I ran to the back and turned the hose faucet on full blast. As I’d hoped, the spray got Gary right in the face—hard—and soaked his clothes. I could hear his howl in the backyard, and I could hear the girls’ laughter. I ran and hid in some brier bushes behind our house, and I didn’t come back for hours. When I did, Gary was still looking dour. “I’ll never forgive you,” he said.
I STUDY THOSE PICTURES of my brothers. I have more hard feelings about those photos than any other items in our family scrapbook. I look at the three of them, their guns pointed at the camera, and I can feel the world they shared together, the world they belonged in. It isn’t the toughness of their stance—their romance as little boy outlaws—that calls out to me. Instead, what strikes me about these photos is how much my brothers smiled when they were together—how happy they seemed in that world of theirs. I don’t remember people in my family smiling that much when I was a child, but then, there’s a lot about those years I don’t remember that well. Those smiles are like a mystery: They tell me there was a whole life my family lived that I still know nothing about—a life that, even to this day, nobody talks about.
For all the hell my brothers may have gone through, they were, at least for a time, real brothers. I look at the faces in those pictures, and I hate them. I don’t want to, but I do. I hate them because I wasn’t included in their picture. I hate them for not being a part of their family, no matter how horrible its costs.
I TRY TO REMEMBER MY MOTHER. I shut my eyes and make myself recall her face from my earliest memories, when my father was gone much of the time, and my brothers had not yet drifted into lives of serial disaster. She smiled a lot in those days; every morning I awoke to a face that seemed to take delight at my awakening. Then I see her face from a few years later. It was different by then, full of hot anger, and sometimes alive with a dangerous insaneness—a face that could not help displaying the costs of a history of endless disappointments. I grew afraid of her face during that time—in part because my father told me I should be afraid of it—and that only made matters worse.
The truth is, Bessie Gilmore had plenty to be angry about. My father had taunted and berated and beat her for years, and my brothers had already turned our house into an address of neighborhood notoriety. But the anger began earlier than that. Much earlier.
In the end, my mother is the person I would spend the most time with in my family, and as I grew older I believed I identified with her experience of sorrow and loneliness, her sense of being a maddened outcast. But now, I reach this place where I must begin to reconstruct her for this story, and I am surprised to learn that perhaps I never really understood the depths or the sources of her damage at all. The rest of us in the family were men; I know well our particular meannesses, our fitful and plundering moods. To a certain extent, I even understand the violence that ran through our lives—at least I understand how one can hate the world for its refusals, and how one can want to punish or destroy anything or anybody that might savor a happiness that we will never have. But when I try to imagine the reality of my mother’s heart, and its endless hatred and fear and hurt, I grow afraid. I’m afraid that the deepest parts of our hearts are inherited, and that my mother’s was a heart of prophecy. In the end, I am only able to enter her memory when I imagine the damnation she felt in her youth and the bereavement she felt in her later years. It’s as if I only understand the painful brackets of her life: the fright she grew up in, the fright she died in.
But I also know this: It was my mother who did her best to instill in me a sense that I might succeed in this world—in other words, that I might escape the tradition of our family—and it was she, perhaps more than any other person, who helped enable me to accomplish that dream. It is probably true, in fact, that she sacrificed some of the health and security of her later years so that I might realize that success. In turn, I learned how to forsake her, just as I learned how to forsake everybody else in my family. She wanted me to survive our bad legacy, to be her best work, and yet in order to do that, I felt I had to leave her behind, and of course that hurt her. You cannot move into a new world and still stay bound to the demands of the old world, and I figured I was somebody who was always headed for new worlds.
But I wasn’t the only one that my mother had hopes for. I suspect that she saw Gary as her work as well: Perhaps he was the one who might act out her rage for her, and avenge all the years of abuse and exclusion she had suffered during life in Utah. If ever a mother had a son who might pay back the legacies of her past, then that alliance was Bessie and Gary Gilmore. I remember my mother once telling me: “Gary was the criminal. I’d like you to be the lawyer. Your brothers will need a good and caring legal mind.”
