Stranger's Gift (8 page)

As for him staying with her and her father, she was quite certain that John could not possibly be any more reluctant to return to Pinecraft with them than she was to have to cater to him while the real work of disaster relief was being handled by others. She knew these thoughts were unworthy of her. Why should it bother her one way or the other where he stayed? He was simply one more human being in need. Yet there was something about him that she found unsettling.

“I can walk,” he growled when Samuel reached once again for his arm.

He shot her a warning look to keep her distance as well, and she realized that it was those eyes that unnerved her. Their sea-green depths seemed to question everyone and everything. No, he was not a man who would go along with them willingly. She sighed and indicated the route her father and Margery had already taken to the shore, knowing that the chopper could not land amid all the debris and John would need to be airlifted from the open water. Well, let him protest and find his way around her father. That would be quite something to see.

“Look, Pastor …” John had to shout to be heard above the beating of the chopper's blades.

“Arlen.”

“Okay, here's the thing, Arlen. I'm not about to leave my property to looters and vandals.”

Arlen surveyed the wreckage behind them. “I see your point,” he said. Hester saw John's eyes widen in surprise and then narrow with suspicion.

“You do?”

“Ja,” her father continued. “You are not a trusting man, are you, John? And without trust—whether in the Lord or our fellow man—we cannot see the full range of possibilities.”

“I see them quite well,” John protested. “I see the possibility that those clouds there on the horizon could develop into another storm or a tornado, and I have at best a few hours to secure whatever might be left of my property. I also see that even if there aren't more storms, there's open water leading straight to my property that could be most tempting to my fellow man living not half a mile away who may have lost everything and decided to rummage through this rubble to find …”

The chopper pilot had headed off to make another circle over the property, and in the sudden silence that followed, Arlen's question filled the void. “Do you not see the good, John?”

“The good?” John's mouth worked, but no other sound came out. Finally he shook his head and released a bark that might have been a laugh. “I'm afraid you've got me there, sir.”

“Could this not be God's way of suggesting a change for you—a change in the way you live your life, the things you hold in esteem, the lives you touch?”

“Seems to me if God wanted to get my attention, He didn't need to send a hurricane to do it.”

Hester heard Samuel suck in a shocked breath at such blasphemy, but her father only smiled.

“Perhaps the Lord has made many attempts, John. Could it be you weren't listening? It's a common fault among young people.” He glanced at Hester, and she knew he was thinking of their conversation of the night before.

“I'm thirty-six years old, Arlen, hardly a teenager out to test my wings before I decide to join up.”

Again Arlen smiled. “Ja, I had forgotten. You are one of us after all.” Hester saw her father glance at John's bright yellow shirt smudged with filth and his cargo shorts ripped in several places. “Perhaps
die Kleidung
,” he mused more to himself than to John. “You choose not to dress in the plain fashion of your ancestors?”

“I choose not to draw attention to myself. Look, Arlen, the point is …” John prepared to state his case as the chopper moved closer.

“The point is, John Steiner, you cannot stay here. At least not for tonight.” Arlen removed his straw hat and fanned himself as he watched the helicopter make its final approach just as it started to rain again. “In a few days the Lord may see fit to bless us with a steady sun that will start to dry things out,” he shouted. “In the meantime those clouds out there promise a full day of rain, and we must go and offer our help to others who are as devastated as you.”

The chopper hovered, its blades whipping what trees were left in a weak imitation of the hurricane's gale-force winds, as the rescue basket emerged from its belly. Arlen strode back down the path they had taken over fallen trees and smashed shrubbery, waving to the pilot. Samuel fell into step behind him, but Hester waited to see what the Amish man would choose.

“Stubborn old …” John muttered under his breath as he watched her father navigate the debris as nimbly as someone half his age.

“He is a respected man of God,” Hester said. “And whether you like it or not, John Steiner, he is right.”

His answer was a feral growl as he gave up the fight. And when he headed for the beach—albeit by a different route—Hester found that she could not suppress her smile. She watched as Samuel and her father assisted him into the basket. Once he was safely on board the chopper, the pilot dropped the basket again.

“Go with him, Hester,” her father shouted above the din. “Samuel and I will meet you at the hospital after we return the boat.”

“Why me?” Hester shouted, but her father and Samuel were already on their way out to where Margery had climbed into her boat and pulled it closer to theirs.

“How is he?” Grady asked later as he and Hester stood several yards away from where a Red Cross medic was applying a splint to John's wrist and forearm. He was being treated at the temporary quarters the agency had set up in back of her father's church. The doctor they'd seen at the hospital had sent them away, citing the need to attend to a host of people with far greater needs than a broken wrist.

Stubborn. Rude. Arrogant
. Hester rejected the litany of adjectives that sprang to mind as she recalled the short flight to the hospital, where they had landed on the roof and been met by a harried-looking team of medics. “I believe he will survive,” she said.

“He looks like he could spit nails,” Grady observed.

“Like many
English
, he's taking the storm personally.” Hester deliberately used the term commonly applied to those from outside the Amish or Mennonite community.

“But he's Amish.”

