The first green shoots appeared in early June. There were fewer than Eli had imagined and more than Callie had dared expect, and their arrival was nearly silent. One morning the bed was dark earth marked by tiny ridges. The next morning several thin leaves pierced the surface, each one carrying the small unreasonable confidence of a plant that had begun growing without knowing how many people were waiting for it.
They did not announce the news. Eli wanted to tell his math teacher, who had helped him build the spreadsheet, but Callie asked him to wait until the plants had passed the stage when a single storm could erase the stand. He agreed reluctantly. That afternoon he took a photograph and printed a copy for his school notebook, which Callie suspected he would stare at during class when he was supposed to be learning something else.
By the end of June, the stronger plants had developed a distinctive look. Their leaves stood at a different angle from those of the nearby comparison rows, their stems seemed stockier, and the young roots appeared well established when Marianne checked them without disturbing the stand. These were observations, not conclusions, and Callie wrote them down without adjectives such as extraordinary or superior. She was learning how often a desire for a result could creep into the words used to describe it.
Meanwhile, Bragg's usual hybrids were growing across the county. His operations were large, professionally managed, and productive, with schedules designed around thousands of acres rather than a protected corner of one small farm. Callie passed some of his fields on the way to a machinery repair job and noticed nothing unusual in them except the same early heat stress that threatened every grower that year. She did not wish failure on his crops, despite what he had done to hers; farmers understood too intimately what crop failure cost.
The serious heat arrived in July. Rainfall totals fell behind the long-term average, and the afternoons grew so dry that the wind carried the smell of heated dust across the porch. Weather reports began using comparisons to the worst summers in nearly a decade. Callie moved through the farm with the exhaustion of somebody who could not afford the luxury of looking worried while there were still practical things to do.
On the north plot, the commercial comparison plants showed stress first. Leaves curled tightly during the hottest part of the day, and several stalks began losing their lower green color. The Voss Flint plants also responded to the heat; their leaves drooped, and their growth slowed, but a larger proportion remained green and upright by evening. Callie measured soil moisture and recorded the timing of the symptoms rather than declaring victory.
Marianne visited after a week of unbroken heat. She walked both plots, checked the records, examined the soil, and asked about differences in rooting depth, cover-crop history, and the water each planting had received. Her conclusion was cautiously encouraging. Under the conditions they had documented, the surviving flint plants were maintaining their condition better than the reference plants, but the small sample and differences in early establishment prevented them from attributing the full result to genetics alone.