The Law of Moses (29 page)

I had thought long and hard about what I would name my baby. We got an ultrasound at twenty-one weeks and I knew it was a boy. I’d grown up reading Louis L’Amour and was convinced that I’d been born in the wrong time. If my child had been a girl I would have called her Annie. As in, Annie Oakley. As in, Annie get your damn gun. But it was a boy. And I couldn’t name him Moses.

I dug through the bible until I found the verse in Exodus where Moses talked about his sons and their names. The oldest was named Gershom. I winced at that. It might have been a popular name in Moses’s day—like Tyler or Ryan or Michael now—but I couldn’t do that to my child. The second son’s name was even worse. Eliezer. Moses said in the scripture that he was named Eliezer because, “
The God of my father was my help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh.”

The baby book of names I bought and perused said Eliezer means “God of Help” or “God is my help.”
I liked that.
Moses had been saved from the sword of Jennifer Wright, I supposed. Maybe he’d been saved so my son could come into the world. I was young, how would I know? But the name seemed fitting, because I had no doubt I was going to need all the help—from God and everyone else—I could get.
So I named him Eli.

Eli Martin Shepherd. Eli because he was the son of Moses, Martin for my dad, Shepherd because he was mine.

I had finished my senior year heavy with pregnancy and graduated with my class. I never answered questions, never talked about Moses. I let people talk and let my middle finger answer for me when a response was demanded. Eventually, people just got over it. But they all knew. You only had to look at Eli to know.

Eli had brown eyes, just like mine, and my mom said he had my smile, but the rest was Moses. His hair was a mass of black curls, and I wondered if Moses’s hair would have looked like that if he’d ever grown it out. It had always been cropped so short it was stubble. I wondered what Moses would think if he saw Eli, if he would recognize himself in our son. And then I would push those thoughts away and pretend I didn’t care, making Moses faceless once more so I couldn’t make comparisons.

But Eli was like me in other ways. He was full of energy and walked at ten months. I chased after him for the next three and a half years. He laughed and ran and would never hold still, except when he saw a horse, and then he’d be quiet and calm, just like I told him to do, and he would watch like there was nothing better in the world, nothing more beautiful, and no place he would rather be. Just like his mom. Other than the little kid drawings and the occasional food mess that he enjoyed smearing everywhere, he showed no inclination to paint.

I couldn’t stay home and take care of him though, not all the time. My mom watched Eli three days a week while I drove an hour north for school at Utah Valley University, which had been my plan, even before Eli changed my priorities. Dreams of following the rodeo circuit and being the top barrel racer in the world were laid by the wayside. I decided to follow in my parents footsteps. Horses and therapy. It made sense. I was good with animals, horses especially. I would be doing what I loved and maybe I would learn something along the way that would help me come to terms with my relationship with Moses. I settled into my life in Levan. I had no plans to leave. It was a good place to raise Eli, among people who loved him. My parents had both been born there, and their parents, with one grandmother tugged over the ridge and into our valley from Fountain Green on the other side of the hill. In the cemetery, five generations of Shepherd grandfathers lay beside their wives. Five greats. And I was certain I would one day lie there too.

But Eli beat me to it.

Moses

I DIDN’T STOP TO THINK. I didn’t go back to Gi’s and tell Tag what I had found in the cemetery. I was filled with a thundering outrage that I wore to mask the quiet horror of the truth. I drove straight to Georgia’s and strode around the house to the corrals and outbuildings beyond. She wasn’t in the round corral anymore. The horse she’d called Cuss was in the pasture, grazing near the fence and his ears perked up as I approached. He whinnied sharply and reared up, like I was a predator. I found Georgia filling the water trough, and like Cuss, her head came up, her back stiffened and she watched me approach with trepidation.

“What do you want, Moses?” She muscled a bale of hay nearer to the fence and reached for a pitchfork to divvy it up to the horses that watched me warily, unwilling to approach, even if dinner was served. Her voice was harsh, loud, but underneath I heard the panic. I was scaring her. I was big and I was male, and I was feared. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the reason she was afraid. She feared me because she had convinced herself she never knew me. I was the unknown. I was the kid who painted pictures while his grandmother lay dead on the kitchen floor. I was the psycho. Some even thought I had killed my grandmother. Some thought I’d killed many people. I really didn’t know what Georgia thought. And at the moment, I didn’t care.

“What do you want?” she repeated as I took the pitchfork from her hands and finished the job for her. I needed the distraction. Her hands fell helplessly to her sides and she took a step back, clearly unsure of the situation.

“You had a son.” I continued to spear the bale of hay and shovel it over the fence in sections, not looking at her as I spoke. I never looked at the family members. I just kept talking until they interrupted me or screamed at me, or sobbed and begged me to continue. Usually, that was enough. The dead would leave me alone once I delivered the message. And I would be free until the next time one of them wouldn’t leave me alone.

“You have a son and he keeps showing me pictures. Your son . . . Eli? I don’t know what he wants exactly, but he won’t leave me alone. He won’t leave me alone so I’m here . . . and maybe that will be enough for him.”

She hadn’t interrupted me. She hadn’t screamed at me. She hadn’t run. She just stood with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes fixed on my face. I met her gaze briefly and looked away again to a spot just above her head. The bale of hay was gone, so I leaned against the pitchfork. And I waited.

