The question was, "Are you willing to begin?" She had been willing. She still was. On the last night of the year, after the guests had gone, and Thomas and his family were sleeping in the two rooms, and Benjamin had driven home with the particular reluctance of a man who is counting the months until he does not have to leave. Elellanar sat at her kitchen table alone with the lamp and the ledger. She opened it to the last page of the year's accounts.
She looked at the numbers at the columns of cost and income and investment and return at at the neat record of a year in which she had done approximately the impossible. She turned to a clean page. She wrote at the top year two. Then she wrote the first thing that needed doing in the spring. She was still writing when the lamp needed trimming.
She trimmed it and kept going. Spring came to Whitmore Farm the way it always came to that part of Montana. Not gently, not all at once, but in arguments. A warm week followed by a killing frost followed by 3 days of rain, followed by the kind of morning that made you understand why people had crossed a continent to get here. Eleanor had learned to read those arguments by now, the same way she had learned to read the barn sounds and the soil's moods, and the particular silence that meant the hens were unsettled about something worth paying attention to.
She was in the South Field on a Tuesday morning in early April when Ruth came across the property line at a pace that told Eleanor something had happened before Ruth said a word. "There's a woman at your gate," Ruth said slightly breathless. "She came on the morning coach from Helena. She says she's a writer." Eleanor straightened up from the row she was turning. "A writer," she said.
"For the Helena Independent," Ruth said. She says she heard your name from Gerald Marsha's cousin, the one who wrote the column. Eleanor pulled off her work gloves. She looked at the South Field, at the rows she had planned through January and begun turning in March, at the 60 acres that had been 2 years ago a decade of indifference pressed into dirt. Then she looked at the gate.
Then I suppose, she said, I should go talk to her. The writer's name was Francis Cole, and she was perhaps 30, with a direct gaze and a notebook, and the particular energy of a woman who has been told no enough times that, yes, surprises her. She stood at Elellanar's front gate with the careful composure of someone who is not certain of her welcome and is determined not to show it. Eleanor opened the gate. "Miss Witmore," Francis said.
"Come in," Eleanor said. "I'll make coffee." Francis Cole wrote for two hours at Elellanar's kitchen table, asking questions with the efficient precision of a woman working against a deadline. And Elellanor answered them the same way she answered everything, plainly, specifically, without embellishment, and without false modesty. She described the deed and the first morning and the pump and the barn and the fair and the storm and the guests and Charles Harrington and the drainage work. She described all of it as the sequence of practical decisions it had been because that was what it was.
And Francis wrote it all down with a speed that suggested she had recognized early that the plain telling was the story. At the end of the 2 hours, Francis put down her pencil and looked at Eleanor directly. "Can I can I ask you something off the record?" she said. "You can ask." Elellanor said. "Do you ever?" Francis stopped started again.
Was there ever a moment when you believed they were right? That you should have given up? Elellanar thought about it honestly, which was the only way she thought about anything. There was a morning, she said slowly, about 6 weeks in, before Ruth, before Benjamin, before any of it had resolved into something I could see clearly. I had split my palm open on a fence post, and I couldn't get the bleeding to stop.