Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [53]
BACK IN PROVO, BESSIE’S PARENTS LET HER STAY in the shack out back, while George roomed with Uncle Charley, next door. Will and Melissa weren’t thrilled to have their black-sheep daughter back home. They had little money as it was, and they figured they had already finished raising and housing all the children they were going to raise. Even the young twins, Ada and Ida, were now married and living away from home. Bessie had been one of the first to leave the Browns’ household, and it seemed to them that she had thumbed her nose when she took her leave. Then, she went on to marry a non-Mormon man she knew too little about—inarguably a criminal, as her father had surmised—and now she was back to make a nest at the home she had once spurned, while she waited for her husband to be released from prison. Plus, she had done all this without regard for the shame that she now brought to their home. The Browns didn’t think of themselves as petty-minded, righteous types who would hound a man for small mistakes; they had seen many Mormon boys take missteps over the years, and they had seen how a mix of swift punishment and loving forgiveness had helped redeem these men. But to their way of thinking, there was nothing small about Frank Gilmore’s mistakes, and there was likely no redeeming him. He had violated the trust of his wife and endangered the welfare of his children with his repeated crimes, and he apparently had no regard for the basic laws of society. He was a sordid man, they decided—a man whose evil ran much deeper than their gullible daughter suspected. Will and Melissa Brown didn’t like anything about Frank Gilmore, and neither did anybody else in their family. “I was afraid of him,” Bessie’s little sister Ida would say, years later. “I’d hide whenever he was around. I didn’t even like to look at him.”
Bessie felt the family’s damnation enwrap her, almost as if sentence had been passed on her as well. She felt humiliated by her husband’s actions, and she hated being relegated by her parents to the backyard, like some bad animal. It wasn’t long before all the rancor—the censure she felt from her family and the disappointments of her still-young marriage—began to churn inside her, and her pain and resentment melded into rage. She and her mother would get into fierce shouting matches about the mess of Bessie’s life, and Bessie would say nasty reciprocal things about the hypocrisy of her sisters and the meanness of her father. Melissa couldn’t stand it. “If you are going to dare talk that way about your own kin,” her mother said, “godly people who have prayed for you out of the love and charity of their hearts, then you can go and sit by yourself out back. I will not allow you to speak that way about your family in my home.”
Bessie stormed back to the shed where she slept with her children and slammed the door behind her. She looked at the paltry furnishings around her. Broken-down chairs and tables, a dilapidated bed—things she couldn’t even call her own. She thought about her sisters in their nice homes with their new furnishings, and she hated everything about her life that had brought her to this disgrace. My brother Frank, nearly three years old at the time, watched his mother’s movements with a learned fear. Bessie picked up a bowl from the table and hurled it against the wall. Then she picked up a chair and threw it at the door. The smashing sounds woke Gary, and he began to cry. Bessie yelled at him to stop, which only made him wail louder. She became livid and turned to Frankie. “You make him shut up,” she shouted. “Make him shut up!” Frankie went over and tried to hush his baby brother—patting him lightly on the head—but Gary kept crying. Bessie grabbed a pillow off the bed and began to slam Frank across the face with it, accompanying each blow with the same imperative: “YOU-MAKE-HIM-SHUT-UP.” She kept hitting Frank with the pillow until he ran outside, his