The Law of Moses (16 page)

I dialed 911, just like we’re all told to do in an emergency. It didn’t take too many rings before an operator was there, an efficient-voiced woman, asking me all types of questions. I rattled off answers, even as my mind moved on to the horror I still hadn’t faced. Where was Moses? I could smell paint. I could smell paint and I had heard someone. Paint meant Moses. I set the phone down, the operator still talking, asking me something that I’d already answered. Then I walked through the little door that led to the family room on wooden legs, my rear-end wet, my hand bleeding, my heart on pause.

He was covered in paint—head, arms and clothing streaked with blue and yellow, doused in red and orange, splattered with purple and black. He still wore the clothes he’d worn when he left me that morning, though nothing looked the same. The tail of his shirt was the only part that was untucked, strangely enough. But that wasn’t the strangest thing. Not by far. The walls were covered in paint too, but there was nothing splattered or haphazard about the paint on the walls.

It was both manic and mesmerizing, it was controlled chaos and detailed dementia. Moses had painted right over the pictures and the windows too. The curtains were streaked with paint, incorporated into the pictures like he couldn’t stop to pull them aside. From the amount of wall space he’d covered, he’d been at it for hours. There was graffiti and horses and people I’d never seen before. There were hallways and pathways and doorways and bridges, as if Moses was running from one place to the next, painting every inexplicable thing he saw. There was a woman’s face over a laundry basket. Her long, blonde hair streamed out around her and the basket was full of babies. It was both beautiful and bizarre, one image becoming another and another, without rhyme or reason. And there Moses stood, staring at the wall in front of him, a section of white yet to be filled, his hands by his sides.

And then he looked at me, his eyes hollow and rimmed with circles so dark they made his burnished skin look pale in comparison. The streaks of paint across his face made him look like a weary warrior returning from battle, only to find devastation at his doorstep.

And I ran to him.

I’ve thought back on that moment so many times since then. Replayed it on a loop. The way I ran to him. The way I threw my arms around him, filled with compassion, completely unafraid. I held onto him as he stood there shivering, muttering something to himself. I think I asked him to tell me what happened. I don’t remember exactly. I just remember he was freezing, icy to the touch, and I asked him if he was cold. And he laughed, just a brief, incredulous laugh. Then he shoved me away so hard that I fell back again, stumbling and then falling to the floor, my injured hand leaving a bloody smear across the pale carpet. There were slashes of paint everywhere, and my bloody handprint looked unremarkable. Completely unremarkable.

Moses wrapped his arms around his head, shielding his eyes, and repeated something about water, over and over. His lips were the only part of his face I could see and I watched them move around the words.

“Water is white when it’s angry. Blue when it’s calm. Red when the sun sets, black at midnight. And water is clear when it falls. Clear when it washes through my head and out my fingertips. Water is clear and it washes all the colors away, it washes all the pictures away.”

I couldn’t take anymore. The 911 operator had told me to wait. But I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t stay in that house for one more second.

And for the very first time, I ran away from him.

Moses

I WOKE UP IN A PADDED ROOM. Not a cell. A room. But it might as well have been. When I came to they took my clothes, documented any wounds or marks on my skin, and gave me a pair of pale yellow scrubs to wear and socks to put on my feet. I was informed I could earn back my clothes as I followed the rules. Various people came to see me. Doctors, therapists, psychiatrists with little medical charts. They all tried to talk to me, but I was too numb to talk. And they all left eventually.

I was alone in my room for three days with meals brought in to me, some pencils to write with, and a lined notebook. Nobody wanted me to paint here. They wanted me to talk. To write in notebooks. To write and write. The more I wrote, the happier they were, until they read what I’d written and thought I was being uncooperative. But words were hard for me. If they let me paint, I could express myself. I was instructed to “journal” all my feelings. I was asked to explain what happened at my grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving Day. Wasn’t there a song about Grandma and Thanksgiving? I was sure there was and wrote it a few times in the notebook they provided.

“Over the river and through the woods, grandma has fallen down. The police save the day, and haul me away, from the shitty all-white town.”

It made me sound cruel, writing about my grandma that way. But they weren’t entitled to know about Gi. And I kept her to myself. If I had to be an asshole to keep them out, I would.

She was the only person who had been true and constant my entire life. The only one. And she was gone. And I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t with the others waiting on the other side for me to let them across. And I didn’t know how I felt about that. For the first time, Gi had abandoned me.

The pencils I was supposed to write with were no longer than a couple inches; I could barely grip them between my index finger and my thumb, probably to make it harder to use them as weapons against myself or someone else. And they were dull. After my attempt at shocking them with my inappropriate levity, I didn’t write anymore, but on the third day, I ended up drawing on the walls. When I’d worked my way through the pencils and had nothing left, I sat on the mattress in the corner and waited.

Dinner time came and an orderly named Chaz, a big, black man with a hint of Jamaica in his voice, was the usual suspect. I guessed they assigned him to me because he was bigger and blacker than I was. Always safer that way. Assign the black man to the black man. Typical white mentality. Especially in Utah where black men were outnumbered 1,000 to 1. Or something like that. I didn’t actually have a clue how many black people lived in Utah. I just knew it wasn’t very many.

