Moses
I HAD GONE TO THE RODEO for Georgia. Not because I had some premonition that she needed me, or even some hope that she wanted me to be there. Definitely not because I expected to find her tied up, covered in mud, crying because someone had tried to hurt her or scare her. Or take her. She said it was probably a prank. I wondered what kind of friends pulled pranks like that. I wouldn’t know. I didn’t have any friends.
My grandma had presented me with an extra, general admission ticket that afternoon and informed me that Georgia was “competing in the barrel races and you don’t want to miss it.” I had the sudden image of Georgia atop a barrel, balancing as she made it roll, her feet flying, trying desperately not to fall off as she tried to cross the finish line ahead of all the other barrel racers.
I had never been to a rodeo before. I had no idea how crazy white people could be. Considering I had been abandoned by a white, crack addict mother, I should have known.
But I actually enjoyed myself. There was a wholesomeness about the entertainment—lots of families and flag waving and music that made me wish I’d worn a cowboy hat, no matter how stupid I would have looked in it. I ate six rodeo burgers, which may have been the best thing I’d ever eaten in my life. Grandma hooted like she’d just been called down on The Price is Right and stomped her feet and generally acted like she was eighteen instead of eighty, which I also enjoyed. Roping, riding, cowboys being flung like rag dolls from bucking horses and twisting bulls, and girls like Georgia, riding like they’d been born in a saddle. I was pretty sure Georgia had. I’d seen her ride plenty of times when she thought I wasn’t watching.
I’d avoided Georgia since the incident in the barn. I didn’t know what to do with her. She was a wild card. She was a small town girl with a simple way of speaking and thinking, a frank way of being that turned me on and turned me off at the same time. I wanted to run from her. But at the same time, I spent all my time thinking about her.
I watched Georgia fly into the arena on her pale horse, dust swirling, hair streaming out behind her, hugging the strategically placed barrels with a grin so huge I knew she was enjoying her flirtation with death. I knew horses were to her what painting was to me, and as I watched her fly, I desperately wanted to paint her. Just like that, full of life and motion, completely unbound. I usually painted when the images in my head became too much to contain and then spilled out in furious frustration. I had rarely painted pictures just for the joy of it, just for the pleasure of painting something that appealed to me. And Georgia, in front of a screaming crowd, hurtling around a dusty arena, had somehow become something that appealed to me.
I left before it was all over, Grandma assuring me she was riding with the Stephensons and didn’t need me to stay. I drove around aimlessly, with no desire to brush up against people at the carnival, ride the Ferris wheel, or watch Georgia with her friends, celebrating her winning ride. I was sure she had friends. And I was sure I was nothing like them.
I drove and drove and then I felt it coming on, the warning that rose in my veins and made my neck and ears throb with heat. I turned up the radio, trying to use sound to drown out sight. It didn’t work very well. Within a few seconds I saw a man by the side of the road. He just stood, looking at me. I shouldn’t have been able to see him. It was dark. And it was a country road, lit only by moonlight and the headlights of my Jeep. But he stood illuminated, as if he’d borrowed light from the moon and wrapped himself in it.
I recognized him almost immediately. And the images started to flood my brain. They were all of Georgia: Georgia with her horse, Georgia leaping fences, Georgia falling to the ground in the barn when I’d spooked her horse.
The image kept repeating—Georgia falling, Georgia falling, Georgia falling. It didn’t scare me. I’d seen her fall. It was in the past. And she was fine. But then I wondered if maybe she wasn’t. I wondered if this man—the man on the side of the road, the same man I’d seen in Georgia’s barn when Sackett reared up and kicked Georgia, the man I’d painted on the side of that same barn because he kept coming back—I wondered if he was trying to tell me something. Not about his life, but about Georgia’s.
And so I turned the Jeep around and went to the fairgrounds. I didn’t park in the lot, but crept around from the side, weaving around the outbuildings and the horse trailers as if I had any idea where I was going. I thought I caught another glimpse of the shadowy man—or was it just a flash of light, a cowboy needing a smoke? I came to a stop, stepped out of my Jeep, and called Georgia’s name. I felt ridiculous, and I stayed still for a minute, unsure, unwilling to join the masses that moved beneath the colorful carnival lights a hundred yards away. I was more comfortable watching from the dark.
