Plain Truth (34 page)

For a moment, I hesitated, spinning a web in my mind that I could use to catch him as he fell, the same way I'd lied to Coop when I broke up with him years ago. I had always believed that some lies could do more good than harm, and therein lay the justification:
I'm not good enough for you; I'm too busy to concentrate on a relationship right now; I just need some time to myself
.

Then I thought of Katie, kneeling in front of her congregation and telling them what they wanted to hear.

I covered his hand with my own. “Yeah. It's like that.”

He pulled our linked fingers down between us, swinging like a pendulum. Stephen, who had always looked so sure of himself, suddenly seemed hollow and fragile, like the husks of maple seeds that helicoptered down from the trees.

He lifted my hand so that my fingers opened like a rose. “Does he love you?”

“He does,” I said, swallowing, slipping my hand into my pocket.

“Do you love him?”

I didn't respond right away. I turned my head, so that I could see the yellow rectangle of light that was the kitchen window, and the silhouettes of Sarah and Coop bent over the double sink. Coop had volunteered to clear the table with her, so that Stephen and I could take a walk on our own. I wondered if he was thinking of me; if he had any doubt about what I was saying.

Stephen was smiling faintly when I looked at him again. He held a finger to my lips. “Asked and answered,” he said; then gently kissed my cheek and walked off toward his car.

I wandered for a while by myself, down the stream and toward the pond, where I sat on the small bench. This break from Stephen was what I had wanted when I left Philadelphia, yet that didn't stop me from feeling like I had been sucker-punched. I drew up my knees and watched the moon scrawl calligraphy on the surface of the water, listened to the creaks and trills of the earth going still for the night.

When he came, all he did was hold out his hand. Without a word I stood, went into Coop's arms, and held on tight.

Sarah leaned against her shovel and raised her face to the sky. “Every time we fill the silos,” she mused, “that's how I know the weather's going to turn.”

I wiped the sweat off my brow for what must have been the hundredth time that day. “Maybe if we concentrate it will turn in the next five minutes.”

Katie laughed. “Last year when we filled the silos it was eighty degrees. Indian summer.”

Sarah shaded her eyes, squinting into the fields. “Oh, they're coming!”

The sight took my breath away. Aaron and Samuel were driving the team of mules, which pulled a gasoline-powered corn binder. The contraption was over six feet tall, with knives in the front for cutting down the field corn, and a mechanism that bundled it into sheaves. Beside it, Levi drove another team that pulled a wagon. Coop stood in the back, tossing the tall bundles of corn that came off the binder into the flatbed.

Coop grinned and waved when he saw me. He was wearing jeans, a polo shirt, and one of Aaron's broad-brimmed hats to keep the sun off his face. He was so proud you'd think he'd cut every stalk himself.

“Look at you,” Katie said, nudging against me. “You've gone all
ferhoodled
.”

I hadn't a clue what it meant, but it certainly sounded the way I felt. I smiled back at Coop and waited for him to jump down from the wagon. Levi, with all the self-importance of a preteen, swaggered toward the conveyor belt beneath the silo and hooked it up so that the gas engine could run the belt and the chopping machine and the big fan that blew the corn up a chute to the silo.

Sarah climbed into the wagon bed to toss down the first sheaf of corn; then I followed. Bits of husk and stalk stuck to my cheeks and the back of my neck. The chopped corn was damp and sweet, with a tang to it that reminded me of alcohol. Then again, the silage fed to the herd all winter was just a step away from fermented corn mash. Maybe that's why cows always looked so placid—they spent the winter drunk.

As Aaron tended to the horses and Coop and Levi hauled corn over the lip of the wagon, Samuel jumped down. With great curiosity I watched him approach Katie. It had to be uncomfortable for her, seeing him day in and day out on the farm when their relationship had taken such a turn for the worse—but recently, Katie had grown even more upset. Every time Samuel came within ten feet of her, she did her best to escape. I'd chalked it up to her nervousness about the impending trial, until Sarah casually mentioned that November was the month for weddings; soon enough, the couples who intended to get married would be published in church.

