Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [66]
No question about it. There was now a terrible spirit living inside her son.
ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, MY MOTHER’S FAMILY had a party at their home in Provo. My mother had known about it for weeks, but she and my father and the rest of us had not been invited. Finally they got a last-minute call and drove down to the Browns’ farm. When they got there, they were treated rudely. Nobody would talk with my father, even though he had taken Bessie’s parents the present of a new radio. And while others were allowed to sneak drinks of liquor that night, Frank’s bottle of beer was taken away from him.
Both my brothers Frank and Gary didn’t like seeing their father treated this way, and they insisted to my mother that everybody go back home. They were gone before the New Year had been rung in.
THE NEXT NIGHT, JANUARY 1, 1952, my family was seated back in the living room in Salt Lake, tired and dispirited from the trip to Provo. There were odd noises around them during the evening, and everybody seemed a bit on edge. Then a sound came from the attic—a moan that was long and mournful, like the noise of a creature caught in the agony of death. Everybody in the family gathered under the ceiling door to the attic and looked upward. Bessie turned to her husband. She said: “How would you like to go up there and have a talk with that big mouse?” Frank said nothing. He stood there with the rest of his family, staring at the place where the noise was coming from. But Bessie could see that the dark presence in the house had finally got to him too. “If we don’t leave here, Frank,” she said, “we’re going to die under the weight of that evil thing.”
The following day, my father put the Salt Lake City home up for sale.
A year or so ago, my brother Frank and I went back to the old neighborhood in Salt Lake to see if we could visit the house where we had once lived. Frank looked around the streets and walked up and down the blocks, double-checking the address we had found. He remembered the neighborhood well, he said. All the old homes were still standing, Frank pointed out, except for one. The house where we had once lived was the only one gone. Where it had stood was now flattened, barren land.
I’VE TOLD ENOUGH GHOST STORIES NOW that I should make one thing plain: All these stories came from my mother’s memory or from other accounts of family legend. None of them are my own remembered experiences, except in the sense that they are part of the tormented and hyperbolic family mythology that I grew up with. I listened to my mother attentively when she told me these stories, but I think she knew that, for all the love and compassion that passed between us, I did not—in fact, could not—believe her ghost tales. She knew that I believed that if anything haunted us and our dreams, it was ourselves—that we did not require evil spirits to bring sins and cruelties and stupidities into our lives. We had our own history, our own dark hearts, to do that work for us.
No, I never believed in the stories of the goddamn ghosts. I did not believe that a spirit had killed my mother’s sister or had crouched over Gary on that fevered night or had reached out to kiss me as a baby years later. Nor did I believe, as my mother did, that somehow that ghost had followed Gary, finally catching up with him again when he made the fateful mistake of returning to Utah in April 1976. I knew there are worse things than an inhuman touch in the night. There are memories of rage and loss and longing that are so ruinous and transforming, you can carry them to your grave before they will leave you alone. It is easy to be frightened of the unknown, and it is also easy to give superstition the power to rule you. By contrast, it is much harder to confront the real demons—the faces of all those