Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [2]
These parts of the story were never told because, quite simply, nobody would ever talk about them. During the last few weeks of Gary’s life, Larry Schiller—who had secured the rights to Gary’s life story and who would later conduct most of the interviews for The Executioner’s Song—tried to get Gary to talk openly about the realities of his childhood and family life. Schiller sensed that something horrible had happened in that past, but Gary insisted this was not the case, and he often met these questions with mockery or anger, even until the last hours of his life. Months later, Schiller and Norman Mailer would spend numerous hours interviewing my mother, Bessie Gilmore, trying to explore the same necessary territory: Had something happened in Gary’s childhood that later turned him to the course of murder? Schiller and Mailer tried their best but, more often than not, my mother answered their inquiries with maddening riddles and outright avoidance. There were large, dark parts of the family’s past that she would not deal with, and that she preferred to cloak in the guise of mystery. Something to do with my father: how he had lived his life and how he had treated his sons. Whatever happened in those long-ago days, neither Gary nor my mother would reveal it, and both of them went to their graves keeping a tight hold on their secrets. It was as if they would rather die than give up the past.
I also would not discuss the details of my family’s past. In fact, I would spend the next fifteen years of my life trying my best to distance myself from my family and what I saw as its terrible history and luckless destiny. I used to tell myself that whatever ran in Gary’s blood that turned him into a killer did not also run in my blood, and that whatever turned my family’s hopes to wreckage would not also devastate my life. I was different from them, I knew. I would escape.
I now know better. To believe that Gary had absorbed all the family’s dissolution, or that the worst of our rot had died with him that morning in Draper, Utah, was to miss the real nature of the legacy that had placed him before those rifles: what that heritage or patrimony was about, and where it had come from.
“[T]here are transgressors who, if they knew themselves, and the only condition upon which they can obtain forgiveness, would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering to appease the wrath that is kindled against them, and that the law might have its course.”
— BRIGHAM YOUNG,
Journal of Discourses
Even when the Mormons built ghosts, they built for the ages.
—WALLACE STEGNER,
Mormon Country
ONE BY ONE I HAD WATCHED THEM ALL DIE. First, my father. Then my brothers Gaylen and Gary. Finally, my mother, a bitter and ravaged woman. In the end, there was just me, the youngest, and Frank, the oldest. Then one day, when the pain of the family’s history had become too much to bear, Frank simply walked into a shadow world and could not be uncovered, no matter how hard I sought him. Or maybe I just didn’t seek hard enough.
That was over a decade ago. In the time that followed I believed I was no longer tied to the wreckage that had been my family’s spirit, and whatever devastations might come in my life, at least now they would be my own. I told myself I was finally alone: free to pursue my own family dream.
One day, though, that dream dissolved into a nightmare. When that happened, I began to understand that I hadn’t avoided my family’s ruin after all. Indeed, it felt like our ruin might be endless and that the only way to stop it might be to stop the legacy itself—and the only way to do that was to crack open its god-awful secrets, if I could find them.
And so now I want to go back into my family—back into its stories, its myths, its memories, its inheritance.