by Amy Harmon
Navajo. I was right.
“I just wanted to tell you how much I liked your grandmother . . . your great grandmother, actually, yes?” I nodded as she continued. “Kathleen had a way about her that made you feel like everything was going to be okay. After my mom died when I was little, she was one of the ladies in the church who looked after my family, and she looked after me too, teaching me things and letting me hang out in her kitchen when I needed to figure out how to do this or that. She was wonderful.” Josie’s voice rang with sincerity and I nodded, agreeing.
“She was like that. She always made me feel that way too.” I swallowed and looked away awkwardly, realizing I was having an intimate moment with a stranger. “Thank you,” I said, meeting her eyes briefly. “That means a lot to me.”
She nodded once, smiled a sad little smile, and turned away again.
“Moses?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know who Edgar Allen Poe is?”
I raised my eyebrows, puzzled. I did. But it was an odd question. I nodded and she continued.
“He wrote something that I’ve never forgotten, and I love words. You can ask my husband. I buried him in words and music until he begged for mercy and married me.” She winked. “Edgar Allen Poe said many beautiful things—and many disturbing things—but they often go together, you know.”
I waited, wondering what this woman wanted me to hear.
“Poe said, ‘There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.’” Josie tipped her head to the side and looked back at her husband who hadn’t moved at all. Then she murmured, “I think your work is strange and beautiful, Moses. Like a discordant melody that resolves itself as you listen. I just wanted you to know that.”
I was a little speechless, wondering where and when she’d seen my work, flabbergasted that she knew of me at all, and still wasn’t afraid to approach me. Of course, her husband stood fifty feet away, and I highly doubted anyone messed with Josie Jensen on his watch.
Then they were gone, and no one remained but me. Levan Cemetery had the feel of a well-maintained pioneer cemetery—not very big, but big enough and constantly getting bigger as the town grew and buried their dead. It faced west, sitting above the rest of the valley on a rise beneath Tuckaway Hill, looking out over farmland and pasture. From where I stood I could see the old highway, a long silver strip, cutting through fields as far as the eye could see. The view was serene and peaceful, and I liked that Gi’s remains were here.
I walked down rows of stones, past Josie’s mother, until I reached a long line of Wrights, generations of them, four at least. I stopped for a moment at Gigi’s stone, laid a reverent hand on her name, but then moved on, searching for the reason I came. New stones, old stones, stones that were glossy, stones that were flat. Flowers and pinwheels and wreaths and candles decorated many graves. I wondered why people did that. Their dead didn’t need crap covering their names. But like anything, that was mostly about the living. The living needed to prove to themselves and to others that they hadn’t forgotten. And, in a small town like this there was always a little competition going on at the cemetery. It was a mentality that said, “I love the most, I’m suffering the most, and so I’m going to create a huge display every time I come so everyone knows and feels sorry for me.” I knew I was a cynic. I was definitely a bastard. But I didn’t like it. And I didn’t especially think the dead needed it.
I found a long row of Shepherds and almost laughed at the name of one. Warlock Shepherd. What a name. Warlock Wright—maybe that’s what they should have named me. I’d been called a witch before. I studied the stones, and I realized there were five generations of Shepherd grandfathers buried there as well, their wives buried at their sides. I found the first Georgia Shepherd and remembered the day I teased Georgia about her name. Georgie Porgie.
And then there it was, another generation, though it had skipped the one in between. A stone about two feet high and two feet wide, simple and well-tended, stood at the very end of the row, an empty patch of grass on either side, as if saving space for those who would come after.
Eli Martin Shepherd. Born July 27, 2007, Died October 25, 2011 was all it said.
A horse was etched in the stone, a horse that looked like his hind quarters were dappled in color. The Paint. A fat bouquet of wildflowers in a bright yellow vase sat beside the headstone and the song the woman had sung in Eli’s memory, “You are my sunshine . . .” caught in my thoughts, and I found myself saying the words. Georgia’s name wasn’t printed on the stone, but I knew with a clarity both sick and shocking that she was Eli’s mother. She had to be.
I counted backwards just to be sure. Nine months before July of 2007 would have been October of 2006.
Georgia was Eli’s mother. And I was Eli’s father. I had to be.
Georgia
I GAVE BIRTH TO ELI on July 27, 2007, a month before I turned eighteen. No one knew I was pregnant until I was three months along. I would have waited longer, but the snug Wranglers I wore every day wouldn’t button and my flat stomach and trim hips were no longer flat enough or trim enough to wedge into tight, unforgiving denim. The horror of my predicament wasn’t just the pregnancy. It was that Moses was the father, and Moses’s name had become a hiss and a curse word everywhere I turned.
My parents and I talked about adoption, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do that to Moses. It made what had been between us meaningless. And for me, it never had been and it never would be. Moses might never know about his child, and he might be forever alone in the world, but his child would not be. And even though I hated him sometimes, even though I’d made him the faceless man, even though I didn’t know where he was or what he was doing now, I couldn’t give his child away. I couldn’t do it.
But the day Eli was born, it was no longer about me, or Moses, or about being strong or being weak. Suddenly it was all about Eli, a boy conceived in turmoil, a boy who looked so much like his father that when I gazed down into his tiny face, I loved him with a fervor that made the regret of his conception quake and crack and then crumble into dust—powerless to hurt us, paper against the flame of devotion that welled in my heart and set my child’s precious face in stone, no longer faceless, no longer feared.
