Vern and Ida also had two teenage daughters, Brenda and Toni. I may have been only eight at the time, but I already knew cute and sexy when I saw it, and Brenda and Toni fit that bill in an unmistakable manner, though there was nothing showy or inappropriate about it. They were sweet and concerned, and they were the only women who would ever feel like sisters to me. I felt safe at Ida and Vern’s house. I remember thinking: This would be a good family to stay with. That same thought, I later learned, had also occurred to my brothers many times over the years, and eventually it led to horrible consequences for us all.
On the third or fourth night of our Provo visit, I was sitting on the front porch of my grandparents’ house with my mother and grandmother. The BYU football team had won a game earlier that evening, and the players had made the trek to light up the Y on the side of Bessie’s mountain. My mother was thrilled that I got to witness this ritual. We sat there and watched the burning Y until it faded into a bare glow. A few minutes later, from down the road in the direction of Mary Brown’s old farm, we saw something white emerge from the darkness and move our way. As it quickly got closer, it seemed to float about a foot off the ground. Above its white form—which now looked like a gown, rippling in the night breeze—we saw two eyes, looking our way, glowing. Bessie and Melissa stood up at the same moment. “It’s the ghost,” my grandmother said, and my mother took me by the shoulders and steered me into the house. I wanted to go closer—I had never seen a ghost before; I wanted to see what it would do if you moved its way—but Bessie and Melissa would not allow it. So I watched for a while from the front window. After we moved inside, the apparition stopped advancing toward the house. It moved back and forth across the road several times, like it was waiting for something to happen, or like it was studying us. Then, after a minute or two, it took off, moving quickly back into the night it had come from. Later, when I told my father about the ghost, he laughed. “That was no ghost,” he said. “It was probably just a neighborhood dog that had pulled an old white shirt off a laundry line and was looking for somebody to show it off to. What you saw were the silly superstitions of old Mormons.”
THE NIGHT AFTER THE APPEARANCE OF THE GHOST, my grandfather Will Brown died at age seventy-three. At his bedside were his church bishop, his wife, and all his living children. I don’t remember feeling much about his passing at the time—after all, I never got to meet the man—but thirty-some years later, when I read Melissa’s final journals, I came across a simple passage that broke my heart. Melissa’s last few notebooks were tedious, as hell to read—page after page after page about knitting doilies for grandchildren, or cooking roasts for guests, or dusting knickknacks. Even her reportage of her husband’s stroke was dully matter-of-fact. And then, noting Will Brown’s final night, Melissa wrote five words about his slip into darkness: “Watched him die. So hard.” After reading those words, I never took those people’s feelings lightly again.
Will Brown’s funeral was reportedly one of the biggest that Provo had witnessed in years. Apparently, everybody had revered the old school janitor. For some reason, all the grandchildren—and various other tots-were seated in the first few rows of the church, right in front of my grandfather’s open casket. It was the first time I had ever seen a dead person up close. I studied Will Brown’s white hair, trying to feel something. Mostly, I just felt horrified at having to look at a dead man. There was something unreal about staring so long at death, something that felt forbidden, like looking at raw sex—except death, I later realized, was far nastier.
Later, a long line of limousines and cars rode out to the Provo City Cemetery. We stood around a freshly dug empty grave, and my grandfather’s coffin rested alongside the deep hole. Wreaths had been draped across the casket and, one by one, Will Brown’s children approached the coffin and added single flowers to the pile. When my uncle George’s turn came, he seemed to fumble, looking for a place to put his flower. Finally he dropped it on the pile, and the boutonniere glided gracefully into place alongside the other flowers. It seemed to me at the time as if my grandfather had reached up from death and pulled the rose down to him. I have thought about that image many times over the years, and it has appeared frequently in my dreams.
