Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [54]
She beat him until the noise of his crying brought her half-deaf mother outside, to demand that she stop. “If you don’t quit hitting these children,” she said, “I’m going to take them away from you.” Then Melissa gathered Frankie and Gary and took them into the warmth of her home. She dried Frankie’s tears and fed him cookies and rocked Gary at her breast, while Bessie sat in the shack out back, crying alone, without her children or her parents.
These beatings of the babies became common, my brother Frank recalls. One time, when Bessie and her mother were arguing, Frankie interrupted, asking them to stop. “I don’t even love you anymore,” Bessie told Frankie, and then shoved him. Frankie was off balance and fell and hit his head hard against the wall. Seeing the dazed, scared look on her little boy’s face, Bessie knelt and cradled him, petting his blond hair. “Oh, Frank, I really do love you,” she said, crying. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”
Melissa felt she had seen enough. “That’s it, Bessie. We’re just going to have to take these kids away from you. We can’t stand by and watch this anymore.”
Bessie dressed Frankie and Gary and fled the farm that day. Later that night, her baby sister Ida found Bessie wandering the streets of Provo, carrying Gary in one arm and leading Frank by the hand. Ida and her husband Vern loaned Bessie twenty-five dollars and got her a room for a couple of nights at the City Center Motel, not far from where they lived. It was at this same motel, a lifetime later, that Gary would commit his second murder. He walked into City Center’s office and shot the motel manager in the back of the head. In the next room, only a few feet away, the man’s baby boy lay sleeping. The boy was about the same age Gary had been when he stayed there, in 1942.
BESSIE’S FIGHT WITH HER MOTHER GOT SMOOTHED OVER and she was allowed to return to her shack in the backyard. On July 3,1943, after eighteen months in prison, my father got time off his sentence for good behavior and was paroled from Canon City, Colorado, to Provo. Bessie felt relieved to see him, but Frank Gilmore came home a harder man than when his family had last seen him. My brother Frank told me: “He had been gone so long that I don’t think we remembered him. He was like this new man in our lives, and he was real mean. One time we were eating dinner and I dropped my cake and, man, he just went bananas. Made me get down and pick up every crumb and gave me a few good whacks along the way. He’s screaming and yelling at me and hitting me the whole time for dropping a piece of cake on the floor. Maybe he’d had a bad day, but it was an immature way to treat a little kid.” After that, the boys found themselves punished for the slightest things, like not eating their food fast enough, or crying too loud, or knocking things over. Apparently, it was not difficult to get my father angry enough to hit.
My father hadn’t been back a day when he learned that Bessie’s parents had recently been considering proceedings to have Frankie and Gary taken away from Frank and Bessie, and turned over to the custody of the Browns. Frank and Will almost came to blows in the argument that followed, and Will ordered Frank off his property. That night, Frank and Bessie and their sons were on the road, hitchhiking their way back to Sacramento. If Frank hadn’t arrived when he did, Bessie realized, they might have lost their sons to her parents and the dull life of their farm. The thought made her feel new hate throughout her veins.
AFTER MY PARENTS GOT BACK TO CALIFORNIA, Frank wanted to join up and fight the Nazis, but he was too old, plus there was the matter of his criminal record. Instead, my father took jobs working as a ship fitter in various ship plants and steel yards. For the rest of the war, that was the family’s life: Bessie