Plain Truth

by Jodie Picoult

  He tugged the fabric back down and gathered her into his arms. “You’re shaking.”

  Katie buried her face against his neck. “I . . . I’ve never done that before.”

  Adam kissed her callused hand. It made her feel cherished, as if she were a princess instead of a farm girl. Then he sat up, untangling himself from her arms.

  Katie frowned, thinking that she’d done something wrong; thinking that she hadn’t done enough. “Where are you going?”

  “I made you a promise. I said I’d do whatever you wanted, if you let me see you. I’m guessing that right now, you want me to go away.”

  She sat up, cross-legged, and reached for him. “That’s not what I want,” she said.

  It had been a long, strenuous day for Samuel, working beside Aaron in the fields. The whole way home he’d watched Silver plodding along, and he’d been unaware of Levi’s chatter. He could not stop thinking about Katie, about what she might have done. What he wanted was a hot meal, a hotter shower, and the sweet oblivion that came with sleep.

  At his parents’ home, he unhitched his buggy and led the horse into the barn. There was another buggy in the yard; someone visiting with his mother, maybe. Gritting his teeth at the thought of being polite, Samuel lumbered heavily onto the front porch, where he stood for a moment gathering his thoughts before heading inside.

  He was staring at the main road, watching the cars cross with their bright headlights and throaty engines, when the front door opened behind him. His mother stood there, surrounded by the soft yellow light that spilled from inside the house. “Samuel! What are you doing out here?” She reached for his arm and dragged him into the kitchen, where Bishop Ephram and Lucas the deacon were sitting with steaming cups of coffee. “We’ve been waiting for you,” Samuel’s mother scolded. “Sometimes I think you come home via Philadelphia.”

  Samuel smiled, a slow unraveling. “Ja, you can’t keep Silver from the entrance ramps to those fancy highways.”

  He sat down, nodding at the two men, who couldn’t seem to look him in the eye. His mother excused herself, and a moment later Samuel heard her heavy footsteps treading up the stairs. Steepling his fingers in front of him, he tried to act calm, but inside his stomach was rolling like the tiller in the fields. He had heard of what it was like to be called to account for your sins, but never experienced it firsthand. From the looks of things, the bishop and the deacon didn’t like the prospect any more than Samuel himself.

  The bishop cleared his throat. “We know what it’s like to be a young man,” Ephram began. “There are certain temptations . . .” The voice trailed off, unraveling at the edges like one of Samuel’s mother’s balls of yarn.

  Samuel looked from Lucas to Ephram. He wondered what Katie had told them. He wondered if Katie had told them anything at all.

  Katie, for whom he would have laid down his life; for whom he would have gladly been shunned for six weeks’ time; with whom he’d wanted to spend the rest of his days, filling a house with children and serving God. Katie, who had had a baby.

  Samuel bowed his head. Any minute now, they’d ask him to come to church to make his things right, and if they asked him, he’d go, as was expected. You didn’t argue once the bishop laid a sin against you; it just wasn’t done. But suddenly Samuel realized that this awkward hesitation of Ephram’s was a gift. If Samuel spoke first, if Samuel spoke now-that sin might never be laid against him at all.

  “Lucas, Ephram,” he said, in a voice so steady that it could not be his own, “I want to marry Katie Fisher. I will tell you and the preachers and all our brothers and sisters this if you wish next Gemeesunndaag.”

  A broad smile split the white mass of Ephram’s beard. He turned to the deacon and nodded, satisfied.

  Samuel tightened his fingers on his knees, almost to the point of pain. “I want to marry Katie Fisher,” he repeated. “And I will. But you should know something else right now-I was not the father of her baby.”

  EIGHT

  Ellie

  My favorite place on the farm was the milk room. Thanks to the bulk refrigeration tank, it stayed cool, even at the hottest times of the day. It smelled like ice cream and winter, and the white walls and spotless floor made it a fine place to sit down and think. Once the inverter had charged the batteries of my laptop, I’d take my computer there to do my work.

