The Face of Heaven (26 page)

Lyndel felt the skin on her face tighten. “All the more reason to have experienced nurses to help with the casualties. Many more lives may be saved.”

His eyes darkened. “Do you enjoy it so much, daughter?”

Heat filled her head in an instant. “No one loves to see men die—no general, no soldier, not President Lincoln or Jefferson Davis. The slaughter at Antietam Creek was terrible. If the next battle is the last battle, I thank God. But until it is over I must heal men. Not sit back
from a safe distance and watch them bleed and cry out for water while their wounds suck their life from them.”

“Healing. This is not what Jesus did. Show me where he placed his hands on injured soldiers so that they could return to the battlefield.”

“Did he not heal the Roman centurion’s servant? When did he tell the officer to stop being a soldier?”

“So and you will lecture me about David and Jonathan and Gideon next. I am not here for a debate. You do not understand. If you do not return with me it is finished.”

“What is finished?”

“You and I are finished. Your brother and I are finished.” The lamp flared and his eyes flared with the leap of the flame. “Already the people blame not only Nathaniel King and Corinth, now gone from us forever, for setting the example that caused others to stumble. They point the finger at you. They point the finger at Levi. I am the bishop of the church and they accuse my children of dragging others into sin.” He turned his back on her and began to pace the bedroom. “Even Abraham Yoder confesses he harbors bitterness in his heart. He feels young Joshua would still be on the farm but for his letters back and forth with Levi.”

“Oh, Papa, that’s not fair. Joshua was caught up in the affair between the South and the North from the beginning. Always scanning the papers. Debating with others. He even read the Confederate constitution.”

“It doesn’t matter what he did beforehand. It was all a young man’s talk. But Levi convinced him to take up the bayonet.”

“No—”

“Abraham showed me the letters from Levi that Joshua left behind in his room.”

Her father paused to look out the window at the street. “So I ask you to return with me. Confess your sin. Repent. Then there will be no shunning or excommunication. You can write your brother and young Joshua, write Nathaniel, one final time and implore them to turn from violence and the gun to a life of peace and prayer. The church will look favorably on your act of contrition.”

Lyndel clenched her fists. “But I am not contrite. I have not sinned.”

He stared at her. “Of course you have sinned. The Amish beat their swords into plowshares centuries ago. You are Amish. You took those vows of peace when you were baptized. Now you have broken them.”

“I have never lifted a weapon, Father.”

“You have aided hundreds who do. Men you have nursed have returned to the fields of war to kill other men.”

“I have not broken Amish laws. I have not broken God’s laws. He commands me to love my neighbor as myself. That is what I do on the battlefield. So do others. We do not kill, Father. It’s life we wish to restore to the young men. Suppose it was Levi lying wounded in the mud? Would you rather people stood by and did nothing for him? That they let him die because they didn’t wish to soil their hands in warfare?”

“There are others who can do this work, daughter. It is not for us. We are called to be Amish. That is our ministry to America and to the world. It is for us to
live out
the Sermon on the Mount, not discuss it as they do at Harvard and Yale. We must exemplify forgiveness and mercy. In our bodies we must live like Jesus Christ, who gave his life for others.”

“I
am
giving my life for others. So is Levi. So is Joshua. So is Nathaniel. So did Corinth.”

“Always you will use slavery as an excuse.”

“An excuse?” Lyndel’s eyes widened. “I saw Charlie Preston, Father. Before I ran to you for help I tried to lift his body and take the pressure of the rope off his neck. I thought he might still be alive.” Tears cut across her face. “I saw the wounds on his back. Do you think I didn’t notice how they had whipped him to the bone? Do you think covering him with Nathaniel’s shirt meant I would forget what I had seen?”

“I am sorry, my child—”

“How many men like Charlie have been murdered since this nation began? How many have been scourged like Jesus and worked to death? Do you feel ashamed at their blood? Do you cry out for their broken bodies like you do for the broken bodies at Antietam Creek and Manassas Junction?”

Her father extended his hands and came toward her. “Lyndy.”

She stepped away from him. “I do not want anyone’s blood shed. But it may be that blood for blood is what it will take to make this nation whole again. I do not wish it, but I cannot say what is required. I only know I’m called to be Amish and a follower of Jesus and because of that, I’m obliged to be on the battleground binding up wounds. Just as Levi and Nathaniel feel obliged to bear arms to put an end to wickedness. Yes, Father, in the same manner in which Jesus shall come a second time to right wrongs and establish justice on the earth, mounted on a charger, sweeping away evil with the sword.”

Bishop Keim dropped his arms to his side. “How you have changed.” He went to the doorway. “I’m going to get my case. I did not travel with very much and I am ready to leave. If you wish to join me, we can walk to the station together.”

“You know I can’t, Father. I am…where I believe God wants me to be.”

“You understand it will be impossible to receive any more letters from you, although we have thanked the Lord for them?”

“
Ja
.”

“That there will be no more parcels from your mother with the wild ginger?”

“I’m sorry to hear that. The plants help us to cure the wounded.”

He lifted his hands. “From the moment my train leaves Washington you are cut off from us. You and your brother and the others. There is nothing I can do. And you have made it clear there is nothing more I can say.”

“The priest went on his way. And the Levite. But the Samaritan stopped and had compassion.”

Her father’s face filled with blood. “Do not quote the Scriptures to me.”

