Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [166]
Years later, Elvis Presley would adopt this tune as one of his signature songs. Elvis was the American artist that Gaylen loved above all other singers or poets, and a half decade later, when Elvis died—only a few months after Gary was executed—I never heard that song but what I thought of my brothers, leaving behind so many fragmented, incomplete hearts to ache over them and all their terrible deeds.
I put on my coat and went out on the front porch to wait for Janet. I sat there in the night and began to shake. Death had come very close. It had swooped in, with its unerring scythe, and taken my brother. It could have taken me—it was just a matter of death making the choice. I wondered what it was like to pass into whatever realm or place of nonbeing that Gaylen had passed into, only minutes before. I looked around at the silent streets and then above, at the darkness and its few stars. I thought I saw something moving up there. I thought it was death. I felt it hover, and I felt it regard me. If I tell it to take me instead, I thought, and return Gaylen to Janet and my family, death will do that. But I could not bring myself to make this offer, and then death moved on.
I am glad it was not me who died, I thought, and a chilly wind kicked up, around me, as if in reprimand to my ugly and selfish thought.
GAYLEN’S FRIEND JOHN DROPPED ME AND JANET at my mother’s trailer in Oak Grove at about four in the morning.
I knocked on the door. In a few moments, a light went on and I heard my mother fumbling at the latch. “Who is it?” she asked.
“It’s Mikal, Mother. Mikal and Janet.”
My mother flung the door open. Her eyes were wide. “It’s Gaylen, isn’t it?” she said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” And then she and Janet wrapped their arms around each other, crying for everything that was now lost and would be forever dead.
My mother woke up Frank and gave him the news. “Don’t say that,” I heard Frank yelling from the other room. “You have to be lying.”
ASTHE SUN WAS RISING, WE WERE ALL STILL SITTING around the trailer’s small living room. My mother gave Frank and me a necessary assignment: We should go to Oregon State Penitentiary and give Gary the news. He should not hear it the same way he learned of his father’s death—from cruel guards.
As Gary entered the visitors’ room that morning, he looked unusually old, unusually tired for a man of thirty. He also looked frightened. He knew, by the earliness of the hour that something was wrong.
“We have some bad news for you, Gary,” Frank began.
“It’s not Mom, is it?” Gary asked, his face sharpening in pain.
No, it wasn’t our mother, but as we told him of Gaylen’s death, Gary doubled over in tears. It was only the second time I had ever seen him cry.
GAYLEN’S FUNERAL WAS A FEW DAYS LATER, at the same parlor where my father’s funeral took place. My mother paid the prison overtime fees, so a pair of guards could escort Gary to his brother’s funeral. The guards sat behind us, in the family’s private pews. They wore pistols under their suit jackets.
I spoke a few words at one point from the chapel’s altar. For the life of me, I can’t remember what I said: something about how we would always love and never forget our lost brother.
When I sat down, Gary was watching me. He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Then he put his arm around our mother and held her close to him for the rest of the service. She kept her head on his shoulder the whole time, crying softly.
LAST NIGHT, I HAD A DREAM ABOUT ONE OF MY BROTHERS being executed. I have these dreams often.
This time, it is Gaylen who has been sentenced to die, and it is for a crime that should not have earned him the death penalty—something like being simply an irretrievable, small-time sinner. My family and I are waiting for a reprieve to be granted him. It doesn’t come, however, and the time for his death draws near. Finally, it is somehow decided that I should be the one to