Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [108]
Looking at the bird, I felt sick and awful. I had wanted to see this creature shot dead as much as my brothers had wanted to shoot it, but now that I was looking at its sprawled, lifeless form, I realized I would never see the pheasant fly again or hear its call. It felt like we had just committed an unforgivable sin.
I went off and sat a few feet away while my brothers plucked the bird’s feathers. I told myself that I would never pick up a gun, never fire one, never shoot anything.
And to this day, I never have.
The graves grow deeper.
The dead are more dead each night.
Under the elms and the rain of leaves,
The graves grow deeper.
The dark folds of the wind
Cover the ground. The night is cold.
The leaves are swept against the stones.
The dead are more dead each night.
A starless dark embraces them.
Their faces dim.
We cannot remember them
Clearly enough. We never will.
“THE DEAD,”
by Mark Strand
I HAVE SAID VERY LITTLE so far about my other brothers, Frank Jr. and Gaylen. In part, that’s because the marriage of my parents and the troubles with Gary occupied so much space in our family drama. But by concentrating on those stories—particularly Gary’s—I run the risk of saying that those are the family’s only stories that truly mattered. Also, by reporting that Frank Jr. and Gaylen were physically and emotionally mistreated just as much as Gary was, and yet neither of them went on to match Gary’s criminal life or to kill anybody or to die at the executioner’s hands, is to invite some people to say: “Look, these boys had it bad too, yet they did not kill. Therefore, Gary’s evil must have been his own doing—it had to arise out of his own will and his own peculiar meanness.” Even my mother had to face this possibility. “I raised both Frank Jr. and Gary side by side,” she told Larry Schiller in 1977. “One son picked up the gun. The other did not pick up the gun. Why?”
That one child killed and the other did not is, obviously, an important matter. But the fact that my brother Frank wasn’t a killer does not mean he did not also suffer a damage worthy of killing. There are all kinds of ways to die in this world. Some die without taking others with them. It’s a victory, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it the same as redemption.
I HAVE ALREADY MENTIONED that Frank was a magician. As a child, I spent many hours watching him pull silk scarves out of thin air or make a bouquet of flowers materialize and then disappear with a wave of his hand. I begged him to show me how to perform the same wonders, but Frank took pride in what he had learned and would not easily give up his secrets. He showed me how to accomplish a few tricks, but when he tried to show me the intricacies of his legerdemain—for example, how to manipulate or hide coins or playing cards with a subtle movement of your fingers—I couldn’t match his skills. Frank Jr. simply had remarkably deft hands and a keen patience. A few times over the years, when he would perform at local schools, he let me work as his assistant on a handful of tricks. Those were some of the proudest moments I ever had with any of my brothers.
I never really understood why Frank Jr. didn’t stay with his avocation. Obviously, magic or any other performance skill can be difficult to parlay into a successful career, but Frank probably had the talent to make such an ambition work. For that matter, he is still an accomplished sleight-of-hand artist. One day, a year or so ago, Frank came over to my apartment in Portland and showed me a few card tricks he had been working on. He would tell me to draw any card from the deck, memorize it, and put it back in the deck. He’d ruffle the cards, pass his hand over them, and the card I had chosen would rise mysteriously upward from the pack as he held it upright in his hands. He could even make my chosen card pop up in the deck backward. I was just as impressed that day by Frank’s artistry as I had been as a child, and so I asked him: Why had he never gone on to become