Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [3]
It’s as if the structure of my family’s past has taken on the dimensions of a mystery for me. I want to see if, by examining our history, I can discover somewhere within it a key—an event that might explain what produced so much loss and violence. Maybe if I could discover some answers, I might be able to bargain my way out of any further loss.
So back I go, afraid in part that I might never know the truth, afraid also that I might find too much. I know this much: We all paid for something that had happened long before we were born, something that we were not allowed to know. In the end, perhaps it will all remain a mystery that nobody may touch at the heart.
THE FAMILY I GREW UP IN was not the same family my brothers grew up in. They grew up in a family that was on the road constantly, never in the same place longer than a couple of months at best. They grew up in a family where they watched the father beat the mother regularly, battering her face until it was a mortified, blue knot. They grew up in a family where they were slapped and pummeled and belittled for paltry affronts. They grew up in a family where they had to unite in secret misadventures just to find common pleasures.
In the family I grew up in, my brothers were as much a part of its construction as my parents. They were part of what I had to experience, to learn from. They were part of what I had to overcome and shun. They gave me something to aspire to: the chance to escape their fates. In fact, one of the ways my family best served me was by teaching me that I did not want to stay bound to its values and its debts or to its traditions.
In any event, I grew up in a world so entirely different from that of my brothers, I may as well have grown up under another surname. Obviously, I should be thankful for those differences, but of course things never work quite that smoothly. The misery of my brothers’ childhood is so distinct from the misery of my own childhood, it’s almost impossible for me to feel delivered from their hell, anymore than I feel saved from World War Two merely because I didn’t have to live through it.
You could find much of the truth about these two families—the family of my brothers and the family I grew up in—by flipping through the pages of our main photo albums. Those pages are made up almost entirely of pictures of my brothers, and in most of those photos my brothers appear together in one configuration or another. Pictures of Frankie and Gary as babies, holding each other’s hands and smiling delightedly at the camera; pictures of them standing together, in their matching army and navy outfits during the war years, or in matching slacks, with suspenders, white shirts, and wide ties, when the family lived in the deserts of Arizona. After Gaylen was born, it was pictures of the three of them. Three boys, dressed in authentic cowboy gear, standing with gleaming toy guns in their hands, all trying to look ominous, like little brother outlaws. By the time you page through the books to the time of my childhood, you will find only a few photos of me with any of my other brothers—mostly as we were lined up single file on Christmas mornings in front of the tree, looking like heartsick convicts. Just as notably, there are only two or three pictures of me by myself in those main family albums, in contrast to the numerous solo portraits of my brothers.
These pictures make plain a certain truth: My brothers and I did not inhabit the same time and space. We did not know each other. We barely belonged together. I remember playing a bit with Gaylen when I was a child, because he was the one closest in age to me, and I remember Frank Jr. taking care of me, taking me to movies, looking after me, loving me. Contrary to my mother’s memories, I don’t recall doing much of anything with Gary until years later, when