Between You and Me

“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 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.

3 (#u3920f48e-859a-5e05-95ab-2b736602a1e0)

In Philly, traumas were plentiful and Reese had attended her share. Gunshot wounds, stabbings, and automobile wrecks accounted for most of them. But every once in a while, something new and unexpected came through the heavy doors of the trauma bay—a guy crushed in a logrolling contest. A window washer who had fallen from a scaffold. A skydiver whose chute hadn’t opened properly in midair and who had hit the ground at seventy-five miles per hour.

The dramatic, over-the-top traumas had a peculiar effect on the team. Everyone felt the sting of the razor’s edge, reminding them that anyone could be a hair’s breadth from death. The sole purpose of the team was to reel the victim back from tragedy.

According to the advance reports coming from the life flight crew, this boy, too, balanced on the edge. On the one hand, he was young and strong and in a good general health. But on the other, he had suffered a devastating injury and had lost a lot of blood. If the shock didn’t kill him, sepsis or secondary injuries could.

“They’re bringing him down now,” the lead trauma nurse reported.

“Get ready, people,” Jack added. The trauma chief worked the team like a drill sergeant, preparing the high-tech bay with painstaking attention to detail—airway, IV, monitoring equipment, essential personnel, lab and radiology backup. With everything in readiness, the area resembled the inside of a strange, futuristic cathedral, the bed in the center like an altar where victims were brought forth to appease a pantheon of wrathful gods.

The last moments were silent, team members’ minds weighted by the tension of expectation while their bodies were physically weighted by the heavy purple X-ray vests. Everyone was alone with their thoughts—the team leader, primary physician, airway team, nurses and patient care techs, radiology tech, CT, pharmacy, recorder, support staff, chaplain. Reese imagined that some were praying. She herself clung to her mantra: do right.