A farmer near the back asked how Eli knew he had not simply found one pocket of better soil beneath the pear tree. Eli pointed toward the newer comparison rows farther from the tree and explained what Clara Bell had helped them measure. He admitted that the data were still limited and that some of the untreated plots had done reasonably well. The farmer nodded, apparently satisfied less by certainty than by the boy's refusal to invent it.
When the group began to leave, Warren Reese lingered beside the gate. He looked across the neat patterns of pale stone and dark soil, then turned to Eli. "I gave you a hard time about this," he said. "I was wrong to do that. A man ought to be able to ask a question without the whole town making him pay for it."
Eli felt his face grow warm. He had imagined this moment so many times during the worst part of the summer that the real thing seemed unexpectedly small and human. Warren was not a villain defeated by a crop; he was a worried farmer who had laughed at something unfamiliar while his own fields suffered. Eli thanked him for saying it and asked whether he wanted to try a small test along the dry edge of his orchard.
"I reckon I do," Warren answered. He asked if Eli would come by next weekend and help him choose a place where the trial would not interfere with the roots. Eli agreed, provided his father did not need him for the barn work first. Warren laughed softly and said that was a fair condition, then drove home without mentioning rock gardens or foolish boys.
More people asked questions in the following weeks. Some brought drawings of their fields; others arrived with jars of soil, weather notes, or photographs of areas where water ran off too quickly. Eli could not answer everything, and he became increasingly comfortable saying so. When a question involved a steep slope or a crop he knew little about, he suggested calling Clara Bell rather than pretending that his own experience was sufficient.
The extension office invited him to speak at a small winter meeting on dryland soil management. Eli nearly refused because he pictured a room full of older farmers staring at him while he tried to explain something they had been doing professionally longer than he had been alive. Nana Vera told him that being young did not make his observations false, and being old did not make another person's questions unimportant. Thomas offered to stand beside him, but Eli asked his father to sit in the audience so he could practice speaking for himself.
He prepared the talk at the kitchen table. Ruth helped arrange the notebook pages, Thomas checked the labor figures, and Vera insisted he begin with the day he had found damp soil beneath the old Henderson wall. Eli wanted to begin with the harvest because it sounded more impressive, but his grandmother reminded him that people needed to understand how he arrived at the result. In the end he organized the story around questions rather than achievements.