As we were walking away from the grave, I stepped accidentally on a headstone. Then, deliberately, I stepped on another and another. Maybe I was trying to dispel some of the fear I felt, being so close to the dead. I don’t really know. It was a childish and irreverent thing to do, and it was met with disapproving gasps from my aunts and cousins. The next thing I knew, one of the stern Mormon patriarchs had grabbed and whirled me around and was sticking a finger in my face. “Never disrespect the dead, young man,” he told me, poking his finger. “Never. Remember that you live in their debt.”
NOT LONG AGO I PAID A REPEAT VISIT of sorts to the Brown farm.
My cousin Brenda took me on a drive up around the Grandview area, which is now filled with nice, clean, box-style houses. What was once Jordan Lane is now Jordan Avenue, and at the end of the avenue is the property that was once owned by my grandparents. It now belongs to a cousin—the son of one of my mother’s sisters—and he (or somebody) has sequestered the land behind a fence and posted a sign: DEAD END, PRIVATE PROPERTY. There’s something unreal about the barrier: It’s a dead end where there really shouldn’t be one; you get the feeling that what’s been sealed off here isn’t property so much as history—a past that’s better forgotten. At the same time, there’s no history visibly apparent. Everything that was once here has been transformed or razed, turned into modern urbanity, and modern mundaneness. Of course, you can’t exactly fault anybody for that. Who would want to live in or preserve an old two-room shack farm merely because their grandparents lived there? Who would want to keep an artifact of past poverty and fragmented family hopes intact as an unvisited and unloved museum? Yet in another way, none of this transformation matters: It still felt like a place where loss was lived out over the course of nearly a century. Some things don’t leave the air just because the land has been changed.
Brenda and I parked out front, where some boys tinkered on a car, and since we were on what was essentially private property we gradually invited some curious looks. Brenda asked for her cousin, and he came out, acting polite, but also wary—perhaps not exactly thrilled to find me, a bad reminder of a horrible history, on the edge of his front lawn. We talked nicely and emptily for a few minutes, but there was no invitation to come in and see what had been done with the farm, or to look about the old property. After a bit, Brenda said our good-byes and we got back in the car to drive on. As we left, Brenda pointed out a patch of ground right before the property, just at the place where the land begins to tip and run down over the steep hill to the valley below. “That’s where it happened,” she said, and I knew immediately what she meant. It is the spot where, over sixty years before, tragedy entered and filled the Browns’ life with a suddenness and horrific impact that was never forgotten, and never eradicated. In the light of the setting sun, it almost looked as if there was still a patch of blood on that spot—blood that cost so much hope and, in my mother’s mind, announced such unshakable ruin that no amount of time or weather could ever fade it out.
AS THE YEARS PROGRESSED, THE BROWN CLAN BROKE DOWN into two camps: the good children and the rebellious ones. In the former group were those who were diligent farm workers, and who were obedient to their parents and church leaders—such as Mark, Mary, and Wanda. In the latter camp were those who made a point of having a will and pride of their own, like George and Patta, and, in time, my mother. Somewhere in between these two factions was Alta, who had been born five years after Bessie. Alta was the dividing line between the family’s older and younger children. She was also a dividing line in other ways.
In the photos I have seen of her, Alta looks plain and stoic, like so many of the serious-faced children of pioneer stock. But in her eyes you could see an unmistakable, active intelligence. She looked like someone who could outsmar
t anybody around her without making the slightest show of it. That’s probably why she became everybody’s favorite of the Brown children—well-liked enough that her death was headline news in Provo. In her parents’ eyes, Alta was the ideal child: She was humble and obedient—did what she was told without resentment—and brought home good reports from her teachers at school and church. But according to my mother, there was something more to Alta than that. She knew how to play the surfaces, how to appear as if she was giving people what they wanted, yet behind that pose of compliance, Alta led her own life. Like Patta and my mother, she pretty much did what she wanted, but in secret, without the defiance the others flaunted. Whereas Bessie and Patta might stay out late against their parents’ instructions—bringing holy hell on their heads when they got home—Alta would wait until after her parents were asleep, then sneak out and meet her sisters, or a boyfriend. It was easy to do; Melissa’s deafness was already bad enough that she couldn’t hear the window opening and closing in the next-door bedroom.
