“Chances are,” he said, “all you’re hearing in the night is the sound of a mouse. If we got a cat, you’d be rid of your spooks.”
“I saw the damn thing, Frank,” my mother said. “If it was a mouse, then it was a big mouse, with a face from hell.”
It was also during the Salt Lake stay that, according to my mother, Gary first started to go wrong. He and Frank Jr. missed the friends they had made back in Portland, and the new companions that Gary found were ones that Frank Jr. wanted to have nothing to do with. The new friends were rough boys, who made a point of swearing, smoking, stealing, and talking about guns. But whatever their bad habits, Gary aspired to outdistance them. Frank remembered finding him once with some kids, playing Russian roulette with a pistol. It was one of the few times that Frank told on his brother. Gary insisted the gun wasn’t loaded, but he got a whipping anyway. Another time, Gary got into a fracas with one of the men in the neighborhood. The man chased the eleven-year-old boy, and when he caught him, he started to beat Gary’s head against the wall of a garage. Frank Jr. ran and got my mother. She leaped a fence, grabbed the man, and began pounding his head against the garage, until neighbors had to pull everybody apart. Later, when she told my father, he went and found the man, bent him backward over a sawhorse, and beat the hell out of him. I think we always had a little trouble getting along with our neighbors.
For months during this period, Gary was stealing things and hiding them in the garage. It was mostly little things—packages of cookies, yoyos, comic books—that he pilfered from the Big C grocery store down the street. He didn’t seem to be doing it for any particular reason. He just stole and stockpiled the things and then would show them off to his friends and my brother. Somehow, Frank Sr. found out about it, and the shit hit the fan. He beat the hell out of Gary and made him put all the stolen objects in boxes and furtively return them to where he’d stolen them. Nobody ever found out about it; no charges were pressed. My brother Frank thinks the whole thing may have scared my father more than Gary. Maybe in that moment he saw something of himself coming alive in his child, and he wanted to kill it before it grew.
In the lateness and darkness of night, though, Gary was a smaller child. He would have bad dreams most nights of the week, and he would wake up, calling for my mother, swearing to her that something had been in the room with him, that he had seen it.
One night, following one of these episodes, Bessie studied Gary as he fell back asleep. Maybe he had spent too much time around Fay and her damn spirits, my mother thought. Maybe that awful ghost that night had somehow gotten inside him—or maybe the spirit that dwelled in this very house had found entry into his vulnerable soul. Something about Gary’s face, as well as his recent wrongful behavior, Bessie decided, was inexplicably different.
No question about it. There was now a terrible spirit living inside her son.
ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, MY MOTHER’S FAMILY had a party at their home in Provo. My mother had known about it for weeks, but she and my father and the rest of us had not been invited. Finally they got a last-minute call and drove down to the Browns’ farm. When they got there, they were treated rudely. Nobody would talk with my father, even though he had taken Bessie’s parents the present of a new radio. And while others were allowed to sneak drinks of liquor that night, Frank’s bottle of beer was taken away from him.
Both my brothers Frank and Gary didn’t like seeing their father treated this way, and they insisted to my mother that everybody go back home. They were gone before the New Year had been rung in.
THE NEXT NIGHT, JANUARY 1, 1952, my family was seated back in the living room in Salt Lake, tired and dispirited from the trip to Provo. There were odd noises around them during the evening, and everybody seemed a bit on edge. Then a sound came from the attic—a moan that was long and mournful, like the noise of a creature caught in the agony of death. Everybody in the family gathered under the ceiling door to the attic and looked upward. Bessie turned to her husband. She said: “How would you like to go up there and have a talk with that big mouse?” Frank said nothing. He stood there with the rest of his family, staring at the place where the noise was coming from. But Bessie could see that the dark presence in the house had finally got to him too. “If we don’t leave here, Frank,” she said, “we’re going to die under the weight of that evil thing.”
The following day, my father put the Salt Lake City home up for sale.
A year or so ago, my brother Frank and I went back to the old neighborhood in Salt Lake to see if we could visit the house where we had once lived. Frank looked around the streets and walked up and down the blocks, double-checking the address we had found. He remembered the neighborhood well, he said. All the old homes were still standing, Frank pointed out, except for one. The house where we had once lived was the only one gone. Where it had stood was now flattened, barren land.
