Summary
Bucolic Pennsylvania mist clings like a guilty secret to the Getz homestead, where adolescent Tillie—more chattel than child—hauls milk-pails through pre-dawn gloom while her iron-souled Amish sire counts souls the way bankers tally coin. An aunt she never met, Sarah Oberholtzer, bequeaths a small fortune contingent upon the girl’s renunciation of plain-dress piety and embrace of the gentler Mennonite confession before the eighteenth autumn. Doc Weaver, country physician with a Hippocratic conscience, swallows the codicil like a bitter pill, vowing silence, yet a rapacious solicitor leaks the clause to Absalom, a barn-bred opportunist who smells dowry in every hay-wisp. Smelling marriage as his personal deed of acquisition, Absalom bargains with Jake: plow-horse, scythe, and Tillie’s future in exchange for a promissory slice of the Oberholtzer pie. Cornered, the girl slips toward the creek, stones in her apron pockets, only to be hauled back by the twin interventions of Doc and Jack Fairchild, a passing stranger whose kindness carries the faint whiff of providence. Resurrected, Tillie dons Mennonite bonnet, repudiates patriarchal rule, and flees under moon-sheen toward a horizon still inked with doubt. Marriage to Jack—Sarah’s nephew—appears the coup de grâce for the father’s scheme, yet church elders bar the prodigal, branding her rebellion a trespass against the Ordnung. Jack, brandishing bloodline claim, swears to secure her stolen patrimony even as the final reel flickers on a question mark: is emancipation measured in coin or conscience?
Synopsis
Tillie, daughter of a stern Amish farmer, Jake Getz, is treated as a farm chattel by her father, the trustee of the will of Sarah Oberholtzer, who leaves an inheritance to Tillie on the condition that she become a Mennonite before her 18th birthday. Doc Weaver takes an oath never to tell Tillie of this bequest, but the lawyer who draws up the will accepts a promissory note from young Absalom, whom he informs of the contents of the will. Absalom asks Jake for the hand of Tillie, promising him a stake in her inheritance. Frightened at the prospect of marrying Absalom, Tillie attempts suicide but is saved by Doc and Jack Fairchild, a stranger who learns about the will. Tillie then becomes a Mennonite, and to escape her father's tyranny she runs away. Tillie and Jack are married, and although she is turned from the church, Jack, who is Sarah Oberholtzer's nephew, assures her of her rights.
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