Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [5]
For all the hell my brothers may have gone through, they were, at least for a time, real brothers. I look at the faces in those pictures, and I hate them. I don’t want to, but I do. I hate them because I wasn’t included in their picture. I hate them for not being a part of their family, no matter how horrible its costs.
I TRY TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER. I shut my eyes and make myself recall her face from my earliest memories, when my father was gone much of the time, and my brothers had not yet drifted into lives of serial disaster. She smiled a lot in those days; every morning I awoke to a face that seemed to take delight at my awakening. Then I see her face from a few years later. It was different by then, full of hot anger, and sometimes alive with a dangerous insaneness—a face that could not help displaying the costs of a history of endless disappointments. I grew afraid of her face during that time—in part because my father told me I should be afraid of it—and that only made matters worse.
The truth is, Bessie Gilmore had plenty to be angry about. My father had taunted and berated and beat her for years, and my brothers had already turned our house into an address of neighborhood notoriety. But the anger began earlier than that. Much earlier.
In the end, my mother is the person I would spend the most time with in my family, and as I grew older I believed I identified with her experience of sorrow and loneliness, her sense of being a maddened outcast. But now, I reach this place where I must begin to reconstruct her for this story, and I am surprised to learn that perhaps I never really understood the depths or the sources of her damage at all. The rest of us in the family were men; I know well our particular meannesses, our fitful and plundering moods. To a certain extent, I even understand the violence that ran through our lives—at least I understand how one can hate the world for its refusals, and how one can want to punish or destroy anything or anybody that might savor a happiness that we will never have. But when I try to imagine the reality of my mother’s heart, and its endless hatred and fear and hurt, I grow afraid. I’m afraid that the deepest parts of our hearts are inherited, and that my mother’s was a heart of prophecy. In the end, I am only able to enter her memory when I imagine the damnation she felt in her youth and the bereavement she felt in her later years. It’s as if I only understand the painful brackets of her life: the fright she grew up in, the fright she died in.
But I also know this: It was my mother who did her best to instill in me a sense that I might succeed in this world—in other words, that I might escape the tradition of our family—and it was she, perhaps more than any other person, who helped enable me to accomplish that dream. It is probably true, in fact, that she sacrificed some of the health and security of her later years so that I might realize that success. In turn, I learned how to forsake her, just as I learned how to forsake everybody else in my family. She wanted me to survive our bad legacy, to be her best work, and yet in order to do that, I felt I had to leave her behind, and of course that hurt her. You cannot move into a new world and still stay bound to the demands of the old world, and I figured I was somebody who was always headed for new worlds.
But I wasn’t the only one that my mother had hopes for. I suspect that she saw Gary as her work as well: Perhaps he was the one who might act out her rage for her, and avenge all the years of abuse and exclusion she had suffered during life in Utah. If ever a mother had a son who might pay back the legacies of her past, then that alliance was Bessie and Gary Gilmore. I remember my mother once telling me: “Gary was the criminal. I’d like you to be the lawyer. Your brothers will need a good and caring legal mind.”
She said this without demand, but also utterly without humor or