Even though my mother was half a decade older, she felt closer to Alta than any of her other sisters, and Alta felt the same bond—or so Bessie later claimed. They would tell each other their best guarded secrets, and though Bessie could not emulate Alta’s social finesse, she admired it. “Alta was the best of us,” my mother said. “She was the one who showed the most promise. We never got over losing her. We were less of a family after that.”
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE HALLOWEEN IN 1929, when Alta was twelve and Bessie sixteen, the two girls, along with the rest of their family, sat in Sunday School one afternoon while the bishop railed against the danger of Ouija boards and other spiritualist trappings. The Mormons had a special calling to be on guard against spiritualism, the bishop said. More than most people, the Saints understood that spirits were real. It had been a spirit, after all, in the form of the Angel Moroni, who had led Joseph Smith to the golden plates at the start of their religion, and in the generations since, spirits had made themselves manifest to the Mormons a thousand times, in a thousand ways. But some spirits, the bishop warned, were like some people: troubled and ignoble. They might reach for the living through such means as Ouija boards or séances, but any such occult connection would be the work of Satan. Once such a spirit was in a person’s life, it could lead him or her wayward—to unredeemable sins, or even a horrible death. The bishop personally knew of young Mormon men who had gone astray. They had tried to contact the dead, but they had raised something evil instead, and one or two of them had been found nailed to the wall, their hair turned shock-white, a Ouija board under their feet.
Have fun with Halloween, concluded the bishop. Dress up and scare yourselves silly. But remember that you are Saints, and Saints do not invite Satan’s spirits into their home.
A week or so later, Bessie, Alta, and the others were down on Provo’s Center Street, shopping for decorations for a Halloween party, when Bessie found a Ouija board in a five-and-dime store. She bought it, hid it in her shopping bag with some other items, and sneaked it home. Late that night, after the parents had gone to sleep, Bessie and Alta lit a candle in the girls’ bedroom. They sat cross-legged next to each other on the floor and put the Ouija board on their knees. The others sat up in bed to see what they were doing. Patta joined Bessie and Alta, but Mary was indignant. “What are you doing?” she said. “You know what the bishop said. Do you want to bring the devil into our house?”
Wanda started to whimper. “I’m going to go tell Mother.”
Bessie glared up at her. “You’ll do no such thing, unless you want a good slapping.”
Bessie turned back to Alta and Patta. The three of them placed their fingertips on the heart-shaped planchette that rested on the board. Their sisters stood around watching, frightened and transfixed at the same time. “What do we say?” asked Patta.
Bessie looked at Alta and shrugged. Alta shut her eyes tight, tilted her head back, and intoned: “Is there anybody there?”
The room was quiet. Everybody watched the planchette. After a few moments it began to move, with the girls’ fingers resting on it. Slowly, jerkily, it inched to the Ouija board’s corner, to the word YES.
Bessie, Patta, and Alta looked at each other, eyes wide. They’d made contact. No prayer had ever been answered so quickly or so palpably.
Alta closed her eyes again and asked: “Who are you?”
More quickly this time, the planchette moved over the board’s single letters, spelling out its reply: I-A-M-A-D-E-A-D-I-N-D-I-A-N.
“A dead Indian?” said Bessie.
At that point, the girls heard a ghostly wail that scared the hell out of them all. It was Wanda, trembling and crying. Before anybody could stop her, she bolted out of the room, screaming.
Melissa may have been hard of hearing, but not that hard. She stormed into the bedroom and saw the Ouija board on her daughters’ laps. “What,” she said, “have you brought into my house?”
Nobody said a word.
Melissa turned on Alta. “I might expect this from Patta and Bessie,” she said. “They like to flirt with wickedness. But you know better, Alta. How could you take part in bringing evil into our home? Don’t you know you are mocking God? Don’t you know the price of mocking God?”
Alta looked stricken. “I’m sorry, Mother. We were just making a game out of it. We’ll put it away.”
