The Law of Moses(12)

“Can I take up more than one wall?” he asked.

“Uh, sure.” I scrambled up and started pulling down pictures and yanking out thumbtacks. Before long, my furniture was in the middle of the room and Moses was wildly sketching with what he called a grease pencil. He pulled a few of them out of his pockets as if he carried them wherever he went.

I watched in fascination as Moses became lost in the story I’d shared with him. He rarely stepped back to see what he’d sketched, and his hands flew. He was using both hands interchangeably, and before long, he had a pencil clasped in each and was drawing frantically with both hands at once. It was mind-boggling to behold. I could barely write with my left hand, not to mention draw, and draw while my other hand was doing something else. Moses didn’t speak to me, and the one time I interrupted him, when it was close to dawn and my eyes were growing heavy, he looked at me blankly like he’d forgotten I was there.

“Let’s stop. I can’t stay awake,” I yawned. “And I don’t want to miss anything. You’re a genius. You know that, right? Maybe you’ll be famous one day and they’ll turn my room into a Moses Wright museum.” He started shaking his head immediately.

“I don’t want to stop,” he said, and his eyes pled with me. “I can’t stop yet. If I do, I might not be able to finish.”

“Okay,” I agreed immediately. “But you better be gone before my parents wake up. You can come back every day until it’s done. You just have to promise that you’ll let me watch.”

I fought the battle with sleep as long as I could, desperate not to miss the magic. But as brilliant as the images unfolding across my walls were, it was Moses himself who kept me spellbound. And when my eyes would no longer focus and my lids slid closed one last time, it was Moses who danced in my dreams, arms flying, eyes glowing, color and curved lines flowing from his fingertips.

I didn’t open my eyes again until well past noon. And when I did, it was because someone was making a racket outside my bedroom windows.

“What are you doing?” I asked Moses, dumbfounded, stumbling out of bed and rubbing the sleep from my face.

“Putting screens on your windows. If I’m going to paint in there, we need some ventilation. Without screens, I’ll have bugs biting me, swarming around the light, and getting stuck in my paint. And you and I will get high from the fumes. My brain is already scrambled enough.”“Cracked,” I said, not thinking.

“Yeah.” Moses scowled.

“Well, it’s working for you.” I turned and looked at my walls. “Cracks and all. In fact, if your brain wasn’t cracked, none of the brilliance could spill out. Do you realize that?” And it was brilliant. He hadn’t used any paint yet. But with a grease pencil and a cracked brain, Moses had filled two walls with the beginning scenes of a blind man who found his sight and a horse who came alive only at night. It was already beyond anything I could have imagined.

“Have you even slept?” I turned back to him with a yawn.

“Nah. But I’ll go crash for a while now. I’ll be back after dinner.”

After dinner was too far away and I had hours to kill until then. After I took care of my chickens, mowed the front lawn, and helped mom for an hour with the two foster kids we’d taken in for a few days, I retreated to the corral. My horses were happy to see me, and I felt bad that I’d made them wait for my attention. The meadow was still grassy and they had water, so it wasn’t as if they were starving, but I rarely missed a morning with them. I made it up to them by spending the rest of the long afternoon until dark trying to make Lucky fall in love with me.

Lucky was a horse with a black coat and an even darker mane. He was the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen, but he knew he was beautiful, and he had a temper. He didn’t want to be touched or ridden or coaxed into standing still. He wanted me to leave him alone. Dad had a client that hadn’t been able to pay his vet bills, so they’d worked out a trade. It wasn’t a great trade, because Dad needed horses he and Mom could train to be around kids. But the horse had a pedigree Dad liked, and he thought maybe he could get some stud fees out of him.

Lucky reminded me of Moses—powerful and perfectly formed, muscles sinuous and defined just below the sleek surface, and the way he held his head and ignored me was almost spot-on Moses. But then Lucky would look at me and I knew he was well aware of my presence. He hadn’t forgotten me for a moment, and he wanted me to chase him. Call me crazy, but I was pretty sure what worked with the horse could work with the boy.

Moses came back that night. And again the next night. And the next. I watched him in wonder as he added color to the lines and a dream-like quality to the story that made me feel like I’d stepped inside the blind man’s head and was seeing it all through his eyes—seeing the world for the very first time.

Moses didn’t stop with my walls. On the third night the story continued on my ceiling, and he rigged up some scaffolding so he could paint the Sistine Chapel right on my ten by twelve bedroom ceiling. I had to admit, I didn’t know about the Sistine Chapel until Moses told me all about Michelangelo as he assembled the platform he intended to lie on while he painted. He said some day he would see it in person. He wanted to travel all over the world and see all the great art. That was his dream. I stayed very quiet while he talked, only contributing when I thought he was losing steam and might stop talking. I needed him to keep talking. I wanted to know everything about him. I wanted inside, and little by little, especially when he was painting, he was giving me glimpses, brief moments with him that I treasured up like a child collecting fragile shells and shiny pebbles. And when he wasn’t with me, I took out those treasures and turned them over and over in my mind, studying them from every angle, learning him.