The Law of Moses(33)

Moses wrapped his arms around his head, shielding his eyes, and repeated something about water, over and over. His lips were the only part of his face I could see and I watched them move around the words.



“Water is white when it’s angry. Blue when it’s calm. Red when the sun sets, black at midnight. And water is clear when it falls. Clear when it washes through my head and out my fingertips. Water is clear and it washes all the colors away, it washes all the pictures away.”



I couldn’t take anymore. The 911 operator had told me to wait. But I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t stay in that house for one more second.

And for the very first time, I ran away from him.





Moses




I WOKE UP IN A PADDED ROOM. Not a cell. A room. But it might as well have been. When I came to they took my clothes, documented any wounds or marks on my skin, and gave me a pair of pale yellow scrubs to wear and socks to put on my feet. I was informed I could earn back my clothes as I followed the rules. Various people came to see me. Doctors, therapists, psychiatrists with little medical charts. They all tried to talk to me, but I was too numb to talk. And they all left eventually.

I was alone in my room for three days with meals brought in to me, some pencils to write with, and a lined notebook. Nobody wanted me to paint here. They wanted me to talk. To write in notebooks. To write and write. The more I wrote, the happier they were, until they read what I’d written and thought I was being uncooperative. But words were hard for me. If they let me paint, I could express myself. I was instructed to “journal” all my feelings. I was asked to explain what happened at my grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving Day. Wasn’t there a song about Grandma and Thanksgiving? I was sure there was and wrote it a few times in the notebook they provided.

“Over the river and through the woods, grandma has fallen down. The police save the day, and haul me away, from the shitty all-white town.”

It made me sound cruel, writing about my grandma that way. But they weren’t entitled to know about Gi. And I kept her to myself. If I had to be an * to keep them out, I would.

She was the only person who had been true and constant my entire life. The only one. And she was gone. And I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t with the others waiting on the other side for me to let them across. And I didn’t know how I felt about that. For the first time, Gi had abandoned me.

The pencils I was supposed to write with were no longer than a couple inches; I could barely grip them between my index finger and my thumb, probably to make it harder to use them as weapons against myself or someone else. And they were dull. After my attempt at shocking them with my inappropriate levity, I didn’t write anymore, but on the third day, I ended up drawing on the walls. When I’d worked my way through the pencils and had nothing left, I sat on the mattress in the corner and waited.

Dinner time came and an orderly named Chaz, a big, black man with a hint of Jamaica in his voice, was the usual suspect. I guessed they assigned him to me because he was bigger and blacker than I was. Always safer that way. Assign the black man to the black man. Typical white mentality. Especially in Utah where black men were outnumbered 1,000 to 1. Or something like that. I didn’t actually have a clue how many black people lived in Utah. I just knew it wasn’t very many.

Chaz stopped in amazement, and my dinner tray hit the floor.





Georgia



THEY PUT MOSES in a hospital far away. It was a two hour drive from Levan to Salt Lake. They took Moses and his grandmother in the same ambulance, and I was horrified for his sake, but then I realized he wasn’t aware. They said he fought. They said it took three men to hold him down. And they stuck him with a tranquilizer.

I heard the word crazy. Psycho. Murderer. Yes, that one too. And they took Moses away.

Everybody said he killed his grandmother, ate a piece of Thanksgiving pie, and then painted the house. But even though I was afraid, afraid of what I’d seen and what I didn’t understand, I didn’t believe that.

They did a full investigation into her death, but nobody had told me anything.

Moses couldn’t come to his grandmother’s funeral. Her extended family did, and they all cried like they had killed her themselves. They sat on the pews in the Levan Chapel and there was no celebration, no joy of a life well-lived, even though Kathleen Wright deserved that. She’d outlived many of her friends, but not all. The whole town attended, though my angry mind accused many of wanting front row seats to the on-going drama that was Moses Wright. Mother and son, two peas in a pod. Moses would hate the comparison.

Josie Jensen played a piano solo, which is the only thing I remember well. Ave Maria, requested specifically by Kathleen. Josie was a bit of a celebrity in town because of her musical abilities. She was only three years older than me, and I looked up to her. She was everything I wasn’t. Quiet, kind. Ladylike. Feminine. Musically gifted. But we had something in common now. We had both loved and lost, though nobody really knew it but me. Moses and I had been seen together, but nobody really knew how I felt.

People still talked about Josie too, though they did so with shakes of their head and sad eyes. Eighteen months ago, Josie Jensen had lost her fiancé in a car accident. Kind of like Ms. Murray, but Josie was engaged to a local boy and only eighteen when it happened. The town had gone crazy for a while. Some said Josie had even gone crazy for a while, though crazy is subjective. You can be crazed with grief and not crazy at all.