Morning, said Eleanor, not stopping work. A pause. That beam's going to need a proper brace at the base, he said. Just splicing the rotted section won't hold long. Eleanor looked at the beam, then at him.
I know, she said. I don't have the lumber for it yet. I'm stabilizing it until I do. Another pause, a longer one. Benjamin Carter, he said.
I run the double C east of here. Eleanor Whitmore. She said she had been going to leave it at that, but something made her add. I own this farm. She said it the way you'd stake a claim, plainly and without apology.
I know, he said. And there was nothing in his voice but acknowledgement, no amusement, no condescension, just the flat recognition of a fact. I've watched you working this property for 3 weeks. Have you? You've done more with it in 3 weeks than the Harker family did in the last 3 years they owned it, he said.
Ellaner set down her mallet and straightened up and looked at him directly. He had honest eyes, she noticed. The kind that looked at what was actually there rather than at some version of it they'd decided on beforehand. Why have you been watching? She asked.
Curious, he said simply. Everybody in town said you'd be gone before July. I wanted to see if they were right. And he looked in the barn at the repaired porch visible from where he sat at the kitchen garden cleared now and beginning to show the first green of planted rose at her. Not the way most men looked at her with that particular sliding away gaze that took in her heavy frame and then found somewhere else to be, but straight on the way he'd look at any person he was taking the measure of.
"They were wrong," he said. He touched his hat again, turned the gray horse, and rode back toward the road. Eleanor looked after him for a moment. Then she picked up her mallet and went back to work. He came back 4 days later unannounced and without apparent agenda and simply asked if she needed a hand with the fence line.
She looked at him for a moment assessing and then said she reckoned she could use one and pointed him at the section nearest the road while she worked the back corner. They worked most of the morning without talking much which suited Eleanor. She had learned that men who felt the need to fill silence usually did so because they were uncomfortable with what the silence might reveal. And Benjamin Carter worked quietly and competently, which told her more about him than a conversation would have. When they stopped at midday and Eleanor produced biscuits and cold coffee from a cloth sack she'd brought out from the house, he accepted both without comment and sat on a fence rail and looked out at the south field.
"What are you planting?" he asked. "Corn in the south field, kitchen gardens already in beans, squash, tomatoes, greens. I want to try wheat in the western acreage, but the soil needs working first. She paused. The eastern section along the creek.
I'm thinking I leave that in grass this year and put cattle on it next spring. He was quiet for a moment. You've thought this through. I had time, she said, on the wagon coming out and the first few nights before I was tired enough to sleep. Who taught you farming?