Thomas listened with a furrowed brow. He had farmed this ground since childhood, and the notion that a method from another dry region might help his four acres was both hopeful and uncomfortable. Farmers were supposed to know the land they worked, and Thomas had spent enough years learning its moods to distrust easy surprises. But he had eyes, and the darker soil beneath Eli's stones was there whether he liked the boy's method or not.
Henderson finally stood, leaning hard on his cane, and looked toward the pile of unused rocks by the barn. "If you need more flat ones," he said, "take the lot behind my shed. I cleared them from the lower field after a flood thirty years back. They're doing no good where they are."
Eli thanked him, but Henderson lifted a hand before the boy could run for the wheelbarrow. "Don't go covering everything tomorrow," he said. "Find out what you're doing first. A useful little patch can turn into an expensive big mistake faster than you think." Eli promised he understood, and for once he believed he did.
When the old man left, Thomas remained beside the strip. The evening light laid long shadows from the stones across the soil, and three healthy bean plants stood in the center of the experimental rows. He looked at Eli's blistered hands, then at the place where the notebook rested inside the wheelbarrow. "Tomorrow after chores," he said, "show me how you make those little channels."
The words were quiet, almost casual, but Eli heard them as clearly as if his father had shouted across the field. He nodded once, afraid that a bigger reaction would make Thomas reconsider. That night he told Nana Vera, and she said she had noticed Thomas looking at the stones for days. Eli asked why she had not told him, and she laughed softly. "Some things a boy needs to see his father do for himself," she replied.
The next morning Thomas kept his promise. After repairing the fence and checking the water troughs, he came to the experimental strip carrying his own shovel and a folding measuring rule. Eli felt awkward demonstrating the placement of shallow channels to the man who had taught him how to hold a hoe, but Thomas listened without interrupting. When the boy explained why he had changed the slope of one section, his father asked a practical question about what would happen in a heavier storm.
Eli admitted that he did not know. Thomas knelt beside him, studied the land's natural fall, and suggested a small outlet that would allow excess water to escape without flooding the plants. They dug it together, widened it slightly, and tested the path with a bucket poured from the upper edge. The water traveled more slowly through the new channel and settled near the base of the plants before the remainder drained away.
"That's better," Thomas said. He did not say it with the astonishment of a man witnessing a miracle, but with the satisfaction of a farmer correcting a practical problem. Eli had waited weeks for approval, yet the ordinary tone made the moment more meaningful than any dramatic praise could have been. His father was no longer standing outside the experiment, wondering whether it should exist.