If things had gone slightly different, Katie and Samuel would have been one of them.

“Here,” Samuel said. “Let me.” He rested his hand on Katie's shoulder and took the tall bundle of corn from her hands. With sure, strong motions, he set the heavy stack on the conveyor belt while Katie stood back and watched.

“Samuel!” At Aaron's shout, Samuel gave an apologetic grin and relinquished his position to Katie again.

She immediately reached up for another sheaf of corn. The bristling stalks groaned to the top of the belt. The mules, unhitched now, stamped and shuffled. And although she did not say a word, as Sarah worked with her daughter, she was smiling.

Teresa Polacci was coming to go over the testimony for her direct examination on a day when heavy gray clouds had been rolling across the sky for hours, threatening a downpour. In the milk room, where I sat in front of my computer, the wind pressed up against the windows and screamed beneath the cracks of the doors.

“So after we discuss dissociation,” I mused aloud, “we'll—” I broke off as a kitten began to use my leg as a clawing post. “Hey, Katie, do you mind?”

On her belly on the linoleum floor, with the rest of the litter of barn kittens crawling over her back and legs, Katie sighed. She got to her hands and knees, knocking off all but one cat, which rode on her shoulder, and pulled the kitten off my jeans.

“All right. So we go through the basic profile of a woman who commits neonaticide, talk about dissociation, and then walk through your interview with Dr. Polacci.”

Katie turned. “Will I have to sit there and listen to you say all these things?”

“You mean in the courtroom? Yeah. You're the defendant.”

“Then why don't you just let me do it?”

“Get on the stand, you mean? Because the prosecutor would rip you to pieces. If Dr. Polacci tells your story, the jury is more likely to find you sympathetic.”

Katie blinked. “What's so unsympathetic about falling asleep?”

“First off, if you stand up there and say that you fell asleep and didn't kill the baby, it goes against our defense. Second, your story is harder for the jury to believe.”

“But it's the truth.”

The psychiatrist had warned me about this—that Katie might be mulishly set on her amnesic explanation of events for some time yet. “Well, Dr. Polacci's testified in dozens of cases like this one. If you got on the stand, it would be the first time. Don't you feel a little safer going with an expert?”

Katie rolled one of the kittens into a ball in the palm of her hand. “How many cases have you done, Ellie?”

“Hundreds.”

“Do you always win?”

I frowned. “Not always,” I admitted. “Most of the time.”

“You want to win this one, don't you?”

“Of course. That's why I'm using this defense. And you should go along with it because you want to win, too.”

Katie held her hand high so that one of the kittens leaped over it. Then she looked right at me. “But if you win,” she said, “I still lose.”

The smell of sawdust carried on the air and the high whine of hydraulic-powered saws sliced through the sky as nearly sixty Amishmen puzzled together the wooden skeleton of a huge barn wall. All shapes and sizes and ages, the men wore carpenter's pouches around their waists, stuffed with nails and a hammer. Young boys, let out early from school for the event, scrambled around in an effort to be useful.

I stood on the hill with the other women, my arms crossed as I watched the magic of a barn raising. The four walls lay flat on the ground, assembled two-dimensionally at first. A handful of men stationed themselves along what would be the western wall, taking positions a few feet apart from each other. The man whose barn this would be, Martin Zook, took a spot a distance apart. On a count given by him in the Dialect, the others picked up the frame of the wall and began to walk it upright. Martin came up behind them, holding the wall in place with a long stick, while Aaron took up a stick to secure the far side. Ten more men swarmed to the base of the wall, hammering it into place in a volley of staccato pounding. One man began to walk along the cement foundation, setting nails with a single swipe of his hammer at intervals along the wood base that joined it, while a pair of eager schoolboys trailed him, using three or four sharp blows to drive the nails home.

