Jodie Picoult - Plain Truth

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.”

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.