by Jodi Picoult
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.”
If this was some roundabout Amish reasoning, I was missing the mark. “Samuel, I’m not quite sure—”
“I want to help,” he interrupted. “I want to work with Katie in the court so she don’t have to be all alone.”
Samuel’s face was dark and set; he had given this much thought. “Building a barn isn’t forbidden by the Ordnung,” I said gently. “But I don’t know how the bishop will feel if you willingly take the role of character witness in a murder trial.”
“I will speak to Bishop Ephram,” Samuel said.
“And if he says no?”
Samuel tightened his mouth. “An English judge won’t care about the Meidung.”
No, a superior court judge wouldn’t give a damn if a witness was being shunned by his religious community. But Samuel might. And Katie.
I looked over his shoulder at the sturdy walls, the right angles, the roof that would keep out the rain. “We’ll see,” I answered.
* * *
“Now what?”
Katie snipped off a thread between her teeth and looked up at me. “Now you’re done.”
My jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” Katie spread her hands over the small quilt, a log cabin pattern with hints of yellow, purples, deep blues, and a streak of rose. When I had first arrived at the Fishers’, shamelessly unable to sew on a button, Sarah and Katie decided I was a worthy cause. With their help, I’d learned how to baste and pin and sew. Each night when the family gathered after dinner—to read the newspaper, or play backgammon or Yahtzee, or—like Elam—just doze off and snore, Katie and I would bend over the small frame of my quilt, and piece it together. And now it was finished.
Sarah lifted her face from her mending. “Ellie’s done?”
Beaming, I nodded. “Want to see?”
Even Aaron put down the paper. “Of course,” he joked. “This is the biggest event since Omar Lapp sold his twenty acres to that real estate developer from Harrisburg.” He lowered his voice. “And just about as unlikely.” But he was grinning, too, as Katie helped me unfas
ten the quilt from the frame and hold it up to my chest with pride.
I knew that if Katie had completed a quilt, she wouldn’t show it off so, and it would have been far more worthy of praise. I knew that the stitches on her side of the quilt were neat and even as baby teeth, while mine scurried drunk across the marked pencil lines. “Well, that’s just fine, Ellie,” Sarah said.
Elam, in the La-Z-Boy, opened one eye. “Won’t even keep her feet warm in the winter.”
“It’s supposed to be small,” I argued, then turned to Katie. “Isn’t it?”
“Ja. It’s like a baby quilt. For all those children still to come,” she said with a smile.
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t go holding your breath.”
“Most Plain women your age are only half done with having their children.”
“Most Plain women my age have been married for twenty years,” I pointed out.
“Katie,” Sarah warned, “leave Ellie be.”
I folded my quilt as carefully as a fallen soldier’s flag and hugged it. “See? Even your mother agrees with me.”
A terrible silence fell over the room, and almost immediately I realized my mistake. Sarah Fisher didn’t agree with me—at forty-three, she’d have given her right arm to be still bearing children, but the decision had been taken out of her hands.
I turned to her. “I’m sorry. That was very tactless of me.”
Sarah was still for a moment, then she shrugged and took the quilt. “You’d like me to iron this for you?” she asked, hurrying from the room before I could tell her that I’d rather she sit down and relax.
I looked around, but Katie and Aaron and Elam were back in their seats, quietly occupied, as if I had never spoken thoughtlessly at all.
In the next instant there was a knock at the door, and I rose to answer it. I could tell from the look that crossed between Aaron and Elam that in their minds, a caller arriving this late on a weeknight was a sure messenger of trouble. My hand had just reached the knob when the door swung open, pushed from the outside. Jacob Fisher stood there. He met my stunned gaze first, a wry and nervous smile playing over his lips. “Hey-Mom-I’m-home,” he said breezily, a parody of TV sitcoms that only the two of us would even understand. “What’s for supper?”
* * *
Sarah came running first, drawn by the sound of a son she had not seen in years. Her hand clapped over her mouth, her eyes smiling through tears, she was a yard away from Jacob when Aaron stopped her by simply slashing his arm through the air and saying, “No.”
He advanced on his son, and in deference Sarah melted against the wall. “You are no longer welcome here.”
“Why, Dat?” Jacob asked. “It’s not because the bishop said so. And who are you to make a rule stronger than the Ordnung?” He stepped further inside. “I miss my family.”
Sarah gasped. “You will come back to the church?”
“No, Mam, I can’t. But I want badly to come back to my home.”
Aaron stood toe to toe with his son, his throat working. Then, without saying a word, he turned and walked out of the room. A few seconds later a door slammed in the rear of the house.
Elam patted Jacob on the shoulder, then moved slowly in the direction his own son had gone. Sarah, tears running down her face, held her hands out to her oldest child. “Oh, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it’s you.”
As I watched her, I understood why a mother would starve herself to feed a baby; how there was always time and room for a child to curl close to her side; how she could be soft enough to serve as a pillow and strong enough to move heaven and earth. Sarah’s fingers traced the slopes and planes of Jacob’s face: beardless, older, different. “My boy,” she whispered. “My beautiful boy.”
In that moment, I could see the girl she had been at eighteen—slender and strong, shyly offering up this brand-new infant to her young husband. She squeezed Jacob’s hands, wanting him all to herself, even when Katie leaped up like a puppy to get her own embrace. Jacob met my gaze over the women’s heads. “Ellie, it’s good to see you again.”