Mixed with the sweet, raw scent of new construction was the heavier tang of the men's sweat as they hoisted the other walls into place, secured them, and climbed the wooden rigging like monkeys to fasten the boards of the roof. I thought of the workers who'd put a new roof on our house when I was sixteen and in awe of men's chests: parading on the black tar paper, their feet canted at an angle, their heads wrapped in bandannas and their torsos bare, their boomboxes beating. These men seemed to be working twice as hard as that long-ago crew; yet not a single one had given into the heat past rolling up the sleeves of their pale shirts.

“Fine day for this,” Sarah said behind my back to another woman, as they set out dishes on the long picnic tables.

“Not too hot, not too cold,” the woman agreed. She was Martin Zook's wife, and I had been introduced to her, but I couldn't remember her name. She bustled past Sarah and laid a platter of fried chicken on the table. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled,
“Komm esse!”

Almost in unison, everyone laid down his hammer and nails and untied his canvas waist pouch. The boys, who still had energy, ran ahead to an old washtub set outside the kitchen, filled with water. A bar of Ivory soap bobbed on its surface. Huddled shoulder to shoulder, the boys slipped the soap from one fist to another with squelching fart noises and lots of grinning. They patted their forearms dry with light blue towels, giving up their spots at the washtub to the red-faced, sweating men.

Martin Zook sat down, his sons on his right and his left. Men fell into empty spots at the table. Martin lowered his head, and for a moment the only sound was the creak of the benches beneath the men and the measured beat of their breathing. Then Martin looked up and reached for the chicken.

I would have expected boisterous conversation—at the very least, discussion of how much longer it would take to finish the barn. But hardly anyone spoke. Men shoveled food into their mouths, too hungry for niceties.

“Save room, now,” Martin's wife said, leaning over the table with a refilled platter of chicken. “Sarah made her squash pie.”

When Samuel spoke, it was all the more arresting because of the lack of chatter at the table. “Katie,” he said, surprising her so that she jumped, “is this your potato salad?”

“Why, you know it is,” Sarah answered. “Katie's the only one who puts in tomatoes.”

Samuel took another helping. “Good thing, since that's how I've grown to like it.”

The others at the table continued to devour their lunch, as if they had not been witness to the furious blush that rose on Katie's face, or Samuel's slow smile, or this uncharacteristically public championing. And a few minutes later when the men rose, leaving us behind to clean up, Katie was still staring off in the direction of the barn.

The Tupperware had been cleaned and returned to the women who'd brought the food. Nails had been gathered up in brown paper bags, and hammers tucked beneath the bench seats of buggies. The barn stood proud and raw and yellow, a new silhouette carved into a sky as purple as a bruise.

“Ellie?”

I turned, surprised by the voice. “Samuel.”

He was holding his hat in his hands, running it around and around by the brim like an exercise wheel. “I thought you maybe would like to see the inside.”

“Of the barn?” In all the hours we'd been at the barn raising, I hadn't seen a single woman stray toward the construction site. “I'd love to.”

I walked beside him, unsure of what to say. The last true private conversation we'd had had ended with Samuel sobbing over Katie's pregnancy. In the end, I took the Amish way out—I did not say anything, but instead moved companionably alongside him.

The barn seemed even larger from the inside than from the outside. Thick beams crossed over my head, fragrant pine that would be here for decades. The high gambrel roof arched like a pale, artificial sky; and when I touched the posts that supported the animal stalls, a confetti of sawdust rained down on me.

“This is really something,” I said. “To build a whole barn in a single day.”

“It only looks like such a big thing when it's one man by himself.”

Not much different from my own philosophy to my clients—although having an ardent attorney by your side to help you out of a bind paled in comparison to having fifty friends and relatives ready in an instant.

“I need to talk to you,” Samuel said, clearly uncomfortable.

I smiled at him. “Talk away.”

He frowned, puzzling out my English, and then shook his head. “Katie … she's doing all right?”

“Yes. And that was a nice thing you did for her, today at lunch.”

Samuel shrugged. “It was nothing.” He turned, gnawing at his thumbnail. “I've been thinking about this court.”

“You mean the trial?”

“Ja
. The trial. And the more I think about it, it's not so different from anything else. Martin Zook didn't have to look up at that pile of lumber all by himself.”