Calvin Reese returned one Saturday carrying two glass jars. One held dirt from his father's upper field, and the other held dirt from the shallow ditch below their barn. He asked Eli whether different soil might behave differently beneath stone, the same question Clara Bell had raised weeks earlier. Eli invited him to place both samples beside his own and compare their texture after adding a little water.
The two boys worked at the barn bench while Thomas repaired a harness nearby. Calvin admitted that his father had begun talking about trying a small stone-covered strip near their orchard, and Eli smiled at the thought of Warren Reese moving rocks into the ground he had spent so many years clearing. They laughed together, and for the first time in months Eli could hear Calvin's laughter without feeling that he was the reason for it.
Eli's schoolwork did not disappear because the farm was receiving attention. The autumn term began, and his teacher assigned reading, arithmetic, and essays that still had to be completed after chores. Ruth insisted he be at the kitchen table each evening with his books open, no matter what visitors had arrived or what the newspaper had said. The boy sometimes protested, pointing out that he was learning more about soil than any textbook had taught him, but his mother reminded him that understanding the land did not excuse him from learning to explain numbers and ideas clearly.
His teacher noticed the change in his assignments. Eli began using the measurements from his field experiments in arithmetic problems, writing about percentages, averages, and the difference between a single observation and a pattern. In an essay about perseverance, he described one ruined row of beans and the embarrassment of watching his stones become a joke. The teacher returned it with a note that said, A careful record is a form of honesty, and Eli folded the page into his field notebook.
The first harvest work began in the small bean rows before sunrise on a cool morning that smelled briefly like the summers Nana Vera remembered. Eli and Thomas moved between the plants with baskets, handling the pods carefully so they would not bruise the beans or tear the remaining vines. The protected sections had produced more than the comparison areas in several of the places they had tracked, especially where runoff had been slowed and moisture held long enough for the plants to use it. Not every protected plant had done better, and a few ordinary rows had benefited from shade or soil that happened to be more favorable.
They weighed the baskets separately. Ruth recorded the yields from the original strip, the newer protected rows, and the comparable untreated sections, keeping notes on the differences in plant health and location. Eli was tempted to calculate a single impressive number that would summarize the entire summer. Clara had warned him against doing exactly that, so he wrote the results by section and kept the limitations beside them.