Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [68]
The house itself was one of those weather-wasted dwellings that my father seemed to have a mystifying affection for. It was a two-story, dark-brown-shingled place with an unfriendly-looking face, and it sat with one or two other homes between a pair of large industrial buildings that filled the night with an otherworldly lambent glow. Across the street lay the train tracks that carried the aging trolley between downtown Portland and Clackamas County’s Oregon City. Just past the tracks ran Johnson Creek—in those days, a decent place for swimming and catching crawfish—and beyond that there was a large, densely wooded area. It was rumored that teenagers gathered at nights in those woods and drank and had sex in hard-to-find groves. It was also rumored that a gruesome murder had taken place there years before, and that some of the body parts from the crime had never been recovered and still lay buried somewhere among the trees.
On the far side of the woods was a lengthy range of small, cheaply-built houses that made up the poor part of a neighboring town called Milwaukie. Beyond that was an area of rolling hills, full of stately, privileged homes—the better half of Milwaukie. Up the hill behind our house was a neighborhood known locally as Shacktown, where laborers’ families dwelled. Drive a few blocks past that and you would hit the old moneyed district of Eastmoreland, where you could find the state’s most prestigious school, Reed College. If you were to draw two concentric circles on a map—the outer ring, a loop of wealth; the inner one, a wheel of privation—then our home on Johnson Creek Boulevard would lie at the core point of those circles. A null heart, in the inner ring of the city’s worst back country.
This is the home where my first memories come from. This was also the place that we would live the longest as a family, before imprisonment and death and hatred began to sunder us.
ONCE THE FAMILY HAD SETTLED INTO ITS NEW HOME, my father became obsessed with the idea that his sons were in need of strict discipline. Maybe it was an outgrowth of all those years on the road, when the family had been without any sort of firm or dependable structure, but my father began to see the emergence of a willfulness that he did not like in his older sons and had even started to see some signs of that same boldness in Gaylen—now all of seven, and fast losing his standing as favorite son to me. Frank Gilmore could love his sons until they defied or challenged his rule. Once that happened, he treated them as his worst enemies. It was as if my father perceived any act of defiance by his sons as a denial of their love for him, and love’s denial had already cost him his heart too much in his life. As a grown and strong man, he did not have to abide such a refusal from children.
The pattern of my father’s temper hadn’t changed all that much from the previous years when the family was on the road—that is, any infraction or displeasing act was enough to invoke a punishment—but the methods of correction had changed considerably. Instead of spankings, my father now administered fierce beatings, by means of razor straps and belts, and sometimes with his bare, clenched fists. With each blow that was thrown, my father was issuing the command that his children love him. With each blow that landed they learned instead to hate, and to annihilate their own faith in love.
“This is something you never really saw about him,” my brother Frank told me one day. “When Dad got angry at somebody he knew no limits. He wouldn’t have cared what he did. He would come at you with his razor strap, and he’d really bring that thing down on you. He was merciless at those times. We would end up with cuts and bruises all over us, though he was careful not to leave marks on our faces, or anyplace else where other people might see them.”
Apparently the beatings were commonplace affairs—that is, if you can ever call the pounding of a child commonplace. On an at least weekly basis, my father would whip either Frank Jr. or Gary, or more likely both of them