“No,” said Melissa. “You’ll do more than that: You’ll take it outside and put it in the incinerator and burn it, this instant. You will do it, Alta. And you’ll do it alone.” Melissa stood and watched her daughter slip into her clothes. Then she followed Alta out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
As soon as she was gone, Bessie turned on Wanda. “Tattletale.”
Wanda started to whimper again. “Leave her alone,” Mary said to Bessie. “You asked for this trouble, bringing that infernal thing in here.”
A half hour later, Alta returned. As they were all falling asleep, she whispered to Bessie: “Mother went back to bed. I hid the Ouija board in the barn.”
THE OUIJA BOARD INCIDENT HAD BEEN GOOD FOR A FEW DAYS of misery and preaching around the Brown home. The guilty took their chastisements silently, with only Alta showing convincing remorse.
Halloween night arrived. The Browns went to a costume party at the Grandview church ward, and everybody danced and laughed until they were giddy and tired with the silliness of it all.
At about two that morning, Alta and Bessie sneaked out their bedroom window to the barn. It was a silent autumn night. Bessie lighted a kerosene lamp and Alta dug out the Ouija board. It was time to get back to their spirit.
Alone in the barn, Bessie and Alta sat with the board on their knees, their fingers on its planchette, and they made the same inquiries as before. Again, the words spelled out under their fingers: “I-AM-A-DEAD-INDIAN. I-WAS-KILLED-BECAUSE-I-KILLED-A-MAN. HE-STOLE-FROM-ME. I-WANT-BACK …”
Bessie and Alta heard the barn door creak. They saw a figure move through it and into the dim light. It was their father. Bessie might have been relieved, but by this time she had already learned some hard lessons about her father. Will Brown was a nice man until you made him angry. Then he was not a nice man at all.
He walked toward them. “Are you conjuring spirits in the middle of the night?” he asked. “Are you my children, or have you already given yourselves to the devil?” Will picked up an ax. He took the Ouija board from their hands and hacked it to pieces. “If I ever find you worshiping the devil again,” he said, “I’ll give you to the Danites.”
That was the end of Ouija boards in the Brown household. In the weeks that followed, Bessie and Alta tried a time or two again to contact the spirit, holding hands in the dark, in secluded places far away from home. But nothing ever happened. No voices answered, no images materialized. They might as well have been praying.
CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT, AND THEN CAME THE NEW YEAR. In the second week of 1930, Provo awoke to a snowfall that spread across its valley and mountains.
It snowed the rest of the week.
One night, after the day’s snow had fallen, a white horse wandered into the backyard of the Provo farmhouse. Since Grandview was a small community, everybody knew everybody else’s horses as well as they knew each other’s children, and the Browns knew nobody who owned such a lovely, ghostly-looking mare. Bessie and her sisters went outside to stare at the animal, and Alta wandered over and petted its mane. When Melissa saw her daughters with the strange horse, she ordered them inside. She tried to shoo the animal away, but it just looked at her.
The horse stood there for hours staring at the house, shimmering in the winter moonlight. When Will Brown arrived home from his job at the school, he chased the horse away. Later that night, my mother heard her parents talking. “You know what it means when a white horse comes to visit,” my grandmother said. “It means someone in this house will die.”
“I’m not sure,” Will said, “that I’ve ever known the Lord to work that way.”
Early the following Sunday evening, a neighbor was using his horse to pull a sled around Grandview, and he offered the Brown girls a chance to pile on the sled for a ride. Alta and Wanda ran to find their mother and ask if it was okay to ride down the street on the sled. Melissa knew the man, and she knew the horse—a calm, friendly animal—but she shook her head. “I don’t have a reason to say no,” she said, “but I’m going to tell you no. I just have a funny feeling.” The girls were disappointed but they didn’t argue back. After Melissa had returned to her work, Alta went and got Bessie. “Come on, Bess,” she said. “We can sneak down around the bend and ride the sled back up the hill. Mother will never know.”
Shot in the Heart Page 5