They did not begin by covering entire beds. Eli and Thomas placed stone along selected root zones, leaving clear cultivation paths and enough open soil for future work. They preserved drainage outlets and kept the larger pieces away from the bases of tender stems. Where crops were already tall, they carried stones by hand to avoid breaking leaves with the sled.
The work looked irregular from the road, but it made sense from inside the rows. Pale stones shaded narrow bands of soil and interrupted the wind as it crossed the ground, while shallow channels followed the natural slope. In places where Eli had added loose organic material, he marked the difference so they could compare the results later. Thomas insisted on doing one section without the stones at all, both as a control and as a reminder that the field should be allowed to tell them whether the effort was worth repeating.
After several days, Eli's blistered hands began to heal into rougher skin. His shoulders strengthened, and he learned to lift the wheelbarrow handles without twisting his back. Thomas reminded him to stop when the heat grew severe, which frustrated Eli until he watched his father come home dizzy from an afternoon spent repairing a fence in the full sun. The drought was threatening their livelihood; it was not worth sacrificing their health merely to appear industrious.
Ruth took over much of the written accounting. She listed the hours spent moving stone and the small expenses for the tractor repair, keeping the new labor separate from the ordinary farm costs. Eli thought the numbers made the work look wasteful, but Ruth explained that hiding costs did not make a project successful. If the technique helped, they needed to know whether its benefit justified the labor, and if it did not, the truth would save them trouble next year.
Thomas agreed to another rule: they would stop collecting rock from the creek bed. The banks were already vulnerable to erosion, and removing more large pieces could make matters worse when heavy rain finally came. Henderson's old piles and stones displaced by road grading provided plenty of material for the trial, with permission from the people who owned the land. Eli felt a little ashamed that he had not considered how fixing one part of the landscape might damage another.
The first neighbor to come looking for an explanation was Warren Reese. He arrived near the end of an afternoon carrying a wrench that Thomas had loaned him weeks earlier and had apparently forgotten. Eli saw him pause beside the new stone rows, his expression narrowing as he compared them with the original strip. Warren asked Thomas whether the newspaper story had made the boy impossible to live with.
Thomas accepted the wrench and told him the boy was still doing his chores. Warren squatted beside a bean plant and pressed two fingers into the shaded earth. He stayed there longer than Eli expected, then moved to an unprotected patch and repeated the test. "That's a difference," he admitted reluctantly, though he immediately added that they might have had more rain under the pear tree.