I was not worthless. We were simply waiting for someone patient enough to believe in us. The room was very quiet. Then a woman in the fourth row, middle-aged, workworn, with the kind of face that has been outside in all weathers, began to clap, and then the rest of them. Elellanor stood at the front of the room and let it happen and felt something unlock in her chest that she had not known was locked.
Afterward, nine women came to speak to her individually. Two of them asked for her advice about their own land situations. One of them, a widow named Martha Gail, who had been running 40 acres alone since her husband died 3 years previous, gripped Elanor's hand and said in a low voice, "I nearly gave it up last spring," "I nearly sold." She did not say anything else, but she held Elellanor's hand for a moment longer, and Eleanor understood what she meant and squeezed back. She drove back to Willow Creek in the dark alone with the lantern swaying on the side of the wagon. And she felt the distance between who she had been in Thomas's dining room and who she was on this road at this particular hour in this particular October.
And the distance was not as large as it sometimes felt. The woman who had taken that deed and pressed it to her chest had always been capable of this. She had simply needed the ground under her. She had found the ground. She was still finding it.
The letter from Thomas came 3 days after she returned from Miles City, and it arrived via the post office, not handd delivered, not brought by one of his men, but properly posted with a stamp, which told Eleanor before she opened it that he had written it more than once. A man only uses the formal mail for a letter he has revised into its final form. She opened it at Ida's counter, which was where she always read mail that mattered, because Ida's presence was somehow studying. Thomas had written four pages in his careful hand. He did not lead with what he wanted.
He led and this surprised her with what he'd heard. He had heard about the Mile City meeting from Catherine's cousin, who had been in the audience. He had heard about the Chicago paper endorsement from a business associate who had seen the column. He had heard about the storm sheltering from Frank Alderman, who had told the story at a county meeting two weeks after the storm with a specificity that suggested he had told it before and would tell it again. I understand, Thomas wrote in the third page, that what I did was not the kindness I believed it to be.
I have been I have been thinking about this a great deal. I have been thinking about it since I stood in your kitchen and saw what you had made of that place and I have not had the right words for it until now. I want to say that I am sorry, Eleanor. I am sorry for what I assumed about you. I am sorry for what I did not tell you about the bequest.
I am sorry that I needed you to prove yourself before I could see you clearly. She read that paragraph three times. Then she read the last page. I would like, if you are willing, to bring Catherine and the children to Witmore Farm for Christmas as you suggested. I would like to come not as your benefactor or your older brother with opinions, but simply as your family, if you will have us, Elellanor folded the letter.
Ida was watching her with the careful attention of a woman who knows when not to ask. Well, Ida said when Eleanor had been quiet for what was apparently long enough. He apologized," Eleanor said. Ida looked at her. "Is it a good apology?" she asked.
Eleanor thought about it with the seriousness the question deserved. "Yes," she said finally. "It's a very good apology. He knows exactly what he's apologizing for." "Will you forgive him?" Eleanor put the letter in her coat pocket. "I already have," she said.