Someone ran into me from behind, making me lurch forward and stumble, careening into me and then away from me, disappearing into the night without apology and without giving me a chance to push back. Drunk cowboy. But after that there was silence, peppered only with the stomp and snort of the animals penned and quartered nearby. I didn’t want to go any closer to the animals; I might cause a stampede of my own.
I headed toward the carnival and walked the perimeter, searching for Georgia from the sidelines. And then I saw the man again. Georgia’s grandfather. He was standing by the darkened entrance to the arena. He didn’t call to me. They never did. They just filled my head with their memories. But no images came. He just stood in a swath of pearly moonlight. And I walked toward him until I was back to where I’d started. He disappeared as I approached, but something gleamed at my left, disappearing around the chutes, beneath the grandstands, closer to the animals. And that’s when I found Georgia.
Georgia
I TOLD MY PARENTS what happened at the stampede. I had to. I also told them that I thought it might be Terrence who had tied me up. Moses came inside with me and stood anxiously by the door, not making eye contact with anyone in the room, his eyes glued to the floor. My parents urged him to sit, but he refused and they finally let him be, ignoring him as studiously as he ignored them.
What was already a late night became much later as my parents reacted with alarm, unending questions, and finally a phone call to the sheriff, who fortunately lived on the outskirts of Levan and not on the other side of the county.
My parents called Moses’s grandma and told her he would need to stick around to tell the sheriff what he saw. She ended up coming right over, bustling in the back door like it was ten am instead of two am. She patted Moses’s cheek and gave him a squeeze before she moved to me and wrapped me up in her arms. Her head only came to my shoulder, and her grey curls tickled my chin, but I immediately felt safer. Better. She sat down at the table and I went and showered the dirt from my skin and hair while we waited for the sheriff to arrive. I was sore and bruised and there were rope burns on my wrists and a wide scrape on my left cheek. The back of my head ached and even my lips felt tender from where my face had been shoved into the ground. But worse than all of that was the sick fear in my belly and the sense that I’d escaped something truly awful.
When I walked into the kitchen with my head in a towel and my body swathed in polka-dotted pajamas, Sheriff Dawson was sitting at the kitchen table, a Pepsi at the ready and a slice of pie in front of him, thanks to Mom, the unfailing hostess. Sheriff Dawson was lean and fit in his brown sheriff’s uniform, his blonde hair parted and neatly combed, his blue eyes bright in a tanned face that revealed his preference for the outdoors. He was in his late thirties or early forties and had recently been re-elected sheriff. People liked him and he liked horses. That was a pretty good resume for the people in our county. I didn’t see him losing his job any time soon. He and my dad were talking about breaking Lucky when I settled down at the table next to Mrs. Wright. Moses was seated across from the sheriff, and the sheriff started asking him questions right away. Moses was quiet and guarded and he kept looking at the door like he couldn’t wait to bolt. It reminded me of Sunday school, and the thought almost made me smile. The interview didn’t take long; Moses gave the briefest answers ever recorded.
He went to the rodeo with his grandmother. His grandma nodded helpfully. He came to see me ride. Mrs. Wright nodded again.
He did? The thought made me squirm and feel all warm inside. He continued in a quiet tone, giving the barest of details.
He was parked near the animal pens, standing next to his Jeep, trying to decide whether to go to the carnival for a couple corndogs and a caramel apple or to just head home. Someone had bumped into him from behind. He didn’t see who it was. A cowboy, he thought. Not especially helpful, I thought. But I couldn’t add anything to that description either. He thought he heard someone call out, scream even. And he found me. He untied me, he brought me home. The end.
Then Moses stared at the sheriff and repeated the same answers when Sheriff Dawson pressed him a little harder. Sheriff Dawson asked why he was parked by the pens instead of in the parking lot.
Moses answered that he didn’t want to walk.
The sheriff wanted to know why he couldn’t give a more detailed description of the man he’d seen running away, the man who’d run right into him?
Moses said his back was turned, and it was dark.
The sheriff seemed uneasy and suspicious, but I wasn’t. Moses wasn’t the one who had tied me up. He was the one who freed me. And that’s the only part I cared about.
Then it was my turn. I told my story too, my small audience hanging on every word. I told Sheriff Dawson that I thought it might be Terrence Anderson who had been pulling a prank, which was highly uncomfortable, considering Sheriff Dawson was Terrence’s uncle. But to his credit, the sheriff didn’t bat an eye or argue with me, and he promised to look into it. The sheriff took down everything I said and even took some pictures of the rope burns on my wrists and the scrapes on my face.