She said this without demand, but also utterly without humor or irony.
TO EXPLAIN WHY BESSIE GILMORE might have wanted to punish her kin and homeland, I should begin by telling a bit about the people and history she grew up with. My mother was born into the world of early twentieth-century Mormon Utah—a place that, in many respects, was dramatically different from the America that surrounded it. The Mormons had long possessed a strong and spectacular sense of otherness and unity: They saw themselves not only as God’s modern chosen people, but also as a people whose faith and identity had been forged by a long and bloody history, and by outright banishment. They were a people apart—a people with its own myths and purposes, and with a history of astonishing violence.
My mother remembered hearing the legends of her people—their miracles and persecutions—throughout her childhood, and she passed these same tales along to me and my brothers in our childhoods. Chief among these stories were accounts of Mormonism’s early struggle for survival—in particular the powerful and haunting story of the church’s martyred founder, Joseph Smith, Jr. Smith was a man with a remarkable imagination and vision—indeed, he was among the most innovative mythmakers in the nation’s history—and he was also a man who managed to turn his most personal obsessions into a complex, epic mix of theology and folklore. Smith would build nearly his entire complex theology on what was essentially a dilemma of bloodline: how one might redeem the dreams and debts of one’s heritage, or else perish as the result of unfinished curses. By the time this question reached my own family, it had become a matter of fatal consequence.
Smith’s most lasting work, of course, was the Book of Mormon. First published in the late 1820s, the Book of Mormon has managed a staying power matched by only a handful of other American texts and novels from the same period, and for over a hundred and sixty years, it has been a central factor in helping to establish Mormonism as one of the fastest growing religions in modern history. The origins of the book are as fascinating as they are controversial: Smith claimed that the book had been transcribed from a set of ancient golden plates that had been presented to him by an angel of God named Moroni. Upon these plates was written the history of America’s ancient inhabitants and their dealings with the God of Israel—in effect, Smith was claiming to have discovered a long lost, sacred complement to the Bible’s Old and New Testaments. The book had—and still has—a tremendous impact on the minds of many Americans, and it is not hard to understand its almost primal appeal. Once you strip away all the Book of Mormon’s pretenses of scriptural import, what you have is nothing more nor less than a lusty tale of America’s favorite subject: families and murder.
Written—or at least narrated by Smith to his transcribers—in a voice that sought to emulate the King James translation of the Bible, the Book of Mormon tells the one-thousand-year chronicle of a Jewish tribe, the family of a righteous man and prophet named Lehi, who took his kin and friends and fled Jerusalem in the year 600 B.C., during a time of the city’s corruption. Under the direction of God, Lehi and his sons built a ship and sailed to a new land, where Lehi taught that the greatest purpose in life—the single path to redemption—was to win God’s love by obeying his laws. But there had always been a rivalry in Lehi’s tribe, and at the time of the old prophet’s
death, when he appointed one of his younger sons, Nephi, as the family’s rightful patriarch and seer, the development was met with great resentment by the older sons, Laman and Lemuel. Soon, Laman and Lemuel swelled in their anger toward their father’s legacy, as well as toward the piety of Nephi and his Old World god. They threatened to overtake their brother and his followers, until Nephi was forced to remove his tribe from his brothers’ dynasty. God was enraged by Laman and Lemuel’s rebellion, and because of their pride and blood-thirstiness he struck them with the curse of red skin and proclaimed that all their descendants would have to carry this blemish—and the knowledge of God’s disfavor—as payment for their fathers’ sins. Thus began the schism between the Nephites and the Lamanites, which formed the central historical dynamic for the Book of Mormon.
