Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [27]
It was not until a year or two ago, after I started working on this book and was doing some reading in the history of Utah’s death penalty, that I learned something even more disturbing: These stories that my mother told could not have been true; she could never have witnessed what she claimed to witness. There were no semi-public executions in Utah after about 1919, when my mother would have been six years old, and it is not likely that any children or families had been present at these events for several years before that. More important, as far as I have been able to determine, there were no hangings at all in Utah during my mother’s childhood and youth. About twelve executions took place in that period—including the world-famous 1915 death of union activist Joe Hill, whom we also heard much about in our home—and all these sentences had been carried out by firing squads, behind the walls of Utah’s Sugar-house Prison, before invited assemblies of witnesses.
I think about my mother’s tales, and I know now that it was remarkable and terrible to tell these things to children or young men. On one level, of course, I am struck by the impact that such legends must have had on us. I think these images helped to instill a sense of otherness—not to mention a sense of doom—in our hearts. I think we felt we were hearing not just a story of the distant past in a cruel place, but that we were also hearing something about our own predestination. Or, to put it differently, there was no way you could hear such a story as a child and want to be any part of the world that gathered together to put a man to death. The only place left for you in the story was to be the condemned man or the child forced to behold his fate; my brother Gary chose to be one, and I guess I chose to be the other. I know I could never have chosen to be among the executioners. In any event, I grew up in a family where the noose worked as a talisman; it hung over our heads not so much as a deterrent but as a sign of destiny. As a result, the ideal of ruin was a family covenant. Nobody ever said as much out loud, but then, nobody had to.
I try to imagine what was in my mother’s heart to make this ideal such an intrinsic part of our mythology. What had really happened to her that gave her such an overpowering fear of Blood Atonement, and how did it happen that her fear would be transformed into a near prophecy of how her favorite son would die? Sometimes we tell lies about our past—maybe a claim to achievement, maybe a claim to crime—as a way of heightening our importance, and sometimes we tell our fictions as a subterfuge to keep our deepest secrets hidden. I believe that when my mother told us the story of the hanging in Utah, something else was at work for her: I think she was probably trying to convey to us the harshness of growing up amid such an unforgiving land and its people. And I also believe that she could have been trying to tell us about other ways that her father may have visited ruin and violence upon her—ways that she might not have been able otherwise to talk about, or that perhaps she could no longer bring herself to remember.
WHAT MIGHT THOSE WAYS HAVE BEEN? I don’t really know for sure. I have only guesses and rumors to offer. In one way or another, the problem probably had to do with sex. When she was still a child, Bessie was regarded as one of the Browns’ prettiest daughters. She liked dressing in graceful outfits and putting large bows in her beautiful, black hair; apparently, she made a dainty little sight at church dances and picnics. In those days, Will had been proud of Bess. Some thought he was even a bit possessive of her. But when Bessie turned older, her prettiness started to become a liability in the Brown home. According to some folks, Bessie began to take on airs. She acted as if she were the child of a rich family—as if she were simply too good to do the hard farm work that the others had to do. She didn’t like blistering