“What’s this? Is that something we need to document?” The sheriff pointed to the place Sackett’s hoof had connected with my forehead. It was three weeks old and mostly healed, but having my head ground into the dirt and gravel had irritated the scar, and it was now red and raw looking.
“Sackett got excited,” I said, shrugging, not wanting to rehash the incident. I knew the sheriff knew who Sackett was.
The sheriff grinned a little and pointed to a knot on his own forehead. “I wonder if Tonga was excited about the same thing. She got me good, damn horse. You can never get too comfortable around animals. Just when you think you’ve got ‘em figured out, they’ll do something completely unexpected.”
“Yeah. People are like that too.” I said, without thought.
And it was true. Tonight, more than ever. I felt the fear flood my mouth immediately and wondered how in the world I would be able to sleep tonight . . . or ever again. The sheriff nodded sympathetically and stood to go, but he reached out and patted my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Georgia. I am. Whether it was a prank or something a lot scarier, I’m just grateful you’re okay. We’ll follow up with Terrence Anderson and Haylee Blevins and see if they know anything about it. We’ve got your statement and the pictures too. And of course, Mr. Wright’s statement as well.” The sheriff looked at Moses nervously, and I almost rolled my eyes. Everyone was afraid of Moses. I was pretty sure if I hadn’t been absolutely adamant it wasn’t Moses who tied me up before he untied me, he would be the number one suspect. He just looked wicked.
The sheriff stepped toward the kitchen door.
“I’m glad it’s the last night of the stampede. People get a little crazy. Hopefully, life will settle down a little around town and we’ll figure out what happened. We’ll be in touch.”
With that, Sheriff Dawson let himself out into the early morning darkness and we all sat, staring at the table, deep in our own thoughts, too tired to move just yet.
“Well.” Kathleen Wright sighed. “Sheriff Dawson is a nice boy.” He was almost forty, but that was apparently boyish to an eighty-year-old. “Moses, he and your mother used to be sweethearts. He was so in love with her. I thought maybe she would come back to Levan and marry him. He tried. Went after her over and over again. Lord knows he did. But she was too far gone, I guess.” Mrs. Wright patted Moses’s cheek again and stood up from the table. His face was tight at the mention of his mother, and I wondered how often anyone talked about her. I had the feeling Moses never did.
My parents stood as well, but Moses, surprisingly, looked at me. We were the only two still sitting, and for a minute, the adults weren’t watching.
“You wanted me to paint your room. I’m here. I might as well have a look.”
My mom tuned in right away.
“It’s almost three a.m.,” she protested.
Moses lifted his eyes to hers. “It will be hard for Georgia to sleep tonight.”
That’s all he said, and everyone fell silent. But my heart sounded like a drum. I stood and led him down the hall. No one objected, and I heard Mrs. Wright leave and my parents move to their bedroom down the hall.
“It’s summertime, Mauna,” I heard my dad murmur. “It’s fine. We’re here, just a few doors down. Let it be.”
And they did. They let us be.
“Tell me the story,” Moses demanded after I told him what I wanted painted in my room. He stared at the blank white wall I had cleared two weeks ago in hopes he would agree to do the mural. My tastes were basic, plain even, and I prided myself on the lack of frills and the rows of books that lined the shelves, all westerns except for Where the Red Fern Grows, Summer of the Monkeys, and another long row by Dean Koontz. After Louis L’Amour, he was my favorite.
“Do you like to read?” I asked, pointing at my little shelf.
Moses eyed my books. “Yes.”
His answer surprised me. Maybe it was his reputation as a gang banging delinquent. Maybe it was because of the way he looked. But he didn’t seem like the type who enjoyed sitting quietly with a book.
“What’s your favorite book?” I sounded suspicious and his eyes tightened.
“I like Catcher in the Rye. The Outsiders, 1984, Of Mice and Men, Dune, Starship Troopers, Lord of the Rings. Anything by Tom Clancy or JK Rowling.”
He said JK Rowling quickly, like he didn’t want to admit to being a Potter fan. But I was stunned.
“You’ve really read all those books?” I’d read The Outsiders and liked it, but hadn’t read any of the others. I wondered if he was lying to me.
“No Stephen King or Dean Koontz?” I added, trying to find something we had in common.
