Aaron and I walked into the barn in the later afternoon-me heading for my computer, Aaron intent on delivering feed to the cows. Suddenly, he stopped beside me. The barn was charged with the scent of something about to happen. One of the ballooned cows in the calving pen was bellowing, a tiny hoof sticking out from between her hind legs. Swiftly, Aaron reached for a pair of long rubber kitchen gloves and went into the pen, pulling at the hoof until a miniature white face emerged beside a second hoof. Aaron tugged and tugged, and I watched with wonder as the calf emerged bloody, with the sound of a seal being broken.
It landed, sprawled, on the hay. Aaron knelt before it and brushed a blade of straw over its face. The little nose wrinkled, sneezed, and then the calf was breathing, standing, nuzzling its mother’s side. Peering under its leg, Aaron grinned. “It’s a heifer,” he announced.
Well, of course it was. What was he expecting-a whale?
As if he could read my mind, he laughed. “A heifer,” he repeated. “Not a bull.”
Peeling off his gloves, he got to his feet. “How’s that for a miracle?”
The mother rasped her tongue along the wet whorls of her baby’s hide. Mesmerized, I stared. “That’ll do just fine,” I murmured.
When she heard that Mary Esch was hosting a singing, Katie got down on her knees and begged to be allowed to go. “You can come along,” she said, just in case that was liable to sway me. “Please, Ellie.”
I knew, from what she’d told Coop and me, that this was a social event. It would give me an opportunity to see Katie react around other Amish boys, boys who might have been the father of her baby. So, five hours later, I was sitting beside Katie on the front bench of the buggy, en route to a hymn sing. I’d ridden in the Fisher buggy before, but it hadn’t seemed quite so precarious from the backseat. Gripping the edge, I asked, “How long have you been driving?”
“Since I was thirteen.” She caught my gaze and grinned. “Why? Wanna take the reins?”
There was something about Katie tonight-a sparkle, a hope-that made my eyes keep coming back to her. After we arrived, she tied up the horse beside a batch of other buggies, and we went inside the barn. Mary kissed Katie on the cheek and whispered something that made Katie cover her mouth and laugh. I tried to blend into the background and stared at the girls with their creamy complexions and their rainbow-colored dresses, the boys with their fringed bangs and furtive glances. I felt like a chaperone at a high school dance-overbearing, critical, and uncomfortably old. And then I saw a familiar face.
Samuel stood with a group of slightly older boys; the ones, I assumed, that had been baptized like him yet still remained single. His back was to Katie, and he was listening to another boy’s conversation-from the looks of it, a rude story about either a fat woman or a horse. When the group broke into laughter, Samuel smiled faintly, then walked off.
The teenagers began to drift toward two long picnic tables. The first had a bench of girls sitting opposite a bench of boys. The second was reserved for couples: girls and boys sat side by side, their entwined hands hidden in the folds of the girl’s skirt. A young woman I had never met approached me. “Ms. Hathaway, can I show you to a seat?”
I had been expecting a barrage of questions about my identity, but I should have known better. The power of word of mouth was mighty in the Amish community; these kids had heard about me for nearly two weeks. “Matter of fact,” I said, “I just might stand back here and watch.”
The girl smiled and took a seat at the singles table, whispering to her friend, who then glanced at me from beneath her lashes. Katie sat at the end of the couples table, leaving a spot beside her. As if nothing at all had happened the night before, she smiled at Samuel as he came toward the table.
He kept walking.
With Katie watching every step, Samuel slid into a spot at the singles’ table. Nearly every pair of eyes followed his progress, then darted back to Katie, but no one said a word. Katie bowed her head, her neck drooping low as a cygnet’s, her cheeks bright.
As the high notes of a hymn rose toward the ceiling, as the mouths of the girls rounded with sound and the voices of boys grew magically deeper, I took a slow step toward the couples table. I climbed over the bench seat and sank down beside Katie, who did not look at me. I placed my hand, palm facing up, on her knee and counted: a quarter note, a half, a full measure before she took what I was offering.
