The road to the Harker property, her property, she made herself think it that way immediately, was rudded and grown over at the edges, and the last half mile was barely a road at all, more a memory of one. When the wagon crested the final rise, and she saw it for the first time, Orville let out a breath through his nose that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh, but was definitely an opinion. Eleanor climbed down before he could offer to help. She stood in front of the farmhouse and she looked at it. The porch sagged on one side where a support had given way, tipping the whole front of the house at an angle that made it look apologetic.
Three of the four front windows were intact, which was better than she had expected. The front door hung slightly open, which was worse because it meant animals had likely gotten in over the years and made themselves comfortable. The paint was peeled down to bare gray wood in most places. The chimney had lost some stones from the upper portion. A previous attempt at a kitchen garden along the south wall had long since gone to weeds and thistle.
Behind the house, she could see the barn, which leaned, not collapsed, leaned the way an old man leans on a fence, tired, but still standing. The chicken coupe was a collection of boards that had apparently given up the argument of being a structure, and were simply lying near each other in vague association. The fence lines that marked the property edges had gaps every 30 or 40 yards, where posts had rotted and rails had fallen. 60 Acres of all of it, 60 acres of grass gone wild, of fields gone, of a decade's worth of indifference pressing down on every board and stone and fence post. Orville set her trunk and her two crates down in the dirt beside the wagon without comment.
"You'll be all right then," he said, which was his longest sentence of the day, and she understood it was not a question. He climbed back up, turned the wagon, and was gone down the rudded road before she had taken more than three steps toward the house. Eleanor stood in the quiet. There were birds somewhere in the overgrown fields. There was wind through the tall grass.
There was the creek of the barn shifting slightly, that slow lean continuing its long conversation with gravity. There was the smell of sun on dry earth and old wood, and something green and alive underneath all the neglect. She put her hands on her hips. She was wearing her second best dress because her best one was packed and she was already too warm in it and her feet hurt from the wagon bench. And she had not eaten since before dawn because Orville had not stopped and she had not asked him to.
She was 28 years old and she was standing in front of 60 acres of nobody's problem. And the man who had put her here believed she would fail quietly enough that he wouldn't have to think about it too hard. She thought about Thomas's face when she'd taken the deed. She thought about Robert Ames, who had considered her a condition to be overlooked at sufficient financial incentive. She thought about the women in town who looked at her with that specific mixture of pity and relief.
Pity for her situation, relief that it was hers and not theirs. She looked at the broken down farmhouse. "All right," she said, to the farm and to herself and to no one. Let's see what you've got. She picked up one of the crates and carried it toward the door.
The inside of the house was dim and smelled of dust and mouse and old wood and something faintly floral that she couldn't identify. Some long dried bunch of herbs hung in a kitchen. She couldn't see yet, perhaps left behind by the last woman who had lived here, and thought it would always smell like home. The front room had a fireplace, a floor with two boards that needed replacing, and a window with a view of the south field that was genuinely beautiful in the late afternoon light. The kitchen behind it was small but functional.
The old cast iron stove intact, the pump at the sink requiring work, but not miracle. There were two rooms beyond, one with a rusted bed frame, one with nothing but a bird's nest in the corner and a cracked plaster wall. Eleanor walked through all of it slowly. She touched the walls. She tested the floors with her weight.
She worked the pump until it gave a grudging cough of water that was brown at first and then eventually clear. She opened every window that would open. She stood at the back door and looked at the barn and the fields and the broken chicken coupe and the fence lines with their gaps. She pulled Thomas's deed from her pocket and unfolded it. 60 Acres.