Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [195]
The night before Gary’s execution, I visited my mother and Frank. I had called the prison earlier in the day and arranged for us all to have a last brief conversation with him on the phone. His last words to my mother were: “Don’t cry, Mom. I love you. I want you to go on with your life.” And her last words were: “Gary, I’m going to stay brave for you until tomorrow, but I know I’ll never stop crying. I’ll cry every day for the rest of my life.”
She handed the phone to me. Gary told me he had talked with his biggest hero, Johnny Cash, earlier that evening. I asked him what Cash had said. “When I picked up the phone I said, ‘Is this the real Johnny Cash?’ And he said: ‘Yes it is.’ And I said: ‘Well, this is the real Gary Gilmore.’”
Gary told me he had to get off the phone. “I’ll miss you, Gary,” I said. “We’re all proud of you.”
“Don’t be proud of me,” he said. “What’s there to be proud of? I’m just going to be shot to death, for something that should never have happened.”
Those were our last words.
ON MONDAY MORNING, JANUARY 17, in a cannery warehouse out behind Utah State Prison, Gary met his firing squad. I was with my mother and brother and girlfriend when it happened. Just moments before, we had seen the morning newspaper with the headline EXECUTION STAYED, and turned on the television for more news. Good Morning America was on, and there was a press conference: They were announcing that Gary was dead.
There was no way to be braced for that last seesawing of emotion. One moment you’re forcing yourself to live through the hell of knowing that somebody you love is going to die in a known way, at a specific time and place, and that not only is there nothing you can do to change that, but that for the rest of your life, you will have to move around in a world that wanted this death to happen. You will have to walk past people every day who were heartened by the killing of somebody in your family-somebody who had long ago been himself murdered emotionally. You will have to live in this world and either hate it or make peace with it, because it is the only world you will have available to live in. It is the only world that is.
The next moment, you see a headline that holds the possibility of a reprieve. Maybe, you think, the courts are seizing control of this matter, wresting it from the momentum of this crazy, eerie inevitability. Maybe they will not allow the death penalty to be applied here so hurriedly—and maybe that will be enough to break the back of this horror, to diffuse all this madness. Maybe it would prove a reprieve not just for Gary and his indomitable will to die, but also a reprieve for what was left of this family. Maybe now we would not have to live in a world that had killed one of us without any misgiving.
And then, as soon as you’ve allowed yourself that impossible hope, you turn on the television, and there is Larry Schiller—the only journalist who was allowed to witness the shooting—and he is telling you how the warden put a black hood over Gary’s head and pinned a small, circular cloth target above his chest, and then how five men pumped a volley of bullets into that target. He is telling you how the blood flowed from Gary’s devastated heart and down his chest, down his legs, staining his white pants scarlet and dripping to the warehouse floor. He is telling you how Gary’s arm rose slowly at the moment of the impact, how his fingers seemed to wave, to send a sign of departure as his life left him, as if he were finally trying to bid a gentle good-bye to a hard life.
One moment, hope has come from nowhere. The next moment, you learn that the horror has already happened—and you know you will always have to live with the details of that horror. You will have to try to find a way to live with the sorrow that will now always be at the heart of your heart. You