Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [141]
Now it came over her that Gary would spend the rest of his lift in jail. If he was not executed.
4
Maybe she couldn't sing, but she was Queen of the Golden Green Ball at church. There were fifteen girls eligible from the ten or twelve families in Grandview Ward north of Provo, south of Orem, but Bessie was chosen, and college students came out from Brigham Young to teach them ballroom dancing. It was like a film.
Bess never liked the movies, however. She would walk in with her parents, and the picture would flicker over her eyes like a moth in a closet, except it was high up on the wall at the end of a long dismal hall, and an organ was racing away in the dark. You had to become a speed reader or you'd miss what the actors were saying. Being rushed gave her the shivers.
The darkness of the movies would remind her of the Iong-gone Christmas when her sister Ada was killed after her horse bolted and her sleigh hit a tree. They buried Ada with the snow deep on the ground, and had to leave her up in the cemetery under the snow. The family never really did have another happy Christmas. Melancholy kept coming into the celebration like memories out of the ground.
That was the worst Christmas, until she thought of the one in '55 when Gary was away at MacLaren, and they tried to get juvenile authorities to let him come home for a couple of days. First they said they would, then he had an infraction and they wouldn't. Since Bess and Frank couldn't get out to MacLaren Christmas Day because the of other kids, there was Gary with nothing. On December 26 they took over his gifts.
The only thing to be said for these present hours under the heat of the sun and the airless night of the trailer was that heat never made her feel as alone as the winter damp. Winter was the time when she felt so cold she had need of all the life she had lived. But now at the age of 63, Bessie could feel old as 83 in the cold snowbound cemetery of all those feelings that had frozen in the middle of July by the word that Gary had killed two boys. She kept seeing the face of Mr. Bushnell whose face she did not know, but it did not matter, for his head was covered with blood.
"Oh, Gary," whispered the child that never ceased to live in the remains of her operations and twisted joints, "Oh, Gary, how could you?"
Yes, the memory of one's life might be one's best and only friend. It was certainly the only touch to soothe those outraged bones that would chafe in the flesh until they were a skeleton free of the flesh.
So she thought often of sweet evenings in the past and breezes along the hill on warm summer twilights, thought of how she loved Provo once, and could sit for hours looking at the beautiful peak she called Y Mountain because the first settlers had put down flat white stones on its flank to make a great big white "Y" for old Brigham Young. Once, when she was a child, she was looking at Y Mountain and her father came over and Bess said, "Dad, I'm going to claim that for my very own," and he said, "Well, honey, you've got just as much right as anyone else, I guess," and walked off, and she thought, "He gave me his consent. That mountain belongs to me." Sitting in the trailer, she said to the good friend who was her memory, "That mountain still belongs to me."
5
Bessie studied dresses in the rotogravure before sewing her own, and went ballroom dancing at the Utahma Dance Hall in Provo when they brought orchestras in. She had a girl friend, Ruby Hills, and Ruby's brother drove them in a Model A Ford. He drove carefully. The roads had ruts as deep as the cracks in a rock.
She had girl friends whose names