “A helicopter pilot?” Jesse was entirely too impressed for Claire’s comfort. “A real one? A man who flies these things?”


  At that, he began to whirl around the room with his arms outstretched, making putt-putt-putt noises.

  “That will be enough,” Claire admonished him. “We do not need for you to knock something over. If you think you want to be a helicopter, you must go outside.”

  Twelve-year-old Albert was uninterested. He had other things on his mind. “May I go check on my chickens now?” he asked. “I want to see if that new feed I’m trying has made a difference in their egg output.”

  “Of course,” Claire said. With some relief, she noted that Albert’s clothes looked exactly as they had when she sent him out the door this morning. He would probably be able to wear them again tomorrow.

  Albert had a mind only for his animals and for learning how to care for the farm. She felt at ease in her mind about Albert’s future. He would be content with his life as long as he could plow and plant and have livestock to care for.

  Jesse was another story. Jesse, with those big ears of his, wanted to know everything.

  It was good that Tom was at Levi’s and no longer in her front room. He and Grace could talk about soldier things to their hearts’ content. She did not want that sort of talk around her children—especially Jesse, who was entirely too suggestible. It was bad enough that Amy had to hear about such things as suicide bombers!

  How could such things exist? How could the human mind come up with a terrible idea like that? Apart from The Budget, she read no newspapers or worldly magazines, nor did she watch television or listen to the radio.

  This dribble of toxic knowledge that had come into her life today had made her especially grateful for the wisdom of their Amish leadership, which forbade such things. She did not want thoughts of war touching her children.

  “I’m hungry.” Jesse had lost interest in pretending to be a helicopter.

  “Of course you are,” Claire said. “You are a growing boy. There is some beef stew in the refrigerator. Ask Maddy to heat it up for you.”

  Claire felt only a slight twinge of guilt about suggesting the stew for Jesse’s after-school snack. Grace’s last attempt at stew had gotten scraped out into the pig’s trough, after dark, when she thought there was no chance Grace would see or know. Her daughter-in-law had a fondness for adding strange spices to her cooking. Perhaps Jesse would be too hungry to notice.

  “You may have as much as you want,” she encouraged. “You do not have to hold back.”

  While Maddy served Jesse, Claire went upstairs to her bedroom. She had not slept for a very long time. Not only had she helped Kathleen have her baby, she had sat up all night with Amanda Hershberger, who turned out to be having false contractions.

  She changed out of her good birthing dress and into an old choring dress. She had chosen the birthing dress material, designed and sewn it with much thought. It was a lighter blue than she would have normally worn—an Amish compromise for a white nurse’s uniform. She had also taken the liberty of modifying her church’s prescribed dress pattern slightly by setting in loose, elbow-length sleeves instead of full-length, so her sleeves did not get in the way when she needed to catch a baby. Her apron was white, and she always took an extra one along with her when she attended a birth. She had made three of these outfits, because she never knew how many times she might get called out in a week, and she did not want to get caught without a clean birthing dress and apron.

  The washing of clothes was more complicated for her and her girls than for the Englisch. She could not simply toss a dress into a washer and then a dryer and have it come out ready to wear with no thought to whether it was raining or the sun was shining. She had to plan ahead.

  Her bed beckoned. There was nothing she wanted more right now than to fall into it and sleep for a long, long time, but she could not. She had chores. Always so many chores. With Abraham gone and Levi having both farms on his shoulders now, she tried to help him as much as possible. It was a heavy load along with the midwifery and the ever-present work that went with raising a family.

  She looked at the bed again. Oh, it was enticing! The soft pillow, the snowy sheets, the lovely, worn wedding-ring quilt passed down from Abraham’s grandmother. It would feel so good to lie down and close her eyes for a few blessed minutes.

  Perhaps if she could catch a short nap, she would have the energy to push through the rest of the evening.

  No. She shook it off. The time to sleep would come tonight. Not a minute of daylight hours could be wasted. Approximately two hundred people would be having church at her house in the late summer, and with all she had to do, she needed every spare minute to get ready for it. Walls had to be washed. Drawers turned out and sorted. The kitchen could use a new coat of paint, as could the girls’ upstairs bedroom. The garden needed to be weeded, the yard raked, the barn cleaned . . . the list was endless. She wanted to plant several more flower beds, enough to make an impressive display. For the past two years, since Abraham’s death, her church had not expected her to host, and with everything else she had to do, she had relaxed a little too much about keeping up her house.

