For once, Bessie’s intuition matched her mother’s. “No,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Alta turned to Wanda. “Will you come with me?” Wanda hesitated. She wasn’t accustomed to disobeying her mother. But then, what was the wrong in a sleigh ride? The two girls ran out of the front yard and down the hill, out of sight of the farmhouse.
Bessie stood on the front porch, watching Ada and Ida as they tried to build a snowman, waiting for the sled to come by. A few moments later, the horse came around the bend, galloping steadily. Alta was lying flat, holding on to the sled, with Wanda piled on top of her. As the horse pulled up in front of the house, something spooked it. The man riding it tried to calm it down. Then it reared again and threw the sled into the air, tossing the girls in an arc against a utility pole. Wanda hit the pole hard on her left shoulder and everybody in the yard heard a crack. Alta hit the pole face first, with a terrible impact, and fell to the ground.
Somebody ran inside and found Melissa, who came hurrying to the road to find two of her daughters spilling blood on the snow. Wanda was unconscious, apparently dead, but Alta was scrabbling on the ground, trying to turn over. Melissa kneeled down beside her and placed Alta’s head on her lap. The front of Alta’s skull had been broken in; Melissa could see bone. “Oh, Mama,” said Alta, “I’m so sorry. I should have listened to you.” And then Alta began to cry. There was so little bone support left in her face that the crying forced her eyes from their sockets, until they rested on her cheeks. Melissa stayed in the snow, rocking her favorite daughter back and forth, petting her hair, until the life left her.
Bessie’s younger brother, Mark, saddled up a horse from the barn and rode down to the church to find his father. By the time Will and Mark arrived back at the Brown home with the bishop and a doctor, the two girls had been moved inside the small front room. The doctor looked at Alta and pronounced her dead. He examined Wanda more closely. “This one,” he said, “is still alive. But she might not be for long if we don’t get her to a hospital.”
Wanda recovered from the accident, but she was partially paralyzed on her left side for the rest of her life.
A few days later, when the time had come to bury Alta, the ground was frozen over. The coffin had to be left beside the burial place, waiting for the ground to thaw. For the next couple of days, the Brown children would make the trek to the cemetery and sit around the coffin, praying for their dead sister’s soul.
A few weeks later, there was a final haunting. “The sisters were in their bedroom at night,” my cousin Brenda told me, “when they saw a white light in the dark room. The light came closer and closer to their bed. It was Alta. She sat down on the bed with the girls and told them she was all right, that she wasn’t in any pain and she was very happy. She wanted to make sure the girls knew that. She loved them. Then the light dimmed and she was gone, but the girls could see the indentation on the bed where she had sat.”
Nobody ever figured out what had spooked the horse in that winter dusk time, but my mother knew: She believed it was the demon of the dead man that she and Alta had conjured, and now he was the ghost that would haunt her family.
MANY YEARS LATER, WITHOUT KNOWING ANY of the details of this story, I asked my mother if I could have a Ouija board. It was during the time after my father’s death—a period in which I was reading nothing but Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Victorian ghost stories. The macabre and supernatural comforted and enthralled me in ways that I could not explain and that my mother could barely tolerate. She denied my request, and, as she had done all those years before, I went out and bought my own Ouija board and sneaked it into the house. The only problem was, I could never get my brothers to try it with me, and so, like a fool, I’d sit around by myself, with the board on my knees, asking it questions and waiting for the planchette to move under my fingers. I don’t remember ever getting much from the spirits in return.
One afternoon, my mother found me concentrating over the board, and she became livid. “I want you to get that goddamn thing out of my house immediately, and never bring it back here. And I want you to stop reading all those morose books about ghosts and horror and evil. I do not intend for all my sons to grow up to be monsters.” And then she wept, so long, so loud and pitifully, that I left the house, just to get away from the sound of her crying.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
—OSCAR WILDE,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
FOR MOST OF HER LIFE, BESSIE GILMORE SPOKE of her father as an ideal. He was a quiet and modest man who would make any sacrifice for a friend or family member in need, without asking anything in return. He was a deep-loving father, who worked long hours to keep his children clothed and in school, and who taught them to think charitably of neighbors and strangers alike.