“My son is dead.” Her voice sounded odd, as if her lips had turned to stone and could no longer easily form words. My eyes glanced off her face once more. She had, indeed, turned to stone. Her face was so still it resembled the sculptures in my books. In the muted light of the golden afternoon, her skin was smooth and pale, just like marble. Even her hair looked colorless, thick and white and spilling over her shoulder in that long braid that reminded me of the heavy rope that Eli kept showing me, rope that spun in the air and fell in a sinuous loop over the horse’s head, the horse with colors on his back.

“I know he is,” I said mildly, but the pressure in my head increased exponentially. The water was rising, pulsing, and my levies were close to bursting.

“So how can he show you anything?” Georgia challenged harshly.

I swallowed, trying to stem the tide and met her eyes again. “You know how, Georgia.”

She shook her head briskly, adamantly denying that she knew any such thing. She took a step back and her eyes shot to the left, as if she was preparing to run. “You need to leave me alone.”

I pushed the anger back. I shoved it hard so I wouldn’t shove her. And I wanted to push her, wipe the denial off her pretty face, push her head into the dirt until her mouth was filled with mud. Then she could order me to go. Then I would deserve it. Instead, I did as she asked and turned away, ignoring the little boy who trotted after me, sending desperate images of his mother to my brain, trying to call me back without words.

“What does he look like?” She called after me, and the desperation in her voice was so at odds with her rejection that I stopped in my tracks. “I mean, if you can see him. What does he look like?”

Eli was suddenly in front of me, jumping up and down, smiling and pointing back toward Georgia. I turned, still angry, still defiant, but willing to go another round, and Eli was there in front of me again, standing between me and the horse corral. I looked at him and then back at Georgia.

“He’s small. He has dark, curly hair. And brown eyes. His eyes are like yours.” She winced and her hands rose to press against her chest as if to encourage her heart to continue beating.

“His hair is too long. It’s curling in his eyes. He needs a haircut.” The little boy brushed a droopy curl out of his eyes as if he understood what I was telling his mother.

“He hated haircuts,” she said softly, and her lips tightened immediately as if she wished she hadn’t contributed to the conversation.

“He was afraid of the clippers,” I supplied, Eli’s memory of the buzzing around his ears making my own heart quicken in sympathy. Eli’s memories were shot with terror and the clippers were twice as big as his head. They resembled the gaping jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, proving that memory wasn’t always accurate. Then the image changed to something else. A birthday cake. It was chocolate with a plastic horse in the center, rearing up. Four candles flickered around it.

“He’s four,” I said, trusting that that was what Eli was trying to tell me. But I knew. I’d seen the dates on the grave.

“He would be six now.” She shook her head defiantly. I waited. The child looked up at me expectantly and then looked back at his mother.

“He’s still four,” I said. “Kids wait.”

Her lower lip trembled and she bit into it. She was starting to believe me. That, or she was starting to hate me. Or maybe she already did.

“Wait for what?” Her voice was so soft I barely caught the question.

“Wait for someone to raise them.”

The pain on her face was so intense, I felt a flash of remorse that I’d cornered her like this. She wasn’t prepared for me. But I hadn’t been prepared either. It was aces as far as I was concerned.

“He would have been waiting a long time for you,” she said softly, taking a few steps toward me and then stopping, her stance aggressive, her hands clenched. The grieving mother was gone. She was the wronged woman now. And I was the man who knocked her up and left town.

“That’s how you want to play this?” I gasped hoarsely, all my anger back in full force, so angry I wanted to start ripping fence posts from the ground and flinging barbed wire.

“Play what, Moses?” she snapped. And I snapped too.

“The fact that you and I had a son. I had a son! We made a child together. And he’s dead. And I never knew him. I never knew him, Georgia! I never knew a damn thing about him. And you’re going to spit that shit at me? How did he die, Georgia? Huh? Tell me!” I knew. I was almost sure I knew. Eli kept showing me the truck. Georgia’s old truck, Myrtle. Something happened to Eli in the truck.

Anger zinged in colorful zags and streaks behind my eyes. I felt the water start to part, separating, splitting, and the colors from the other side started to seep down the channel. I pressed my hands into my eyes, and maybe I looked as crazed as I felt, because when I pulled my hands away, Georgia had jumped the fence and began to run, her legs eating up the distance swiftly, as if she thought I would kill her too. And instead of making me pause, her flight just made me angrier. She was going to answer me. She was going to tell me. And she was going to do it now. I went after her, over the fence, arms and legs pumping, rage narrowed on her slim back and on her pale hair falling out of her braid, running away from me like I was a monster.

When I pulled her down, I wrapped myself around her and took her weight on mine. We hit hard, her head bouncing off my shoulder, my head bouncing off the ground, but it didn’t slow her down any. She fought me, kicking and scratching like a wild animal, and I rolled on top of her, pinning her arms between us, pressing her legs down with my own.

“Georgia!” I roared, pressing my forehead into hers, controlling every part of her. I could feel her gasping for breath, crying, resisting me with all her strength.

“Stop it! You’re going to talk to me. You’re going to talk to me. Right. Now. What happened to him?” I felt the ice in my hands and flames at my neck, and I was reminded that Eli was there. I knew he was watching us, watching me restraining his mother. And I was ashamed. I didn’t want to see him and I couldn’t let her go. I needed her to tell me. I shifted so I wasn’t crushing her, but I didn’t lift my brow from where I pressed it into hers, controlling her head.
When a horse gives you her head, she’s yours
. Georgia’s words whispered in my memory. She wasn’t giving me her head. But I was taking it.