Then the hailstorm arrived. It was an ugly, sudden event, born out of a yellow-gray sky that dropped pellets hard enough to knock leaves from the pear tree and tear thin bean vines. Eli was inside the barn when it began, repairing a broken wheelbarrow brace, and by the time he reached the doorway the field had vanished behind sheets of rain and ice. He watched helplessly as the bare sections flooded and loose material washed downhill.
When the storm passed, he ran to his strip and found the arrangement damaged. Several stones had shifted in the runoff, the narrow channels he had dug were filled with silt, and broken leaves lay against the stems of the surviving beans. One patch he had been proud of was stripped almost to its roots. The hail had not destroyed everything, but it had damaged enough that the work of rebuilding seemed nearly as large as the work of beginning.
Eli dragged two misplaced stones back into position, then stopped. His arms felt empty, his knees ached, and he could hear Calvin's old joke in his head as clearly as though the boy were standing beside him. A garden of stones, a graveyard for vegetables, a fool's answer to a real farmer's problem. He dropped his gloves into the wheelbarrow and walked home without closing the notebook.
For six days he did not touch the strip. He completed his assigned chores, helped Thomas repair the storm-damaged fence, and answered questions at meals, but he avoided the field whenever he could. At school he did his work and spoke little, allowing other boys to fill the silence with whatever they wished. He told himself the experiment had ended, though he knew he had not actually decided that; he had simply stopped being willing to face the possibility of another failed attempt.
Thomas did not ask why the wheelbarrow remained behind the barn. He needed Eli's help with the fence, and he was grateful not to see the boy spend another hot evening on stones that might never produce anything. Yet he passed the abandoned strip twice each day and noticed that, despite the storm damage, the earth in its center was still darker than the unprotected ground around it. He found himself looking for the surviving bean plants as though they were something he had agreed to watch over without meaning to.
Nana Vera did not interfere either. She sat on her crate near the fence, observed the battered strip, and carried her observations back to Ruth rather than to Eli. The boy needed space to be disappointed, she said, but he also needed someone to remember what he had accomplished before the hail. Ruth listened, watched her son turn away from the field each afternoon, and decided that a quiet reminder might do what a lecture could not.