With my back turned, I never would have been able to identify them as Amish teens. The buzz and chatter, the giggling, the clink of glasses and plates as the snacks were served, all seemed familiar and English. Even the dark and shifting shapes in the corners-couples looking for a spot to get closer-and the odd pair who wandered outside, their faces burning with an internal fever, seemed far more suited to my world than Katie’s.
Katie sat like a queen bee on a stool, surrounded by loyal girlfriends speculating on the cause of Samuel’s defection. If she was being comforted by them, it wasn’t working. She looked shell-shocked, as if two consecutive nights of rebuff were too much for her to accept.
Then again, she was having trouble accepting more than one fact of life these days.
Suddenly the group of girls cleaved and fell back in two halves. Hat in his hands, Samuel stepped forward toward Katie. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello.”
“Could I take you home?”
Some of the girls patted Katie’s back, as if to say that they knew it would come out all right the whole time. Katie kept her face averted. “I have my own buggy. And Ellie’s with me.”
“Maybe Ellie could drive home herself.”
That was my cue to speak up. I stepped forward from where I had been shamelessly eavesdropping and smiled. “Sorry, guys. Katie, you’re welcome to a private moment, but only if it doesn’t involve me, a sway-backed mare, and a set of reins.”
Samuel glanced at me. “My cousin Susie said she’d drive you back to the Fishers’, if you’re willing. And then I can take her back home after.”
Katie waited, yielding to my wishes. “All right,” I sighed. I wondered if Susie was even old enough to have a learner’s permit in my world.
I watched Katie climb into the open buggy Samuel had brought. I hauled myself into the family carriage we’d arrived in, beside a slip of a girl with thick Coke bottle glasses who was my designated driver. Just before they drove off, Katie waved to me and smiled nervously.
The ride home was a long, silent fifteen minutes. Susie was far from the budding conversationalist; she seemed to have been struck dumb by her close proximity to someone who wasn’t Amish. When she asked to use the bathroom just as we arrived at the Fishers’, I jumped at the sound of her voice. “Sure,” I said. “Go on inside.”
It wasn’t good hostessing, but I wasn’t about to leave before Katie arrived. Just in case.
I sat in the buggy, because I had no idea how to unhook the horse from its traces. A moment later, the light clop of hooves on packed dirt announced the arrival of Samuel’s horse.
I should have let them know I was there. Instead I sank into the dark recesses of the buggy, waiting to hear what Katie and Samuel had to say.
“Just tell me.” Samuel’s voice was so soft I would not have heard it if not for the wind that carried it close. “Tell me who it was.” At Katie’s silence, he began to grow frustrated. “Was it John Lapp? I’ve seen him staring at you. Or Karl Mueller?”
“It was no one,” Katie insisted. “Stop it.”
“It was someone! Someone touched you. Someone held you. Someone made that baby!”
“There was no baby. There was no baby!” Katie’s voice rose in pitch, in volume, and then I heard a thump as she jumped down from the buggy and ran into the house.
I stepped out of my hiding spot and sheepishly looked at Samuel, and Susie, who’d collided with Katie at the door of the Fishers’ home.
“There was a baby,” Samuel whispered to me.
I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
E. Trumbul
l Tewksbury arrived shortly after lunchtime, wearing his G-man aviator sunglasses and his buzz cut and his black suit. He looked around the farm as if he was scoping it for assassins or terrorists, and then asked where he could set up. “The kitchen,” I said, leading him inside, to where Katie was already waiting.
A former FBI man, Bull now administered lie detector tests in the private sector. Basically, he was a suitcase for hire. He’d come out before on my behalf to clients’ homes with his portable equipment, and exuded enough of his past training to invite both an air of solemnity for the occasion, and a vague threat suggesting that-criminal or not-the client had better be telling the truth.
Of course, this was probably the first time he’d had to get the thumbs-up from an Amish bishop to administer a test, what with the requisite tape recorder and microphone and battery pack that was part and parcel of a lie detector. But, since church permission had been granted, even Aaron was grudgingly leaving us alone. It was just me, Katie, and for moral support, Sarah, holding tight to her daughter’s hand.
