He continued measuring. The protected plants held moisture longer after a small rainfall, but even the healthiest ones began showing stress when enough rainless days passed. Clara Bell telephoned to ask about the comparison plots, and Eli gave her the numbers without trying to make them sound better. She told him the fact that the plants still suffered was an important result, because it showed the method's limits as clearly as its benefits.
"Don't let other people turn your experiment into a miracle story," she said. "That's the fastest way for somebody to get hurt trying something without the conditions that made it help you." Eli thanked her, then sat beside the telephone for a few minutes thinking about the article folded beneath his mattress. He had wanted the town to stop laughing, but he did not want the laughter replaced by expectations no patch of stone could satisfy.
Thomas was more practical. He had watched the new growth, compared the soil, and decided that a carefully limited expansion might improve their chance of bringing in enough of a harvest to satisfy the bank. He asked Eli to choose the next section, but insisted they begin where the slope, soil, and crops most closely resembled the original strip. The boy studied the field for two evenings and selected a narrow area adjoining the first experiment rather than a distant corner that might behave differently.
The garden tractor had not been used much since its transmission began slipping the previous winter. Thomas pulled it into the barn and spent a Saturday repairing the hitch of an old wooden sled that could trail behind it at walking speed. Eli helped replace two worn bolts and straighten a twisted bracket, and the work felt different from the time he had spent alone with the wheelbarrow. His father knew the tools better than he did, but on the subject of the stone arrangement, Eli had become the one explaining why a particular shape mattered.
Their first hauling trip together began before sunrise. Thomas drove the tractor along the edge of the property while Eli walked beside the sled, warning him around the ruts and the old drainage ditch. They collected the loose stones Henderson had offered from behind his shed and brought them back in loads far larger than Eli could have managed by hand. By breakfast they had enough material for several new rows, and Ruth met them at the porch with eggs and a look of amused disbelief.
"I thought I married a man who spent his life hauling rocks out of fields," she said to Thomas. He sat down heavily and admitted that apparently his son had talked him into hauling them back. Nana Vera smiled over her coffee, pleased to see the two of them tired from the same task. She said her own father had once taught her that the most dangerous sentence in farming was we have always done it this way, then asked for another piece of toast before anyone could accuse her of making a speech.