Part Two: The Boy
His name was Eli.
He was twelve years old, and he was small for twelve — not the smallness of malnourishment, though he was lean, but the smallness of someone whose genetics had delivered a particular frame and whose frame would not begin to change for another few years. He wore a shirt that had been good once and that had passed through enough wear to have become simply serviceable, and jeans that were the jeans of someone who worked in them rather than wore them. His shoes had the specific coloring of dust that has been there long enough to have become structural rather than incidental.
He had come twenty miles.
He had come by the road that ran along the eastern edge of the Calloway property, which was a road he had not been on before because the eastern edge of the Calloway property was a significant distance from where he lived, which was a small house with his mother and his grandmother on the other side of the county. He had come on foot for most of it and by truck for the last eight miles, in the cab of a vehicle driven by a man who was going in that direction anyway and who had asked no questions, which Eli had been grateful for because he had prepared no answers.
He had been planning this visit for six months.
He had known about the horse for longer than that.