“Breathe deeply,” I said, leaning closer to Katie. She was absolutely terrified, like several of my former clients. Of course, I didn’t know if that was due to guilt, or because she had never seen so many bells and whistles in one place. However, since the machine reacted to nerves, Katie’s fear had to be nipped in the bud, no matter what was causing it.
“I’m just going to be asking you some questions,” Bull said. “You see here? This is just a little bitty tape recorder. And this part is a microphone.” He tapped it with his fingernail. “And this thing, it’s no different from those earthquake seismographs.”
Katie’s fingers were white where they held Sarah’s hand. Beneath her breath she was whispering in the dialect, words that were becoming familiar to me after many evenings with the Fishers: “Unser Vater, in dem Himmel. Dein Name werde geheiliget. Dein Reich komme. Dein Wille geschehe auf Erden wie im Himmel.”
In all my years of practice, I’d never had a client reciting the Lord’s Prayer before a lie detector test.
“Just relax,” I said, patting her arm. “All you have to do is say yes or no.”
In the end, it wasn’t me who managed to calm Katie down. It was Bull himself, who-bless his Pentagonal heart-struck up a distracting conversation about Jersey cows and the cream content of their milk. Watching her mother chat with the strange man about a familiar topic, Katie’s shoulders softened, then her spine, then finally her resolve.
The tape began to turn incrementally. “What’s your name?” Bull asked.
“Katie Fisher.”
“Are you eighteen?”
“Yes.”
“Do you live in Lancaster?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been baptized Amish?”
“Yes.”
I listened to the preliminary questions I’d drafted from my seat beside Bull, a seat where I could see the needle on the lie detector and the printout of responses. So far, nothing was out of the ordinary. But nothing he’d asked so far could be considered a provocative question, either. This went on for a few minutes, loosening Katie’s tongue up, and then we began to get down to the real reason we were all here.
“Do you know Samuel Stoltzfus?”
“Yes,” Katie said, her voice a little more thready.
“Did you have sexual relations with Samuel Stoltzfus?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been pregnant?”
Katie looked at her mother. “No,” she said.
The needle remained steady.
“Have you ever had a baby?”
“No.”
“Did you kill your baby?”
“No,” Katie said.
Trumbull turned off the machine and ripped off the long printout. He marked a couple of places where the needle had wavered slightly, but he and I both knew that none of the responses indicated an out-and-out lie. “You passed,” he said.
Katie’s eyes widened with delight, then she gave a small cry and hugged Sarah hard. When she pulled back, she turned to me, smiling. “This is good? You can tell the jury this?”
I nodded. “It’s definitely a step in the right direction. Usually, though, we do two tests. It’s that much more proof.” I nodded to Bull, asking him to set up again. “Besides, you’ve already gotten over the hard part.”
Much more relaxed, Katie sat down in her seat and patiently waited for Bull to adjust the microphone to her mouth. I listened to her give the same answers to the same batch of questions.
Katie finished, her cheeks pink, and smiled at her mother. Bull pulled the printout free and circled several spots where the needle had gone sky-high-in one case, running off the top edge of the paper. This time around, Katie had lied in response to three questions: about being pregnant, about having the baby, about killing it.
“Surprising,” Bull murmured to me, “since she was so much more at ease this time around.” He shrugged, and began to disconnect wires. “Then again, maybe that’s why.”
It meant that I couldn’t use the previous test as evidence-not without submitting to the prosecution this final test too, which Katie had failed miserably. It meant that the outcome of the lie detector examination was inconclusive.
Bright-eyed and blissfully unaware, Katie looked up at me. “Are we finished?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “We certainly are.”
It was Katie’s job to feed the calves. After a couple of days they were taken from their mothers and housed in little plastic igloos that were queued up outside the barn like a row of doghouses. We each carried a bottle-they were fed formula, so that they didn’t take milk from their moms that might otherwise provide income. “You can have Sadie,” she said, referring to the little calf that had been born in front of me days before. “I’ll take Gideon.”
