"I'm still inside the marks," Eli answered. Thomas came closer to look for himself, noticed the careful twine borders, and saw that his son had kept his word. The irritation drained from his face, leaving behind something harder to read. "Just don't let their laughing turn this into a stubbornness contest," he said, then returned to the barn before Eli could explain that it was already too late for that.
Eli had not expected how much it would hurt to be laughed at. He knew intellectually that Calvin's opinion made no difference to the condition of his soil, but the knowledge was less useful when boys at the feed store repeated the story in loud voices. On Monday, one of them left a pebble on his school desk and announced that he was making a contribution to the harvest. Eli put the pebble in his pocket instead of throwing it back, and for the rest of the day he struggled to pay attention to anything his teachers said.
After school he stopped by the Henderson property, where the old boundary wall had collapsed in places into a weed-filled ditch. Mr. Henderson was out repairing a gate with a hammer and a bent pair of pliers. Eli asked whether he might take a few of the loose stones that were no longer part of the standing wall. The older farmer eyed him, looked toward the narrow road, and asked whether this was about the strange experiment everyone had been discussing.
"Yes, sir," Eli said. Henderson stared at him another moment, then jerked his head toward a pile he had cleared years earlier and never found a use for. "Take those, not the stones that are still holding my field up," he said. He added, as if unwilling to let generosity become approval, that Eli would be doing him a favor by removing them. Eli thanked him and spent the next hour sorting flat pieces from the heap while Henderson worked on the gate without looking in his direction.
The stones were heavier than he had expected, especially after a full day of school and chores. His palms blistered beneath the cloth wrapping the wheelbarrow handles, and the rear of his shirt stuck to his back. Twice he had to unload part of the cargo before he could push the barrow over a rise in the road. Each time he stopped, he looked toward the patch he was making and imagined the beans in it standing upright in a way the rest of the field no longer could.