Thomas observed these changes without comment. He saw Eli repairing the wheelbarrow wheel rather than demanding a new one, and he saw the boy return to the barn when there were other jobs to do. He also saw him carrying the notebook out to the strip, crouching beside two struggling plants with the seriousness of an adult studying a broken machine. Thomas did not believe in the stones yet, but he was beginning to recognize the work.
The second failure arrived more gradually than the first. By the middle of July, the afternoons had become so hot that the air above the field seemed to tremble, and the exposed channels between Eli's stones hardened despite his repeated adjustments. The surviving beans held on, but they were barely ahead of the plants growing in ordinary soil. A week of promising morning observations had failed to produce the kind of difference that might justify the labor.
Eli wrote, Better than the first arrangement, still not enough, and stared at the words until he could not stand looking at them. He had expected to see a line of green across the brown field by now. Instead he saw a patch that looked slightly less miserable than everything around it, and the distinction seemed too small to defend. The laughter at the feed store suddenly felt much louder in his memory than it had at the time.
At supper he told his family that perhaps his father had been right all along. Thomas looked up from his plate, and Eli saw surprise pass briefly across his face. "I never said there wasn't something under those rocks," Thomas replied. "I said rocks don't grow beans. The question is whether they help you give the beans what they need."
"And if they don't?" Eli asked. Thomas set down his fork and considered the question. "Then you quit using them for that purpose," he said, "not because someone laughed, but because the ground showed you they weren't helping." Eli recognized his own earlier words about checking the plants instead of guessing, and the recognition made him feel oddly less alone.
Ruth began helping with the measurements in a way that surprised him. She had an old rain gauge whose markings were faded but readable, and she placed it beside the kitchen garden so they could record what actually fell. She also brought him a cheap metal ruler and a small kitchen scale that no longer measured accurately enough for baking but could compare soil samples after they had dried. Eli asked whether she had known he would need such things, and she laughed at the suggestion that a mother had to predict every question before finding a use for what was already in a drawer.