Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [67]
No, I never believed any of it. I’m not even sure I believed it when, many years later, after I had tried to return to my home, I finally came face to face with something terrible in a small, dark room—something that grabbed hold of me in the worst hour of my life and said: “I know you: You are the last one left, and now I am coming for you.” No, I told myself, this ghost is not real, this haunting is coming from someplace else, some dark place deep inside. Even then, I told myself, there were more horrible things that could be gripping me than a ghost.
But that’s another story, and it is not yet time to tell it.
MY FAMILY WENT BACK TO PORTLAND, OREGON. Another miserable trip, Frank and Bessie fighting the whole way about who was to blame for the Salt Lake move in the first place. When they got back into town, Bessie insisted that the first thing they should do was to go and retrieve Gary’s dog, Queen.
They pulled up to the house where they had left the dog and knocked. Nobody answered. They went to another neighbor and asked him if he knew where the dog was. “I hate to tell you this,” the man said, “but Queen was shot just a couple days ago.” It turned out that a few days before, when the woman who now owned Queen was drunk, she beat the dog with a belt and it attacked her in return. Queen put the woman in the hospital, so the woman had the animal shot.
Bessie cried for days over Queen’s death. She could not believe that somebody had shot Gary’s pet. It was as if the dog had come to embody the family’s calamity—the hatred and punishing fate that she saw in store for herself and her sons. Right then, Bessie would later say, she knew what the future held.
And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
—ST. MATTHEW 10:36
MY FIRST MEMORY of my brother Gary goes like this:
I must have been about three or four years old. I had been playing in the front yard of our home in Portland on a hot summer day, and I ran inside to get a drink of water. When I came into the kitchen I saw my mother and my brothers Frank and Gaylen sitting at the kitchen table, and seated with them was a stranger. I remember that he had short brownish hair and bright blue eyes and that he gave me a shy smile.
“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing at the stranger.
Everybody at the dining table laughed. “That’s your brother Gary,” my mother said. She must have seen the puzzled look on my face—the look that said, My brother Gary? Where did he come from?—because she added: “We’ve kept him buried out back next to the garage for a while. We finally got around to digging him up.” Everybody laughed again.
The truth was, he had been at a reform school for boys for the last year or so, and nobody wanted to explain that to me.
For years afterward, that’s how I thought of Gary: as somebody who had been buried in my family’s backyard and then uncovered.
IN 1952, MY FAMILY bought another house on the outskirts of Portland, and my father returned to publishing his building codes book. In this case, the term outskirts is no exaggeration. The house, which was located at one end of a rural-industrial highway called Johnson Creek Boulevard, literally sat on the line that divided Multnomah County from Clackamas County. In fact, the perimeter line ran right through the bedroom in which my three older brothers slept. When it came time to decide which nearby school the boys would attend, a county official came out to examine the situation. He decided that the side of the county line the boys slept on would determine which school they would be assigned to. Gary and Frank ended up going to junior high in Multnomah County, and Gaylen wound up going to grammar school in