Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  Between all the Mormon superstitions and various Indian tales, Provo came to be known as a haunted place. There were stories about ghosts who moved through the hills and around the farms at night: the spirits of men who had lost their land and their lives to the Mormons and their strange new rituals.

  This is the area where my grandparents were born and where my mother and her brothers and sisters were born and raised. My grandmother Melissa Kerby came from nearby Wallsburg in 1880, the daughter of Joseph Kerby and Mary Ellen Murphy. Joseph Kerby was a talented artist—he was best known for taking his canvas and tools and isolating himself in one of Utah’s canyons for days at a time, painting majestic mountain views. He was also a man given to frequent depression and abrupt mood changes, and his need for solitude was often hard on his family. When Melissa was nine, her father sent her to nearby Heber, to cook and keep house for three men who worked for him. She later said that she was lonely and homesick the whole time, and it was in one of these periods of isolation that Melissa began to write as a way to stave off the boredom. It was a habit she would never give up; she wrote an incessant outpouring of poems, plays, letters, stories, and journals, and she committed herself to daily writing of one sort or another until the last day of her life.

  While Melissa’s poems and church-aimed writings were full of typical Mormon pieties, her short stories were something else. Sometimes she wrote first-person accounts about a young woman whose father was lonely and tormented—a man who forced his daughter to stay home, to look after him and keep the world out, while he drank himself into deeper shame and unconscious violence. He would beat his daughter and wreck his house, but the anguish he showed afterward always won his daughter’s pity and her pledge never to abandon him to himself. Some of her other stories were about a young woman who needed to win the love and devotion of the young men around her—sometimes two or more at a time—and who would then invariably reject the men and break their hearts. It is tempting to infer facts about Melissa Kerby’s young life from these stories, but I have no way of knowing if such an interpretation would hold. All I know from family legend is that Melissa was supposed to have been attractive when she was young and had several male pursuers and, yes, she reportedly broke a few hearts before she met the man she could not spurn.

  Melissa Kerby found that man in William Brown, a shy and gangling fellow who was six years her junior, and apparently no match for her intelligence. Will’s father, Alma, had lived in Provo all his life, working as a blacksmith and a railroad man. Alma married Mary Ann Duke in 1875 and, in ideal Mormon tradition, they had ten children; Will was the fifth born. In his middle adult years, Alma slipped under the wheels of a moving train at Provo’s train yards and lost a leg. After his accident, he reportedly became a hard, madly authoritarian man. In his worst bouts of rage, Alma Brown would pull off the wooden leg he now wore and would beat his wife Mary Ann with it in front of the children. Sometimes he did it until she would drop unconscious, and at least once or twice he beat her terribly enough to send her to the hospital for a few days. One time, when he was young, Will tried to intervene and stop the beating; he found the wooden leg turned against him, and he ended up in the hospital with his own leg badly injured. The Browns would later tell the story that Will’s horse had fallen on him. Will learned to obey his father without resistance after that, and he learned to keep his feelings quiet.

  By the time Melissa met Will, Alma’s fearful days were past; in fact, the old man would die just a week or two before the young couple’s marriage. When the two met, Melissa was the belle of the local church ward. She directed the ward’s plays, had been named the ward poet and the president of the Young Ladies’ Association, and had even been chosen the local Goddess of Liberty for Provo’s big July 24th pageant (the annual celebration of the day the Saints arrived in the Salt Lake Valley). Will had a part in a play she was directing for the event, and there was something about his shyness, the broken way he tried to speak his lines, that appealed to her. Maybe there was something in his loneliness that she identified with. In any event, this was a man’s heart that she could not bring herself to break.

