Chapter 7: The Wire

Eli's excavator bit into the hayfield at seven on Saturday morning.

By noon the first forty feet of trench lay open, red clay on one side and a clean wall of limestone on the other.

Hank pushed the spoil into a berm with his dozer, humming, and swore at every rock he hit.

I carried stakes, ran string, and shoveled the places the machines couldn't reach.

At two I caught my forearm on a snag of old fence wire.

I looked at the scratch, a thin red line across the pale burn scar I had carried from Helmand.

"Don't touch it," Eli said.

He had climbed down from the cab without my hearing the engine stop.

"It's a scratch."

"It's a farm scratch. Come here."

He sat me down on an upturned bucket and took the first aid kit off the dozer's seat.

I let him.

His hands were huge, and very careful.

He cleaned the cut with a saline wipe, and then he stopped.

His thumb lay over the old scar.

The skin there was ridged and shiny, and it ran from my wrist almost to the elbow.

"I was in that truck," he said.

"I know."

"I never said thank you properly."

"You said it in the hospital. You cried."

"I was on morphine."

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