Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [178]
Then the phone rang.
My mother walked, in her slow, limping way, into the trailer and over to the phone. It always took her many moments to get to the phone, so anybody who called her was accustomed to letting the phone ring for a long time.
When she answered, it was Brenda. Brenda asked to speak with Frank. This struck my mother as odd. “He’s not here, Brenda. He’s at work. Is something wrong? Has something happened to Gary? What kind of trouble is he in?”
“He’s fine, Aunt Bessie. I really think I should wait and talk to Frank.”
“Brenda, tell me what’s happened.”
She heard Brenda take a deep breath. “Bessie, they’ve got Gary on a Murder One charge. He shot two men in the head, and then he shot one of his thumbs off.”
It was Brenda’s way to be blunt when she had to be, but this was more bluntness than my mother could bear. “I don’t believe you,” she told Brenda. “The Gary I know would not do such a thing.”
“Well, Bessie, you better believe it. He killed two young Mormon men.”
Brenda then handed the phone to Vern. He affirmed to my mother what Brenda had said and gave her a bit more information about the killings. “I think you should brace yourself, Bessie,” he said. “They recently restored the death penalty here. People are angry. I think they’re going to kill Gary.”
My mother hung up and tried calling Gary at the jail in Utah. When a police officer answered, she told him who she was. “Don’t kill my boy,” she said to the policeman, weeping. “Please don’t kill him. We did so much to get him out.” The officer was tender with her. Told her that nobody at the jail had any plans to hurt Gary. Then went and told my brother that his mother was on the telephone, wanting to speak to him. “Tell her I’m not here,” Gary said.
“Very funny, Gilmore. Are you going to talk to her or not?”
“No, I’m not. I don’t know what I would say to her.”
“I HAD BEEN WORKING, CUTTING TREES, PAINTING FENCES, THAT WEEK,” Frank told me later. “It was hard labor, but it was the kind of work that made me happy.
“I stopped on the way home and got some groceries, so I could fix dinner for me and Mom. I came in with this big sack, and Mom said: ‘Why don’t you set the groceries down. I have something I have to tell you.’ I set the bag down and I turned around and she started crying. At first I thought one of the brothers had been hurt. And so I asked her. I said: ‘Man, I hope the brothers are all right.’ She said: ‘Yes, your brothers are all right, but—but Gary murdered somebody over in Provo.’
“That’s how I found out. She told me that, and you know how she would keep crying—you couldn’t understand a thing she said. Finally she calmed down enough to tell me what it was that had happened—that he had been arrested for killing two people, one in a gas station and one in a motel, both in armed robberies and apparently both in cold blood. I remember I just sat there. It was a couple of hours before I even got up and moved at all. I just sat there, totally depressed. Finally I fixed something for Mom to eat, then I wrote Gary a letter. The first thing I said was, in real big letters: WHAT HAPPENED, GARY? Then I said something else below it and I sent it over to him. When I heard from him, I remember he didn’t tell me what happened. He just wrote a letter saying: ‘I’m in jail.’ That’s all he said.”
I asked Frank if he felt as if his life had stopped, after receiving the news.
“For several hours it did, yes. It took a while to reel back from it. It’s not something that you want to hear, and we’d had so much bad news from Gary anyway. The other thing is, I remember that I was not just happy because I had some work that I liked for a change, or that I was working with people I liked. I was happy because, for the first time in many years, I had an inner peace. Everybody in the family was out of jail, and that alone was an unusual thing. And when I would come home from work in those days, I’d hear things from Mom like, ‘Oh, Gary’s working and he’s got a girlfriend and they have a little place.’ I was thinking: Man, the guy’s actually