  On December 4, 1907, after a year and a half of courtship, Will Brown and Melissa Kerby were married in Provo. The money side of things ran against them from the start. With his father dead, it had fallen to Will to continue the support of his mother and siblings and the maintenance of their farm, in addition to looking after his own new family. What’s more, Mary Duke Brown insisted that her children stay as close to her as possible. With such obligations, a man couldn’t make much of a living or afford much of a home, and so, after their wedding, Will and Melissa took the only course they saw open: They moved in with Will’s mother and devoted their time to her farm. According to my mother, Mary Brown was a hard taskmaster. It was as if she’d been waiting all those years for Alma Brown to die so she could try on his role for size.

  In 1908, Melissa and Will had their first child, a boy named George. Two years later, they had another baby, a daughter named Patta, but the birth had been hard on Melissa, and she almost died. Will decided that the crowded living conditions at his mother’s farm, plus the strain of looking after two children, would likely be too much for Melissa. He told his mother that the time had come for him and his wife to build then-own home. Mary Brown didn’t like the idea of losing her son entirely to a life of his own, and so she made him an offer. Up Jordan Lane a ways, where the road curved around to a hill crest that sat across from the Wasatch Mountain Range and overlooked the entire Provo Valley—an area appropriately called Grandview—there was a nice bit of farmland that Mary and Alma had owned for years and had once hoped to move to. She would give her son and his wife the best acre and a quarter of that land, on the condition that Will would continue to run her own farm for her and would promise that, as soon as his children were old enough to lift a pail and dig dirt with their hands, they too would help on her farm. Will knew that this was a chance to get some of the best high-level farmland in the Provo area. He agreed to his mother’s terms, and within a short time he had built a two-room house on the land at the top of Jordan Lane, for him and his wife and children to live in.

  A year after Patta, Melissa bore her third child, a girl named Mary, and then, on August 19, 1913, my mother, Bessie Brown, was born. In the next few years, five more Brown children would be born: Mark, Alta, Wanda, and a pair of twins, Ada and Ida. One by one they all crammed into the two-room house on Jordan, nine children in all, and when everybody finally started to push against each other, Will added two more rooms to the house—including a bedroom for him and his wife, and another room for all the girls. Out in back of the house, past a couple of large trees, Will built a storage and work shed, where the boys slept at night. Next to the shed, he built a large, simple barn. Will and Melissa’s home was now a modest farm, but it would never come to much—in large part because Will and his children were working his mother’s farm down the road more than they worked their own.

  Like many of the small farms in Provo, Will’s farm yielded enough fruits and vegetables to keep his wife and children fed, but rarely more. For milk, there was also a family cow—an animal named Bessie. My mother hated that cow with a vengeance. It was bad enough she had to share the bossy’s name. What was worse, she was told the cow had held the name first—which led to an endless run of bad jokes about how she had been named after the damn thing. Years afterward—and up until the time of her death—my mother waged a campaign to disprove the charge that she shared a forename with the family cow. “My real name was Betty, not Bessie,” she would say. “It’s short for Elizabeth. I was named after the Queen of England.” I never thought to ask her which Queen Elizabeth she meant, but I’m willing to bet it was the modern one—who wasn’t born until 1926, thirteen years after Bessie Brown.

  As the years went along, the Brown children were left to raise themselves much of the time. In addition to working his mother’s farm, Will had taken on a job as the janitor at
the local school, and he also became the Grandview Hills Watermaster, in charge of the water flow for the area’s irrigation canals. Plus, he did blacksmith work whenever there was a call for it. Meantime, Melissa became more and more flustered by having so many children to look after. In addition, after the twins’ birth, Melissa’s hearing began to fade. In short, there was too much family, too many obligations, and too little time. Will and Melissa had given birth to so many children because, as Mormons, they were obliged to. However, they weren’t prepared to give the children a lot of individual time. They made it understood: The children had to work hard and help take care of each other. And if anybody strayed too far from an acceptable range of behavior, if anybody became too defiant or rebellious or violated the values of their community or church, they would be thrown out. That was how it had to be.