Over the next millennium, the posterity of these two families warred almost constantly, one side paying the cost for having descended from righteous blood, and the other doomed to living out the disobedient and murderous legacy of their evil forefathers. Later, in the book’s most daring moments, Jesus Christ visits these peoples, following his crucifixion and resurrection, and administers to them the doctrines of salvation and the counsel of peace. But peace does not hold for long. Violence returns, and killing grows rampant. At the book’s close, there is only the voice of one man, Moroni, the last survivor of the Nephites. He ruminates over the history of his fallen people and their last battles, which began in a city called Desolation. At the end of the battles, the bodies of the Nephites lay in thousands, across the bloodied landscape of a dying nation, and the few children who survived were forced to eat the flesh of their fathers. Finally, there is nothing left for Moroni to do except wait for the Lamanites, who are in effect his estranged brothers, to find him and slay him.
Murder and ruin are written across the breadth of Joseph Smith’s pre-American panorama, and because violence always demands an explanation or solution, the Book of Mormon’s unexamined greatest revelation is a truly startling one: As Moroni looks at the blood-reddened land around him, and as he reviews the full reach of the history that led to this mass extinction, it is plain that the force behind all these centuries of destruction is none other than God himself. It is God who brought these wandering people to an empty land, and it is God who established the legacies that could only lead to such awful obliteration. God is the hidden architect of all the killing at the heart of America’s greatest mystery novel, the angry father who demands that countless offspring pay for his rules and honor, even at the cost of generations of endless ruin.
The single strongest instance of blasphemy in the Book of Mormon occurs when a charismatic atheist and Antichrist named Korihor stands before one of God’s judges and kings and proclaims: “Ye say that this people is a guilty and a fallen people, because of the transgression of a parent. Behold, I say that a child is not guilty because of its parents.”
For proclaiming such outrageous words, God strikes Korihor mute, and despite Korihor’s full-hearted repentance, God will not allow him forgiveness. Korihor is left to wander among the people of the nation, begging for mercy and support, and the people take him and stamp upon him, until he lies dead under their feet.
THE BOOK OF MORMON’S VISION OF AMERICA as a land that had always known destruction would in effect become his most haunting work of prophecy. Violence and fear would follow Joseph Smith and his people until his own bloody death years later, and even after that, murder would have a way of staying in the Mormons’ history.
Despite all this, thousands of men and women flocked to Smith and his beliefs. Joseph would eventually name his new religion the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and its followers, the Saints. But his enemies—drawing on their hatred of the Book of Mormon—called them the Mormons.
My mother’s Mormon pedigree stretched back to these early times, along all the paths of her ancestry. Most of these men and women came to the American Mormon community from the poverty of England, on the promise that they were journeying to the new Promised Land. What they found instead was a land full of fear and violence. By the mid 1830s, the Mormons had already been forced from several settlements, including the large communities they had built in Kirtland, Ohio, and Independence, Missouri. Their farms had been burned, their men and children murdered, their women raped—sometimes under the direction of state militiamen. Much of the enmity was ascribed to what many Americans viewed as the Mormons’ odd beliefs and troubling mode of community—the Saints were said to be practicing polygamous marriages (which turned out to be true), and believed in a system of plural deities and multiple heavens (which also turned out to be true). But what seemed to disturb—or stir—people most was the character of Joseph Smith himself. He was an alluring man, but also a proud and ambitious one. Speculation was rampant among politicians and newspapermen that Smith had a meticulous plan to conquer America’s middle states and build a Mormon Empire, based on a religious government, with Smith at its head. By the 1840s, Smith had been tarred and feathered, shot at, jailed and threatened with military execution, and had been called, by many men, “the most dangerous man on the American frontier.” One state governor—Lilburn Boggs, of Missouri—had even decreed that the Mormons had become an official enemy, and should be driven from the land, or exterminated. The Mormons left and built a new city-state called Nauvoo, across the river in the western part of Illinois. Under Smith’s direction, Nauvoo would become one of the largest and most wondrous cities in the Midwest—but ironically, that development only tended to make matters worse for Smith and his followers. The Mormons were already seen as a kingdom within a state—an accomplishment unparalleled in America’s growth—and by 1844 the people of Illinois had come to fear Smith and his Mormons as the Missourians had. When it was rumored that Smith’s personal bodyguard—a legendary Western gunfighter named Orrin Porter Rockwell—was responsible for shooting Missouri’s former governor, Lilburn Boggs, in the back of the head (miraculously, Boggs lived), the dream of Midwestern empire was effectively over.