She stood in the hall as he picked up his case from his room, along with a heavy coat he threw over his shoulders, and began to walk down the staircase.

“I love you, Papa,” she said quietly.

It looked as if he was going to carry on without stopping but at the
foot of the stairs he hesitated and glanced up. “I love you as well, my daughter. May Christ be with you.”

The front door opened and shut. She went to her window and looked out. His tall slender figure moved along the street, one hand gripping his case, a wind stirring dark autumn leaves, a fine mist softening the night and blurring the glass of the windowpane. He vanished in the shadows but she remained at the window a long time, finally leaning her head against it, unwilling to sit down or take to her bed. She prayed, she slept for a few minutes, she woke, she prayed again, her head still resting on the windowpane. Then she heard the train’s whistle crying over the city and the war and taking her father back to a world of crops and harvest and draft horses and hymns. She went to the chair he had been sitting in when she entered the room and remained there throughout the night.

16

L
yndel didn’t see Nathaniel again for more than a month. A quick visit to Armory Square gave evidence of the great need for nurses to tend the wounded brought in from Antietam Creek, so she went to work. One day became two and three and then thirty. She slept four or five hours a night and returned to the hospital each morning well before dawn.

Letters arrived from Nathaniel imploring her to return to the regiment and she sent back hastily written messages expressing her love and promising she would rejoin the ambulance corps and surgeons’ wagons as soon as she could. She didn’t tell him she had no intention of making her way back to the Army of the Potomac until there was a reason for her to be with the troops other than to hold Nathaniel in her arms. It was crucial that she work. The visit with her father had filled her with a darkness that could only be kept at bay by saving as many wounded as possible.

There was a bright moment when she discovered Nip in one of her wards. He had been shunted from field hospital to field hospital and had never been strong enough to pen a note or get word to his platoon. An infection had almost ended his life but further removal of shell fragments and constant cleansing of his wound, followed by quiet recovery at Armory Square, had him ready to return to his regiment by late November.

“You tell the boys how much I miss them,” she instructed Nip the morning he headed out.

“Anyone special?” he teased.

“I’m sure you’re bright enough to figure that out. If you have the courage you can give him one of these.” And then she kissed him on the forehead.

He smiled his small smile. “I might summon up the courage, Miss Keim. But I’m not sure that Nathaniel won’t belt me, even if I say the kiss is from you.”

“Not Nathaniel. Remember, at heart, he’s an Amish boy, even after all this.”

“Even so, I’ve pulled out of this last scrape by the skin of my teeth. I don’t want to push my luck or God’s favor.”

Morganne sent a telegram the second week of December warning her that the army seemed to be preparing for an assault. Lyndel repacked her case and took a train as far forward as she could and then talked her way onto an ambulance drawn by four black horses. She arrived just as the army crossed the Rappahannock River on pontoon bridges and began to occupy Fredericksburg.

Stunned, she watched as Union troops ransacked the town, smashing windows, stealing clothing and furniture, and setting buildings on fire. The town hadn’t surrendered, she was told, and this was its punishment. She made her way, with a military escort, to Nathaniel’s platoon, an anger gathering inside her as she stepped through streets full of broken glass, bayoneted couches, and scorched rugs. The Iron Brigade was not committing any of the depredations—in fact Nathaniel and other sergeants and officers were trying to quell the looters, but all Lyndel could think of was what her father would say about armies and wars and the sin the troops were committing.

“How can we tell the world we’re fighting for a better America when we’re treating fellow Americans like this?” she blurted out in her anger.

“Can’t you see I am trying to stop it?” he said in defense. “I don’t like it any better than you do!”

She stormed away with her military escort and eventually found where Morganne and Hiram and the medical units were located. They were a half-mile from Fredericksburg on the other side of the
Rappahannock at a place called Stafford Heights. She agonized all night that Nathaniel could be killed in the morning’s attack and they had parted in the middle of an argument.

Led by General Burnside now, not McClellan, Union forces crossed a canal on three narrow bridges the next day once the fog had burned off and attacked a high ridge known as Marye’s Heights. After the first assault was thrown back by entrenched Rebel forces Lyndel was too busy with casualties that came to them to fret over Nathaniel and the rough words she had hurled at him.

Smoke billowed over Fredericksburg as if the fog had settled back down over houses and churches again. Gunfire rolled and roared from the ridge, where the slopes were increasingly covered in the blue uniforms of the wounded. After the fourth assault was repulsed Morganne told her they were asking for nurses in Fredericksburg and just below Marye’s Heights.

“Clara is already in the town,” she said. “Hiram is over by Marye’s Heights and sent me a note. He said the wounded are in desperate straits.”

“Then we should go,” Lyndel replied. “Our surgeons here can get plenty of help from others.”

“We’ll have to cross the Rappahannock into Fredericksburg and then cross the canal to the battleground.”

Lyndel’s eyes became steel-gray. “If Lee wants to shoot us he can shoot us.”

Slipping across the Rappahannock on the pontoon bridges the Union army had placed, they hurried through town. Wounded were being carried by stretcher bearers into houses and buildings. After a short prayer the two began to approach one of the slender bridges over the canal. Hundreds of decks of playing cards were scattered on the ground in front of them.

“What’s this?” Lyndel was looking down at a queen of hearts.

“The devil’s instruments,” said Morganne. “No soldier would wish to risk facing his Maker with those in his pocket.”