Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [14]
Between all the Mormon superstitions and various Indian tales, Provo came to be known as a haunted place. There were stories about ghosts who moved through the hills and around the farms at night: the spirits of men who had lost their land and their lives to the Mormons and their strange new rituals.
This is the area where my grandparents were born and where my mother and her brothers and sisters were born and raised. My grandmother Melissa Kerby came from nearby Wallsburg in 1880, the daughter of Joseph Kerby and Mary Ellen Murphy. Joseph Kerby was a talented artist—he was best known for taking his canvas and tools and isolating himself in one of Utah’s canyons for days at a time, painting majestic mountain views. He was also a man given to frequent depression and abrupt mood changes, and his need for solitude was often hard on his family. When Melissa was nine, her father sent her to nearby Heber, to cook and keep house for three men who worked for him. She later said that she was lonely and homesick the whole time, and it was in one of these periods of isolation that Melissa began to write as a way to stave off the boredom. It was a habit she would never give up; she wrote an incessant outpouring of poems, plays, letters, stories, and journals, and she committed herself to daily writing of one sort or another until the last day of her life.
While Melissa’s poems and church-aimed writings were full of typical Mormon pieties, her short stories were something else. Sometimes she wrote first-person accounts about a young woman whose father was lonely and tormented—a man who forced his daughter to stay home, to look after him and keep the world out, while he drank himself into deeper shame and unconscious violence. He would beat his daughter and wreck his house, but the anguish he showed afterward always won his daughter’s pity and her pledge never to abandon him to himself. Some of her other stories were about a young woman who needed to win the love and devotion of the young men around her—sometimes two or more at a time—and who would then invariably reject the men and break their hearts. It is tempting to infer facts about Melissa Kerby’s young life from these stories, but I have no way of knowing if such an interpretation would hold. All I know from family legend is that Melissa was supposed to have been attractive when she was young and had several male pursuers and, yes, she reportedly broke a few hearts before she met the man she could not spurn.
Melissa Kerby found that man in William Brown, a shy and gangling fellow who was six years her junior, and apparently no match for her intelligence. Will’s father, Alma, had lived in Provo all his life, working as a blacksmith and a railroad man. Alma married Mary Ann Duke in 1875 and, in ideal Mormon tradition, they had ten children; Will was the fifth born. In his middle adult years, Alma slipped under the wheels of a moving train at Provo’s train yards and lost a leg. After his accident, he reportedly became a hard, madly authoritarian man. In his worst bouts of rage, Alma Brown would pull off the wooden leg he now wore and would beat his wife Mary Ann with it in front of the children. Sometimes he did it until she would drop unconscious, and at least once or twice he beat her terribly enough to send her to the hospital for a few days. One time, when he was young, Will tried to intervene and stop the beating; he found the wooden leg turned against him, and he ended up in the hospital with his own leg badly injured. The Browns would later tell the story that Will’s horse had fallen on him. Will learned to obey his father without resistance after that, and he learned to keep his feelings quiet.
By the time Melissa met Will, Alma’s fearful days were past; in fact, the old man would die just a week or two before the young couple