“What are you going to name him, Georgia?” my mom had whispered, tears streaming down her face as she watched her child become a mother. She’d aged in the months since I had unburdened myself on her. But with the sweetness of new life making the hospital room a sacred place, she looked serene. I wondered if the same serenity marked my own expression. We were going to be okay. It was going to be okay.
“Eli.”
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 wors
e. 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.
“What do you want?” she repeated as I took the pitchfork from her hands and finished the job for her. I needed the distraction. Her hands fell helplessly to her sides and she took a step back, clearly unsure of the situation.
“You had a son.” I continued to spear the bale of hay and shovel it over the fence in sections, not looking at her as I spoke. I never looked at the family members. I just kept talking until they interrupted me or screamed at me, or sobbed and begged me to continue. Usually, that was enough. The dead would leave me alone once I delivered the message. And I would be free until the next time one of them wouldn’t leave me alone.
“You have a son and he keeps showing me pictures. Your son . . . Eli? I don’t know what he wants exactly, but he won’t leave me alone. He won’t leave me alone so I’m here . . . and maybe that will be enough for him.”
She hadn’t interrupted me. She hadn’t screamed at me. She hadn’t run. She just stood with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes fixed on my face. I met her gaze briefly and looked away again to a spot just above her head. The bale of hay was gone, so I leaned against the pitchfork. And I waited.
“My son is dead.” Her voice sounded odd, as if her lips had turned to stone and could no longer easily form words. My eyes glanced off her face once more. She had, indeed, turned to stone. Her face was so still it resembled the sculptures in my books. In the muted light of the golden afternoon, her skin was smooth and pale, just like marble. Even her hair looked colorless, thick and white and spilling over her shoulder in that long braid that reminded me of the heavy rope that Eli kept showing me, rope that spun in the air and fell in a sinuous loop over the horse’s head, the horse with colors on his back.
“I know he is,” I said mildly, but the pressure in my head increased exponentially. The water was rising, pulsing, and my levies were close to bursting.
“So how can he show you anything?” Georgia challenged harshly.
I swallowed, trying to stem the tide and met her eyes again. “You know how, Georgia.”
She shook her head briskly, adamantly denying that she knew any such thing. She took a step back and her eyes shot to the left, as if she was preparing to run. “You need to leave me alone.”
I pushed the anger back. I shoved it hard so I wouldn’t shove her. And I wanted to push her, wipe the denial off her pretty face, push her head into the dirt until her mouth was filled with mud. Then she could order me to go. Then I would deserve it. Instead, I did as she asked and turned away, ignoring the little boy who trotted after me, sending desperate images of his mother to my brain, trying to call me back without words.
“What does he look like?” She called after me, and the desperation in her voice was so at odds with her rejection that I stopped in my tracks. “I mean, if you can see him. What does he look like?”
Eli was suddenly in front of me, jumping up and down, smiling and pointing back toward Georgia. I turned, still angry, still defiant, but willing to go another round, and Eli was there in front of me again, standing between me and the horse corral. I looked at him and then back at Georgia.
“He’s small. He has dark, curly hair. And brown eyes. His eyes are like yours.” She winced and her hands rose to press against her chest as if to encourage her heart to continue beating.
“His hair is too long. It’s curling in his eyes. He needs a haircut.” The little boy brushed a droopy curl out of his eyes as if he understood what I was telling his mother.
“He hated haircuts,” she said softly, and her lips tightened immediately as if she wished she hadn’t contributed to the conversation.
“He was afraid of the clippers,” I supplied, Eli’s memory of the buzzing around his ears making my own heart quicken in sympathy. Eli’s memories were shot with terror and the clippers wer
e twice as big as his head. They resembled the gaping jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, proving that memory wasn’t always accurate. Then the image changed to something else. A birthday cake. It was chocolate with a plastic horse in the center, rearing up. Four candles flickered around it.
“He’s four,” I said, trusting that that was what Eli was trying to tell me. But I knew. I’d seen the dates on the grave.
“He would be six now.” She shook her head defiantly. I waited. The child looked up at me expectantly and then looked back at his mother.
“He’s still four,” I said. “Kids wait.”
Her lower lip trembled and she bit into it. She was starting to believe me. That, or she was starting to hate me. Or maybe she already did.
“Wait for what?” Her voice was so soft I barely caught the question.
“Wait for someone to raise them.”
The pain on her face was so intense, I felt a flash of remorse that I’d cornered her like this. She wasn’t prepared for me. But I hadn’t been prepared either. It was aces as far as I was concerned.
“He would have been waiting a long time for you,” she said softly, taking a few steps toward me and then stopping, her stance aggressive, her hands clenched. The grieving mother was gone. She was the wronged woman now. And I was the man who knocked her up and left town.
“That’s how you want to play this?” I gasped hoarsely, all my anger back in full force, so angry I wanted to start ripping fence posts from the ground and flinging barbed wire.
“Play what, Moses?” she snapped. And I snapped too.
“The fact that you and I had a son. I had a son! We made a child together. And he’s dead. And I never knew him. I never knew him, Georgia! I never knew a damn thing about him. And you’re going to spit that shit at me? How did he die, Georgia? Huh? Tell me!” I knew. I was almost sure I knew. Eli kept showing me the truck. Georgia’s old truck, Myrtle. Something happened to Eli in the truck.
