On Wings Of The Morning

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Authors: Marie Bostwick

BOOK: On Wings Of The Morning
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Also by Marie Bostwick
River's Edge
 
Fields of Gold
 
“A High-Kicking Christmas”
in the anthology
Comfort and Joy
On Wings of the Morning
MARIE BOSTWICK
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
To the Women's Air Service Pilots
With Gratitude
I thank God for giving me the opportunity and inspiration to write and for surrounding me with the wonderful mix of friends and family who make writing my joy. Without the encouragement and support of so many, especially my husband, Brad, my dear friend, Pamela Helm, my agent, Jill Grosjean, and my editor, Audrey LaFehr, this book would never have been written. Thank you all.
 
Additionally, I want to extend a special and heartfelt thanks to my first-round reader, Elizabeth Walsh, whose humor, optimism, attention to detail, patience, and uncanny sense of dramatic timing, make all the difference to her little sister's books and life. Betty, I'm glad you're my sister.
Prologue
Morgan
 
K
nowing who I am, you might think I was born to fly. Probably there is something to that. If the yearning for flight is something you can inherit from your parents like blue eyes or a bad temper, then I suppose I come by it honestly enough. But if that is true, then it might just be the only honest piece of my birthright.
Though it was years before we could talk about my father, Mama says that even as a little boy I sensed the truth, or at least part of it. She still speaks in hushed amazement of the night of my fourth birthday, the night she tucked me in under her present to me, a quilt of the Oklahoma night sky appliquéd with star points over a field of cobalt and midnight, stitched by hand with the three-strand thread that held Mama's whole world together—imagination, determination, and secrets. There was so much we couldn't, or didn't, talk about.
And I wanted to know everything. Things about her. About me. About why, when she thought I wasn't looking, she would fix her eyes on closed doors as though waiting for someone to open them. Who was she waiting for? I wanted to ask, but didn't. Somehow I sensed that if I pulled on the strand that stood for secrets, all of us would unravel at the seams.
Maybe that's why I made up the story I told her that night, about the father I'd imagined for myself, a father who'd died and flown a recon mission to Heaven, just to make sure the coast was clear for me. I knew he was an invention, but an invented father was better than a void. Mama's eyes welled up when I told her my story, but they were happy tears, I could tell. Somehow I'd hit upon something right, something that caused a flickering light of hope to shine through her tears. I rolled my tale out as a bolt of whole cloth, woven with equal parts of plausibility and fabrication, and Mama did what she always did: she embellished it with explanations and appliquéd on a desire for things the way they should have been, and by the time I closed my eyes to sleep we'd stitched a story so sincere and inviting that it could nearly have passed for truth. Nearly.
If the truth is to be told, and I think the time has come, it wasn't my heritage that drove me to the sky. It was the secrets. The first time I pulled the stick back and nosed my plane skyward, breaking through a bank of bleached muslin clouds into a field of edgeless blue, I realized that I'd finally found the place I belonged, the only place where my skin didn't feel as if it were bound too tight around my soul. The longing was always there, but how could I have known what it was I longed for? I was just trying to outrun the secrets.
The family history Mama and I patched together was warm and comfortable and tightly sewn; we wrapped it around ourselves as a shelter from the hard blows of life, but at the end of the day it was just a collection of lies.
There are no secrets in the sky. There is no need for them. When I see the heavens stretched before me, it does not matter where I came from, or where I am going, or who came before me. No one asks me questions, and I don't ask them of myself. That moment is
the
moment for me. There is no time and no regrets, nothing to weigh me down.
The closer you fly to Earth, the more your craft will be rocked and battered by turbulence, and if the tumult is strong it can throw you completely off course. But if you fly high enough, where there isn't oxygen enough to sustain a lie, you'll find bright skies and air so smooth you can cut through the clouds, slippery and free. That is where I live.
I am the eagle's son.
PART ONE
1
Morgan
Dillon, Oklahoma—1933
 