  It was where Leda found me when she decided to grace me with a visit ten days after I’d become an official resident of the Fisher farm. As I sat typing with my head bowed, the first things that came into my range of vision were her Clark sandals-something I hadn’t seen in a while. The Amish women who didn’t wear boots wore the ugliest sneakers I’d ever seen in my life, no doubt some bulk lot even Kmart couldn’t stand on its shelves. “It’s about time,” I said, not bothering to lift my head.

  “Now, I couldn’t come any quicker, and you know that,” Leda said.

  “Aaron would have gotten over it.”

  “It wasn’t Aaron. It was you. If I hadn’t given you a chance to get your feet wet, you would have crawled into the trunk of my car and stowed away like a fugitive.”

  I snorted. “Well, you’ll be thrilled to know that not only have my feet gotten wet, they’ve also gotten stuck in the mud, nearly run over by a buggy, and come this close to being urinated on by a heifer.”

  Laughing, Leda leaned against the stainless steel sink. “Bet Marcia Clark didn’t have details like that in her book.”

  “Fabulous. The best-seller I eventually write will be shrink-wrapped with the Farmer’s Almanac.”

  Leda smiled. “I hear Katie got a clean bill of health?”

  I nodded. We had gone to the doctor for a checkup yesterday, and the OB had pronounced Katie healing well. Physically, she would be fine. Mentally-well, that was still up in the air.

  I closed the file I’d been working on and popped the disc from its drive. “You couldn’t have timed this better. Guess who’s about to become my paralegal?”

  She held up her hands to ward me off. “Don’t even think it, honey. The most I know about the law is that possession is nine-tenths of it.”

  “But you know how to use a computer. You used to send me e-mail.” I sighed, thinking of how long it would be before I could access my account. “I need you to print a file and deliver it to the superior court. Needless to say, my laser printer’s not running.”

  “I’m surprised you even have your computer here. How upset did Aaron get?”

  “The bishop took the decision out of his hands. He’s very supportive of Katie.”

  “Ephram’s a good man,” Leda said faintly, her mind far away. “He was very kind to me when I was excommunicated. It meant a lot to Aaron and Sarah to have him come to the baby’s funeral.”

  I shut off the computer, unplugged it from the inverter, and stood. “Why’d they do that? Have a funeral, I mean.”

  Leda shrugged. “Because the baby was their responsibility.”

  “It was Katie’s.”

  “A lot of Amish folks will have a service for a stillborn baby.” She hesitated, then looked at me. “That’s what it says on the stone-Stillborn. I suppose that was the only way Aaron and Sarah could live with what’s happened.”

  I thought about a girl who might have been sexually assaulted, and then might completely block the incident and the aftereffects-including a pregnancy-out of her mind. “According to the ME, that baby wasn’t stillborn, Leda.”

  “According to the prosecutor, Katie killed the baby. I don’t believe that either.”

  I scuffed my sneaker along the cement floor of the milk room, contemplating how much I should confide in her. “She might have,” I said carefully. “I’m going to have a psychiatrist come out and talk to her.”

  Leda blinked. “A psychiatrist?”

  “Katie’s not only denying the pregnancy and the birth-but also the conception. I’m beginning to wonder if she might have been raped.”

  “Samuel is such a fine boy, he-”

&
nbsp; “The baby wasn’t Samuel’s. He’s never had sex with Katie.” I took a step forward. “Look, this has nothing to do with the defense. In fact, if Katie was raped, it gives her an emotional motive to want to get rid of the newborn. I just think that Katie might need someone to talk to-someone more qualified than me. For all I know, Katie comes in contact with the guy every single day, and God only knows how that’s affecting her.”

  Leda was quiet for a moment. “Maybe the man wasn’t Amish,” she said finally.

  I rolled my eyes. “Why not? Samuel may be one thing, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some Amish boy out there who got carried away in the heat of the moment and forced Katie to do something she didn’t want to. And besides, I can count on one hand the number of English people Katie’s talked to since I’ve been here.”

