A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2)(68)

“Stand. This makes me feel ridiculous.” His big hands reached down to Hosea and Reva, and in a jiffy they were up.

I scrambled to my feet, giving Eli a side look to make sure he was doing the same.

“You are a priest?” Moses rumbled at Eli.

Real thunder sounded, far away. The clouds were advancing from the east, and the sky was darkening.

“I am a grigori, a wizard, in service to the tsar. The Russian ruler.”

I’d never heard Eli sound so formal, so awed. He was a true Orthodox believer. He’d never talked about that; I hadn’t known.

What Moses the Black would have said in reply I will never know. Reva had latched on to the important thing.

“Moses,” Reva said. “We have to get you to town. That’s where you’re needed.” Her rusty voice was strong and sure. Hosea stood behind her, his hands on her bony shoulders.

Moses the Black laughed. “Let us go,” he said.

He couldn’t fly, it seemed. I was disappointed when he had to get in the car to be driven. I never thought I’d chauffeur a saint. I drove Moses in the car Eli and I had stolen. Reva and Hosea rode with Eli in his car. It seemed like a much shorter trip back to town.

Sally was in chaos.

Picking among clumps of brawling people, mostly men, we made it back to the courthouse. Fighting was especially intense there because of all the open space. There was a lot of gunfire, and lots of bodies. I’d never seen anything on this scale. This was a little war.

We all got out and waited for whatever the saint decided to do.

I figured Moses would weigh in with his sword, and I was looking forward to seeing that. He would step on the bodies piling up.

What happened instead was completely different.

Moses began singing. Didn’t make no nevermind whether his voice itself was beautiful, made no nevermind what he was singing. I felt my scalp tingle all over. Was this a church-type miracle? Was this magic like Eli had? No one besides me seemed to be asking any questions.

Hosea and Reva went to stand by him, their arms spread at shoulder level, floating in the voice. Eli came to stand by me, and he put his arm around my shoulders.

Rolling out from the sound of the saint’s voice, the fighting stopped. I could watch the progress of it, like a wave. All up and down the street, people came walking, staggering, bleeding, carrying all kinds of sharp things, and guns, and crowbars. And they came side by side, not trying to kill one another.

Not even looking at one another.

Not talking to one another.

And they kept coming.

This would have been the time I started shooting, if they’d been hostile. But they weren’t. They were empty: not angry, or terrified, or vengeful.

But I was relieved and angry at the same time. I wasn’t under the same spell everyone else was. Neither was Eli.

That was something I should have been thinking about.

I should have been wondering what was going to happen next.

But no matter what I’d guessed, I would have been wrong.

Instead of telling the black people who had been stolen from Africa that they were free and equal to the white people, instead of advising the former slaves to rise up and take over the property of their former owners, Moses told the whole crowd, “You must love one another.”

The skies opened and the rain fell. And they all laid down their weapons.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR


This is just spooky,” I said. We were sitting on the hood of Eli’s Carrier, parked by the car I’d stolen. It was pouring rain, and we were as wet as we could be. But there was so much to watch.

The people of Sally had begun to straighten up their town. They had shaken hands with one another, then cooperated with piling the bodies in the back of a two-ton truck and pushing abandoned cars off the streets.

Then they’d faded away. We were almost alone at the recent battleground.

“I wonder where Felix is,” Eli said. He hadn’t spoken in a long time.

“Do you think Felix did this?” Though I’d had a wonder or two when Eli and I hadn’t become lovey like all the other people, I still hoped this was God doing stuff.

“Moses the Black hasn’t moved in twenty minutes,” Eli said. That wasn’t an answer.

“Yep.” I hadn’t had much else to look at. We were sitting in the rain watching a saint turn into a statue.

I slid off the car hood and went over to Moses. I was watching him at every step. His eyes did not move to track me. His black skin was smooth and hard to the touch. The sword in his hand had turned into a scroll that read, Turn away from violence and love your fellow man. So he’d had the book after all, tucked under his robe.

I thought about this piece of advice. I didn’t often begin the violence. And I loved some of my fellow men and women. That didn’t seem too bad a start.

“What do you want to do now?” Eli asked from right behind me. He reached out a finger, as I’d done, and touched Moses’s shoulder.

“You reckon everything is over?” I would have to check to make sure Maddie would be able to mend and go home. Charlie dead. Rogelio dead. Jake dead. Harriet, who knew? Travis, dead. Sarah, dead. The contents of the chest (standing before us and looking serious, maybe forever) recovered and delivered.

“I don’t know.” Eli put his arm around me again. “I’m thinking about it.”