Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore Read Free Book Online

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 morerooms 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.
    W HEN 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 thesame. “I
hated
working on the farm, getting my hands dirty,”