The Law of Moses(11)

“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.