Karma Day 2

He’d fallen off his horse during the joists and they’d hauled him over to the hospital tent where I was working as an RN all the while dressed like a serving wench in a tightly laced dress with copious cleavage on display. I remember his friends dumping him unto a cot, silent and still, knocked unconscious by the fall. I’d taken his vitals, struck by the fact that the man before me in the chain mail shirt and knights helmet looked like he could have danced out of a Disney movie about knights and their ladies fair. He was tanned, not too dark but seasoned to a healthy glow. I remember restraining myself from running my fingers over the cleft in his chin and his strong boxy jaw line, willing the black long lashes covering his chiseled cheeks to open and show me his eyes. When he regained his senses I accompanied him first to the local hospital for a head x-ray and later I took him to a nearby restaurant so he could have something to eat. I was in awe of this beautiful man and I still am. He could wear a suit or a suit of armor like no one I knew.

While pulling weeds that morning I’d prayed anew for him, thinking about the handsome knight I’d fallen in love with. So what if the castle was crumbling and he sometimes behaved with selfish disregard, he was still my lord and master in every way. King of the castle even before my Christian faith urged me to be submissive in all ways to him.

The birds swooped and sang as I weeded and prayed for traveling mercies and safety. I prayed that his business concluded quickly and Michael came home in record time. One of the reasons Michael had been in a mood the day before was he resented having to fly out to the Los Angeles area again, he hated LA mightily. Not that I blamed him, we’d always been East Coast people.

I almost hated going inside the house that fall morning because the weather was glorious in all ways. The first of the morning freight trains passed by our house, blasting it’s low whistle while the engineer waved to me out of the window. I smiled and waved back.

Michael had always hated the fact that our house set several hundred feet from the railroad tracks, even if it was just for a local regional line that didn’t run that many daily lines. I loved it because it reminded me of home. He hated it and I always suspected it had to do with his life growing up dirt poor in Philadelphia literally next to the railroad tracks. While the sounds of the train passing many times a day was comforting sweet music from a world and time long gone to me, to Michael it was a reminder of how he’d been raised.

After making sure that the goats were free to roam down into the brushy ravine and up the rocky ridge behind the house I warmed the last of this mornings coffee and settled in to fold and iron the first of today’s laundry. Monday always meant clean clothes and bedding in our house.

While it might mean clean clothing and I knew it was part of my realm as a good wife it was the part I most detested. I would rather do just about anything over wash, iron and fold clothing. It was so deadly boring that I did it every Monday morning while I indulged in one of my few extravagancies, television. Satellite television to be exact.

Throughout most of our marriage I had been the penny pincher, the thrifty one making do, saving, scrimping, while Michael lived like a grasshopper, never thinking about winter, only for the season of pleasure ahead so when I’d insisted we pay for a satellite dish and the subscription fee Michael hadn’t protested. I knew he wouldn’t just as I knew I could never reveal that on the days I was stuck inside doing the family washing I also spent as long as it took to do the laundry with the television on. First a little news, a little CNN, before moving on to the morning talk and cooking shows. Later there were movies, game shows and more talk shows to watch.


I kept my secret television habit just that, a secret from everyone. By the time I picked up Jay from school in the afternoons it was firmly off, as if it had never been on and I never turned it on while either Jay or Michael were around. Besides, each of them had shows they liked to watch and I graciously allowed each to put their needs before my own. It was what we were taught at Plover Creek that a good Christian woman did.

Now Plover Creek frowned on looking at television unless it was to watch CBN and Pat Robertson or Fox News. The rest of tv was considered trash that would rot your brain and allow the demonic to infiltrate your home. No one at Plover Creek knew of my habit either and I have no intention of anyone finding out.

Plopping down on the comfortable sofa in our den, piled laundry basket before me, remote in one hand, coffee cup in the other, I was so naïve, so clueless and innocent to the changes about to occur in my life. I pressed the on button and CNN filled the screen with rescue vehicles as I watched some tragedy unfolding in that Godless American Sodom and Gomorrah New York City.

When I heard that a plane had struck one of the towers of the World Trade Center on it’s way to Los Angeles and that they thought it was a tragic accident I couldn’t help but feel my heart dropping into my shoes. I cranked up the volume on our large Sony Trinitron and got up to pick up the scribbled notes on my desk, the flight numbers and departure times for Michael today. NYC is a long way from DC and I knew it wasn’t likely it was his flight but I had to reassure myself again. It was a relieve to see his flight number was not 11 even if he was flying American Airlines.

No clothes were folded that morning. I sat on the soft old beige corduroy covered sofa from our first apartment and stared transfixed at what I was seeing on CNN. While news media scrambled to figure out if this was just a awful bizarre accident something even more stunning happened. Right before my horrified eyes another plane appeared, flying in at an odd angle very rapidly and slammed into the remaining tower of the World Trade Center. I gasped, bursting into tears seeing what I knew was the death on camera of hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand people. How could this be happening? In America of all places? Random attacks on citizens occurred in the middle east, the third world, not here, the land of the brave and the free.

The rest of the day takes on a nightmare haze, a fun house warped clock, time stood still, time sped up but shortly after the second tower was hit I was seized with an irrational desire to talk to Michael, to assure myself that he was alright, even though I knew he was airborne at that point and could not answer his cell phone. I rang it anyway. It clicked over to voice mail and I left him a message to call home as soon as he got off the plane.

And my phone started ringing madly, friends calling unable to grasp the concept that we’d been attacked on our own soil any more than I could. Church members calling, a few saying that this was God’s own judgment on the corruption of our nation, calling for repentance from us all.

Each time the phone rang I grabbed for it frantically even as I couldn’t stop staring at the human massacre playing out onscreen in front of me. I’d answered with my heart pounding, so sure each time it was Michael calling to tell me that his plane had been grounded and wanting to let me know he was alright. But none of those calls were him.

When CNN cut away from the New York coverage to show the smashed smoking wreck of a third plane I nearly fainted. The sight of burning jet fuel scorching the gray granite making up the Pentagon building was more than I could handle. I instantly dropped to my knees next to our coffee table and began to plead with God, plead for the life of my husband. I don’t know how I knew before the plane was identified that it was his, but I knew. I knew he was dead.

That’s how our neighbor from across the road, Marveletta Yoder, found me, on my knees in front of a blaring television calling out for God’s protection over my husband at the top of my lungs. I don’t know how she got in, she just appeared in the doorway to the den, tall and bulky in her hopeful pink dress and starched white cotton cap all Mennonite women wore. She swooped in and crushed me in a bear hug, murmuring, “I’m so so sorry, Mary Martha, I’m sorry.”

I could take anyone’s pity but Marvel’s, she’d been through so much through the years and I collapsed into her arms, unable to speak, awful moans and sobs being ripped from the fiber of my being. My world had ended.