Between You and Me. Susan Wiggs
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blue-lipped, his eyes dull with shock as his life drained away, the boy tried to speak through chattering teeth. “Cold,” he kept saying. “I’m ssso … cold.”
“I’m here, little man,” Caleb said, his voice a rasp of panic. “I’ll keep you warm.”
The rescue workers had immobilized the arm with an air bladder and enclosed his neck in a stiff collar. They covered him with every blanket they had, but it wasn’t enough to keep Jonah from shivering like a leaf in the wind. Then they prepared to load the stretcher into the helicopter.
“You cannot take him in that … that thing.” Caleb’s father stepped forward, thumping his hickory cane on the ground. “I won’t allow it.”
From the moment the county rescue crew had declared that Jonah’s only hope of survival was to be airlifted to a trauma center in Philadelphia, there had been a division in the community. Dr. Mose Shrock, who supervised the emergency services of the local hospital, had been contacted by phone. He’d confirmed the rescuers’ plan, and Caleb had approved the transport without hesitation.
Now his face felt carved in stone as he glared at his father. “They’re taking him,” he said simply. “I’ ll allow it.”
“Sir, you’ll have to step aside,” a man shouted, jostling in front of Asa. “We’re going to load him hot, while the chopper’s still going.”
“These people will take care of you,” Caleb said to his nephew, climbing to his feet. “I love you, Jonah, don’t ever forget I love you.”
“Uncle Caleb, don’t leave me.”
Despite the noise of the beating rotors, Caleb heard his nephew’s faint plea, piercing his heart.
The nurses and paramedics of the life flight lifted the board as the pilot did a walk around the helicopter, checking the landing area. Jonah was lost amid a pile of blankets and gear. His blood stained the ground everywhere.
“I’m going with him,” Caleb said loudly. “I have to go with him.”
A nurse in a utility vest looked at him, then over at Jonah.
“Please,” Caleb said. “He’s just a little boy.”
“It’s the pilot’s call. I’ll see what she says about the fly-along.”
Caleb turned and found himself face-to-face with his father. Asa held his hat clapped on his head to keep it from being blown away by the rotors. His straight-cut coat and broadfall trousers flapped in the wind. He stood flanked by the neighbors, forming a somber wall of fear and disapproval.
The last thing on Caleb’s mind was Amish Ordnung. Clearly it was uppermost in the minds of his father and the elders.
“If it’s God’s will that the boy is to survive,” Asa stated, “then he will do so without being lifted into the sky.”
Caleb didn’t trust God’s will, and he hadn’t in a long time. But he didn’t argue with his father. He hadn’t done that in a long time either.
Hannah rushed to his side. Her face was pale gray and awash with tears. “You have to go, Uncle Caleb. You have to.”
Alma Troyer stepped forward, her mouth set in a firm line. She cut a quick glance from Asa to Hannah. “You go, Caleb. I’ll keep Hannah with me while you’re away.”
The flight nurse touched his arm. “You’re in. The pilot said you can come.”
Caleb nodded and turned to his father. “I’ll call.” The Amish families shared a phone box in the middle of the village, its use limited to necessary business and emergencies. Without waiting for a reply, he turned on his heel and followed one of the EMS technicians to the chopper.
In a tangle of tubes and monitors, Jonah was being loaded into the side bay of the shiny blue helicopter. “Whoa, you’re a tall one. Keep your head low,” a technician cautioned Caleb, pointing upward. “Stay to the front and left of the chopper.”
Hardwired to her radio equipment, the pilot glanced at Caleb. “You’re a big fella,” she yelled. “What do you weigh?”
Caleb never weighed himself. “Two hundred pounds,” he estimated, aware of the broad blade swinging overhead. He was nineteen hands tall, judging by the draft horses he worked with. Well over six feet. He was definitely at risk of having his head lopped off by the rotating blade.
“Our weight limit’s two-twenty,” the pilot said. “Let’s do it.”
The technician kept his hand on Caleb’s shoulder and guided him aboard. Someone tossed his hat to him. They showed him where to sit and how to strap himself in. In the cramped space, he was close enough to Jonah to reach the boy, but he couldn’t figure out a place to touch. He rested his hand somewhere—the kid’s foot. Even through layers of thermal blankets, it was cold as ice.
“Jonah,” he said, “I’m with you. Hear me? I’m coming with you.”
He was given a set of headphones with spongy earpieces. Radios crackled and screeched. Monitoring equipment beeped, straps and clamps were locked into place. A mask was put over Jonah’s nose and mouth, and one of the workers squeezed an air bag at regular intervals. In minutes, the doors were pulled shut. The pilot rattled off a series of orders, simultaneously checking things in the cockpit and snapping a series of switches and levers. With a roar of increasing power, the chopper lifted straight off the ground.
Caleb’s stomach dropped, and the breath left his lungs. Through a rounded glass opening, he saw the people gathered near the landing site. Neighbors and friends, his father still holding his hat to his head, growing smaller and smaller as the copter ascended into the sky. They looked like a black-and-gray cloud against the golden fields. Hannah lay crumpled on the ground, her skirts surrounding her like an inkblot. Someone should go to her, put a hand on her shoulder to reassure the girl. But no one did.
The helicopter passed the silo in the blink of an eye, but in one glimpse Caleb could see the conveyor slanting up to the opening, the shredding machine positioned at the top. And on the ground, on the green-and-brown earth where the farm had stood for generations, he saw the livid stain of his nephew’s blood, oddly in the shape of a broken star.
The helicopter nurse was yelling information into a radio, most of which Caleb barely understood. Jonah’s BP and respiration, absent pulses distal to the injury site, other things spoken in code so rapidly he couldn’t follow. He did catch one word, though, loud and clear.
Incomplete transhumeral amputation.
Amputation.
The helicopter lurched and careened to one side. Caleb pressed his hand against the hull to steady himself, and his stomach roiled. Another feeling pushed through his terror for Jonah, a feeling so powerful that it made him ashamed. Because in the middle of this devastating trauma, he felt an undeniable thrill. He was up in the air, hovering above the earth, flying.
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