  “Since you’ve been here,” she repeated.

  Leda was shifting in her seat, a miserable mottled flush rising over her cheeks. Clearly, being on the farm had clouded my mind, or I would have realized that with an excommunicated aunt, Katie probably had more access to worldly people and places than most Amish girls. “What haven’t you told me?” I said quietly.

  “Once a month she goes to State College on the train. To the university. Sarah knows about it, but they tell Aaron that Katie’s come to visit me. I’m her cover, and since Aaron isn’t about to come to my house to check up on his daughter, I’m a good one.”

  “What’s at the university?”

  Leda exhaled softly. “Her brother.”

  “How on earth do you expect me to defend Katie when no one’s willing to cooperate?” I exploded. “My God, Leda, I’ve been here nearly two weeks, and nobody bothered to mention that Katie has a brother she visits once a month?”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional,” Leda hurried to explain. “Jacob was excommunicated, like me, because he wanted to continue his schooling. Aaron took the high road, and said if Jacob left the church, he wouldn’t be his son any longer. His name isn’t mentioned in the house.”

  “What about Sarah?”

  “Sarah’s an Amish wife. She yields to her husband’s wishes. She hasn’t seen Jacob since he left six years ago-but she secretly sends Katie as her emissary, once a month.” Leda jumped as the automatic stirring machine came to life, mixing the milk in the bulk tank. She raised her voice over the hum of the battery that powered it. “After Hannah, she couldn’t have any more children. She’d had a batch of miscarriages between Jacob and Katie, anyway. And she couldn’t stand the thought of losing Jacob like she’d lost Hannah. So, indirectly, she didn’t.”

  I thought of Katie taking the train all the way to State College by herself, wearing her kapp and her pinned dress and her apron, attracting stares. I imagined her fresh-faced innocence lighting the room at a frat party. I pictured her fighting off the groping hands of a college boy, who at nineteen knew more about the ways of the world than Katie would learn in a lifetime. I wondered if Jacob knew that Katie had been pregnant; if he could tell me the father of the baby. “I need to talk to him,” I said, wondering whether it would be faster to drive or take the train.

  Then I groaned. I couldn’t go; I had Coop coming sometime this afternoon to interview Katie.

  If I had learned anything in ten days, it was that the Amish way was slow. Work was painstaking, travel took forever, even church hymns were deliberate and lugubrious. Plain people didn’t check their watches twenty times a day. Plain people didn’t hurry; they just took as much time as it needed for something to be done.

  Jacob Fisher would simply have to wait.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you have a brother?”

  Katie’s hands froze on the hose that she was hooking up to the outside faucet. She looked away, and if I hadn’t known better I would have believed she was deciding whether or not to lie to me. “I had a brother,” she said.

  “Rumor has it he’s alive and well and living in State College.” I tied the ends of the apron I’d borrowed from Sarah, shucked off my sneakers, and stepped into the rubber barn boots she’d loaned me. I wasn’t going to win any fashion awards, but then again, I was on my way to hose down heifers. “Rumor has it you visit him from time to time, too.”

  Katie wrenched the faucet open, then tested the nozzle of the hose. “We don’t talk about Jacob here anymore. My father doesn’t like it.”

  “I’m not your father.” Katie began walking into the field with the hose, and I fell into step behind her, swatting away a patch of mosquitoes that circled my face. “Isn’t it hard, visiting Jacob on the sly?”

  “He takes me to movies. And he bought me a pair of jeans to wear. It’s not hard, because when I’m with him, I’m not Katie Fisher.”

  I stopped walking. “Who are you?”

  She shrugged. “Just anyone. Just any other girl in the world.”

  “It must have been very upsetting when your father kicked him out of the house.”

  Katie yanked again on the hose. “It was upsetting even before that, when Jacob was lying about his schooling. He should have just confessed at church.”

  “Ah,” I said. “The way you’re going to. Even though you’re innocent.”

