Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [20]
NOT LONG AGO I PAID A REPEAT VISIT of sorts to the Brown farm.
My cousin Brenda took me on a drive up around the Grandview area, which is now filled with nice, clean, box-style houses. What was once Jordan Lane is now Jordan Avenue, and at the end of the avenue is the property that was once owned by my grandparents. It now belongs to a cousin—the son of one of my mother’s sisters—and he (or somebody) has sequestered the land behind a fence and posted a sign: DEAD END, PRIVATE PROPERTY. There’s something unreal about the barrier: It’s a dead end where there really shouldn’t be one; you get the feeling that what’s been sealed off here isn’t property so much as history—a past that’s better forgotten. At the same time, there’s no history visibly apparent. Everything that was once here has been transformed or razed, turned into modern urbanity, and modern mundaneness. Of course, you can’t exactly fault anybody for that. Who would want to live in or preserve an old two-room shack farm merely because their grandparents lived there? Who would want to keep an artifact of past poverty and fragmented family hopes intact as an unvisited and unloved museum? Yet in another way, none of this transformation matters: It still felt like a place where loss was lived out over the course of nearly a century. Some things don’t leave the air just because the land has been changed.
Brenda and I parked out front, where some boys tinkered on a car, and since we were on what was essentially private property we gradually invited some curious looks. Brenda asked for her cousin, and he came out, acting polite, but also wary—perhaps not exactly thrilled to find me, a bad reminder of a horrible history, on the edge of his front lawn. We talked nicely and emptily for a few minutes, but there was no invitation to come in and see what had been done with the farm, or to look about the old property. After a bit, Brenda said our good-byes and we got back in the car to drive on. As we left, Brenda pointed out a patch of ground right before the property, just at the place where the land begins to tip and run down over the steep hill to the valley below. “That’s where it happened,” she said, and I knew immediately what she meant. It is the spot where, over sixty years before, tragedy entered and filled the Browns’ life with a suddenness and horrific impact that was never forgotten, and never eradicated. In the light of the setting sun, it almost looked as if there was still a patch of blood on that spot—blood that cost so much hope and, in my mother’s mind, announced such unshakable ruin that no amount of time or weather could ever fade it out.
AS THE YEARS PROGRESSED, THE BROWN CLAN BROKE DOWN into two camps: the good children and the rebellious ones. In the former group were those who were diligent farm workers, and who were obedient to their parents and church leaders—such as Mark, Mary, and Wanda. In the latter camp were those who made a point of having a will and pride of their own, like George and Patta, and, in time, my mother. Somewhere in between these two factions was Alta, who had been born five years after Bessie. Alta was the dividing line between the family’s older and younger children. She was also a dividing line in other ways.
In the photos I have seen of her, Alta looks plain and stoic, like so many of the serious-faced children of pioneer stock. But in her eyes you could see an unmistakable, active intelligence. She looked like someone who could outsmart anybody around her without making the slightest show of it. That’s probably why she became everybody’s favorite of the Brown children—well-liked enough that her death was headline news in Provo. In her parents’ eyes, Alta was the ideal child: She was humble and obedient