"I ain't trying to be paid with loyalty," he answered. "I'm trying to make sure there's a barn left here for me to work in."
"And I'm trying to make sure you aren't seventy-five before I can afford to pay you what I owe." She reached into her pocket and handed him an envelope containing everything she could manage that week. He stared at it, then folded it without counting the money and put it inside his shirt.
On a gray afternoon near the end of May, Callie stood beside the failed trial plot while Eli marked the final survival count on his clipboard. She had lost enough of the precious original seed to make her stomach ache whenever she thought of it. The remaining plants stood behind a simple windbreak and were doing better, but their green leaves offered no excuse for what had gone wrong in the rest of the bed.
She realized that the first discovery had presented her with an inheritance she could not even name properly, and her first response had been to rush it toward becoming useful. Her great-grandfather had spent decades observing the same fields. She had spent fewer than twenty days demanding proof from plants that had barely learned the soil. The contrast was embarrassing, and she decided she had earned the embarrassment.
In late May, she returned to the crates they had removed from the old room and noticed that the bottom of the smallest one sounded different when she tapped it. The boards near the edge were thick, but the middle gave a shallow wooden response. She turned the crate over on the kitchen table and found a narrow seam hidden beneath a strip of old felt.
Eli leaned over her shoulder. "Is there another box inside the box?"
"Maybe." She fetched a thin tool and worked cautiously along the seam. When the inner board came free, both of them fell silent.
Beneath the false bottom lay an oilcloth packet tied with cotton string. Inside were folded pages covered in the close, careful handwriting Callie remembered from a few entries in the family ledger. There were planting dates, diagrams of alternating rows, notes on soil amendments, sketches of root development, and a yearly rotation involving clover, manure compost, and periods when the ground was deliberately left covered rather than cultivated bare.
On the first page, beneath the words "Voss Flint," Silas had written a sentence that made Callie read it twice. "The seed is only half the inheritance. The other half is the ground and what we do to keep it alive."
Eli stood beside her without moving. He understood the shape of the discovery before he understood every technical term on the page. The buried room had protected old ears of corn, but the hidden compartment had protected something that might be even harder to replace: the method by which Silas had kept selecting, growing, and preserving them.