In her last few years, though, my mother’s portrayal of Will Brown changed drastically. This was in the period following Gary’s execution, when she retreated more and more into the terrain of the past. It became one of the reasons I began to call or visit her less: All she could talk about was the milestones of our collective tragedy. I suspect that by this time the chain of all the disappointments and deaths had made her crazy, and she felt driven to reexamine each link in her mind, looking for the key to where everything had gone wrong—not unlike what I’ve been doing these last few years. Or maybe she had come to suspect that the whole story had been fated from the start, and she couldn’t stop dwelling on the cruelty of a joke that keeps you waiting over a lifetime for a punch line of hope or deliverance that never arrives. In any event, as my mother replayed her past, she began telling remarkably different stories about her youth than she had told before.
In particular, she told stories about her father. As the Brown children grew older, my mother said, Will Brown’s temper grew shorter and took on a frightening resemblance to his own father’s legendary explosiveness. The two children he selected as the most frequent targets of his anger were my mother and her older brother, George. I’m not sure what the main quarrel was between George and his father, though I do know that George became regarded by both his family and the Grandview community as the odd character among the Browns. Apparently he had always been a bit shy and awkward (much like his father had been in his youth, which may have been part of what Will could not tolerate), and some of the neighborhood children teased him for his homely looks and gawky manner. Consequently, George spent a lot of time alone and, like his grandfather Joseph Kerby, used his solitude to develop his artistic skills. He painted rich, naturalistic views of the Provo landscape, and he also carved handsomely detailed bows for archers throughout the state.
Sometimes, though, George’s isolation seemed to drive something wild in him. On these occasions, he would strip off his clothes and lay them in a tidy pile in the Browns’ front yard, then take off running down Jordan Lane. Once or twice he made it all the way to Provo’s Center Street, running naked among the pop-eyed Mormons, until the police would pick him up and hold him for Will Brown to come and retrieve him. Invariably, these events would be followed by Will beating George, though frequently the beatings happened for no reason better than Will’s own fury. On these occasions, Will dragged George to one of the large trees in the backyard and tied him to its trunk with a strong rope. Then he took a strap and lashed his screaming son until the boy passed out from the pain and humiliation. Occasionally, the beatings grew so fierce that Bessie or Mark would run next door, where Will’s older brother Charley lived, and beg him to come over and drag Will off George. At such times, Charley was the only person in the world who could come safely between Will Brown and his rage.
The beatings continued until the 1940s, when George and Mark went off to fight in the Second World War. George was among the American troops who helped liberate the Nazi concentration camps in Germany, and he was also stationed in France for a short time. Within a few days after his return from
the war, George got on the wrong side of his father’s temper. Will threw a fist at his son, but George caught it and twisted his father’s hand. “You will not hit me again,” George told him. According to my mother, Will Brown never hit George or anybody after that.
All the years of outrage and madness left their mark on George. He never dated, he never married, and for all the hurt he had suffered at home, he never ventured outside of the family. In a trunk in his room, George kept a collection of photos he had brought home from the war. Some were pictures he had taken of the corpses and emaciated survivors left in the concentration camps. The others were pornographic postcards that he had bought on the streets of Paris. Sometimes, George would coax his nieces and their friends into his room. Then he would lock the door and not let them out until they had looked at both sets of photos. It was an odd choice of images to show children—pictures of the modern world’s most horrific murders, mingled with pictures of forbidden pleasures. No doubt something about the juxtaposition titillated Uncle George, though something about the mix also told the whole sad story of what had been done to his life.
George never left the farm. He inherited it after his mother died, and he lived there by himself, until his death in 1974. He lay dead for three days before he was found alone in his bed, near the trunk where he kept his pictures.
ACCORDING TO MY MOTHER, THE DAY SHE FIRST CAME TO HATE Will Brown was the day of an execution. It’s an interesting story, so mired in fear and improbability that I’m no longer sure what its real meaning might be. Still, the story should be told, if only because it’s one that had consequences.
