Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [158]
It wasn’t long before Grace was driving my mother down to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, so she could visit Gary on Sundays. A short time later, Grace started sitting in on my mother’s visits with Gary. Grace and my brother got into long and lively conversations about literature and art, and she was struck by his fine mind and his impressive vocabulary. She liked him very much.
I was invited to join these trips, but I always declined. I told Grace I had seen enough of the insides of jails and courthouses by the age of twelve to last me a lifetime.
MY MOTHER FINALLY DECIDED SHE SHOULD GO TO THE MORMON church and ask them for help with her problem. She said that if the church would help her with the property taxes, she would deed the place over to them upon her death. But the church was reluctant to take this offer. After all, she had two sons who had repeatedly got themselves in trouble and had been no help to her. Plus, she had a son who had been imprisoned for his refusal to serve in the army. Such a defiance of convention was unimaginable to the church leaders. And then there was me: The church had once taken me in, befriended me, given me the priesthood, and in turn I had become a rebel who, as far as they could see, now believed in ungodly values and was living a less than exemplary life.
The local bishop decided against giving my mother the help she requested. “It wasn’t wise for her to keep the house,” he later told Larry Schiller. “It was too large, she only lived in a room or two, and she couldn’t maintain it. She wanted to keep it because it reminded her of happier years, but it didn’t seem sensible. It seemed wiser to get her into a small apartment. But she refused that idea. I think it was an emotional thing with her. She didn’t like people telling her what to do, plus, she had an emotional tie to that house.”
The bishop was right: It was an emotional thing. I sat in on a couple of the meetings that he had with her and Grace. My mother got so livid in the discussions that she got up and walked out. She later said: “Who were they to think I didn’t need that house?”
Grace went with my mother when she visited Gary and told him that the church had refused her plea and that she would now almost definitely lose the house. Grace later said that visit was the only time she ever saw Gary get angry. He couldn’t stand the thought that my mother’s church had turned her down, and now she would forfeit her beautiful home. Grace said that was the day she first saw a look of murder cross Gary’s face.
IN MY LAST FEW WEEKS OF HIGH SHOOL, I WON A TUITION scholarship to Portland State University. Within a week or two of my graduation—in the late spring of 1969—I was looking for my own apartment in downtown Portland. It seemed a reasonable thing to do: I would be attending school in downtown Portland, and I should live close to the campus. But there was another, truer reason for why I was leaving home: I wanted to. I had always wanted to.
I could tell as I moved my last belongings out of the house on Oatfield that my mother was hurting deeply someplace inside, but she was smiling bravely, and she was saying encouraging things. Looking back now, it tears my heart to think about that parting. But at the time, my heart did not feel such pain.
A week later, I went back to the house to visit my mother. I walked up on the front porch, opened the door, and stepped into an empty front room. Where before there had been furniture and a television and people, there was now only vacancy. I walked through the entire place. My mother and brother were gone. There wasn’t a trace of them or anything they owned. Being in that empty old house scared the hell out of me. I felt a chill spot as I walked through the upstairs hallway. I feared that at any moment a set of black claws might appear out of nowhere and swipe me into the darkness. I got out as quickly as I could.
I called Grace. She explained to me that my mother