Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [17]
Her father stopped the pounding of his hammer long enough to glance up at the mountain, then shrugged. “Sure, I don’t see why not,” he said, and went back to his hammering.
“Okay, mountain,” Bessie said, “you’re mine.”
A few weeks later, Bessie was playing in the barn, close to her father as he worked, when she came across an old wooden box, nailed shut. “What’s in there?” she asked.
Her father walked over and pried the nails off the box. “Open it and see,” he said.
My mother opened the box and inside she saw the wooden leg that Alma Brown had once used to beat his wife and son. Bessie screamed and slammed down the lid and started to cry. Will Brown, standing next to her, roared with laughter.
I WAS THE ONLY PERSON IN MY FAMILY WHO HAD NEVER spent time on my mother’s farm. My brothers had lived there several times over the years with my mother, during my father’s various absences, and they knew its temper and history almost as well as she did.
Then, one day in early 1959, my mother received word that her father had suffered a stroke and might not live much longer. My mother had not been back home since my birth, and she decided that I should make the train trip to Utah with her and see the home of my grandparents.
I was eight at the time, and even now it surprises me how much I can recall from that journey. I remember my mother’s older brother George—from whom I gained my middle name—meeting us at night at the old train station. He seemed shy and funny, a slender, elderly man with a mustache, dressed in a flannel shirt, a heavy cap with earflaps, and a winter coat. He took us to a well-weathered station wagon, and as we drove up into the foothills above Provo, George told Bessie that she should be prepared to speak loudly and directly to their mother. By this time, Melissa’s hearing was almost gone, and some days even her hearing aid hardly helped.
We pulled into a long, rough driveway that took us past a small house and into the backyard. In the moonlight, I could make out the barn and large trees that I already felt anxious to make my own. We entered the house by the back door, into a kitchen that looked as if it still had the same flowered wallpaper and old-fashioned wall telephone that had been there in my mother’s youth. In the kitchen’s corner, in a rocking chair, sat my grandmother, her head tilted in sleep, her reading glasses halfway down her nose. She did not know we were in the room until George shook her gently by the shoulder. Her eyes jumped open, with that instant look of terror and grief that comes to those who awaken to a painful reality, and then she saw my mother. Melissa leaped to her feet and hugged her daughter instantly. It was a quick reconciliation, and perhaps for both of them it momentarily overcame the years of hard distance. They talked into the night, while George showed me around the farmyard in the dark.
When it was time to sleep, Melissa led us to the bedroom where Bessie and her sisters had slept for years. I lay awake for hours, excited about being in Utah. I tried not to move, because my mother was a light sleeper. After a time, I became aware that she was crying. I looked over at her. She had her back to me, but I could tell that she had her hand cupped over her mouth, and she was sobbing a desolate, uncontrollable sob that I had never heard from her—or from anybody—before. Something about it told me to leave her alone. I figured she was crying because her father was near death, and perhaps that’s what it was, though it’s just as likely it was the memories that this place stirred for her.
By the time I awoke the next morning, my mother was already up. I found her outside, in the front yard. She was staring at the mountain that she had claimed for her own, years before. After seeing it again recently, I understood better her fondness for it. It is a proud and isolated thing, like Bessie Brown herself.
“Is that your mountain?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s my mountain. I’ve been talking to it. I know how to hear the things it says, and this morning it is