Thanksgiving dinner was crowded and imperfect. Dutch arrived with a jar of pickles he had made himself, which Ruth accepted with the politeness reserved for food nobody quite trusts. Eli insisted on describing every major step of the seed trials while the potatoes were getting cold. Callie burned the first pan of rolls because the oven thermostat was inaccurate, and all four of them laughed when Dutch suggested adding it to the year's list of equipment failures.
After the meal, Ruth helped Callie wash dishes. The warm water steamed the kitchen window, turning the yard outside into a blur of yellow lights and shadows. For a while they worked without speaking, side by side in the same kitchen where Callie had cried after the harvest trucks left. The quiet no longer felt empty.
By the third harvest after the discovery, Hollow Bend looked like a working farm rather than a place being held together in anticipation of the next disaster. The regular crop income had steadied, the equipment debts were being reduced on a schedule Callie understood, and the grain bins were full of produce she could sell under agreements she had read with Helen before signing. The barn roof was sound, the fence lines were maintained, and the old cattle pasture had been improved without erasing the corner where Eli had first noticed the sunken ground.
Dutch received his full wage and complained that Callie's new bookkeeping system contained more columns than a man needed to repair a tractor. She pointed out that he was welcome to look at every column affecting his pay. He said he would rather use the time to find the missing socket wrench, then returned twenty minutes later to ask whether the retirement savings contribution was really included as she had promised.
"Every month," Callie told him.
"Hmph." Dutch examined the printed statement, folded it, and tucked it into his wallet. "Your father would've liked that part, too."
The flint corn program had grown enough to support larger evaluation plantings, though Callie still resisted using words such as breakthrough or guaranteed. There were strong results under some dryland conditions, mixed results elsewhere, and continuing questions about yield, quality, and the practical cost of commercial production. Bragg's company began discussing a carefully limited release for growers in suitable areas, with the Voss family's role and the documented history of the collection openly acknowledged. The project was worth money, but it was also still work, and Callie trusted it more because everyone involved had learned to say both things in the same sentence.
Eli became the unofficial guardian of the farm records. He developed a habit of checking every number a second time and asking whether a comparison was fair before drawing conclusions. At sixteen, he was studying agricultural science with a seriousness that surprised the teachers who remembered him as a boy forever distracted by broken machinery and the birds behind the cattle pasture. He talked about studying plant breeding after graduation, then coming back to work with the seed conservation program.