After a few more troubling incidents, Illinois exploded in rage at Smith, and Governor Thomas Ford insisted that the prophet turn himself over to civic authorities to stand trial. Smith surrendered himself to the authorities, and was held in jail—along with his brother Hyrum and a few other church leaders—in a small town called Carthage. There was no criminal charge at first, but soon one was formed: treason against the state—a crime punishable by death.
Governor Ford had guaranteed the Smiths’ safety if they surrendered, but the militia assigned to protect them was the Carthage Greys—a troop that, on Joseph’s appearance in the town, had assured him that they would see him dead before they would see him free again. On the late afternoon of June 27, 1844, a small force was guarding the Carthage Jail when a mob of a hundred men approached. The mob and the guardians were friends and part of the same militia, and so there was no real resistance offered the attackers. Several men entered the jail and rushed up the stairs to the room where Joseph and Hyrum were held. The mob-members fired musket shots through the door into the room, and a bullet caught Hyrum in the face. Four more shots ripped through him before he fell to his brother’s feet, dead. Joseph had a pistol which a friend had slipped him earlier. He fired all six bullets back through the door. Three of the shots wounded some attackers, slowing the assault long enough for him to rush to the window to escape. He swung one leg out, and when he looked down, he saw nothing but bayonets and rifles. According to most accounts, it was there, as Joseph Smith was perched on the moment where he could see the full cost of his vision, that bullets riddled him from the doorway and from the crowd below. He cried, “Oh Lord, my God!” and toppled from the window to the ground. The mob outside gathered around him, some of them kicking and jeering at him, until they were satisfied he would never rise again, and then they fled.
That’s the story I have heard all my life about the martyrdom of Joseph Smith. There were other witnesses, though, who told a different story
about Smith’s death, and for many years after the event, I learned recently, it was their version that was widely accepted as the true one. According to the earlier account—which had been supported by Mormon witnesses and the later confession of a mob member—this is what happened in Joseph Smith’s last living moments in Carthage:
He made it to the window, then two shots hit him and he fell outward, to the waiting mob. One of the men in the crowd picked Joseph up and propped him against a well curb, a few feet from the jail. A militia colonel ordered four men to shoot him. They stood about eight feet from Joseph, and at the same moment, they fired their bullets through his heart. Joseph Smith fell on his face, and his blood poured into the land of the country whose secret history he had once tried to divine. He lay there for a long time alone, dying.
He was no blood relation, but I feel more kinship to Joseph Smith—the damnation he feared, and the long-coming doom that finally swallowed him—than I do any of my true forebears. I feel for him as a brother.
THE KILLING OF JOSEPH SMITH WAS MEANT TO END MORMONISM, but instead, it changed its course. Within a few months of the assassination the surviving church rallied around a new prophet and president, Brigham Young—a less visionary theologian than Smith, but a smarter leader and more gifted autocrat. The Mormons remained in Nauvoo for two more years—long enough to make it temporarily the largest city in Illinois. But pressures for the Mormons to move continued and so did the mob assaults, and after Young heard a rumor that federal troops were preparing a campaign to destroy the Saints, he decided that the only way for his people to survive America was to leave it. In February 1846, Young and the Mormons began the long pilgrimage to find a new home beyond the nation’s borders. Eighteen months later, they settled in the Great Salt Lake Basin, in a land that they called Deseret (taken from the Book of Mormon’s term for the honey bee—which is to say, the industrious worker who knew how to work in a like-minded community). This new home was to be, in part, the fulfillment of Joseph Smith’s dream of a Kingdom of God on earth—and, in fact, it became the only religious nation ever established within America’s borders. In this millennial land called Deseret—later to be called Utah—the Mormons would be free from the fearful vigilante armies that had made them, along with the Cherokees, one of the only populations ever to be driven from the United States under the threat of extinction, and in this promised place, they would defend themselves from any oppressors who might follow them.
Shot in the Heart Page 2