T
here was a patch of dried blood stuck in the crease where my upper lip met the lower. I squashed my face up and felt the blood crack into a dozen dry little flakes. I rubbed them off with my hand, held my palm open, and watched the wind grab hold of the rusty flecks and suck them into a passing dust cloud. By nightfall those dried-up blood slivers would most likely be blown into the next county, but the rest of the evidence would be harder to conceal.
I'd used the sleeve of my shirt to sop up the blood that had spurted from my nose where Johnny McCurdle's elbow had clipped me as I'd wrestled him to the ground. I knew by tomorrow morning he'd be telling everybody that he'd broken my nose, but I wasn't worried about that. There'd been plenty of witnesses to the fight, and they'd be more than ready to testify to the truth—that Johnny hadn't intentionally been able to land a single punch on my face, that he looked much worse than I did when it was all over, that when he fought he closed his eyes and flailed his arms like a girl, and that, being frustrated in his effort to connect his fists with any vulnerable part of my anatomy, he'd kicked me in the shins with those hard, pointy-toed cowboy boots he always wore, which, in the unwritten rules of schoolyard fisticuffs, is just flat bush-league.
No, I wasn't worried about my reputation suffering after my fight with Johnny, but I was worried about how I was going to keep the news from getting to Mama. The blood from my nose had spread and bloomed into a good-sized stain on the sleeve of my shirt. On the walk home from school, I'd scuttled down the dirty banks of the irrigation ditch that ran parallel to Grandpa's parched wheat fields, hoping to find some water to wash out my shirt. It was spring, and the trench should have been home to a fresh and flowing stream, but this was the Oklahoma panhandle in the third year of what would be a nearly ten-year drought, and there was barely a trickle of water to be found at the bottom of the ditch. The soil rising up from the streambed had dried and cracked into a pattern of uneven diamond shapes, like the skin on an alligator's back, and the stingy rivulet of water that dribbled past my feet was so thick and muddy that washing with it would probably have left my shirt dirtier than it had been to start with. I had no choice; I'd have to walk home and get myself cleaned up at the pump in the barnyard before my mother could spot me and start asking questions.
The pump handle squeaked in protest as I wrenched it up and down, trying to bring forth the flow of water. After some effort the old pump complied, but even so, the stream that poured from the spout was slow, and I knew that our well was getting low. I took off my shirt, squatted down next to the pump, and filled a bucket with water before shutting off the spout. In years past I'd have carelessly let the water run out onto the ground, but even at the age of ten, I knew that water in a drought is precious and mustn't be wasted. I plunged my shirt into the bucket and scrubbed the stain by rubbing one piece of fabric against another, the way I'd seen Mama do, and noted with some satisfaction that the combination of cold water and elbow grease was doing the trick; the bloodstain was fading.
“Now that your shirt's clean, have you thought about how you're going to get it dry before your mother sees it?” The sound of my grandfather's amused Irish brogue startled me, and I jumped.
“Geez, Papaw! You don't need to sneak up on a guy like that. I almost tipped the bucket over.”
“Sorry, Morgan.” He grinned, and the corners of his eyes drew up like folds in a paper fan. “I whistled to you from the hog pen, but I don't think you heard me. You were pretty intent on doing your laundry.” He nodded at my sodden shirt that dripped a trail of water, streaming a dark stripe over the thirsty soil.
Papaw took a step and leaned down to get a closer look at me. His face grew solemn. “That lip is pretty swollen. Your nose doesn't look any too good, either.”
For a moment I considered telling him that I'd fallen or been beaned by a wild pitch during a game of baseball, but I didn't want to lie to my grandfather. Papaw was my best friend, even if he was a grown-up. I didn't say anything. His eyes bore into me, questioning.
Finally, he drew his eyebrows up and smiled. “So, how does the other fella look?”
I grinned. “Not too good. Two black eyes and a split lip.”
“Well, I don't doubt but he deserved it,” Papaw said evenly and paused for a moment. “Did he deserve it?”
I thought about Johnny McCurdle and the things he'd said about me. About me not having a father. That wasn't anything new. I'd endured that kind of schoolyard taunting for as long as I could remember. They could say anything they wanted about me and I'd just shrug it off or turn the joke on them. In Johnny's case that wasn't too hard. He had ears that stuck out like open doors on a car, so all I had to do was call him “fender face” and that would set all the other kids to laughing. Suddenly Johnny himself would be the butt of the joke, surrounded by jeering classmates, coloring with anger and embarrassment to the tips of his car-door ears while I slipped away from the crowd unnoticed. Much as I disliked Johnny, always had, I didn't enjoy doing this. I only picked on him when he started it. He was mean, it was true, but more than that, he was just not too bright. By making fun of me he was trying to get a little attention for himself, and he always seemed a little perplexed when his plans turned around on him. Part of me felt sorry for him. I suppose that's why I'd never fought him—not until that day.
It was one thing to call me names and quite another to bring my mother into it. That day he had. He'd called Mama a name so bad that I didn't really know what it meant, and I bet Johnny didn't, either. Probably he'd heard it from his older brothers, but definitions aside, I got his general drift. The sneer on his ugly face told me of his intent, and the shocked gasps from some of the older girls who stood nearby let me know that this was a word that went far, far beyond the normal range of schoolyard insults. Nobody could talk about my mother like that and get away with it. “He deserved it,” I muttered darkly and felt my hand involuntarily ball up into a fist. If Johnny had been standing there I'd have beaten him a second time.
