Dance Away with Me - Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page 0,30
dirt, and snot smearing his face. He had brown eyes the size of buckeyes and thick, dark hair with straight bangs that covered his eyebrows. “It fell on me.”
“I see that.” Ian had run across Eli before. In modern parlance, Eli was a free-range kid, roaming the woods with a lack of supervision urban eight-year-olds couldn’t imagine.
Eight and a half, Eli had told him.
Despite his perpetually dirty face and homegrown haircut the kid seemed to be well cared for, with a sturdy body and no more bruises than the average boy. “This isn’t the best place for you to be poking around.” The jagged metal piece was heavier than it looked with murderously sharp edges, and Ian took care lifting it. As he moved it aside, the long gash visible through a rip in the leg of Eli’s jeans gushed fresh blood. Too much of it. Ian threw off his jacket and unbuttoned his flannel shirt. “That’s got to hurt.”
“I’m—I’m tough.” Another tear made a fresh road in the dirt map of his face.
“Sure you are.” He stripped off his shirt, leaving himself in only a T-shirt, and tightened one long sleeve around the wound to stanch the flow of blood. “Promise me you’ll stay away from here from now on.”
“I guess.”
He bunched the rest of the shirt on Eli’s chest and carefully picked him up. Eli whimpered. “Hurts.”
“Sure it does. Let’s get you home.”
Eli leaned into Ian’s chest. “You don’t have to carry me like I’m a baby.”
“I know that. But I’m training for the Ironman. I need to work on my endurance.”
“You’re training for the Ironman?”
“I might.” Or might not. Running and swimming were one thing, but 112 miles on a bike was a deal breaker for someone who liked to have direct contact with the earth.
Eli’s parents were homesteaders. Ian had seen the tin roof of their house below the ridgeline off to the west. He slowed his pace as the boy’s face contorted with pain. “How’s your mother doing?” he said to distract him.
“She’s still sad.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” In their last conversation, Eli had revealed that his mother was going to have a baby but that “something went wrong and now she cries a lot.”
Eli gripped Ian’s neck tighter. “My dad says she’ll get better soon.”
Ian nodded. “That’s good.” He carefully stepped over a sapling that had fallen across the trail. “What have you been eating lately? You weigh a ton.” In truth, the eight-year-old didn’t weigh much at all.
Eli made a face. “Beans. We ate most of what Mom put up last summer, but the onions and mustard greens’ll be comin’ in soon.”
Eli sounded like a seasoned farmer. Ian kept the conversation going as he climbed toward the ridge. He asked him what new birds he’d identified, if he’d spotted any bear, how his homeschooling project on beekeeping was progressing. Finally, the bare-bones farm came into view.
The utilitarian house had unpainted wood siding and a couple of solar panels on the tin roof. The freshly plowed ground off to the left marked the vegetable garden. The outbuildings included an old tobacco barn, a goat pen, and a coop with a rudimentary wire chicken run. All of it was surrounded by a crude barbed wire fence guarded by a pair of barking dogs and a rangy man coming toward them with a rifle. “Stop right there!”
Ian wasn’t big on firearms, but he knew enough to recognize an AR-15.
“Dad!”
“Eli?” The man squinted into the morning sun.
“Eli ran into some trouble,” Ian called out.
“Rebecca!” The man rushed toward them across the rutted dirt yard, still carrying the assault rifle, but no longer pointing it at Ian’s chest. He fumbled with the gate one-handed as a slender, brown-haired woman came out the front door. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Eli!” The man set the rifle against the gatepost and hurried toward them. “What happened?”
“Eli cut his leg on a piece of sheet metal at the old moonshine still,” Ian explained.
“Damn it, Eli! You should have known better.”
Eli’s mother raced to her son’s side, her hand pressed to her mouth.
“It wasn’t my fault!” Eli declared from his father’s arms.
His mother soothed him, worry etched in every line of her tired face. “Nobody said it was.”
“I say it was,” his father snapped. “You gotta be smarter, Eli.”
Ian stepped back. “He might need some stitches.”
“No stitches!” Eli howled.
“Let me see.” His mother’s hand shook as she started to unwrap the shirt binding her son’s leg.