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

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 perhapsfor 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 of 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 sortof 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