down at the smooth, gray-white face, Caleb felt a painful surge of terror and love pushing at his chest. They had shaved Jonah’s head on one side and repaired the gashes with what appeared to be string and glue. His face was mottled by bruises and flecked with tiny cuts. A bit of blood had pooled and dried in the hollow of one ear. Caleb resisted the urge to clean it out.
Did I do this? he wondered. Did I let a terrible thing happen to an innocent little boy? He felt eaten alive by guilt.
In the wake of his brother’s death, Caleb hadn’t been sure he’d be able to raise Jonah and Hannah properly. And maybe he wasn’t doing such a good job, but right away he had learned how to love a child. It was the easiest thing he’d ever done. He loved Jonah with all his heart, and every second of the boy’s suffering belonged to Caleb, too.
Under such extraordinary circumstances, a man of faith would surely pray. He’d pray for this beautiful child to heal; he’d thank the Lord for sparing Jonah’s life. But Caleb Stoltz wasn’t a man of faith, not anymore. Maybe he’d never been one.
He found himself thinking about John, his older brother, Jonah’s father. John’s faith had been as deep as a well, as endless as the sky. He would have known how to pray for his son.
“I’m sorry, John. I’m real, real sorry about your boy,” he quietly murmured. “I’m going to do the best I can, the best I know how. I hope it’s enough.” But even as he spoke, Caleb feared it wouldn’t be.
His stomach rumbled, the noise loud and profane in the unnatural hissing quiet of the hospital room. He felt slightly embarrassed by the urges of his body. When something this terrible happened, it just didn’t seem right that Caleb would feel hungry, that his whiskers would grow, that he’d have to take a piss. And yet, that was the case.
He went to the men’s room down the hall, relieved himself, and washed up with thin, watery soap from an old wall dispenser, drying off with flimsy brown paper towels. He was startled by his own reflection in the mirror above the row of sinks. There were no mirrors in an Amish household, of course. Mirrors implied pride and vanity, which had no place in an Amishman’s character. He rinsed the taste of sleep from his mouth, snapped his suspenders into place.
But there were no suspenders. He was still wearing the green shirt and loose trousers Reese Powell had given him.
He hurried back to Jonah’s room. Another hospital worker stood by the bed, marking things on a glass tablet device. A dark-skinned fellow. He smiled politely when Caleb came into the room. “Your son’s been stable all night,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”
“When will he wake up?” Caleb asked.
“That’s up to him, mainly,” said the man. “The doctors can tell you more during rounds. But you can go ahead and talk to him. He’ll be groggy at first, but if everything goes well, he’ll be awake and chattering away in no time.”
When the health aide left, Caleb returned to his vigil beside the bed. “Jonah.” He spoke the boy’s name a few times, just Jonah, and nothing more. Then, since the nurse seemed absorbed in her monitoring, he spoke some more. “Jonah, it’s me, your uncle Caleb. I’m here waiting for you to wake up, because we’ve got lots to talk about. Can you hear me, Jonah? Can you?”
The boy lay as still as a rock. He resembled a graven image carved into a gray headstone like one of those stone angels the English favored in their cemeteries.
“Jonah, can you hear me?” Caleb tried again. “It’s me, Uncle Caleb. Can you feel my hand on your leg? It’s right here on your knee. I’m sure worried about you, Jonah. I sure do wish you’d wake up so we could have a talk.”
He kept standing there, gazing down, his big thumb absently circling Jonah’s knee. Then he saw it. The tiniest flash of movement. The flicker of a shadow on the boy’s cheek.
“Jonah?” Caleb leaned a little closer. “Come on, little man. You can do it.”
The boy blinked again, then opened his eyes. He stared up, then squeezed his eyes shut as if to hide from the glare of the ceiling lights. Caleb kept saying his name, gently touching his knee and right shoulder, taking care not to focus on the thickly bandaged truncated arm. Jonah opened his eyes again—a squint of confusion. This time, he didn’t look at the lights, but at Caleb. He moved his lips, his bluish cracked lips, but no sound came out.
“You can give him a little water,” the nurse said. “He can have sips of water and ice chips if he wants, until the doctor says it’s okay to eat and drink again.”
Caleb grabbed a paper cup from the tray by the bed. “Here you go,” he said, angling the straw to Jonah’s lips. He shifted to their German dialect. “Easy there. Take it easy.”
Jonah drew weakly on the straw. Most of the water trickled out the sides of his mouth and down into the hospital pillow under his head.
“You can raise the bed with this.” The nurse handed him a remote control on a cord.
Caleb fiddled with the automatic controls until he figured out the button that caused the head of the bed to slowly raise up. Jonah looked almost comically startled by the motion, but when he saw what was happening, he relaxed. Caleb raised the bed only a few inches, just enough so the boy could swallow rather than spill. Jonah took one more sip then and finally whispered, “Uncle … Caleb.”
“That’s me,” Caleb said too loudly and too cheerfully. “I’ve been sitting around wondering when you’d wake up.”
“How long have I been asleep?”
“All night long, and then some.” Caleb looked right down into Jonah’s bewildered eyes. “Do you know where you are?”
The boy’s gaze darted to and fro. His poor face looked as though it had been slashed by vicious claws. “No.”
“We’re at the hospital,” Caleb said. “You got hurt bad, Jonah. Real bad. You had to have an operation. Do you remember getting hurt?”
“Um, not so much. I’m having trouble remembering,” Jonah said.
A nurse had warned Caleb about this. Victims of trauma often lost all recollection of the accident. Sometimes they never regained their memory of the specific event. It was a protective reaction. The mind didn’t want to remember a pain so deep and harsh.
“Do you remember going over to the Haubers’ to work?”
“Sure I do.”
Caleb was ashamed to realize that he’d been wishing Jonah would forget the entire morning. “Then you probably remember how I yelled at you,” he said. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you, Jonah. I should know better than yelling.”
“Your yelling doesn’t bother me, Uncle Caleb.”
“It bothers me that I yelled.” Caleb took a deep breath. “Do you remember the shredder?”
“The shredder?” Jonah frowned slightly. “I know how to work it. I know how to work all the equipment. You taught me yourself.”
The trusting expression on his face pierced Caleb’s heart. “Something got fouled up in the blades.”
“It
