The summer everyone else in Millbrook Hollow was trying to clear stones from their fields, fourteen-year-old Eli Barnett was carrying them in the opposite direction.
He pushed a rusted wheelbarrow along the county road with both hands wrapped around handles worn smooth by three generations of work. The load rattled over every rut, and the wheel made a high, complaining squeak that carried farther than the boy's footsteps.
He had already made six trips that afternoon, but he was turning back for a seventh when a pickup slowed beside him.
Three men were riding in the cab, their windows down against the heat. One of them leaned an elbow outside and grinned at the sight of the rocks stacked higher than the wheelbarrow's battered rim. "You taking those home, Eli, or finally getting smart and hauling them away?" he called. The other two laughed, and the driver eased forward just enough to make the boy push through the dust the tires had lifted.
Eli waited for the dust to settle before answering, and then he decided not to answer at all. He had discovered that an explanation offered to someone determined to find a joke usually gave that person another reason to laugh. He tightened his grip, lifted the wheelbarrow handles, and continued toward the small farm at the far edge of town. A stone shifted against another stone with a sound like a dull knock, and Eli adjusted his pace so he would not lose half the load before he reached home.
By August, almost everyone in Millbrook Hollow had seen him doing it. Farmers stopped at the feed store and described the strange rows of rock spreading across the Barnett family's least productive ground. The jokes changed from week to week, but the conclusion did not: Thomas Barnett's boy had apparently lost his mind in the heat. Nobody knew exactly what he was building, and if the truth had been told, Eli was not entirely certain either.
He knew only that he had found one small difference between the ground that still held life and the ground that had given up. He had noticed that difference while other people were looking elsewhere, and he could not make himself forget it. What began as a boy's question would become the first decent harvest the Barnetts had seen in three years. Before that happened, however, it would cost him blisters, sleep, a little of his father's confidence, and three failures so discouraging that each one nearly convinced him the laughing men were right.
Millbrook Hollow lay in the folds of low, weathered hills, where a narrow river curved around a stand of sycamores before disappearing behind a wooded ridge. Older maps showed a thriving agricultural community there, complete with a grain mill, two livestock markets, and a rail siding that had once loaded vegetables for towns thirty miles away. By Eli's childhood, the rail siding was a strip of weeds, the mill had become a storage building, and the river ran thin enough in late summer that children could cross it without wetting their knees. People still called it a farming town because nobody had decided what else to call it.