Chapter 13: AB Negative

I had my flannel half buttoned when the first horn blared.

Eli was already reaching for his jeans.

"Stay down here," he said.

"It's my gate."

"Then I'm coming with you."

We climbed out into a gray morning with frost on the grass.

A white sedan sat crooked across the cattle guard.

Brent was out of it, in yesterday's shirt, one hand flat on the roof.

Shelby stood by the back door with her arms wrapped around herself.

The brown dog ran in circles at her feet.

Cody sat on the gravel with his sleeve rolled up, and blood ran down his forearm into his palm.

"Look what you did," Brent shouted at me. "Look at my son."

Hank was already coming across the yard with the shotgun broken open over his arm.

Behind him, four men from Eli's road crew had stopped their truck at the barn and were climbing out in orange vests.

Nobody was going to miss this.

"Cody cut himself on the cattle guard," Shelby said. Her voice cracked. "He wanted the dog to go through and he slid."

"I need a kit," I said.

Eli was already jogging to his truck.

I knelt in the gravel in front of the boy.

"Hi, Cody."

"It hurts," he said, and then he looked past me at Eli's back and went quiet.

"I know. I'm going to clean it, and then it won't hurt as much."

I held his wrist and turned his arm to the light.

The cut ran four inches along the outside of his forearm.

It was clean and not deep, and it would need six or seven stitches.

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