At the produce table, she arranged her tomatoes and her squash and her beans and a display of the dried herbs she'd been growing along the south wall of the farmhouse. And she stepped back and looked at it. And she thought, "It's good. It's genuinely good." Not from pride, but from the honest assessment of someone who had been looking at produce her entire life and knew the difference between what the soil gives when it's cared for and what it gives when it isn't. She won the preserves competition.
She didn't find out until 2 hours later when the judging was announced and her name was read out and she was standing with Ruth near the edge of the crowd and Ruth grabbed her arm so hard it left a mark. The room did something interesting when the announcement was made. There was applause, genuine applause from people who had tasted the preserves blind and were simply acknowledging what they'd tasted. And then there was a specific subregister of reaction that Eleanor caught in the faces of the people she'd been watching. The adjustment, the recalibration, the look of something previously decided being quietly revised.
Ida Marsh found her in the crowd afterward. Eleanor held her breath slightly. "Well," Ida said. She looked at Elellanor with those direct eyes, and for a moment, Eleanor couldn't read her at all. Then Ida held out her hand.
Fair's fair, she said. Those tomato preserves were something exceptional. What did you do with the acidity? Added a small amount of apple, Elellanor said cautiously. Ida's eyes sharpened with genuine interest.
Now that's clever, she said. Come see me next week. I want to talk technique. Elellanar shook her hand. On her way back across the fairground, she passed a knot of men near the livestock pens and she heard her name.
Not quietly because some men do not lower their voices when they are making pronouncements they consider reasonable from a man she didn't know who was talking to two she recognized one of them being Robert Ames the Witmore woman the man was saying good for her I suppose but the fair was one thing you wait till winter 60 acres alone a particular emphasis on alone she won't see spring without selling Robert Ames said something she couldn't here. The other man laughed. Besides, the first man said, "Thomas told me himself she doesn't know the first thing about Eleanor kept walking. She did not slow her pace. She did not look over.
She kept her chin level and she walked past and she felt the words land on her back like something thrown." And she let them because stopping to fight every throne thing was a waste of energy she could not afford. What she did instead was go home and write in her ledger. She wrote, "Winter preparation must be complete by November. Firewood, feed stores, structural checks on barn before first freeze." She wrote, "Will not sell, will not fail, will not stop." Then she closed the ledger and slept better than she had in weeks. It was Ida Marsh who told her about James Whitmore, not Thomas.
James, their father's youngest brother, who Eleanor had not seen since she was 14 years old, and who had left the family under circumstances that had always been discussed in the lowered voices reserved for serious things. She knew he had gone west. She knew there had been something about money, or a woman, or both. She knew that his name was not spoken at Thomas's table. What she did not know, what Ida told her on a rainy October afternoon over the kitchen table, with the particular careful precision of a woman who has held a piece of information long enough to know its weight, was that James Whitmore had come through Willow Creek 11 years ago, that he had stopped at the Harker Farm, which was still operational then, that he had, according to Ida, who had received a letter about it from her cousin in the eastern part of the county, left something with old Harker, a letter, or possibly a package addressed to Eleanor specifically to Eleanor Marie Whitmore by name.
Eleanor stared at her. "Why are you telling me this now?" she said. "Because I only just put it together," Ida said with the directness of a woman who did not find her own delays embarrassing, only factual. "When I heard your name that first day you came in for mail, I knew I'd heard it somewhere. It took me two months to remember where and another month to find my cousin's letter.
I am not, she added. As young as I was, Harker, Eleanor said. The family that the family that owned my farm. Yes, Ida said. They're gone.