Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore Read Free Book Online Page A

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 fatheras 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