Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [98]
Nowhere else in life have I known such safekeeping and such love. He would bounce me on his knee and sing “This Old Man” to me (“With a knick-knack paddywack, give the dog a bone/This old man came rolling home”). He would hold me in his arms, tickling me, calling me Tamarac. I have no idea where the name came from or what it meant, I only know it was my father’s name for me when I was a child.
As I say, nowhere else did I know such love. And nowhere else have I known such loneliness and fear and guilt.
WHEREAS MY BROTHERS lived through vicious physical fights between my parents—all those occasions when my father battered my mother, and my brothers were made to watch—I remember a different experience of argument. I never once saw one of my parents strike the other—or if I saw it, I simply don’t remember it. I don’t doubt that it happened in the earlier years, but perhaps by the time I was born my father either had learned a certain belated restraint, or was simply too old to whale the shit out of everybody all the time. Maybe beating my brothers was now enough to satisfy his rage.
To be sure, my parents fought, and fought frequently. Frightful, mean-spirited yelling matches that would approach the brink of violence but never quite cross over. Instead, my mother and father would hurl terrible invectives at each other. My father would call my mother a “python-spitting she-devil straight from hell” and “a crazy, crack-brained bitch.” Even as a small boy—and even as somebody who often took my father’s side in the end—I knew these were exceptionally awful things to call anyone, especially the person you loved. In turn, my mother would lash into my father for all the women he had loved, married, and left, or at other times she would call him a “cat-licker”—a Mormon epithet for Catholic. Compared to the names my father had thrown at my mother, her insults were mild, but they seemed to goad my father even more. After she made fun of his religion, he would go on a tirade about Mormons—about the evil Danites and how they did Joseph Smith’s work of murder, and how Brigham Young, who was once married to twenty-seven women at the same time, had been nicknamed “Bring ’em Young.” At the end of these rants, he would turn to me or my brothers and say: “The next time you’re in Salt Lake City, boys, I want you to take a look at that pompous statue they have of Brigham Young in Temple Square. I want you to look real good. If you look, you’ll see that he’s got his hand to the bank and his ass to the church.” It was a dumb-enough joke (though as it turns out, an apt description of how the statue actually stands), but it would hurt my mother deeply. She probably felt in those moments that my father was denigrating her entire past, reducing it to a petty joke. What maybe hurt more was that, to some degree, she had herself repudiated that past—her history and legacy as a Mormon, her hope of being a good church member and enjoying access to God’s care and truth—so that she could be with the man who now took such delight in belittling her.
One way or another, these arguments always seemed to mount to the crescendo of a threat. My father would threaten to leave my mother and my brothers and withdraw his support, leaving them to their own inept resources, or he would threaten to throw my mother out of the house and make her live on the street, without money or forgiveness. I can still recall the hubristic, brutish tone with which he would taunt her, and I can still recall how her face became contorted in a pain-filled fury as my father’s warnings wore on. Then he would start in on her sanity. This was probably the most malicious behavior I ever saw from him—even uglier in a way than when he hit my brothers—and it had a wicked, surefire effect. By calling her crazy, Frank Gilmore could provoke Bessie Gilmore to a state where she acted crazy. Her eyes would turn sharp with anger, and her face would become a strange mask that would seem in one moment both frozen and wild—as if she were containing the