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By Root 392 0

years before. One day, Robert—who aspired to a career as a professional photographer—gathered my parents and brothers in the backyard of the home on Crystal Springs and took a picture of them all together. It is perhaps my most treasured artifact of my family. Separately, everyone in the picture is in the role that would fit him or her best in life. My father looked no-nonsense, my mother looked like this was not a fun moment, my brother Gaylen wore a darling and irresistible smile, and Gary was already rehearsing his menacing stare. It is my brother Frank, though, who has the most fitting expression of any of them: a goofy, clownish smile that says, Isn’t this ridiculous—all of us posing like a real family? Nobody in the photo is touching anybody else. And of course, I’m not there, I’m not in this picture yet. In fact, I never would be. This is the closest thing to a family portrait we would ever have. There would never be a photo taken of all of us together.

But not all the family’s changes were good. There was, for example, the matter of the new dog. According to my mother, the dog was half Alaskan husky, one quarter chow, and one quarter German shepherd. It had been bought as Gary’s dog, and he had named it Queen. The dog ended up like its owner, in more ways than one: She started as something small and harmless and became vicious and deadly. Originally, the dog had been one of those things my father wanted and my mother strongly opposed. After it became a part of the family, my father turned against it and began to punish it, while my mother fought to protect it. My father’s favorite disciplinary trick was to roll up a newspaper like a baseball bat and beat the animal with it. “He beat the dog for the same reason he beat anything,” my brother Frank said. “What reason did he need?” The dog took it until it got old enough not to take it, then it turned on my father. It was only my mother’s ability to command Queen that saved Frank Gilmore from being severely hurt.

Queen kept her distance from my father, but she was devoted to Bessie and my brothers. Frank and Gary used to take the dog for walks all the time in the neighborhood, and if other kids gave them trouble, or any other dogs became threatening, Queen took care of them. By my mother’s count, Queen attacked at least fifteen people—biting some of them savagely—and killed at least two other dogs. One time, Gary and Frank had been in mischief down the road and got a neighborhood man angry. He picked up a meat cleaver and began to chase my brothers down Crystal Springs Boulevard. My mother—who had Queen locked up in the house that day—heard her sons’ cries, and when she looked out the window, she saw the man chasing them. She said that was the only time she ever purposely unleashed Queen on anybody. She opened the front door, pointed at the man, and Queen moved like a cheetah. She knocked the man down from behind, bit him all over his arms and probably would have ripped the man’s throat out if my mother hadn’t called her off.

It’s a wonder nobody ever shot the damn animal during those days, or the people who owned it. As one of my friends once pointed out to me, the dog wasn’t a pet so much as a weapon—a killer beast, to defend the family in its protective posture and keep the outside world at bay, as my father finally ran the risk of settling down.

THE DOG HAD TO MOVE INTO THE BACKYARD after I came along.

A year or two after Gaylen’s birth, my mother had another baby boy, which only lived a few days or weeks and then died. I never knew anything about this child until recently, when my brother Frank told me about him. According to Frank, the baby was born, died, and was buried, and nobody ever mentioned him after that. To this day, I do not know this baby’s name, or where it might have been born or died. It was one of those things that was never discussed, and had Frank not had some memory of the event, I would never have known it happened.

After that, my mother was told she could have no more children. But as she watched my father take each of her sons into the