Susan Wiggs - Between You and Me

All his life he had tried to imagine what it was like to fly, and now he was doing it. So far, the experience was more amazing and more terrible than he’d ever thought it would be. The land lay in squares made of different hues of green and yellow and brown, stitched together by pathways and irrigation ditches. Shady Creek was a slick silver ribbon fringed by bunches of trees. There were toy houses connected by walkways and white picket fences, a skinny single-lane road with a canvas-topped buggy creeping along behind a horse. Caleb could tell it was the Zooks’ Shire, even from the sky. He knew practically every horse in Middle Grove.

The chopper moved so fast that the view changed every few seconds, sweeping over the Poconos. The nurse finished punching buttons on some piece of equipment. “Sir,” she said to Caleb, “I need to ask you some questions about your son.” Her voice sounded tinny and distant through the headphones.

No time to explain that Jonah wasn’t his son.

“Yeah, sure.” At her prompting, he reported Jonah’s name, his age, the fact that he didn’t suffer from any allergies Caleb knew of. She wanted to understand the nature of the accident and he did his best to explain how the equipment worked, how the blades shredded the corn and blew it into the silo, how sometimes a piece got fouled up and needed an extra push with the next stalk in line. From the look on the woman’s face, he could tell his explanation was as incomprehensible to her as her medical jargon was to him. Another thing he could see on her face was the real question, the one she would not ask.

How could you let a child work around such dangerous equipment?

Caleb couldn’t even answer that for himself. It was the way things had always been done on the farm. From the time they learned to walk, kids helped out. The tiniest ones fed chickens and ducks, weeded the garden, picked tomatoes and beans. When a boy got older, he helped with plow and harrow, the hay baler, sheaves, fetching and carrying from the milk house, anything that needed doing. It was the Amish way. And the Amish way was to never question tradition.

He tried to check on his nephew, but there was little of Jonah to see amid the tangle of tubes and wires and the guy squeezing the big plastic bulb into the boy’s nose and mouth. The chopper veered again, and the landscape quickly changed. Philadelphia was a bristling maze of steel and concrete giants arranged along the wide river and other waterways. The city had its own kind of strange beauty, made up of crazy angles and busy roads. Atop one of the buildings, a series of markings seemed to pull the chopper from the sky like a magnet.

“They’re going to do a hot unload,” the nurse explained. “They’ll get him out even before the chopper stops. You just wait until it stops, and the pilot will tell you when it’s safe to get out.”

“Got it.” Caleb was startled when he looked down and saw that his hat was still clutched in his bloody hand.

His other hand lay on the blanket covering Jonah’s bony bare foot. Please, Jonah , he said without speaking. Don’t die on me.

The Amish never prayed aloud except at meeting. They were a people of long, meditative silences that made folks think they were slow-witted. Caleb begged, with wordless contemplation, for mercy for his nephew.

He’s only a little boy. He sings to the ducks when he feeds them in the morning. He sleeps with his dog at the foot of his bed. Every time he smiles, the sun comes out. His laughter reminds me that life is beautiful. I can’t lose him. I can’t. Not my Jonah-boy.

Caleb was praying for the first time in years. But for him, prayer had always been like shouting down a well. Your own words were echoed back at you. Only the truly faithful believed someone was actually there on the other end, listening.

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