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I USED TO FIND IT ENCHANTING that my mother had grown up on a farm. Apparently my mother did not feel the same. “I hated working on the farm, getting my hands dirty,” she said. “I had pretty hands. I couldn’t see mining them, picking cucumbers and bush beans, just to keep mean old Grandma Brown happy. She wouldn’t even say thank you.” As much as she could, my mother skipped out on the farm jobs, under one ruse or another. She had a hiding place on Grandma Brown’s farm, where she had found a small quicksand pit. She would spend hours there, sinking twigs and stones, and sometimes her sisters’ dolls. The pit seemed to be bottomless.

  Other times, Bessie would take off across Jordan Lane, down the hill into the valley, where some Gypsies kept a seasonal encampment. Nobody would follow her down there. “The Gypsies steal children,” her mother warned her. “But don’t worry: They only steal beautiful children.” Most of the time, though, Bessie tried to stick close to her father, playing around him, watching him as he would hammer horseshoes on his anvil and then nail the shoes to the animal’s hooves. She liked to watch his big hands and his steady concentration as he worked. Bessie decided that she must be Will Brown’s favorite daughter and that he would give her anything she wanted. One day she tested this belief. The first thing Bessie saw every morning, as she looked out the Browns’ front door, was the line of the Wasatch Mountains—a long, towering ridge that looked like it had been lifted from the earth to protect God’s people from the land outside. One mountain in particular stood out from the rest. This was the mountain where Brigham Young University eventually built a large Y, made of bright white stones; on nights when the school’s football team was victorious, the players would climb the mountain and plant lighted torches into the stones, making a fiery Y that could be seen throughout the valley. Bessie loved that mountain more than anything else about Utah. She spent hours staring at it, talking to it, giving it her secrets. Truth be told, she probably prayed more ardently to that mountain than she ever did to her people’s God. Finally, she decided that, like her father’s love, the mountain was a prize that belonged solely to her heart.

  “Dad,” she said one afternoon, watching her father work at his anvil, “can I have that mountain? Can I claim it for my own?”

  Her father stopped the pounding of his hammer long enough to glance up at the mountain, then shrugged. “Sure, I don’t see why not,” he said, and went back to his hammering.

  “Okay, mountain,” Bessie said, “you’re mine.”

  A few weeks later, Bessie was playing in the barn, close to her father as he worked, when she came across an old wooden box, nailed shut. “What’s in there?” she asked.

  Her father walked over and pried the nails off the box. “Open it and see,” he said.

  My mother opened the box and inside she saw the wooden leg that Alma Brown had once used to beat his wife and son. Bessie screamed and slammed down the lid and started to cry. Will Brown, standing next to her, roared with laughter.

  I WAS THE ONLY PERSON IN MY FAMILY WHO HAD NEVER spent time on my mother’s farm. My brothers had lived there several times over the years with my mother, during my father’s various absences, and they knew its temper and history almost as well as she did.

  Then, one day in early 1959, my mother received word that her father had suffered a stroke and might not live much longer. My mother had not been back home since my birth, and she decided that I should make the train trip to Utah with her and see the home of my grandparents.

  I was eight at the time, and even now it surprises me how much I can recall from that journey. I remember my mother’s older brother George—from whom I gained my middle name—meeting us at night at the old train station. He seemed shy and funny, a slender, elderly man with a mustache, dressed in a flannel shirt, a heavy cap with earflaps, and a winter coat. He took us to a well-weathered station wagon, and as we drove up into the foothills above Provo, George told Bessie that she should be prepared to speak loudly and directly to their mother. By this time, Melissa’s hearing was almost gone, and some days even her hearing aid hardly helped.

  We pulled into a long, rough driveway that took us past a small house and into the backyard. In the moonlight, I could make out the barn and large trees that I already felt anxious to make my own. We entered the house by the back door, into a kitchen that looked as if it still had the same flowered wallpaper and old-fashioned wall telephone that had been there in my mother’s youth. In the kitchen’s corner, in a rocking chair, sat my grandmother, her head tilted in sleep, her reading glasses halfway down her nose. She did not know we were in the room until George shook her gently by the shoulder. Her eyes jumped open, with that instant look of terror and grief that comes to those who awaken to a painful reality, and then she saw my mother. Melissa leaped to her feet and hugged her daughter instantly. It was a quick reconciliation, and perhaps for both of them it momentarily overcame the years of hard distance. They talked into the night, while George showed me around the farmyard in the dark.

