Free Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore Page B

actual execution, she said, she would get up before dawn and hide in a dark recess in the family’s barn, sometimes staying there all day until night came, so she could miss the worst of the news and talk.
    One time, though, she wasn’t so lucky. On one summer morning, my mother said, around the time of one of her youthful birthdays, Will Brown woke her and loaded her and her brothers and sisters into the family wagon and drove them in the darkness to a meadow not far from the state prison. There, she claimed, they watched as a fated man was led up the stairs to the noose and the executioner. She said that she could not watch the hanging itself, that she shut her eyes tight and buried her face into her father’s side. But she heard the trapdoor crack open, and she also heard the horrible snapping sound a split second later, when the man’s weight hit the end of the rope’s length and his neck was broken. Then she heard something worse; she heard cheers and applause. As the family moved away from the site, she stole a look back and saw the man’s body dangling and swaying. She saw men on the meadow around her, holding the hands of their children, pointing at the corpse, admonishing their brood to remember this moment and this lesson.
    Certainly, Bessie Brown remembered it. Indeed, something about the Mormons’ attitude toward the death penalty caused my mother to start to hate her own people—or at least to hate the beliefs that would allow them to participate in these ceremonies. In any event, she hated executions. When I was a child, and we were living in Portland, Oregon, she would follow the news of impending executions with a fearful anxiety. She would write letters to the governor, arguing the morality of the death penalty, and asking the state to commute the condemned person’s sentence. And she would have me join her at the dining table and write my own letters to the governor. Since, as she once explained to me, these killings were the only killings that we
knew
were going to occur—the only killings, that is, that had a schedule to follow—then they were also the only killings we might possibly prevent. I think she truly believed the morality of that argument, but more than anything, she never got over the horror behind the idea of a public audience watching a man’s death. She believed that the men who took their families to watch these executions were, in some ways, worse even than the murderers. After all, such men made their children participants in a killing.
    I heard my mother’s stories about Utah’s executions many times over the years—I suppose we all did—but it wasn’t until the last time I sawher alive that she amplified her tale and revealed an important hidden detail. On that Christmas Day, a few months before she would die, my mother told me that she had not managed to keep her face buried in her father’s side after all on the morning of the hanging. Instead, right before the trapdoor was pulled, her father had grabbed her by the hair and yanked hard, forcing her to watch the man as he dropped into death. She said that on the ride back, she decided that she would never forgive her father and that she would live a life to spite his hard virtue. As she told me this, she wore a look of perfect hatred on her face—her eyes were wide with the inflamed stare of one who has had to see things that one should never have to see. By the time her account ended, the dreadfulness of what she had told me made me share her hatred, and I felt like her memory of the event had in fact become my own. Her tale also made me wonder: If my mother’s father had
not
forced this fatal vision on her, would Gary still have ended up the violent man he became? Had some horrific fate been born in that moment, and had it found its final, awful consequences some fifty-odd years later in the murders that my brother would commit, and in his own blood being spilled on the land that had raised my mother?
    It was not