Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [18]
“Oh, Mother, he’ll be fine,” I said, even though I knew that she was likely right. This was to be my first encounter with death, and I felt both exhilarated and frightened by its nearness. It would not be long before death’s excitement wore off for me and its fearfulness increased.
“No,” she replied. “He’s not going to be all right. This time he’s going to die.” She folded her arms across her breast—a familiar gesture when she had decided to close off a discussion—and stood looking at the mountain a few moments more. Then she moved away from me, her eyes watching the ground as’ she walked around to the back of the old house. I did not follow her. I just stood, watching my mother’s mountain, trying to figure out how you talked to such a thing and how you could hear its revelations.
The rest of that day and most of the next were spent meeting my Utah family—mostly aunts who were sugar-sweet on the outside, but who seemed awfully fussy about table manners and dinner prayers. I also didn’t get along particularly well with most of my cousins. They seemed prissy and mean at the same time—in the way that only well-bred Mormon children can seem—and I remember getting in a fight or some sort of jabbing bout with one of them. The exception to all this was the family of my mother’s favorite living sister, Ida. Generations before, when Melissa began to feel overwhelmed by nine children, she had assigned the care of Ada to Mary, and Ida to my mother. Mary prodded Ada to be competitive with her twin, and told Ida that she was the uglier of the two (or so my mother claimed). In turn, Bessie became protective of Ida and dressed her in pretty clothes and bought special ribbons for her hair. Many years later, the relationship between my mother and Ida would take on its own difficulties—in part because Ida had made a stable marriage to a good, sober man, and her children were loving and respectful, and prone only to unspectacular trouble. By contrast, my mother had married a drunk who left her regularly, and her children were … well, we were bad news, no matter how you sliced it.
But during our visit to Utah, these differences were never mentioned. In fact, some of the old affections and allegiances seemed to get resurrected. When Bessie and Ida saw each other they couldn’t stop talking and laughing and crying, and on our second day there, Ida insisted that we move to her house, where she lived with her husband, Vernon Damico, and their daughters. Vern was a tall, husky man who walked with a limp—the by-product of an old war wound. He ran a popular shoe store on Provo’s Center Street, where I spent my happiest hours in Utah, watching his big hands as they soled shoes, probably in much the same way my mother once had studied her father in his work. Vern was a good man to have as an uncle: He was big, warm, protective, and good-humored. Also, he had a handsome mustache that caused him to resemble the comedian Ernie Kovacs. I didn’t know it then, but the mustache had been grown to cover a cleft palate. Vern had borne a lot of grief and nastiness because of that particular birth defect, and as a result, he had grown up rough. But I never saw any of that roughness in him. I just saw the first man who would make me wish for a different father.
Vern and Ida also had two teenage daughters, Brenda and Toni. I may have been only eight at the time, but I already knew cute and sexy when I saw it, and Brenda and Toni fit that bill in an unmistakable manner, though there was nothing showy or inappropriate about it. They were sweet and concerned, and they were the only women who would ever feel like sisters to me. I felt safe at Ida and Vern’s house. I remember thinking: This would be a good family to stay with. That same thought, I later learned, had also occurred to my brothers many times over the years, and eventually it led to horrible consequences for us all.
On the third or fourth night of our Provo visit, I was sitting on the front porch of my grandparents’ house with my mother and grandmother.