Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [123]
You followed that road up the hill in a long, semicircular loop, and just before it crested out, it turned sharply left. You made that swing and you were at the top of the hill. There, on the left, at the highest point of Milwaukie’s nicest hill, was our new home. In those days it was a two-story gray structure, set back off the highway, high upon an embanked yard. Several wide steps took you up to a large front porch, with squared pillars and a hanging bench swing. On the left of the house was a large side yard, and to the left of that was a long driveway loop that circled around a teardrop-shaped garden island. In back there was another acre of yard, with a big cherry tree at its center.
Walk through the front door of the house and you entered the living room, with a red brick fireplace along the main wall. To its right there was a double-width sliding door that took you into the dining room, and alongside that was the kitchen. At the rear of the house was a glassed-in sunporch. The upstairs held four bedrooms, plus the main bathroom and another sunporch. From the upstairs windows you could see the church steeples and rooftops of Milwaukie, and beyond that, you could see the skyline and night lights of downtown Portland, eight miles away. It was a mesmerizing view.
I loved that house on the hill, and I also grew to fear it. It is, beyond question, the central house of my mind, my life, my memory. Not a week goes by that I don’t dream of it.
I know that if I could return there, I would. When I was living back in Portland a couple of years ago, I wrote the people who were the current residents of our old home. I told them I was working on a book about my family’s life, and I asked if I could pay the house a brief revisit. I never heard from them. I can’t say that I blame them. I’m not sure I’d want somebody connected with such a bad past walking through my front door.
As I SAY, MY MOTHER SAW THIS RELOCATION as a new start for the family. This was the home she had always wanted, and she set about landscaping the yard with elaborately-patterned flower gardens, while filling the house with fine furniture imported from Europe and Japan. I think she hoped that a new, better home would rehabilitate the family— that it would give my wayward brothers some new pride and, in turn, win back my father’s faith and support for his sons. She wanted us to be the family on the hill, not the family near the tracks.
But something that none of us had counted on was about to happen. We began to die.
There’s an episode I’ve always thought of as the harbinger to this development, though I can’t say exactly why the particular memory works this way in my mind.
I had just started school at Milwaukie Grammar School—the middle part of the third grade. It was my father’s custom to drive me there and pick me up afterward; he did not like me riding the bus with other children. This one afternoon in early December a heavy snow had started to fall on the Willamette Valley. As school let out, our teachers advised us to check the radio listings early the next day, since they expected the school would be closed due to weather conditions. That afternoon, at four-fifteen, I waited in front of the school for my father’s 1960 green Pontiac station wagon to pull up. He was late this day—something I had never known him to be before—and it gave me a bad feeling.
When he finally pulled up, long after all the other kids and school buses had departed, he had a worried look on his face. “Whatever you do,” he instructed me after I got in the car, “don’t say anything to your mother that might upset her. We’ve had painters and decorators at the house all day, and she hates the colors and patterns of everything,