Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [139]
All this had happened before the day Gary sat at her desk and handed his birth certificate over.
She did not like to think of how that ridiculous misunderstanding ate at him. Gary had been getting in enough trouble for enough years not to blame it on a birth certificate, especially when he knew his father had traveled with a number of names. Still, she could never be certain that piece of paper had nothing to do with the armed robbery he did next and the terrible sentence of fifteen years at the age of twenty-two. Soon after, Bess's gall bladder went so bad, it had to be removed. What with complications in her convalescence, a few months went by before she could even visit Gary at the prison. It was the longest she'd ever gone without seeing him. She was shockproof by then or she would have screamed when he came into the visiting room. There he stood at the age of twenty-two without any teeth, but for two in his lower jaw-looked like fangs. "They're working on the plates," he said.
By the next visit, he told her that he liked his new set. "I can pick up an apple and really eat it without getting a toothache," he stated. His headaches seemed better too.
"Well," she said to herself then, "I am the daughter of the very first people who settled in Provo. I am the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of pioneers on both sides. If they could live through it, I can live through it." She had to say it to herself again after the phone calls from Brenda and Ida and Vern.
2
Bessie could see the old blacksmith shop down by the creek where she grew up. Smell it, too. She could sniff the steam of horses when the manure flew out of them in fear, and catch again the bottom-rind stink that came up from the parings of the horses' hooves. That was worse than an old man's feet, and the awful reek of charred hooves on the hot horseshoe followed-she always knew what hell was planning to offer. It was so bad that she almost liked the strong air of red-hot iron when it mixed with the odor of burning coal. She thought it had to be the way a tomb would smell if a strong man was buried in it.
Outside the blacksmith shop, there was grass and some fruit trees, and the fall-into-heaven of a fresh breeze. Of course, there was also the desert that had no smell at all, but was dry in the nose and left you for dust. In the background were the mountains high as a wall when you stood next to a wall and looked up.
She lived in a big family of seven girls and two sons that came out of two big families. Her mother was the eldest of thirteen children, her father of nine. The mother's family name was Kerby, like the vacuum cleaner company, but with an "e" not an "i," and at one time Kerbys owned the Isle of Wales, so they would tell her, but her great-grandfather joined the Mormon Church in I850, and was disowned by his family, so he came to America without a cent, and moved on to Utah with the Goddard Handcart Company, pushed a cart across the plains with all his belongings, one of an army of Mormons pushing their little wagons up the canyons of the Rockies because there was not enough money in the Church that year for prairie-wagons, and Brigham Young had told them, Come anyway, come with handcarts to the new Zion in the Kingdom of Deseret.
Hardy, healthy people, Bessie always said, and knew what they were doing.
Her great-grandmother was Mary Ellen Murphy, the only Irish in the Kerby family. The rest was English and one dot of French.
Bessie was 98 percent English