Gideon Pierce looked at her for a moment. Eight jars, he said. Fair price. She walked out of the merkantile with a handshake agreement and a figure in her head that when she worked it against her costs that evening in the ledger gave her the first number that looked not like survival but like a beginning. She allowed herself 30 seconds of sitting at the kitchen table with her hands flat on the surface.
Feeling the solidity of it. Then she opened the ledger and started planning the fall planting. The gossip about her she knew had not stopped. Ruth kept her informed, not out of cruelty, but out of the pragmatic friendship of a woman who believed you were better equipped to handle what you knew about. Margaret Harrington, Charles Harrington's daughter-in-law, had apparently told several women at the dress makers that the Witmore woman was making a spectacle of herself, and that the farm would be back on the market before spring.
The pastor's wife had expressed concern, the particular performative concern of a woman who enjoys having things to be concerned about, that a woman alone on 60 acres was not a proper situation, and someone ought to look into it. Thomas had heard about the merkantile arrangement, according to Ida Marsh, and had expressed surprise. Just that, surprise, not pride, not pleasure. Surprise. As though Eleanor had done something mildly unexpected, like a decorative figurine getting up and walking across a shelf, Elellanar recorded this information in her head and felt it fuel something quiet and steady in her chest, the way a good fire catches and holds.
And then Benjamin Carter came back. He came on a Wednesday in the first week of September, and this time he was not carrying lumber or offering a convenient excuse. He simply rode up to the farm, tied his horse at the fence post Eleanor had replaced in the first week, and walked up to where she was working in the kitchen garden and said, "There's a county harvest fair in 3 weeks. They have a produce competition and a preserves competition." Ida Marsh won the preserves last four years running, and she's insufferable about it. Eleanor sat back on her heels and looked up at him.
"Is that so?" she said. "I've tasted Ida's preserves," he said. And I've tasted yours." He paused. "You should enter." "I've been here 4 months," Eleanor said. "I'd be stepping into someone else's territory." "You'd be entering a fair competition," Benjamin said.
"Which is what the competition is for?" Eleanor pulled a weed she'd been about to get to anyway and thought about it. "Why do you care?" she asked. "How was quiet for a moment?" It was the particular quiet of a man choosing his words because he means them rather than because he's performing thoughtfulness. "Because you have worked this land harder than I've seen anyone work a farm in 10 years," he said. "And every person in this county who thought you'd fail quietly is going to have to sit in a fairground and look at what you've done.
And I think you should let them." Eleanor looked at her garden, at the heavy tomatoes still on the vine, at the beans she was harvesting in quantities that had surprised even her. At the rows of squash that were going to come in better than she'd planned. "You just want Ida Marsh to lose," she said. Something that was definitely a smile this time moved across Benjamin Carter's face. "That he said is also true." She entered the fair.
The morning of the harvest fair was the first time Eleanor Whitmore walked into a large gathering of Willow Creek residents since her arrival at the farm, and she was under no illusions about what that meant. She had been abstract to most of them. A story people told, a situation they had opinions about, a name that appeared in the kind of conversations women have at the dress makers and men have at the feed store. Walking into the fairground on a September morning with two jars of preserves under her arm and a basket of produce, she became a specific person in front of a lot of people who had decided what kind of specific person she was before they ever saw her. She felt it.
She was not a woman who had ever learned to be insensible to a room's opinion, but she had learned over the course of the last 4 months to feel it and keep walking anyway. Ruth was beside her, which helped. "Head up," Ruth said quietly. "Walk like you own it." "I don't own the fairground," Eleanor said. "Walk like you own the farm, then Ruth said.
You actually do own that." Elellanor squared her shoulders and kept walking. She registered her entries. She set her jars of preserves on the table with the others, and looked at Ida Marsh's four contributions, which were beautifully presented and smelled excellent. Ida herself was at the far end of the table talking to the pastor's wife, and she looked over when Eleanor set her entries down and gave a nod that was entirely neutral and could have been interpreted as anything. Eleanor nodded back.