Sporadically, Utah’s executions had been public or semi-public affairs. At times, hundreds had assembled for these events; sometimes thousands. On a few occasions, fathers and mothers would bring their families to witness the deaths and to attest to the merciless cost of violating God’s most precious laws. For a child growing up in early twentieth-century Utah, the atmosphere surrounding these events could be a fearful thing. My mother used to tell us that she hated hearing people talk about an impending execution, that she would cover her ears and try to shut out the awful news and the grim but excited way that her father and other churchmen would discuss the event. On the day of the 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 saw her 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 until a year or two ago, after I started working on this book and was doing some reading in the history of Utah’s death penalty, that I learned something even more disturbing: These stories that my mother told could not have been true; she could never have witnessed what she claimed to witness. There were no semi-public executions in Utah after about 1919, when my mother would have been six years old, and it is not likely that any children or families had been present at these events for several years before that. More important, as far as I have been able to determine, there were no hangings at all in Utah during my mother’s childhood and youth. About twelve executions took place in that period—including the world-famous 1915 death of union activist Joe Hill, whom we also heard much about in our home—and all these sentences had been carried out by firing squads, behind the walls of Utah’s Sugar-house Prison, before invited assemblies of witnesses.
I think about my mother’s tales, and I know now that it was remarkable and terrible to tell these things to children or young men. On one level, of course, I am struck by the impact that such legends must have had on us. I think these images helped to instill a sense of otherness—not to mention a sense of doom—in our hearts. I think we felt we were hearing not just a story of the distant past in a cruel place, but that we were also hearing something about our own predestination. Or, to put it differently, there was no way you could hear such a story as a child and want to be any part of the world that gathered together to put a man to death. The only place left for you in the story was to be the condemned man or the child forced to behold his fate; my brother Gary chose to be one, and I guess I chose to be the other. I know I could never have chosen to be among the executioners. In any event, I grew up in a family where the noose worked as a talisman; it hung over our heads not so much as a deterrent but as a sign of destiny. As a result, the ideal of ruin was a family covenant. Nobody ever said as much out loud, but then, nobody had to.
I try to imagine what was in my mother’s heart to make this ideal such an intrinsic part of our mythology. What had really happened to her that gave her such an overpowering fear of Blood Atonement, and how did it happen that
her fear would be transformed into a near prophecy of how her favorite son would die? Sometimes we tell lies about our past—maybe a claim to achievement, maybe a claim to crime—as a way of heightening our importance, and sometimes we tell our fictions as a subterfuge to keep our deepest secrets hidden. I believe that when my mother told us the story of the hanging in Utah, something else was at work for her: I think she was probably trying to convey to us the harshness of growing up amid such an unforgiving land and its people. And I also believe that she could have been trying to tell us about other ways that her father may have visited ruin and violence upon her—ways that she might not have been able otherwise to talk about, or that perhaps she could no longer bring herself to remember.
WHAT MIGHT THOSE WAYS HAVE BEEN? I don’t really know for sure. I have only guesses and rumors to offer. In one way or another, the problem probably had to do with sex. When she was still a child, Bessie was regarded as one of the Browns’ prettiest daughters. She liked dressing in graceful outfits and putting large bows in her beautiful, black hair; apparently, she made a dainty little sight at church dances and picnics. In those days, Will had been proud of Bess. Some thought he was even a bit possessive of her. But when Bessie turned older, her prettiness started to become a liability in the Brown home. According to some folks, Bessie began to take on airs. She acted as if she were the child of a rich family—as if she were simply too good to do the hard farm work that the others had to do. She didn’t like blistering her fine hands—it made it hard to wear her rings—and she hated getting her hair dirty. Said it spoiled the nice clothes she was making for herself to wear to church balls, and to the weekend dances at Provo’s Utahna Dance Hall. Worse, Bessie started acting as if the house rules no longer applied to her. She liked staying out later than the others, and she liked the attention of boys—especially the older ones who attended Brigham Young University. This last item was particularly hard on Bessie’s father. It was said of Will Brown that he loved his daughters and did not want to lose them. For his taste, Bess was moving too quickly into dating.
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