  The mosquitoes hovered in an arc above Katie, a halo. “You don’t understand us,” she accused. “Just because you’ve lived here for ten days doesn’t mean you know what it’s like to be Plain.”

  “Then make me understand,” I said, turning so that she had to stop, or walk around me.

  “For you, it’s all about how you stand out. Who is the smartest, the richest, the best. For us, it’s all about blending in. Like the patches that make up a quilt. One by one, we’re not much to look at. But put us together, and you’ve got something wonderful.”

  “And Jacob?”

  She smiled wistfully. “Jacob was like a black thread on a white background. He made the decision to leave.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  Katie nodded. “A lot. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  At that, I turned. “How come?”

  “The summer here, it’s busy. I was needed at home.”

  More likely, I thought, she wouldn’t have been able to hide a pregnant belly in a pair of Levi’s. “Did Jacob know about the baby?”

  Katie continued walking, tugging on the hose.

  “Was it someone you met there, Katie? Some college boy, some friend of Jacob’s?”

  She mulishly set her jaw, and finally we came to the pen where the one-year-old cows were kept. On days this hot, they were sprayed with water to be made more comfortable. Katie twisted the nozzle, letting the water trickle onto her bare feet. “Can I ask you something, Ellie?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why don’t you talk about your family? How could you move out here and not have to make a phone call to them saying where you’d be?”

  I watched the cows milling in the field, lowering their heads to the fresh grass. “My mother’s dead, and I haven’t spoken to my father in a few years.” Not since I became a defense attorney, and he accused me of selling out my morals for money. “I never got married, and my boyfriend and I just ended our relationship.”

  “How come?”

  “We sort of outgrew each other,” I said, testing the answer on my lips. “Not surprising, after eight years.”

  “How can you be boyfriend and girlfriend for eight years and not get married?”

  How to describe the intricacies of 1990s dating to an Amish girl? “Well, we started out thinking we were right for each other. It took us that long to find out we weren’t.”

  “Eight years,” she scoffed. “You could have had a whole bunch of kids by now.”

  At the thought of all that time wasted, I felt my throat close with tears. Katie dipped her toe in the small puddle of mud forming beneath the nozzle of the hose, clearly embarrassed at having upset me. “You must miss him.”

  “Not Stephen, so much,” I said softly. “Just that bunch of kids.”

  I waited for Katie to make t
he connection, to say something about her own circumstances in relation to mine-but once again she surprised me. “You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There’s the telephone, and the fax-and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You’ve got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide in their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely.”

  Just as I started to protest, Katie handed me the hose and hopped over the fence. Reaching for the nozzle again, she turned the water on and waved it over the cows, who bellowed and tried to dodge the spray. Then, with a grin, she turned the hose on me.

  “Why, you little-!” Soaked from my hair to my ankles, I climbed the fence and started to run after her. The cows got between us, milling in circles. Katie shrieked as I finally grabbed the hose and saturated her. “Take that,” I laughed, then slipped on the wet grass and landed on my bottom in a slick of mud.

  “Excuse me? I’m looking for Ellie Hathaway.”

  At the sound of the deep voice, both Katie and I turned, the nozzle in my hand spraying the shoes of the speaker before he managed to jump out of the way. I stood up, wiping mud off my hands, and grinned sheepishly at the man on the other side of the heifer pen, a man staring at my boots and apron and the muck all over me. “Coop,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

  Ten minutes later when I came downstairs fresh from a shower, I found Coop sitting on the porch with Katie and Sarah. A platter of cookies was on the wicker table, and Coop held a sweating glass of ice water in his hand. He stood up as soon as he saw me.

  “Still a gentleman,” I said, smiling.

  He leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, and to my surprise a hundred memories rushed at me-the way his hair had always smelled of wood smoke and apples, the curve of his jaw, the imprint of his fingers splayed over my back. Dizzy, I stepped back and did my best not to look uncomfortable.

  “These ladies have been kind enough to keep me company,” he said, and Katie and Sarah bent their heads together, whispering like schoolgirls.