  She would wait until nightfall to rest—and hope that no one else went into labor tonight!

  chapter FIVE

  Tom’s fever did not abate for several hours that night. He tossed and turned on the bed in Levi and Grace’s downstairs guest room until he barely knew when he was awake and when he was asleep. Scenes from his past found their way into his dreams, becoming nightmares so realistic, it was as though he were reliving each one in detail.

  The worst one of all involved his final day in Afghanistan. “A towering confection of culinary perfection,” Vicki Kenworth texted him. “Deep, rich chocolate with enough coffee-flavored caramel frosting to make it decadent.”

  Vicki had been a pastry chef before coming to work for USAID. If she said his birthday cake was perfection, it was. In an often brutal and disheartening environment, Vicki was a bright ray of decency and kindness.

  He pulled up to the gate of Green Village in Kabul and was passed through on foot by the Nepalese guards. The name of the compound was a joke. Like the rest of Afghanistan, there was little that was “green” about Green Village. The best that could be said about it was that it was well guarded.

  As Tom strode toward Vicki’s office, he saw George, an old Marine buddy who had been hired to help train the Afghan army. George sat in the shade of an office building, his chair tilted back against the cooler side of the wall.

  Vicki stepped out of the office building where she worked and gave him a big smile. “Happy birthday, Tom. The coffee is ready. You two go on in. I’m heading to the bakery for the cake. George has been eager to help you celebrate.”

  “I’m touched, George,” Tom joked.

  “We’re talking birthday cake, buddy,” George said. “I’d celebrate Groundhog Day for a slice of whatever it is that Vicki’s concocted.”

  “Hey, guys, check out my party clothes.” Vicki turned around in a circle so they could get the full impact of her outfit. “I dressed up for the occasion.”

  She wore garish orange slacks and a bright pink blouse. Oversize sparkly earrings peeked out from behind her shoulder-length blond hair. A multicolored scarf was draped around her neck. It was a deliberately silly outfit, but it was nice to rest his eyes on a woman wearing something other than desert camouflage and olive green.

  “Y’all go on into my office,” she said in that sweet, Southern Tennessee accent of hers. “I’ll be right back.”

  They found that she printed out a banner saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOM and attached it to the wall of her office. Somewhere, she’d managed to dig up three sad-looking balloons, which hung from the ceiling.

  “That boyfriend of hers back home is a lucky man,” George observed.

  “I hope she gets to go home soon,” Tom said. “That girl does not belong here.”

  They’d barely walked inside her office when there was a deafening explosion. The ground shook beneath their feet, the walls of the office building trembled, and he heard screa
ms.

  • • •

  He awoke with a start. His teeth were chattering and he was chilled to the bone. Where was he? Whose bed was he lying in? This was not Green Village.

  A pregnant woman materialized and tried to give him a pill. He wouldn’t take it from her. She disappeared and then came in again, wiped his arm with something cold, and gave him an injection. He tried to fight it, but he was so weak. A man held him still so she could do this thing, and it shamed him that he was too helpless to fight.

  “You go on to bed,” the man said to the woman. “I will call if you are needed.”

  “The meds should take hold in a few minutes,” she said. “If this fever doesn’t break soon, I’ll want to get him to the hospital where I can start an IV.”

  “You rest.” There was kindness in the man’s voice. “I will watch over him.”

  The man had his brother’s face. That was strange. Matthew was dead. He knew this for a fact, because he had been the one who killed him.

  The shot began to take effect, and he started to sink into a spiraling oblivion, until the nightmare started up again. He thrashed around, trying to regain consciousness. Then, when he could no longer fight and began to slip back into that dark place, the movie that had been playing started back up again—like a movie projector over which he had no control.

  • • •

  He had spent enough time in the Middle East to know that an explosion that big could only mean one thing—a VBIED—a vehicle borne improvised explosive device, better known to the world and the media as a car bomb.

  Glass shattered all around them. George dropped his Field & Stream on the floor as they rushed to the window. A black cloud rose from the front gate—the very gate through which Tom had walked minutes before.

  The compound had been compromised. Sirens wailed. Noncombatants were heading to safety.

  “Move it, man!” George shoved Tom out the door. “Let’s get inside a bunker. You aren’t gonna do any good with that little peashooter sidearm you’re carrying, and neither am I.”