Eli the Good Read Free

it was horrible.” But something in her face told me it had been nice somehow, too.
    Soon we were past all the houses and up where the woods took over one side of the road and the river widened on the other side. Stripes of mist moved down the hillsides and burned away in the new morning. We raced. We each rode a stretch without holding our handlebars, a trick Edie had taught me.
    After a while we turned around and headed back the way we had come. I clicked on the radio and the deejay was encouraging everyone to stock up on fireworks for the bicentennial celebration on July Fourth. Then he gave the weather and said it was going to be the hottest day of the year so far. “I’m going to play a big hit from the summer of ’74 to get you all up and moving this morning,” he said, and then “I Can Help” came on. Josie had this record and still played it all the time. We pedaled in rhythm to the song, let our bicycles sway and veer across the road along with the weaving music. We both knew every word and sang it very loud. Stella heard the music as we coasted by and turned from her work at the clothesline to snap her fingers and dance a little. We laughed at that and kept singing. Everyone loved Stella.
    When we rode back by my house, I realized that Daddy had already left for work at the station. I had wanted to tell him good-bye. When I noticed his truck was gone, I stopped in the middle of the road and stood with my legs on either side of my bike, watching the house as if he might magically reappear. Edie had sped on past me, but now she had noticed that I was stopped in the middle of the road, staring at the house like a dullard. She hollered and laughed at me but I couldn’t move for a time, and eventually she rode away, putting her arms in the air to ride with no hands.

I ran up the path as dusk came in with purple and red and a kind of whiteness I cannot explain. The light was different that summer, a clean light that filtered through the leaves and made them look like pieces of typing paper that had been cut in the shape of leaves. When the sun went down, everything cooled instantly, leaving the world to smell like cooked greens.
    I sat in my secret place: the roots of my beech tree, where I could look out over the valley, waiting for my mother to come onto the porch to call my name. This was the only time of day when I felt she actually knew I existed, when she stood there on the porch, holding on to the banister and calling for me, the pulsating air of the gloaming around her.
    I waited, my chin resting on the tops of my knees. The sun was melting fast, spreading out along the horizon like butter. The breath of wind that had been stirring the leaves stopped. All birdcall ceased. Not one dog barked; no one hollered out as they ran across a yard. Everything became completely still as if the whole world realized this moment without knowing it. This hushed time of day carried its own scent, too, a low sweetness like honeysuckle that hadn’t bloomed yet, like honeysuckle that didn’t even know it was about to bloom. The sun sank lower and lower and then: “Eli!”
    My mother’s voice. If I had moved from my spot and crawled out onto the edge of the bluff, I could have seen her standing out on the back porch, her elbows in her hands as she scanned the yard. “Eli! It’s time to come in now!”
    I held my breath and felt like the whole world was waiting with me.
    “Eli?” A question now. The shoals of the river were quiet; all the other kids had gone home. It was the same every day of summer. Now she would call out more firmly — “
E
li!” — and then I would stand and take one final look at the sunset before running through the woods, down the old path, and into our backyard.
    My mother didn’t see me coming out of the trees. She walked to the corner of the screen porch, leaned against one of the posts, and called my name again, a long stretching of the two syllables of my name, turning “Eli” into a