Chaz stopped in amazement, and my dinner tray hit the floor.

Georgia

THEY PUT MOSES in a hospital far away. It was a two hour drive from Levan to Salt Lake. They took Moses and his grandmother in the same ambulance, and I was horrified for his sake, but then I realized he wasn’t aware. They said he fought. They said it took three men to hold him down. And they stuck him with a tranquilizer.

I heard the word crazy. Psycho. Murderer. Yes, that one too. And they took Moses away.

Everybody said he killed his grandmother, ate a piece of Thanksgiving pie, and then painted the house. But even though I was afraid, afraid of what I’d seen and what I didn’t understand, I didn’t believe that.

They did a full investigation into her death, but nobody had told me anything.

Moses couldn’t come to his grandmother’s funeral. Her extended family did, and they all cried like they had killed her themselves. They sat on the pews in the Levan Chapel and there was no celebration, no joy of a life well-lived, even though Kathleen Wright deserved that. She’d outlived many of her friends, but not all. The whole town attended, though my angry mind accused many of wanting front row seats to the on-going drama that was Moses Wright. Mother and son, two peas in a pod. Moses would hate the comparison.

Josie Jensen played a piano solo, which is the only thing I remember well.
Ave Maria
, requested specifically by Kathleen. Josie was a bit of a celebrity in town because of her musical abilities. She was only three years older than me, and I looked up to her. She was everything I wasn’t. Quiet, kind. Ladylike. Feminine. Musically gifted. But we had something in common now. We had both loved and lost, though nobody really knew it but me. Moses and I had been seen together, but nobody really knew how I felt.

People still talked about Josie too, though they did so with shakes of their head and sad eyes. Eighteen months ago, Josie Jensen had lost her fiancé in a car accident. Kind of like Ms. Murray, but Josie was engaged to a local boy and only eighteen when it happened. The town had gone crazy for a while. Some said Josie had even gone crazy for a while, though crazy is subjective. You can be crazed with grief and not crazy at all.

My mom had signed me up for piano lessons from Josie when I was thirteen, and I had tried, only to quickly come to the conclusion that we aren’t all born with the same talents, and piano was never going to be mine. I wondered if Moses had painted Josie’s fiancé’s face somewhere in town. It made me sick to think about it.

A week after the funeral, Sheriff Dawson came by our house to officially tell me they had no idea who had tied me up the last night of the stampede. We weren’t surprised. We were only surprised he’d actually stopped by to tell us. It had been months, they hadn’t had any leads beyond Terrance Anderson, who had been cleared, and even though Sheriff Dawson couldn’t prove it one way or another, he seemed confident it was just a prank gone wrong.

I didn’t have the energy to care one way or the other. There was a new tragedy in my life, and that night at the stampede was insignificant compared to having Moses tranquilized and hauled away. It was small compared to Kathleen Wright, covered in lace, lying dead on her kitchen floor, Thanksgiving pies sitting innocently on the counter. It was meaningless compared to the turmoil I now found myself in.

It was then, with Sheriff Dawson sitting there in our kitchen just like he had the night of the stampede, that I found out Moses’s grandmother had died from a stroke. Not murder. A stroke. My parents sat back in their chairs in relief, never even looking at me, not having any idea what those words meant to me. Natural causes. Moses hadn’t hurt her. He had simply found her, like I had found her, and dealt with it in the way he dealt with death. He painted it.

“Will they let him go now?” I asked. My parents and Sheriff Dawson looked at me in surprise. It was like they had forgotten I was there.

“I don’t know,” Sheriff Dawson had hedged.

“Moses is my friend. I might be his only friend in the world. He didn’t kill Kathleen. So why can’t he come home?” The emotion was leaking out around my words and my parents mistook the emotion for post-traumatic stress. After all, I’d seen death up close.

“He doesn’t really have a home to come back to. Though I heard Kathleen left him the house and everything in it. He’s eighteen already, far as I know, so he can be on his own.”

“He’s not in the hospital anymore. He wasn’t injured. So where is he?” I demanded.

“I don’t know exactly . . .”

“Yes you do, Sheriff. Come on. Where is he?” I insisted.

“Georgia!” My mom patted my arm and told me to calm down.

Sheriff Dawson shoved his cowboy hat on his head and then took it off again. He seemed distressed and reluctant to tell me.

“Is he in jail?”

“No. No, he’s not. They’ve taken him to another facility in Salt Lake City. He’s in the psych ward.”

I stared, not really understanding.

“It’s a mental hospital, Georgia,” my mom said gently.

My parents met my stunned gaze with sober faces and Sheriff Dawson stood abruptly, as if the whole thing had just gone beyond his pay grade. I found myself standing too, my legs shaking and my stomach swimming with nausea. I managed to make it to the bathroom without running, and was even able to lock the door behind me before I threw up the piece of pie mom had pressed upon me when she’d dished up a piece for Sheriff Dawson. Pie made me think of Kathleen Wright and tranquilizers.