  When it was time to sleep, Melissa led us to the bedroom where Bessie and her sisters had slept for years. I lay awake for hours, excited about being in Utah. I tried not to move, because my mother was a light sleeper. After a time, I became aware that she was crying. I looked over at her. She had her back to me, but I could tell that she had her hand cupped over her mouth, and she was sobbing a desolate, uncontrollable sob that I had never heard from her—or from anybody—before. Something about it told me to leave her alone. I figured she was crying because her father was near death, and perhaps that’s what it was, though it’s just as likely it was the memories that this place stirred for her.

  By the time I awoke the next morning, my mother was already up. I found her outside, in the front yard. She was staring at the mountain that she had claimed for her own, years before. After seeing it again recently, I understood better her fondness for it. It is a proud and isolated thing, like Bessie Brown herself.

  “Is that your mountain?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s my mountain. I’ve been talking to it. I know how to hear the things it says, and this morning it is telling me that my father is not going to live.”

  “Oh, Mother, he’ll be fine,” I said, even though I knew that she was likely right. This was to be my first encounter with death, and I felt both exhilarated and frightened by its nearness. It would not be long before death’s excitement wore off for me and its fearfulness increased.

  “No,” she replied. “He’s not going to be all right. This time he’s going to die.” She folded her arms across her breast—a familiar gesture when she had decided to close off a discussion—and stood looking at the mountain a few moments more. Then she moved away from me, her eyes watching the ground as’ she walked around to the back of the old house. I did not follow her. I just stood, watching my mother’s mountain, trying to figure out how you talked to such a thing and how you could hear its revelations.

  The rest of that day and most of the next were spent meeting my Utah family—mostly aunts who were sugar-sweet on the outside, but who seemed awfully fussy about table manners and dinner prayers. I also didn’t get along particularly well with most o
f my cousins. They seemed prissy and mean at the same time—in the way that only well-bred Mormon children can seem—and I remember getting in a fight or some sort of jabbing bout with one of them. The exception to all this was the family of my mother’s favorite living sister, Ida. Generations before, when Melissa began to feel overwhelmed by nine children, she had assigned the care of Ada to Mary, and Ida to my mother. Mary prodded Ada to be competitive with her twin, and told Ida that she was the uglier of the two (or so my mother claimed). In turn, Bessie became protective of Ida and dressed her in pretty clothes and bought special ribbons for her hair. Many years later, the relationship between my mother and Ida would take on its own difficulties—in part because Ida had made a stable marriage to a good, sober man, and her children were loving and respectful, and prone only to unspectacular trouble. By contrast, my mother had married a drunk who left her regularly, and her children were … well, we were bad news, no matter how you sliced it.

  But during our visit to Utah, these differences were never mentioned. In fact, some of the old affections and allegiances seemed to get resurrected. When Bessie and Ida saw each other they couldn’t stop talking and laughing and crying, and on our second day there, Ida insisted that we move to her house, where she lived with her husband, Vernon Damico, and their daughters. Vern was a tall, husky man who walked with a limp—the by-product of an old war wound. He ran a popular shoe store on Provo’s Center Street, where I spent my happiest hours in Utah, watching his big hands as they soled shoes, probably in much the same way my mother once had studied her father in his work. Vern was a good man to have as an uncle: He was big, warm, protective, and good-humored. Also, he had a handsome mustache that caused him to resemble the comedian Ernie Kovacs. I didn’t know it then, but the mustache had been grown to cover a cleft palate. Vern had borne a lot of grief and nastiness because of that particular birth defect, and as a result, he had grown up rough. But I never saw any of that roughness in him. I just saw the first man who would make me wish for a different father.