Jacob had quickly agreed to serve as a character witness for Katie—the best I could do, since there was no way her mother or father was going to set foot on the witness stand. I had been working on his direct examination questions just that day. However, I’d planned to rehearse with him in State College, simply because I believed it was too difficult to sneak him close to the farm without raising Aaron’s suspicions. But now it looked as if Jacob was playing by his own rules.
He let Sarah lead him into the kitchen for some hot chocolate—was that still his favorite?—and one of the muffins she’d made that morning. I noticed, and I’m sure Jacob did too, that when he settled down to eat, the baptized members of the family stood, overjoyed at the reconciliation but still unable to sit at a table with an excommunicated Amishman.
“Why did you come back?” Katie asked.
“It was time,” Jacob answered. “Well, it was time for you and Mam to see me, anyway.”
Sarah looked away. “Your father was wonderful mad when he found out Katie had been coming to visit you. We disobeyed him, and he’s smarting.” She added, “It’s not that he doesn’t want to see you, or that he doesn’t love you. He’s a fine man, hard on others—but hardest on himself. When you made the decision to leave the church, he didn’t blame you.”
Jacob snorted. “That’s not how I remember it.”
“It’s true. He blamed himself, for being your father and not bringing you up in a way that made you want to stay.”
“My book learning had nothing to do with him.”
“Maybe to you,” Sarah said. “But not to your Dat.” She patted Jacob’s shoulder and kept her hand there, as if she was loath to let him go. “All these years, he has been punishing himself.”
“By banishing me?”
“By giving up the one thing he wanted more than anything else,” Sarah answered quietly. “His son.”
Jacob stood abruptly and looked at Katie. “You want to take a walk?”
She nodded, radiant to be singled out. They had nearly reached the back door when Sarah called to Jacob, “You’ll stay the night?”
He shook his head. “I won’t do that to you,” he said softly. “But whether he likes it or not, Mam, I’ll keep coming back.”
* * *
Sometimes when I was lying in my bed at the Fishers’, I wondered if I would ever be able to adapt back to city living. What would it be like to fall asleep to the sound of buses chugging, instead of owls? To close my eyes in a room that never got completely dark, thanks to the neon signs and floodlamps on the streets? To work in a building so high off the ground that I could not smell the clover and the dandelions under my feet?
That night the moon rose yellow as a wolf’s eye, blinking back at me in my bed, where I waited for Katie to return from her walk with Jacob. I had hoped to talk to him about his testimony a little bit, but he and Katie had disappeared and had not come back, not by the time Elam made his way back to the grossdawdi haus, nor when Aaron returned from a last check on the livestock and headed upstairs in silence, nor even when Sarah went from room to room, turning off gas lanterns for the night.
In fact, it was well after two in the morning when Katie finally slipped into the bedroom. “I’m awake,” I announced. “So don’t worry about keeping quiet.”
Katie paused in the act of removing her apron, then nodded and continued. Keeping her back modestly turned, she slipped off her dress and hung it on one of the wooden pegs lining the walls, then pulled her nightgown over her head.
“It must have been nice, having Jacob all to yourself.”
“Ja,” Katie murmured, with none of the enthusiasm I would have expected.
Concerned, I came up on one elbow. “You all right?”
She managed a smile. “Tired, is all. We talked some about the trial, and it wore me out.” After a moment she added, “I said you would be telling everyone I was crazy.”
Not quite the terminology I’d have used, but there you had it. “What does Jacob think?”
“He said you were a good lawyer, and you knew what you were doing.”
“Bright boy. What else did he say?”
Katie shrugged. “Stuff,” she said quietly. “Stuff about himself.”
Leaning back again, I folded my arms beneath my head. “I bet he threw your father for a loop tonight.”
When there was no response, I assumed Katie had fallen asleep. I jumped when she swung out of bed in a quick motion and yanked on the blinds. “That moon,” she muttered. “It’s too light to get any rest.”
The blackout shades in the bedroom were hunter green, like every other blackout shade in the house. It was one of the ways you could tell an Amish place from an English one—the color of the shades, and the lack of electrical wires winnowing toward the house.
“How come the shades are green?” I asked, certain that there was an explanation for this, as for every other oddity of Amish life.
Katie’s face was turned away from me, her voice coated thick. If not for the mundane question I’d asked, I would have thought she was crying. “Because,” she said, “that’s the way it’s always been.”
* * *
I had gotten into the habit of taking only coffee in the morning, certain that my exit from the Fishers’ would coincide with an angioplasty if I didn’t watch myself more closely. But the day of the final pretrial hearing, when I came down to the kitchen wearing my red knock-’em-dead power suit, Sarah handed me a platter of eggs and bacon, flapjacks, toast, and honey. She even pushed me to have seconds. She was feeding me like she fed Aaron and Samuel, men who worked long, hard hours in order to preserve her way of life.
After only a moment’s thought to my triglycerides, I ate everything she stacked on my plate.
Katie was stationed at the sink while I ate, washing the bowls and pans used to cook. She was wearing her lavender dress and her best apron—her Sunday clothes—for the trip to the superior court. Although she would not be sitting in on the hearing, I wanted the judge to know that she was still firmly in my custody.
She turned to set a freshly washed mixing bowl on the counter, but it slipped out of her hand. “Oh!” she cried, grasping for it, fumbling in a comedy of errors to keep it from shattering on the floor. With pure luck, she managed to catch it, and hugged it close to her middle—only to move too quickly and knock a pitcher off the counter with her elbow, sending pottery shards and orange juice across the kitchen floor.
