White Horse

White Horse
Riverview, FL
February 2007

Someday, I want to tell the story of how I arrived at this white horse on a dusty farm in Florida which begins with meeting a midget named Mitch Tucker at a desolate amusement park in Minnesota three years earlier, but it is perhaps too long of a story for a blog, which seems better suited to short attention spans. But this summer, when I re-read Mikal Gilmore's memoir about growing up with his brother, Gary, who was executed in Utah by a firing squad, and about the pain and love and violence that destroyed the Gilmore family, I found this passage about a white horse:

One night, after the days 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 in means when a white horse comes to visit," my grandmother said. "It means someone in this house will die."

excerpt from Shot in the Heart
Mikal Gilmore