She wrapped it with the practical efficiency of someone who has decided that competence is more useful than squeamishness, and she put Helen and her daughter in her own bed and went back to managing the house. By midnight, the storm had not abaded. By 2:00 in the morning, Eleanor was standing in her kitchen with six people sheltering in her house. Her four original guests, Helen SS and her daughter, and a third family she had not yet met, who had arrived during a momentary lull in the rain, sent by someone who was not there. Someone had apparently told someone on the road that if you needed shelter, you went to the Witmore farm.
She made soup. She made coffee. She lit every lamp in the house. She kept the fire going and she went around to everyone, each person individually with the focused attention of someone who understands that being seen matters as much as being sheltered. And she checked on them and listened to them and made sure they had what they needed.
At 3:00 in the morning, Benjamin arrived. He came through the door with the rain still coming off his hat and his coat, and he looked at the kitchen full of people, and at Eleanor, who was standing at the stove with her hair down because she'd had no time to put it up properly. And her apron soaked where she'd leaned over the soup pot. And he took one look at all of it and rolled up his sleeves. "What needs doing?" he said.
"The east section of the barn," she said without preamble. "I've got livestock in the protected section, but the gap where the roof came off is letting in water, and I need it boarded before." "I'll handle it," he said. "You can't go out in Eleanor," he said. "I'll handle it." He went back out into the storm. Eleanor watched the door close behind him.
And then she turned back to the stove because there was soup to manage and people to look after, but she felt something in her chest lock into place with a kind of solidity she had not let herself feel before. He came back in 2 hours later, soaked and muddy and with a gash on his forearm from a piece of blown debris that he had apparently not considered worth mentioning. "Is that serious?" Elellanor asked, taking his arm without ceremony and examining it. It's fine, he said. It needs to be cleaned, she said.
Elellanor. Sit down, she said in a tone she had apparently developed over the course of the year that communicated that arguing was not a useful option. He sat down. She cleaned the gash and wrapped it and he let her with the particular patience of a man who has decided that some battles are not worth having. The barns boarded, he said.
I know, she said. Thank you. He looked at the kitchen, at the people sleeping and waiting and warming themselves, at the evidence of the kind of night that reveals exactly what a place is made of. "How many did you shelter?" he said. "Six people," she said.
"I need to check on Helen's arm again." And Elellanor put his uninjured hand over hers on the table just for a moment, not dramatically, with the plainness that was his particular quality. Stop for a minute. She stopped. She looked at his hand on hers. She looked at him.
You know what you've built here, he said quietly. Don't you? I'm beginning to, she said. Outside, the storm was finally, gradually beginning to let go. The the rain was still heavy, but the wind had eased, and in the particular way that Montana weather released its hold, the quality of the darkness outside was changing.