“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 asshole 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.
My mom had signed me up for piano lessons from Josie when I was thirteen, and I had tried, only to quickly come to the conclusion that we aren’t all born with the same talents, and piano was never going to be mine. I wondered if Moses had painted Josie’s fiancé’s face somewhere in town. It made me sick to think about it.
A week after the funeral, Sheriff Dawson came by our house to officially tell me they had no idea who had tied me up the last night of the stampede. We weren’t surprised. We were only surprised he’d actually stopped by to tell us. It had been months, they hadn’t had any leads beyond Terrance Anderson, who had been cleared, and even though Sheriff Dawson couldn’t prove it one way or another, he seemed confident it was just a prank gone wrong.
I didn’t have the energy to care one way or the other. There was a new tragedy in my life, and that night at the stampede was insignificant compared to having Moses tranquilized and hauled away. It was small compared to Kathleen Wright, covered in lace, lying dead on her kitchen floor, Thanksgiving pies sitting innocently on the counter. It was meaningless compared to the turmoil I now found myself in.
It was then, with Sheriff Dawson sitting there in our kitchen just like he had the night of the stampede, that I found out Moses’s grandmother had died from a stroke. Not murder. A stroke. My parents sat back in their chairs in relief, never even looking at me, not having any idea what those words meant to me. Natural causes. Moses hadn’t hurt her. He had simply found her, like I had found her, and dealt with it in the way he dealt with death. He painted it.
“Will they let him go now?” I asked. My parents and Sheriff Dawson looked at me in surprise. It was like they had forgotten I was there.
“I don’t know,” Sheriff Dawson had hedged.
“Moses is my friend. I might be his only friend in the world. He didn’t kill Kathleen. So why can’t he come home?” The emotion was leaking out around my words and my parents mistook the emotion for post-traumatic stress. After all, I’d seen death up close.
“He doesn’t really have a home to come back to. Though I heard Kathleen left him the house and everything in it. He’s eighteen already, far as I know, so he can be on his own.”