He worked a little well-rotted compost from Ruth's garden pile into the test soil, using only enough to change a small section he could compare with the others. He set broad, pale stones low to the ground but did not crowd them against the stems, and he angled some pieces so their shadows would reach the narrow gaps during the fiercest part of the afternoon. He left openings for rain to enter rather than forcing it across a smooth continuous surface. Where the ground sloped, he shaped shallow channels that slowed the water and guided it toward the root zones.
It did not look like the orderly stone wall Eli had first imagined. Some rocks lay flat, some leaned slightly, and others were separated by open strips wide enough to admit a growing stem. He used a light covering of dried leaves in a few of the wider spaces, pinning it down where the breeze might lift it. He was building a patchwork rather than a pavement, and for the first time he cared more about the soil beneath than the appearance above.
Thomas came to look at it after dinner. He stood with his hands on his hips, studying the arrangement long enough that Eli began explaining before he was asked. "The stones should keep the sun off parts of the soil," the boy said, "but the rain still has to get down. And I need to stop the water from running away when it comes too fast."
"You sound more careful than last time," Thomas observed. Eli nodded and admitted that he had been trying to prove the stones worked instead of trying to find out where they worked. His father looked from the twine marks to the much larger field beyond them, where dry stalks moved in the evening breeze. "There's a difference between those two things," he said. "It's an expensive difference on a farm."
For the next several days Eli resisted the urge to make dramatic changes. He checked the soil, wrote down the weather, and watched the leaves through the hottest hours without touching the stones whenever he grew impatient. The old habit of fixing something merely because he was worried about it took effort to overcome. Nana Vera noticed him standing with his hands behind his back beside the strip one afternoon and said he was finally learning how difficult it could be to leave a useful experiment alone.
One bean plant in the center of the arrangement began holding itself upright later into the day than its neighbors. The difference was small, and Eli spent two afternoons worrying that he was only seeing what he wanted to see. He asked Ruth to look without telling her which plant he had been watching. She studied the row carefully, pointed to the same stem, and said it looked healthier than the one beside it.
Eli wrote her observation in the notebook, then went to the unprotected patch to compare. The leaves there were curled inward against the sun, and when he pressed his finger into the soil it resisted almost immediately. Under the stones, the upper layer was not wet, but he could work his fingertips deeper before reaching the same hard resistance. That evening he sat at supper with a kind of cautious excitement that made it difficult to keep his foot still beneath the table.