Hester shrugged. “And yet he shows none of the acceptance of God's will that would be common to his faith. So what's in a name? You can contact your boss and let him know that Mr. Steiner is fine. His property is probably a total loss, although I didn't tell him that, but he's alive.” She gestured to the man now sporting a more traditional and substantial sling on his left arm as he stood and looked around. “He's all yours, Grady.”

“I don't have time …” Grady sputtered.

Hester narrowed her eyes as she studied her friend. “And I do? We're swamped now, and Dad tells me there are at least three more church teams on their way here from surrounding areas. They'll be here by suppertime. I need to make sure they're fed and have a place to stay. There are the food boxes that must be delivered, Grady, and John Steiner—”

Grady grimaced. “Remains a priority.”

“Why?” Hester could not disguise the childish petulance that flavored her response.

“It's politics,” Grady replied with a long-suffering sigh. Hester knew that Grady was familiar with her lack of patience when it came to the political gamesmanship so common in his world. “Come on, Hester, help me out here. Put the guy to work on one of your teams just until I can get things fully organized at my end.”

“He only has one good arm,” Hester pointed out.

“So let him serve meals or hand out bottled water. That only takes one good arm.”

As if he would agree to such menial labor
, Hester thought. He was clearly a man used to being in charge, although she doubted very much that he inspired others to work for him. But then suddenly she thought of something Arlen had said to John:
“Perhaps you weren't listening.”

Was it possible that God had deliberately set this cantankerous man squarely in her path to test her while obstructing her ability to relieve the suffering of more deserving souls? Was it possible that John Steiner was some sort of challenge the Lord had placed before her? Perhaps to show her that He was in charge, not her? To test her willingness to take direction—God's direction—rather than go her own way as her father had noted earlier?

Certainly in all the time she had been volunteering with MCC, this wasn't the first time she'd seen a person respond with anger and affront at loss or tragedy. Instead of accepting the outstretched hands of those who wanted to help, such people would push past their rescuers determined to go it alone. More often than not they would fail and only add to their loss and misery. With God's help they would sometimes return, emotional hat in hand so to speak, and ask for the help they had rejected in the first place. Hester studied John as he stood outside the Red Cross tent now with his legs widespread as if balancing on a ship's deck. He appeared to be surveying the activity around him. Everything about his posture commanded others to stay out of his way. But when she looked at his face, she saw uncertainty and just the slightest touch of defeat.

All right, Lord, I will see him through this, for now. I don't understand why You have chosen this path for me to follow, but follow it I will
.

“Lend me your cell phone,” she said, holding her hand out to Grady.

“Not great service,” he warned. “Who are you calling?”

“Not me,” Hester said as she started across the parking lot. “He should call his aunt and let her know he's alive.”

John felt disoriented. It wasn't just the pain medication the Red Cross medic had given him. It was as if he had stepped into a nightmare. The wreckage of his property haunted him, coming back to him in such vivid detail that it took his breath away. As the helicopter had turned north toward the hospital farther up the coast, John had sat speechless staring down at the surreal scene below. He'd spotted bits and pieces of his life cast away among the downed trees and crushed shrubs. In one stripped tree hung a shirt of his, whipped by the breeze until it resembled a flag. And was that his red metal toolbox half buried in the muck of the bay? The packinghouse was useless until he could get the wall and roof repaired, and his own home was equally uninhabitable.

The evacuation chopper had airlifted him to the hospital, where Hester had filled the emergency room personnel in on the situation. Arlen and Samuel had met them there after returning the boat to Margery's marina. But after examining him for injuries beyond a broken wrist and a variety of abrasions and bruises, the resident told Hester that with the more seriously injured people waiting to be treated—three who had suffered possible heart attacks—it would be hours before they could treat John. The doctor suggested that she would be better off to take him with her back to Pinecraft. The first-aid station there could splint his wrist and tend his other wounds. It did not escape his notice that the doctor spoke to Hester and her father, rather than to him.

By that point he'd been overcome by a wave of pure exhaustion, feeling every inch the refugee he'd become so that when his rescuers had led him from the ER to Arlen's car, he had not questioned their destination. He'd heard of Pinecraft, hard not to know something about the Amish/Mennonite haven that attracted tourists in droves in high season. But he had no interest in sightseeing. Instead, he slumped down in the backseat and stared out the window, vaguely aware of palm trees with their crown of fanlike foliage sheared off by the raging winds and water-covered streets through which Arlen navigated his thirty-year-old car. While they were in the emergency room, it had continued to rain, as Arlen had predicted. The usually jammed Highway 41 that cut right through downtown Sarasota was eerily deserted. Only a few cars and the occasional ambulance or patrol vehicle roamed the four-lane road.

Businesses were boarded up and closed. Parking lots were empty of cars and covered in water. Once they turned onto Bahia Vista, the surroundings changed from commercial to more residential, but the homes and condominium complexes were also shuttered and deserted. It was like driving through an abandoned city littered with huge palm fronds and downed power lines tangled in uprooted trees that had been partially pushed to the side of the road. Bits of broken asphalt tiles from roofs and other debris floated on the water that had overflowed from the clogged drains and gullies so that in places the streets were more like canals than roadways.