Georgia
MOSES WAS SUSPENDED. Apparently, Ms. Murray didn’t like him drawing naked people kissing under a waterfall on her whiteboards. I was actually a little surprised. It hadn’t seemed malicious. But I guess it was a little erotic for the classroom. I felt hot all over again and wondered what Moses had been thinking. What had compelled him to do something so stupid? Was it the attention? It was only the beginning of the school year, May was a long way off, and from what I’d been able to coax out of a reluctant Moses, he couldn’t afford to miss anything. He was a senior but didn’t have enough credits to graduate unless he worked his butt off. And getting suspended was pretty counter-productive.
I thought for sure his grandma would be able to twist some arms and smooth things over to get him right back, but over the next two months it was one thing after another, and Moses couldn’t stay out of trouble. He painted another barn in town with blacks and silvers and streaks of gold so vivid it looked as if the entire north side had been swallowed by a black hole that left a violent storm in its wake. I didn’t find out until later that that barn had been struck by lightning thirty years before and burned to the ground, killing a man in the process. The man had been trying to get his horses out and was engulfed in flames. The painting wasn’t quite as beautiful when I knew the story behind it.
The barn had eventually been rebuilt and his wife had remarried, but Charlotte Butters, his widow, wasn’t especially impressed by Moses’s artistic ability and made sure everyone in town knew what a cruel joke she thought it was, though I doubted it was anything but a coincidence. It would be a shame to paint over something so awe-inspiring, but Charlotte Butters was fuming, and Moses’s grandma had smoothed her feathers by promising that Moses would fix it, plus paint the rest of the barn to make amends. No swirls of color or Sistine chapel this time. Just plain barn red and long hours on a ladder. I was, of course, keeping him company even though he was trying to convince me to leave. As usual.
It was October, but although there was a nip in the air and the light warmed the earth at a different angle, we were having a string of unseasonably warm days, warm enough to make painting a barn after school not completely unappealing, especially if it meant I could see Moses…whether or not he wanted to see me. He and I had the strangest relationship. One minute he was telling me to scram and the next he was kissing me like he would never let me go.
To say I was rattled and confused would be putting it mildly. When I showed up in a pair of worn Wranglers and a tank top that had withstood a thousand washes and offered to help him, he took one look at me and started down a list of do’s and don’ts that were a little extreme, considering we were only painting a barn. After the exhaustive list of instructions and parameters, I sighed loudly and picked up my brush, only to have him watch me critically for a few minutes then take the brush from my hand and go back over what I’d just done.
When I protested, he interrupted.
“My job site, my rules.”
“So those are your rules. Your laws?”
“Yeah. The Law of Moses.” He smirked.
“I thought the Law of Moses was the Ten Commandments.”
“I don’t know if I have that many.”
“Well, this is the state of Georgia, and in Georgia we have a different set of laws. So when you’re in the state of Georgia—”
“When I’m in the state of Georgia?” he asked, so softly I almost missed it.
I blushed, realizing that there were sexual connotations to what I’d said. But never one to back down, I blustered on. “Ha. You wish.” I tried to resume painting, but he pushed me away from the paint can.
“You’re just hanging around me because you love breaking the rules—and don’t think I don’t know your parents have some rules when it comes to us. You being with me makes them crazy. Especially your mom. She’s afraid of me.”
Well, that was true. And he wasn’t stupid. It was definitely part of the attraction. But when he lost himself, painting like a demon, painting incredible things that came from somewhere behind those amber-green eyes, I couldn’t get close enough. And I wanted him to paint me. I wanted to stand in front of him and let him cover me in color, let me be one of his creations. I wanted to be part of his world. I wanted to fit in. It was ironic, for the first time in my life, if blending in meant being absorbed into his thoughts, sucked into his head, then I wanted to blend in. Maybe it was being seventeen, maybe it was first love, or first lust. Maybe it was just hot. But I wanted him with a desperation that consumed me. I had never wanted anything so much in my life. And I couldn’t imagine wanting something so much ever again.
“Why do you like me, Moses?” I huffed, hands on my hips. I was tired of being pushed and pulled, never knowing what he really wanted.
“Who says I do?” he answered softly. But he turned his eyes on me. And his eyes kept me hopeful when his words would have crushed me. His eyes said he did.
“Is that one of your laws? Thou shall not like Georgia?
“Nah. It’s thou shall not get strung up.”
His words made me sick. “Strung up? Like lynched? That’s just sick Moses. We may sound like hicks. I may say seen when I should say saw. I may say was when I should say were. We may be small town people with small town ways. But you being black, or whatever color you are, doesn’t matter to anyone here. This isn’t the sixties, and it sure as hell ain’t the Deep South.”
“But it’s Georgia,” he answered softly, playing games with my name the way I had done. “And you’re a sweet Georgia peach with fuzzy pink skin, and I’m not biting.”