“Said something about your mother, did he?” Papaw's eyes were dark.
“Did what I had to do, Papaw.”
He took in a deep breath and nodded. I knew that was all the explanation he required. He wouldn't ask me any more questions.
Living with three women in our house—Mama, Grandma, and Aunt Ruby, who wasn't my aunt at all but Mama's best friend who lived with us—I sometimes felt like I was in danger of drowning in a flood of chintz and feminine fussing. The house was bursting with women, but the barn and barnyard, that was our world, mine and Papaw's—a world of men where people didn't ask endless questions, or go to pieces over the sight of a little blood, where it was understood that sometimes a man had to do what a man had to do, and where sometimes a simple nod of the head was as good as an hour's conversation. What would I have done without Papaw? I knew I could have told him anything, but I also knew I didn't have to—he understood.
“I guess we'd better decide what you're going to tell your mother. Clean shirt or no, she's going to know that something happened. You're a sight, lad.” Papaw sucked on his teeth thoughtfully, and then he walked over near the barn door and picked up a rake that was resting against the wall. He brought the rake back to where I was standing and thunked me—squarely, but not too hard—on the head with the wooden handle.
“Hey!” I protested. “What was that for?”
“If your mother asks what happened to you, you can say that you got hit with a rake while you were out helping me, and it won't be a lie.”
“You mean like I accidentally stepped on the tines and the handle flew up and whacked me on the face?”
Papaw nodded. “No need to go into details, but, yes, that's the general idea.”
“She's not gonna buy that, Papaw. Mama is way too smart to fall for a story like that. We've got to come up with something better.”
“Listen to me, Morgan. Don't start telling lies to your mother. If you tell one lie, you're bound to have to start telling others just to cover up the first one. After a while it gets to be a habit.”
“But, isn't this the same thing? I might not be exactly lying to her, but I'm trying to keep something from her.”
“No.” Papaw shook his head. “We're not trying to keep something from her. We're trying to protect her from something that would only cause her worry and grief. She's had enough of that in her life. If you'll just tell her your story without offering too many details, she'll leave you be. You'll see.”
Papaw was smart about people, I knew, but I couldn't imagine that Mama would let this slide so easily. Mama wasn't a big talker herself, but she was interested in everything that happened to me. Almost every afternoon of my life, once I'd finished my chores, was spent sitting on the floor next to Mama while she sat sewing at her quilt frame or tracing around templates for quilt blocks.
When it came to quilt-making, Mama was an artist. She made quilts that looked like paintings, and until the Depression was in full swing and cash was so scarce, people waited months and paid top dollar for the privilege of owning one of Mama's creations. She had more orders than she could handle and was often weeks behind in her work, but those after-school chats were our special time together. She always had time to listen to me jabber away about school, my teachers, my friends, anything that might be on my mind. And the thing is, she didn't just murmur absentmindedly, pretending to listen while rocking her needle up and down through the fabric, making those tiny, absolutely even stitches she was famous for. She truly listened. She asked just the right question at just the right moment. She made me feel important—as though whatever I had to say was worth listening to. Mama knew me inside and out. She wasn't going to fall for any half-baked explanations about the source and nature of my injury. Papaw read the doubt on my face.
“Morgan, your mother is no fool. Deep in her heart, she's going to know there is more to the story than you're sharing, but she's not going to press you about it. She can't change the past. Not hers. Not yours. When you can't fix a problem, sometimes it's easier to pretend there isn't one. Know what I mean?”
I looked at him blankly.
“Never mind. You'll understand when you're older. Your mother is a good woman, son. No matter what anyone says, your mother is a good woman.”
“I know that.” It was the closest we'd ever come to talking about my mother and, more importantly, my father. Suddenly it dawned on me that Papaw knew who he was—his name, what he looked like, maybe even where he lived and why he wasn't here with me. Papaw knew everything, and I came that close to asking him. My mouth opened, and the question formed on my lips. “Papaw,” I began, but that was as far as I got. My grandfather could read the question in my eyes, knew what I wanted to ask before I could ask it, and in his eyes I could read, just as clearly, that he wouldn't give me an answer. He couldn't. That was Mama's secret, and as long as she kept silent, we'd all have to.
Papaw dropped a big, calloused hand on my shoulder. “I've got to finish fixing that wobbly board on the hog pen. The sow worked it loose again rubbing up to scratch her back. You pump some fresh water for your chickens and get them back inside for the night. I saw a big black dog skulking around last night. Probably a stray. Might be the same one that got to Thompson's birds last week, so you make sure you shut those hens in good and tight. We've got about an hour to supper. Should be enough time for your shirt to dry.”
“Yes, Papaw.” I stooped over the bucket to squeeze the last drops of water from my shirt. The water wasn't clean enough to give to the chickens but I could pour it over Aunt Ruby's tomato plants.
Papaw turned and started walking toward the hog pen, but he only got a few steps before he called to me over his shoulder.
“Morgan!”
“Yes, Papaw?”
“You're a good son.” He smiled and kept walking.
I stood up and shook out my shirt. A quick, sharp gust of prairie wind lifted the wet fabric into the air, blowing dust onto the previously clean cloth. I held tight to the sleeves, and the shirt billowed out in front of me like a sail trying to draw me into the breeze, and I wished, for the hundredth time, that I was light enough and free enough to fly.

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