Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [198]
I came to realize that Gary meant something different to many people than he meant to me—maybe he even meant more to some. Maybe he was a sign of power, or heroism, or disgust, or an exemplar of fame, or even somebody to be pitied or turned into a cause. Whatever he was, he was something they got to through me, but I knew enough to know that I wasn’t what they wanted. I wasn’t famous, and I wasn’t the criminal. I was a stand-in or substitute target for their reprehension or their fascination, sometimes both at the same time, since many people affect scorn for the killers they secretly admire or envy.
There were days, during this time, that I wanted to kill the world. I suppose that in those moments I was finally like my brother in all respects except one: He was destroyed enough to pull the trigger, and I was not.
AGAIN, I WAS MORE OR LESS LEAVING THE CURRENT-DAY REALITY of my family behind me. I would visit my mother up in Oak Grove, Oregon, a couple of times a year, but it was always disturbing. She had taken to talking incessantly about the past—about her childhood in Utah, about Gary’s execution—and her health was in wretched shape. After Gary’s death, she refused to leave her trailer, and my brother Frank and I could not convince her to see a doctor. She lived a reclusive existence, in a virtually crippled state, in a dark, closed-up, and dirty cubicle. When I visited there, I felt hemmed in. It was a hard place to breathe; we had the company of bad memories all around us in that space, and the promise of more to come.
There were people, I know, who tried to reach her. Some members of the Mormon church came by to offer their sympathy and help, but she refused them. She would sit in her chair in the trailer, with all the windows and doors shut, and yell at her visitors: “What did you do to try to save him? Don’t come around now telling me you’re sorry, or that you know how I feel. You do not know how I feel.”
Other times, when people knocked, she would sit there, not moving, not answering. This was something she had done for many years, even during our life on Oatfield. “If you don’t open the door to bad news,” I remember her saying, “then bad news can’t touch you.” My mother wasn’t about to open the door to anybody anymore, other than her remaining sons.
She had good-enough reason. It was not that hard to figure out where she lived, and sometimes, late at night, about the hours the bars were letting out, she would be sitting in her chair in the kitchen, in the dark, and she would hear a car pull up outside. She would hear voices, whispers, laughs, profanities, threats. Some people yelled horrible things, some people threw bottles or cans at the trailer. She sat there in the dark, not moving, knowing full well that the world outside her walls was a world of no forgiveness.
“Bessie suffered untold things the heart cannot bear,” one of her friends remarked later. “That was why she withdrew behind those walls.”
I know that in my mother’s last few years, my absence hurt her much. I know because Grace McGinnis—who had resumed a telephone relationship with my mother by this time—told me so. I know because, on one of the interview tapes that Larry Schiller and Norman Mailer loaned me, my mother