Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [24]
A few weeks later, there was a final haunting. “The sisters were in their bedroom at night,” my cousin Brenda told me, “when they saw a white light in the dark room. The light came closer and closer to their bed. It was Alta. She sat down on the bed with the girls and told them she was all right, that she wasn’t in any pain and she was very happy. She wanted to make sure the girls knew that. She loved them. Then the light dimmed and she was gone, but the girls could see the indentation on the bed where she had sat.”
Nobody ever figured out what had spooked the horse in that winter dusk time, but my mother knew: She believed it was the demon of the dead man that she and Alta had conjured, and now he was the ghost that would haunt her family.
MANY YEARS LATER, WITHOUT KNOWING ANY of the details of this story, I asked my mother if I could have a Ouija board. It was during the time after my father’s death—a period in which I was reading nothing but Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Victorian ghost stories. The macabre and supernatural comforted and enthralled me in ways that I could not explain and that my mother could barely tolerate. She denied my request, and, as she had done all those years before, I went out and bought my own Ouija board and sneaked it into the house. The only problem was, I could never get my brothers to try it with me, and so, like a fool, I’d sit around by myself, with the board on my knees, asking it questions and waiting for the planchette to move under my fingers. I don’t remember ever getting much from the spirits in return.
One afternoon, my mother found me concentrating over the board, and she became livid. “I want you to get that goddamn thing out of my house immediately, and never bring it back here. And I want you to stop reading all those morose books about ghosts and horror and evil. I do not intend for all my sons to grow up to be monsters.” And then she wept, so long, so loud and pitifully, that I left the house, just to get away from the sound of her crying.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
—OSCAR WILDE,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
FOR MOST OF HER LIFE, BESSIE GILMORE SPOKE of her father as an ideal. He was a quiet and modest man who would make any sacrifice for a friend or family member in need, without asking anything in return. He was a deep-loving father, who worked long hours to keep his children clothed and in school, and who taught them to think charitably of neighbors and strangers alike.
In her last few years, though, my mother’s portrayal of Will Brown changed drastically. This was in the period following Gary’s execution, when she retreated more and more into the terrain of the past. It became one of the reasons I began to call or visit her less: All she could talk about was the milestones of our collective tragedy. I suspect that by this time the chain of all the disappointments and deaths had made her crazy, and she felt driven to reexamine each link in her mind, looking for the key to where everything had gone wrong—not unlike what I’ve been doing these last few years. Or maybe she had come to suspect that the whole story had been fated from the start, and she couldn’t stop dwelling on the cruelty of a joke that keeps you waiting over a lifetime for a punch line of hope or deliverance that never arrives. In any event, as my mother replayed her past, she began telling remarkably different stories about her youth than she had told before.
In particular, she told stories about her father. As the Brown children grew older, my mother said, Will Brown’s temper grew shorter and took on a frightening resemblance to his own father’s legendary explosiveness. The two children he selected as the most frequent targets of his anger were my mother and her older brother, George. I’m not sure what the main quarrel was between George and his father, though I do know that George became regarded by both his family and the Grandview community as the odd character