The Law of Moses(100)

When we dream we don’t know we dream. In our dreams our bodies are solid, we touch, we kiss, we run, we feel. Our thoughts somehow create reality. It was like that here too. I knew I didn’t have a body and neither did Eli. And it didn’t matter. Eli was solid and whole in my arms and I was holding my son. And I never wanted to let go.

Eli pulled away slightly and looked at me seriously, his brown eyes so like his mother’s that I wanted to drown in them. Then he unlocked his arms from around my neck and held my face in his small hands.

“You have to choose, Dad.”





Georgia



MOSES DIED ON THE WAY TO THE HOSPITAL. That’s what they told me later. They wouldn’t let us ride with him, so Tag and I jumped in his Hummer and followed the ambulance, breaking speed records and stumbling into the emergency room when we finally reached Nephi.

And then we waited, clinging to each other, while they tried to bring Moses back. Tag’s face was white and his hands shook with horror as he told me that he believed Jacob Dawson had killed his sister, and probably all the other girls as well.

“Moses called me this morning, Georgia. He asked about the brand on Calico, about the circle A. And it nagged at me. I ended up calling my dad and asking him about it, just on the off-chance he knew something. And he told me the circle A was Jacob Dawson’s brand. We bought a couple of horses from him the summer Molly disappeared. The horses we bought had that brand. My father even gave one of them to Molly.”

“Anderson ranches,” I supplied, numbly. “Jacob Dawson’s mother was an Anderson. She inherited the ranch and her brother inherited the mill when their father died. She handed the ranch and all the livestock over to Sheriff Dawson when he turned twenty-one.”

A slew of police came to the hospital—some of the officers were from the Sheriff’s Department, some from Nephi city—and Tag was taken in for questioning. I was questioned as well, though I was questioned at the hospital and allowed to remain there. The sheriff had been killed, and it was Tag’s bullet that had killed him, that and the knife in his chest that Moses had apparently wielded. I was afraid for Tag and for Moses, and I was worried that the truth might never come out.

Then my parents arrived and in hushed, disbelieving tones, they told me that Lisa Kendrick had been found bound and drugged in Jacob Dawson’s SUV. And suddenly everyone wasn’t quite as sure of the world as they once had been. Ironically, it was Jacob Dawson who had once told me, “You can never get too comfortable around animals. Just when you think you’ve got ‘em figured out, they’ll do something completely unexpected.” And he would know.

When I could no longer be brave, I found the little chapel, buried my face in my blood-stained hands and talked to Eli, whispering to him, telling him about Moses, about our story, about how he came to be, about how he was the best parts of both of us. And then I tearfully told him that I needed him to bring Moses back one more time if he could.

“Send him back, Eli,” I begged. “If you have any pull in that place at all, send him back.”





Moses



I TOLD YOU RIGHT UP FRONT, right in the beginning that I lost him. The day I met Eli, he was already gone. I knew he was dead. I knew, and yet it still hurt. So much. I didn’t lose him the way Georgia did. But I still lost him. I lost him before I knew him. And I wasn’t prepared.

And each day, as I grew to love him more, as I watched him, as he showed me his short life and his huge love, it got harder, not easier. In truth—since I’ve decided that’s all I have—I would gladly submit myself to anything else. Anything but that. But that is what was given to me. And I wasn’t prepared.

I can’t tell you how it felt to say goodbye. How it felt to choose. But in the end, mercifully, the choice was made for me, and I didn’t have to do either. I held my little boy in my arms, and I heard his mother’s voice from somewhere far off, telling him our story. A story about how Eli was born, how he died, and how, from beyond the grave he healed us. And Eli and I listened together.

The first few words of every story are always the hardest. It’s almost as if pulling them out, speaking them into existence, commits you to seeing it all through. As if once you start, you are required to finish.

And we weren’t finished. Georgia and I weren’t finished. I knew that. And Eli knew it.

“You have to go now, Dad,” he whispered.

“I know.”

I felt myself slipping, almost falling, much like the way it felt when I called down the waters.

“Goodnight Stewy Stinker,” I heard him say, a smile in his voice.

“Goodnight Buzzard Bates,” I said, my tongue so heavy in my mouth I could barely form the words.

“See you soon, Diehard Dad.”

“See you soon, little man,” I whispered, and then he was gone.





Georgia



THEY SHARED HIS STORY on the 10:00 news—the little baby left in a basket at a dingy laundromat in a bad neighborhood in West Valley City, abandoned by a drug addict and expected to have all sorts of problems. And they shared his story again, twenty-five years later—the story of Moses Wright, the artist who communed with the dead and brought down a killer.

Both Tag and Moses were absolved of any wrong-doing in the death of Sheriff Jacob Dawson. And they were cleared quickly when Sylvie Kendrick’s remains were found on his property, along with the remains of several, still unidentified girls. Lisa Kendrick made a full recovery, and though she doesn’t remember Sheriff Dawson abducting her, she does remember walking along the road and having a vehicle pull up behind her, lights flashing.