Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [131]
KNOWING THAT MY FATHER WAS DYING had some unpredictable effects on the family. My mother was truly grief-stricken and tried to show him tenderness and care, but sometimes all the years of his abuses and her hatred took their toll. I remember one afternoon, as my father slept in the nearby living room, my mother sat in the kitchen and talked about the many ways he had hurt her and betrayed her, and all the ways she had come to hate him—and how she hated him more now that he was going to leave her alone with this family, with no easy way to support us all. They were the most bitter and pain-filled words I had ever heard from her. After listening for a long time, I left the room to use the bathroom, and as I walked past the place where my father was presumably sleeping, I looked in on him. He was sitting on the side of his bed, holding his head in his hands, and when he looked up at me, I saw a look of agony on his face. I went back to my mother and told her that I was afraid he had overheard what she had said. “Good,” she replied. “I wanted him to hear.”
I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine wanting to hurt somebody that bad. Also, I was afraid he may have heard too much; this was not the way my father should discover he was going to die.
I was too angry to say another word to my mother. I turned around and walked out on her. I stayed away for a long time.
Later that night, I found my parents sitting at the kitchen table, holding hands, talking softly. My father was crying, and my mother was petting his hand. I had never seen my parents hold each other’s hands before.
“How would you feel,” he asked her, “if you just couldn’t get better if you just kept feeling worse no matter how hard you tried? What would you think? Nothing has ever hit me like this before.”
“I know, Frank, I know,” she said, petting his hand.
FOR A TIME, THERE WAS AN AWKWARD TRUCE between my father and Gary, but sooner or later it had to crack. My brother was using drugs a lot in these days—uppers, grass, cough syrup, some heroin, plus plenty of alcohol—and he was coming and going at odd hours, bringing strangers around, who sat waiting in his car outside. I never liked the faces I saw on those men. I felt as if they were a danger, just waiting for entrance to our home.
One afternoon, when we are all at home, Gary asked my father for some money. My father was in a bad mood—the cancer was making him nauseous—and he told Gary: “Why the hell can’t you get a job and make your own money, like other adult men? Why can’t you stay the hell out of trouble for five minutes, you goddamn son of a bitch?”
That was all it took. Immediately, Gary and my father were embroiled in one of their terrifying shouting matches, and as had now become our custom, the rest of us removed ourselves to an upstairs room to wait for the storm to blow over.
Only this time, I could tell, it might not end easy. I heard a mean edge and slur in Gary’s voice that frightened me, and I heard a helplessness in my father. I think Gary must have sensed that as well, because he was making threats about tearing the house apart if he didn’t get what he wanted. I turned to my mother and Frank and Gaylen and asked them if somebody would please go down and stop the fight. They looked at me and quietly shook their heads. They had seen plenty of these fights, and they knew better than to try to get in the middle of them. I went down to the kitchen myself. My father was seated at the kitchen table, dressed in his bathrobe, and he looked gray-faced and exhausted. Gary was wearing his black raincoat and straw porkpie and was standing across the room, leaning against the kitchen counter.
“I want the goddamn money,” said Gary.
“And I want you to get the hell out of my house and never come back,” my father said, as forcibly as he could muster the words.
Gary picked a glass up off the counter and hurled it at my father. If my father had not moved his head quickly, the glass would have hit him in the face. Instead, it smashed against the wall behind him