Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [30]
Bessie Brown was about to become the first child in three generations of her family’s lineage to leave the refuge of Mormon Utah.
I AM GOING TO MAKE A CONFESSION.
I never knew anything about how my parents met, or much about the early life of my family, until after my brother Gary had died. I suppose it says something about my detachment, but all I really knew much about were the family’s legends of mystery and death. I knew about the violence of Mormon history, and about the haunted death of Alta, because these were stories my mother told me, time and again. I knew also that my father had a shadowy past—that his own father had wronged him beyond repair, and he had fled some deadly secret for nearly half a century—because these stories, too, were part of our active mythology.
But what I did not know, and what nobody ever told me, was this: I did not know how my parents came to know each other, or how they came to love each other (I never even actively thought they had once loved each other, since all I ever saw between them was distance or anger). I did not know what went on in the years that my brothers were born; I knew the names of various towns the family had lived in, but almost nothing about the family’s life in those places—why my parents moved so frequently, and to such far-flung locales, or what my father did to support everybody in those towns. Mostly, I did not know if my family had ever been a real family. Had my father played sports with his sons? Had they all gone to church together, or to movies or a picnic on the weekend? Did my parents read stories to my brothers when they were small? (I don’t remember anybody ever reading to me.) Did these people love each other—was there any cohesion to the unit beyond the habit of fear or the power of hatred?
The first glimpse I had of what that life may have been like was in 1979, when Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song was published. Larry Schiller and Mailer had interviewed my mother at great length about Gary’s childhood—a core period of the family’s past—and in the book’s latter half, Mailer laid out an intriguing sketch of the family’s background. In a few pages he revealed more than I had been told in twenty-five years. To be honest, though, almost none of it sank in for me. The first few times I read the book, I let my eyes skim over those passages. I didn’t linger on the details of my father’s earlier marriages, or the mention of his criminal trouble, and I didn’t accommodate any of it to the landscape of my own memory. It seemed too much like somebody else’s world—a world you might read about in a book.
When the time came to try to dispel the secrecy of my family’s past for the purposes of this story, Schiller was enormously generous, and offered to loan me the tapes of the interviews that he and Mailer had conducted fifteen years before with my mother and my brother Gary. Somehow, hearing about the family’s hidden past in my mother’s voice helped make that past palpable for me. I had not heard her voice, of course, since she had died; I had never heard her voice tell stories like these. But for every new revelation, there were now many new questions. Schiller and Mailer tried their best, but as often as not, my mother answered their inquiries with maddening riddles and outright avoidance.
At one point, Schiller asked her why she feared telling him and Mailer too much. With my father and Gary dead, he said, who was there left to protect by preserving old secrets? She replied that she was doing it for me. “Mikal doesn’t know any of these things,” my mother said. “I’m afraid he’ll hate me when he learns all this. Or I’m afraid he’ll hate his father, which would be horrible. He was the only one of the boys who ever truly loved his father, and I would hate to take that love away from him.”
With the help of Schiller and Mailer’s tapes, and with the invaluable assistance of a few other people—primarily