I’VE TOLD ENOUGH GHOST STORIES NOW that I should make one thing plain: All these stories came from my mother’s memory or from other accounts of family legend. None of them are my own remembered experiences, except in the sense that they are part of the tormented and hyperbolic family mythology that I grew up with. I listened to my mother attentively when she told me these stories, but I think she knew that, for all the love and compassion that passed between us, I did not—in fact, could not—believe her ghost tales. She knew that I believed that if anything haunted us and our dreams, it was ourselves—that we did not require evil spirits to bring sins and cruelties and stupidities into our lives. We had our own history, our own dark hearts, to do that work for us.
No, I never believed in the stories of the goddamn ghosts. I did not believe that a spirit had killed my mother’s sister or had crouched over Gary on that fevered night or had reached out to kiss me as a baby years later. Nor did I believe, as my mother did, that somehow that ghost had followed Gary, finally catching up with him again when he made the fateful mistake of returning to Utah in April 1976. I knew there are worse things than an inhuman touch in the night. There are memories of rage and loss and longing that are so ruinous and transforming, you can carry them to your grave before they will leave you alone. It is easy to be frightened of the unknown, and it is also easy to give superstition the power to rule you. By contrast, it is much harder to confront the real demons—the faces of all those people, those loved ones and others, who shaped your character or your history. Dealing with the memories and legacies of those faces, I figured, could be haunting enough. I did not need any other ghosts. But I allowed my mother her stories. She came from another time and another culture, and maybe those beliefs helped make sense of just how much had been lost or destroyed over the years.
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 Clackamas.
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 at the same time, until my mother would insist that the beating stop. Usually the punishments were the result of small matters—for example, one of the boys forgetting to mow the lawn behind the backyard tree—but just as often they seemed to occur as the result of my father’s bad whims. Frank Jr. gave me an example of such an occasion. “One time,” he said, “when Gary and I came home from school, Dad was hiding behind the door and we didn’t even know it. We got in the door, we heard the door shut, and the next thing we knew we were getting razor-strapped across the back. He really went wild that night, because we were something like five minutes late—and I’m not kidding when I say five minutes. I don’t even remember why we were late, maybe the schoolteacher stopped us and talked, or maybe we visited with a friend. I can’t remember. I just remember he was hiding behind the door with the razor strap. We didn’t even get a chance to give an explanation, and we got whacked I don’t know how many times.”
On another occasion, some money had been stolen off my father’s desk. He gathered Frank and Gary before him and asked which of them had taken it. Frank knew Gary had stolen the money, and though he was angry at his brother for doing so, he wasn’t about to tell on him. “If that’s the way you want it, then you’ll both get the whipping,” my father said, with the logic of a gym teacher or army sergeant or some similar smalltime despot. That night he doubled up the strap—it could do more damage that way—and flailed his sons until they bled through their jeans. With each thrash, he called them thieves. Later, Frank asked my father if he would still have whipped him if he’d said that Gary had stolen the money. “Of course I would have whipped you,” my father said. “Nobody likes a damn squealer.” That night Frank learned that, one way or another, he was bound to pay for his brother’s crimes.
“When Dad would grab the razor strap and go haywire on us,” Frank told me, “he wasn’t talking to us about anything that we’d done wrong, nor was he telling us how we needed to improve our behavior. It was s
imply that we had upset him. He was angry with us and this was his way of getting revenge. He wasn’t doing it to teach us anything, except possibly to fear him. That was the reason he punished us: not to make us better, but to make us sorry.
“But when you get punished like that,” Frank continued, “how are you going to be sorry for what you did? If you were to take some guy that shoplifted a loaf of bread, and you took him out and castrated him, is he going to feel sorry about the loaf of bread, for crying out loud? He’s not going to care about it. It’s not going to impress him at all what he did, because he wasn’t punished in a way that would make him stop and realize: Well, hey, I deprived somebody of their loaf of bread. All he’s going to think is: For a lousy loaf of bread I was mutilated. He’s going to have hatred. And that’s what built up in us, resentment, because even as kids you know you are being overpunished for simple things. Like dropping something from the table, cleaning up the yard but not doing the immaculate job you were supposed to, or being a few minutes late from getting home from school.”
Frank Jr. now believes that the beatings had as much to do with the relationship between my father and mother as with any desire to discipline rowdy children. Frank Gilmore would beat his sons until his wife intervened. She would come in and let him know that she was angry, that he had gone far enough, and then he’d start a fight with her. Frank Jr. recalls that as he was getting beat, he would pray for his mother to work up her nerve to put a stop to it. “I’d count the lashes. It would be seventeen and eighteen razor straps across the back, which was pretty fucking painful, before she’d finally get her ass up off the chair and come and say something.
Shot in the Heart Page 15