“Green Mile and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. But nothing else by Stephen King. And Dean Koontz knows too much.”
“What do you mean?”
Moses shook his head, not explaining.
“I can’t imagine you holding still long enough to read.”
“I can hold still when my mind is occupied. TV makes me crazy. Usually, music does too. But I like stories.” His eyes found mine again. “You were going to tell me yours.”
“Oh. Yeah. The story. It’s a story that my grandpa used to tell my dad when he was a boy, and my dad then told me. I don’t know where it comes from, actually. But it always felt real to me.”
“Your grandpa. The one your dad mentioned the other night? The one he thought I painted?”
“Yes.”
Moses looked strangely relieved. I stared at him for several long seconds, trying to decipher his expression.
“Go on,” he said.
“There was a blind man who lived in a small western town. He hadn’t been blind all his life. An illness had taken his eyesight when he was a little boy. Along with his eyesight, he’d lost his freedom. He had to have someone lead him around if he went outside, he had to have someone do most of his cooking and cleaning. And worst of all, he wasn’t able to see his horses or the hills around his home. One night he had a dream that he was running in the mountains. When he stopped to drink from a cool stream, he saw his reflection in the water. He wasn’t a man anymore, but a beautiful white horse that could run for miles without tiring. When the man woke in the morning, the woman who came and helped him each day noticed his hands and the bottom of his feet were filthy even though he’d taken a bath the night before.
“He dreamed the same dream the next night, and in the dream the horse caught his foreleg on a branch as he leaped over a log. It was just a scratch on the horse’s leg, but in the morning when the man awoke he realized he had a long scratch on his leg exactly where he, the horse, had been wounded in the dream.” The words came as easily to me as reciting the pledge of allegiance. I’d been told the story so many times as a child that I was probably using the very same words, the same descriptions that had been used then.
“Then people started seeing the white horse at night, and as the rumors reached the blind man, he realized that he wasn’t dreaming. He was actually turning into a horse at night, running and leaping, seeing all the things he hadn’t seen for so long, but through the eyes of this beautiful animal.
“He didn’t dare tell anyone, because he knew how crazy it was. But crazy or not, it was the truth. Night after night, he continued to turn into a horse, and night after night the sightings continued, until a few men in the town made plans to capture the beautiful, white horse.
“The men did as they planned and between the three of them, they cornered the horse. But just when they thought for sure they had it, the horse leaped the fence and ran straight into the clouds, disappearing forever.
“The next day when the woman went to the blind man’s house to make him his breakfast, he was gone. And he never came back home. No one ever knew what had happened to him, but the woman always suspected the truth, because the bare footprints leading down his front walk became hoof prints in the soft mud of the yard.”
Moses had been staring at my face as I talked, but his eyes had grown distant and unfocused, as if he wasn’t really looking at me at all.
“Can I take up more than one wall?” he asked.
“Uh, sure.” I scrambled up and started pulling down pictures and yanking out thumbtacks. Before long, my furniture was in the middle of the room and Moses was wildly sketching with what he called a grease pencil. He pulled a few of them out of his pockets as if he carried them wherever he went.
I watched in fascination as Moses became lost in the story I’d shared with him. He rarely stepped back to see what he’d sketched, and his hands flew. He was using both hands interchangeably, and before long, he had a pencil clasped in each and was drawing frantically with both hands at once. It was mind-boggling to behold. I could barely write with my left hand, not to mention draw, and draw while my other hand was doing something else. Moses didn’t speak to me, and the one time I interrupted him, when it was close to dawn and my eyes were growing heavy, he looked at me blankly like he’d forgotten I was there.
“Let’s stop. I can’t stay awake,” I yawned. “And I don’t want to miss anything. You’re a genius. You know that, right? Maybe you’ll be famous one day and they’ll turn my room into a Moses Wright museum.” He started shaking his head immediately.
“I don’t want to stop,” he said, and his eyes pled with me. “I can’t stop yet. If I do, I might not be able to finish.”
“Okay,” I agreed immediately. “But you better be gone before my parents wake up. You can come back every day until it’s done. You just have to promise that you’ll let me watch.”
I fought the battle with sleep as long as I could, desperate not to miss the magic. But as brilliant as the images unfolding across my walls were, it was Moses himself who kept me spellbound. And when my eyes would no longer focus and my lids slid closed one last time, it was Moses who danced in my dreams, arms flying, eyes glowing, color and curved lines flowing from his fingertips.
