My mom smiled and shook her head. “Georgia Marie.” She laughed. “As in Eli Jackson, the bull rider?”
“As in Eli Jackson. I want him to take life by the horns and ride it for all it’s worth. And when he becomes the best bull rider that ever lived, better even than his namesake, everyone will chant Eli Shepherd instead.” I’d planned out my response, and it sounded pretty damn good because I was sincere. But it wasn’t for the bull rider that I named him Eli. That was just a lucky coincidence. I named him Eli for Moses. No one wanted to think about Moses. No one wanted to talk about him. Even me. But my child was his child. And I couldn’t pretend otherwise. I couldn’t completely blot him out.
I had thought long and hard about what I would name my baby. We got an ultrasound at twenty-one weeks and I knew it was a boy. I’d grown up reading Louis L’Amour and was convinced that I’d been born in the wrong time. If my child had been a girl I would have called her Annie. As in, Annie Oakley. As in, Annie get your damn gun. But it was a boy. And I couldn’t name him Moses.
I dug through the bible until I found the verse in Exodus where Moses talked about his sons and their names. The oldest was named Gershom. I winced at that. It might have been a popular name in Moses’s day—like Tyler or Ryan or Michael now—but I couldn’t do that to my child. The second son’s name was even worse. Eliezer. Moses said in the scripture that he was named Eliezer because, “The God of my father was my help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh.”
The baby book of names I bought and perused said Eliezer means “God of Help” or “God is my help.” I liked that. Moses had been saved from the sword of Jennifer Wright, I supposed. Maybe he’d been saved so my son could come into the world. I was young, how would I know? But the name seemed fitting, because I had no doubt I was going to need all the help—from God and everyone else—I could get. So I named him Eli.
Eli Martin Shepherd. Eli because he was the son of Moses, Martin for my dad, Shepherd because he was mine.
I had finished my senior year heavy with pregnancy and graduated with my class. I never answered questions, never talked about Moses. I let people talk and let my middle finger answer for me when a response was demanded. Eventually, people just got over it. But they all knew. You only had to look at Eli to know.
Eli had brown eyes, just like mine, and my mom said he had my smile, but the rest was Moses. His hair was a mass of black curls, and I wondered if Moses’s hair would have looked like that if he’d ever grown it out. It had always been cropped so short it was stubble. I wondered what Moses would think if he saw Eli, if he would recognize himself in our son. And then I would push those thoughts away and pretend I didn’t care, making Moses faceless once more so I couldn’t make comparisons.
But Eli was like me in other ways. He was full of energy and walked at ten months. I chased after him for the next three and a half years. He laughed and ran and would never hold still, except when he saw a horse, and then he’d be quiet and calm, just like I told him to do, and he would watch like there was nothing better in the world, nothing more beautiful, and no place he would rather be. Just like his mom. Other than the little kid drawings and the occasional food mess that he enjoyed smearing everywhere, he showed no inclination to paint.
I couldn’t stay home and take care of him though, not all the time. My mom watched Eli three days a week while I drove an hour north for school at Utah Valley University, which had been my plan, even before Eli changed my priorities. Dreams of following the rodeo circuit and being the top barrel racer in the world were laid by the wayside. I decided to follow in my parents footsteps. Horses and therapy. It made sense. I was good with animals, horses especially. I would be doing what I loved and maybe I would learn something along the way that would help me come to terms with my relationship with Moses. I settled into my life in Levan. I had no plans to leave. It was a good place to raise Eli, among people who loved him. My parents had both been born there, and their parents, with one grandmother tugged over the ridge and into our valley from Fountain Green on the other side of the hill. In the cemetery, five generations of Shepherd grandfathers lay beside their wives. Five greats. And I was certain I would one day lie there too.
But Eli beat me to it.
Moses
I DIDN’T STOP TO THINK. I didn’t go back to Gi’s and tell Tag what I had found in the cemetery. I was filled with a thundering outrage that I wore to mask the quiet horror of the truth. I drove straight to Georgia’s and strode around the house to the corrals and outbuildings beyond. She wasn’t in the round corral anymore. The horse she’d called Cuss was in the pasture, grazing near the fence and his ears perked up as I approached. He whinnied sharply and reared up, like I was a predator. I found Georgia filling the water trough, and like Cuss, her head came up, her back stiffened and she watched me approach with trepidation.
“What do you want, Moses?” She muscled a bale of hay nearer to the fence and reached for a pitchfork to divvy it up to the horses that watched me warily, unwilling to approach, even if dinner was served. Her voice was harsh, loud, but underneath I heard the panic. I was scaring her. I was big and I was male, and I was feared. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the reason she was afraid. She feared me because she had convinced herself she never knew me. I was the unknown. I was the kid who painted pictures while his grandmother lay dead on the kitchen floor. I was the psycho. Some even thought I had killed my grandmother. Some thought I’d killed many people. I really didn’t know what Georgia thought. And at the moment, I didn’t care.