Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [140]
Later, she would say to people, "Do you know how we are raised? You can't even believe it. If the head of our Church says, Walk on the right-hand side of the street, then you would in no way walk over on the left, even if the rain was pouring down . . . we are almost ridiculous."
That childhood might exist no longer, but she tried to live in it now. It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics.
Bess had an early memory of Provo in World War One. She was five years old and there was no telephone, no electricity in their house, and a telegram was rare. The roads were dirt paved carefully with dust. Newspapers had to be a week old by the time you read them. Their house held two rooms with a lean-to on the back, and they used to go over the hill to the spring and carry water back two buckets at a time, in summer on a small wagon, in winter by sleigh. One November, she remembered, the sky looked like snow, and they heard terrible whistles blowing in town two miles away. Her mother kept saying in a small dark fearsome mood, "Oh, the Germans are coming, the Germans are coming," but instead her dad came up on a horse over the hill, and that was how they received the news that the war had ended.
She thought Bessie was the ugliest name. People named cows and horses Bessie. She told everybody to call her Betty and told it to them again while picking potatoes, picking cucumbers, picking bush beans, and taking turns pushing the washer handle back and forth. At night around the table, their mother would read to them by illumination of an oil lamp. "Betty," Bessie would say when her name was called. She would feel the same way fifty years later. When she had the name Betty, which was what Frank always called her, they had money. Somehow it was Bessie again after he died, and she felt poor as a church mouse.
She sat in her chair in that superheated trailer, breathing the heated air, hot as the blacksmith shop, and the old smell of a frightened horse was in her heart and lungs forever. Thinking of Ida's voice on the phone, describing the blood she had seen on the face and head of Mr. Bushnell, Bess felt vertigo at the fall through space of all those years since Ida was born with her twin Ada.
Those twins had been ten years younger than Bessie, and Ida was her favorite. Bootie, Bess would call her. Little Bootie, like little boots. Now she was married to a man with fists as large as horses' hooves, and he had worked all his life on shoes and boots. It tore through Bess like a treachery, for she had always liked Vern, that he had chosen to say to her on the phone, "They're going to kill Gary." She tried to think instead of the extra room her father built on the house when the twins were born, and the tin tubs on Saturday night.
She felt so raw that agreeable memories were more than agreeable and felt like salve on a small wound. So she thought of the dancing teacher who came down from Salt Lake every Friday to teach ballet. In high-school gym, Bessie would never play basketball, or march, and even had the nerve to sit there and say, Give me Grade E, no excuse. They all talked about her already. She was a farm girl who wouldn't work in the sun and wore large sun hats and long gloves,
The dancing teacher changed everything. Bessie started getting A+ for Dance, and the teacher moved her up to the front row, said she was a natural-born ballerina. Wish I could have gotten hold of her when she was four, said the teacher.
Bessie also listened to the radio and tried to sing, but nobody in the family could even hum. All used the same