Sadie had turned into quite a pretty little calf. No longer bloody with afterbirth, she reminded me of a black-and-white map, with huge continents spread across her bony hips and knobby back. Her rough nose twitched at the smell of the formula. “Hey, little girl,” I said, patting the sweet block of her head. “Are you hungry?”
But Sadie had already found the nipple of the bottle and was now intent on yanking it out of my hands. I tipped it up, frowning at the chain that haltered her to her little prison of a Quonset hut. I knew that the milk cows didn’t much mind being hooked to their stanchions, but this was just a baby. What trouble could she possibly get into?
While Katie’s back was to me, I slipped the hook on the calf’s collar from the tethering chain. Just like I figured, Sadie didn’t even notice. Her throat chugged up and down as she managed to drain every last drop of the bottle, and then butt her head underneath my arm.
“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve run dry.”
Katie smiled at me over her shoulder, where Gideon-a little older, a little less greedy-was still summarily slurping his bottle. And that was the moment when Sadie vaulted over me, kicking me hard in the stomach as she sprang for freedom.
“Ellie!” Katie cried. “What did you do!”
I could not answer, much less breathe. I rolled around in the dirt in front of the little igloo, clutching my side.
Katie ran after the calf, which seemed to have developed springs on the bottoms of her hooves. Sadie ran in a half circle and then began to curve back toward me. “Grab her front legs,” Katie yelled, and I dove for Sadie’s knees, crumbling the rest of her body in a neat tackle.
Panting, Katie dragged the chain to where I was bodily restraining the calf and clipped her collar secure again. Then she sat down beside me to catch her breath. “Sorry,” I gasped. “I didn’t know.” I watched Sadie slink back to the shade of her igloo. “Hell of a good tackle, though. Maybe I ought to try out for the Eagles.”
“Eagles?”
“Football.”
Katie stared blankly at me. “What’s that?”
“You know, the game. On TV.” I could see I was getting nowhere. “It’s like baseball,” I
finally said, remembering the school-age children I’d seen with their gloves and balls. “But different. The Eagles are a professional team, which means that the players get a lot of money to be in the game.”
“They make money for playing games?”
Put that way, it sounded positively stupid. “Well, yeah.”
“Then what do they do for work?”
“That is their work,” I explained. But it seemed strange even to me, now-compared to the day-to-day existence of someone like Aaron Fisher, whose job directly involved putting food into his family’s mouth, what was the value of tossing a ball through an end zone? For that matter, what was the value of my own career, making a living with words instead of with my hands?
“I don’t understand,” Katie said honestly.
And sitting on the Fisher farm, at that moment, neither did I.
I turned to Coop, amused. “You got a divorce because of a bank dispute?”
“Well, maybe not exactly.” His teeth flashed in the moonlight. “Maybe that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
We were sitting on the back of a contraption I’d seen Elam and Samuel and Aaron dragging behind a team of mules, and trying hard not to cut our feet. Wicked prongs stuck like fangs from three deadly pinwheels attached to the base, and it seemed to me an instrument of torture, although Katie had told me it was a tetter, used to fluff up the cut hay so that it could dry better before baling. “Let me guess. Credit card debt. She had a weakness for Neiman Marcus.”
Coop shook his head. “It was her ATM password.”
I laughed. “Why? Was it some embarrassing nickname she had for you?”
“I don’t know what it was. That was the dispute.” He sighed. “I’d left my wallet at home, and we’d gone out to dinner. We needed to get cash from one of the bank machines, so I took her card from her purse and said I’d go. But when I asked for her password, she clammed up.”
“In all fairness,” I pointed out, “you’re not supposed to tell your password to anyone.”
“You probably had a client whose husband cleaned her out and ran off to Mexico, right? Thing is, Ellie, I’m not one of those guys. I never was. And she just wouldn’t back down. Wouldn’t trust me with this one thing. It made me wonder how much more she was holding back from me.”
Plain Truth Page 18