She thought about, "You should enter the fair, and you have as much right to that meeting as anyone, and every small, consistent, undramatic act of recognition that had accumulated over a year into something she had been aware of, but had not let herself examine too directly." "You are the least dramatic man I have ever met." she said. Something moved in his face. "Is that a problem?" he asked. "No," she said. She smiled.
"A real one with the full weight of the year behind it. It's one of the things I find particularly worthwhile." He exhaled. "Good," he said. "Don't presume too much yet," she said. "I have a farm to run." "I know," he said.
"So do I." Then we understand each other," she said. He left an hour later, and Eleanor stood at the window, watching the lights of his lantern move down the road toward his own land, and she felt something in her chest that was warm and somewhat terrifying and entirely welcome. She went to the ledger. She opened it. She did not write anything for a moment.
Then she wrote, "Benjamin Carter." Noted. She closed the ledger and went to bed. The storm came without adequate warning in the middle of August. Eleanor had learned Montana weather over the course of the year, its particular habits, and its sudden reversals, and she had learned to read the signs that old-timers read by instinct, the particular color of the afternoon sky, the behavior of the animals, the smell of the air. She had seen bad weather come before.
She had not seen anything like this. It started as a thunderstorm of normal scale on a Tuesday afternoon and became within 3 hours something categorically different. The kind of storm that people in this territory referenced for a decade afterward by year rather than name, a marker in time. The rain came horizontal. The lightning was continuous enough to navigate by.
The wind pulled a portion of the barn roof that Benjamin had helped reinforce and flung it 50 yard into the east field like it weighed nothing. Eleanor had four guests in the house. She got them all into the back rooms away from the windows. She checked every window herself, latched every shutter, moved the livestock, she could move into the protected section of the barn that was still standing. She did all of this with the systematic thoroughess of a woman who has learned that panic is a luxury and there is always something useful to do.
At the height of the storm, her front door opened. It was not the wind. Someone was knocking, and when she unlatched it, she found two people on her porch. A woman and a teenage girl, soaked through and white-faced, whose wagon had overturned on the road a/4 mile from Eleanor's gate. The woman's arm was at a wrong angle.
The girl was holding it together by sheer will. Eleanor got them inside. She did not hesitate, and she did not perform calm. She simply was calm, the way she had learned to be when there was work to do, because calm was more useful than anything else. "Can you move the fingers?" she asked the woman, whose name she learned later was Helen SS.
"Yes," Helen said through her teeth. "It's not broken, I don't think." "All right," Eleanor said. "Let's get it looked at." She set the arm. She had read about it in her father's almanac in the medical section, which she had read with the thoroughess she brought to everything. Just in case, and it was not broken, as Helen had said, but it was badly wrenched and would need rest.