Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [15]
On December 4, 1907, after a year and a half of courtship, Will Brown and Melissa Kerby were married in Provo. The money side of things ran against them from the start. With his father dead, it had fallen to Will to continue the support of his mother and siblings and the maintenance of their farm, in addition to looking after his own new family. What’s more, Mary Duke Brown insisted that her children stay as close to her as possible. With such obligations, a man couldn’t make much of a living or afford much of a home, and so, after their wedding, Will and Melissa took the only course they saw open: They moved in with Will’s mother and devoted their time to her farm. According to my mother, Mary Brown was a hard taskmaster. It was as if she’d been waiting all those years for Alma Brown to die so she could try on his role for size.
In 1908, Melissa and Will had their first child, a boy named George. Two years later, they had another baby, a daughter named Patta, but the birth had been hard on Melissa, and she almost died. Will decided that the crowded living conditions at his mother’s farm, plus the strain of looking after two children, would likely be too much for Melissa. He told his mother that the time had come for him and his wife to build then-own home. Mary Brown didn’t like the idea of losing her son entirely to a life of his own, and so she made him an offer. Up Jordan Lane a ways, where the road curved around to a hill crest that sat across from the Wasatch Mountain Range and overlooked the entire Provo Valley—an area appropriately called Grandview—there was a nice bit of farmland that Mary and Alma had owned for years and had once hoped to move to. She would give her son and his wife the best acre and a quarter of that land, on the condition that Will would continue to run her own farm for her and would promise that, as soon as his children were old enough to lift a pail and dig dirt with their hands, they too would help on her farm. Will knew that this was a chance to get some of the best high-level farmland in the Provo area. He agreed to his mother’s terms, and within a short time he had built a two-room house on the land at the top of Jordan Lane, for him and his wife and children to live in.
A year after Patta, Melissa bore her third child, a girl named Mary, and then, on August 19, 1913, my mother, Bessie Brown, was born. In the next few years, five more Brown children would be born: Mark, Alta, Wanda, and a pair of twins, Ada and Ida. One by one they all crammed into the two-room house on Jordan, nine children in all, and when everybody finally started to push against each other, Will added two more rooms to the house—including a bedroom for him and his wife, and another room for all the girls. Out in back of the house, past a couple of large trees, Will built a storage and work shed, where the boys slept at night. Next to the shed, he built a large, simple barn. Will and Melissa’s home was now a modest farm, but it would never come to much—in large part because Will and his children were working his mother’s farm down the road more than they worked their own.
Like many of the small farms in Provo, Will’s farm yielded enough fruits and vegetables to keep his wife and children fed, but rarely more. For milk, there was also a family cow—an animal named Bessie. My mother hated that cow with a vengeance. It was bad enough she had to share the