I didn’t open my eyes again until well past noon. And when I did, it was because someone was making a racket outside my bedroom windows.
“What are you doing?” I asked Moses, dumbfounded, stumbling out of bed and rubbing the sleep from my face.
“Putting screens on your windows. If I’m going to paint in there, we need some ventilation. Without screens, I’ll have bugs biting me, swarming around the light, and getting stuck in my paint. And you and I will get high from the fumes. My brain is already scrambled enough.”“Cracked,” I said, not thinking.
“Yeah.” Moses scowled.
“Well, it’s working for you.” I turned and looked at my walls. “Cracks and all. In fact, if your brain wasn’t cracked, none of the brilliance could spill out. Do you realize that?” And it was brilliant. He hadn’t used any paint yet. But with a grease pencil and a cracked brain, Moses had filled two walls with the beginning scenes of a blind man who found his sight and a horse who came alive only at night. It was already beyond anything I could have imagined.
“Have you even slept?” I turned back to him with a yawn.
“Nah. But I’ll go crash for a while now. I’ll be back after dinner.”
After dinner was too far away and I had hours to kill until then. After I took care of my chickens, mowed the front lawn, and helped mom for an hour with the two foster kids we’d taken in for a few days, I retreated to the corral. My horses were happy to see me, and I felt bad that I’d made them wait for my attention. The meadow was still grassy and they had water, so it wasn’t as if they were starving, but I rarely missed a morning with them. I made it up to them by spending the rest of the long afternoon until dark trying to make Lucky fall in love with me.
Lucky was a horse with a black coat and an even darker mane. He was the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen, but he knew he was beautiful, and he had a temper. He didn’t want to be touched or ridden or coaxed into standing still. He wanted me to leave him alone. Dad had a client that hadn’t been able to pay his vet bills, so they’d worked out a trade. It wasn’t a great trade, because Dad needed horses he and Mom could train to be around kids. But the horse had a pedigree Dad liked, and he thought maybe he could get some stud fees out of him.
Lucky reminded me of Moses—powerful and perfectly formed, muscles sinuous and defined just below the sleek surface, and the way he held his head and ignored me was almost spot-on Moses. But then Lucky would look at me and I knew he was well aware of my presence. He hadn’t forgotten me for a moment, and he wanted me to chase him. Call me crazy, but I was pretty sure what worked with the horse could work with the boy.
Moses came back that night. And again the next night. And the next. I watched him in wonder as he added color to the lines and a dream-like quality to the story that made me feel like I’d stepped inside the blind man’s head and was seeing it all through his eyes—seeing the world for the very first time.
Moses didn’t stop with my walls. On the third night the story continued on my ceiling, and he rigged up some scaffolding so he could paint the Sistine Chapel right on my ten by twelve bedroom ceiling. I had to admit, I didn’t know about the Sistine Chapel until Moses told me all about Michelangelo as he assembled the platform he intended to lie on while he painted. He said some day he would see it in person. He wanted to travel all over the world and see all the great art. That was his dream. I stayed very quiet while he talked, only contributing when I thought he was losing steam and might stop talking. I needed him to keep talking. I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted inside, and little by little, especially when he was painting, he was giving me glimpses, brief moments with him that I treasured up like a child collecting fragile shells and shiny pebbles. And when he wasn’t with me, I took out those treasures and turned them over and over in my mind, studying them from every angle, learning him.
My parents didn’t know what to think about my room. Nobody did. It was too much, almost, for such a small space. When you stood in the center with the story cocooning you in color, it was easy to get dizzy and grow lightheaded from the sheer magnitude of the detail and the depth of the work. But I loved it. I left my furniture arranged like a little island in the center of my room so nothing covered the walls, and I strung golden twinkle lights around the edges so that when I turned off my bedroom lamp to sleep, the little lights would cast the blind man’s dream in a soft, warm glow. It was magical.
I felt like an idiot when I handed Moses a hundred dollars the night he finished. I was pretty sure it would barely cover his paint and supplies. But it was all I had, and I’d had no idea what I was getting into when I asked him to paint a mural on my wall.
He actually seemed pleased by the money, like he’d forgotten he’d been commissioned, and thanked me sincerely, folding the bills inside a soft leather wallet and shoving it into the pocket of his jeans.