“I just thought that you’d-”
“Well, you thought wrong, Stephen. I’d actually prefer to have dinner with the Fishers.” I could not say why, but it was important to me that Sarah and Katie know I’d rather be with them than Stephen. That they understand I wasn’t pining to get away as quickly as possible.
Somehow, over the past few months, these people had become my friends.
Stephen held up his hands, crying peace. “Whatever you want, Ellie. Dinner with Ma and Pa Kettle will be just fine.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Stephen. Maybe they dress differently and pray more often than you do, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t hear you being an idiot.”
Stephen sobered quickly. “I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I only figured after-what, four months here? You might be anxious for a little intellectual banter.” He took my hand, tugging me out of the range of the doorway, so that Sarah and Katie couldn’t see us. “I’ve missed you,” he said. “Truth is, I wanted you all to myself.”
I saw him coming closer to kiss me and froze-a deer in the headlights, unable to stop what was about to happen. Stephen’s mouth was warm on mine, his hands crossing the map of my back, but my mind was running. After eight years, how could being in Stephen’s arms feel less comfortable than being in Coop’s?
With a small, tight smile, I flattened my hands against Stephen’s chest. “Not now,” I whispered. “Why don’t you walk around the farm while I help with supper?”
An hour later, when the family gathered at the table, all my doubts about Stephen were laid to rest. He bowed his head solemnly at the silent prayer; he used his charm on Sarah until she couldn’t pass him a serving dish without blushing the color of a plum; he talked about silage as if the subject interested him even more than the law. I should have known that this would be fine: the Fishers were generous and friendly; Stephen was a consummate actor. By the time Sarah served the main course-a pot roast, chicken pie, and turkey stroganoff-I had relaxed enough to take my first bite of food.
Katie was telling a hilarious story about the time the cows got out of the barn in the middle of a snowstorm when there was a knock at the door. Elam went to open it, but before the older man could get there, the visitor let himself in. “Hey,” Coop said, shrugging out of his coat. “Am I too late for dessert?”
Like me, he’d become an adopted member of the Fisher family. After the first month, even Aaron stopped objecting with mutinous silence when Sarah graciously offered him dinner on the days he met with Katie or visited me. His eyes lit on mine and warmed-that was all the contact we allowed each other, in front of others. Then he saw Stephen sitting next to me.
Stephen was already getting to his feet, one hand on my shoulder and the other extended. “Stephen Chatham,” he said, smiling quizzically. “Have we met?”
“John Cooper. And yes, I think we have,” Coop said, so smoothly I could have kissed him right then and there. “At the opera.”
“Symphony,” I murmured.
Both men looked at me.
“Coop’s taken Katie on as a patient,” I explained.
“Coop,” Stephen repeated slowly, and I saw him making the synaptic connections: the abbreviated nickname, the snapshots jammed into the back of my college yearbook, the conversations we’d had under a blanket of darkness about our past lovers, when we were still safe and secure in each other’s arms. “That’s right. You knew Ellie from Penn.”
Coop looked at me reluctantly, as if he didn’t trust himself to control whatever emotions might play across his face. “Yeah. It’s been a while.”
I had never been more thankful for the Amish belief that intimate relationships were matters only for the interest of the two people involved. Katie was meticulously cutting the meat on her plate; Sarah found something to attend to in the kitchen; the other men began to discuss when they were planning to fill the silos. Drawing a deep breath, I sat down. “Well,” I said, my voice high and bright. “Who’s hungry?”
Outside, a light wind whistled through the trees, playing them like pipes. Stephen and I walked beneath the overturned bowl of the sky, close enough to feel each other’s body heat without actually touching. “The whole case is riding on the forensic psychiatrist,” I told him. “If the jury doesn’t buy her, Katie’s screwed.”
“Then let’s hope the jury buys her,” Stephen said gallantly, when I knew he was thinking that we didn’t have a prayer.
“Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe I’ll get a mistrial.”
Stephen pulled the lapels of his coat up. “How’s that?”
“I motioned for one on the grounds that Katie won’t be tried by a jury of her peers.”
He smiled slyly. “Meaning there won’t be a single Amish body among the twelve?”
“Yup.”
“I thought participation in the legal system was against their religion?”
“It might as well be. Like I said: she won’t be tried by a jury of her peers.”
Stephen burst out laughing. “God, El. You’re never gonna win it, but it’s one hell of an appealable issue. This backwater judge isn’t going to know what hit her.” He stepped in front of me in one smooth maneuver, so that I walked into his open arms. “You are something else,” he murmured against my ear.
Maybe it was the way I lighted in his embrace, or the millisecond it took my body to relax against his-something made Stephen draw back. He spread his hand against my cheek, curving his thumb along my jaw. “So,” he said softly. “It’s like that?”
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 m
oment 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.
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