Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [147]
That was it. One night, Frank was there. The next morning he was gone. I felt worse about his leaving than anybody’s else’s. This was a kind and good man. I knew that the army would try to change him. They would try to make him as violent as his brothers.
GARY WAS IN OREGON STATE PENITENTIARY, GAYLEN WAS IN NEW YORK, Frank was stationed at California’s Fort Ord. That left just me and my mother in that big house that we could no longer afford or fill.
This was a lonely and destitute time. We had run out of money, and we were now subsisting on what came in monthly from my father’s Social Security payments.
This was also the period when I began to grow closer to my mother. There was little choice—it was just her and me now—but also I suppose I was ready to learn to see the world through her eyes, to hear it described in her voice. What a painful, persecuting world it was. It was in this time that I came to understand just how much my mother, like my father or Gary or Gaylen, identified with the life and causes of an outsider. She had, in effect, been one all her life—first, as a young girl who wanted to break rules, then, as a young woman who did break them, and finally, as a woman who had to pay and pay for having broken those rules. I learned that the world would not forgive those who flaunted its rules—that it would destroy you for doing so. My mother was an outcast. My brothers were outcasts. My mother promised that I would be one too. I would have to be strong, she told me; I would have to learn to live with the world’s condemnation, and with its punishments. I thought she was probably right, but what I didn’t tell her was I thought that the fearful world she talked about included my family. I dreamed of keeping not only the world on the outside, but also of keeping my family on the outside.
One day, I suddenly found myself living that way. In the early winter of 1965, my mother fell gravely sick and had to enter the hospital to have her gall bladder removed, or something similar. I would go visit her every day, then I would go home to the big house. I was just starting high school, and I was living by myself—at least for a few weeks. It was the first time in my life, since the years alone with my father, that I felt happy and safe.
OF COURSE, IT COULDN’T LAST. A FEW WEEKS LATER my mother came home from the hospital. But things were never quite the same. The surgery had taken something out of her. After this, she would start to live a more limited life. The first sign of this came within moments of her arriving back home. She refused to venture to her bedroom upstairs. She said she no longer had the strength to climb those steps. Instead, she moved her sleeping quarters downstairs, to the same sofa and living room that my father had made his own, during his last few weeks in our big lost house. My mother never again went upstairs. Also, after that, my mother rarely let strangers, or even friends, come into our house.
In the months that followed, the house and yard began to fall into disrepair. My mother could no longer take care of her gardens, and I found the place too big to handle. In time, the grass out front grew knee-high. The property looked awful, and forbidding. Eventually, some folks at the Mormon church started coming over regularly to help keep the yard in shape. By now, they more or less thought of us as a welfare family.
WITH MY MOTHER NOW LIVING DOWNSTAIRS, I had the entire run of the upstairs. Some weeks, I would sleep in a different room every night. Then I started hearing the voices.
I would awaken about three in the morning, and I would hear voices outside my bedroom door, maybe five or six feet away, at about the place where the mysterious gap space existed in our hallway. I’d lie there and hear those voices for an hour or two—sometimes until the sky started to lighten outside.