Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [28]
Whereas the other Brown children learned how to make a peace with their parents’ house rules—or to sneak around them without getting caught—Bessie liked to make a point of flouting authority. Of course, this was seen as a bad example for the other children. Then, after Alta’s death, Bessie got worse. It seemed to others in the family as if some restraint inside Bess had died along with her sister. It was like she had turned her mourning into outright rebellion—or as if she held her parents or the farm itself to blame for what had happened that day. She started staying out later, and when she came home, the fights with her parents got louder and nastier. Will and Melissa accused her of immoral behavior with the boys she dated. Bessie never came out and said it was true—it probably wasn’t—but she liked the leverage the suspicion gave her, the way it drove her parents nuts when she said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Still, it was a dangerous game. Short of murder or betraying one’s testimony of God, there was no greater sin in the Mormon world than sexual vice. By taunting her parents on this point, Bessie was risking exclusion from the family. A generation or two before, she might have been risking the discipline of the Danites.
One night, in fact, Bessie came close to such a judgment. For a couple of weeks she had been dating a young man from Salt Lake. He was rumored to be a drinker and somebody who led a fast life. This was in the middle of Prohibition, and though Provo had a speakeasy or two, no Mormon family could afford to have its daughter found in one. Bessie’s parents told her that she should no longer see this young man, and that he wasn’t welcome at their house. But Bessie kept seeing the boy anyway, and in the period of a single week she came home past her parents’ curfew on three occasions, resulting in the ugliest arguments anybody had ever witnessed in the Brown household. On the fourth occasion, Bessie was standing on the front porch of her house at about 3 A.M., giving her boyfriend a good-night kiss, when the door was flung open. Will Brown stood there with a shotgun, and he leveled it at his daughter. His face was full of fear and insanity. “I’m going to blow your whore soul to hell,” Will said, and pulled back the hammer on one of the barrels. At that moment George stepped up from behind his father and grabbed the rifle. “You aren’t shooting anybody,” he said. In the fight that followed, George and Bessie got whipped badly by their father, while the other children stood around crying, begging for the violence to stop. Meantime, Bessie’s boyfriend got his little Mormon ass the hell off the crazy Brown farm, never to bring it back.
I HAVE A HANDFUL OF PICTURES OF MY MOTHER TAKEN, I believe, by my Uncle George, in about 1933, when Bessie was around twenty years of age. I never saw these photographs while my mother was alive—they were given to me by Larry Schiller, who interviewed my family extensively, a short time after her death. The first time I saw them they bothered me so much that I put them away immediately and didn’t pull them out again for years. It took me a while to figure out my reaction. I had never before seen my mother’s image when she was a young woman. The face is unmistakably hers, and yet it appeared so different, stripped of everything that age and pain and the experiences of death would later bring to it.
My mother was always a courageous woman