Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [202]
That night, Mikal Gilmore, Gary's youngest brother, received a phone call from Bessie. She told him that Gary received the death penalty. "Mother," Mikal said, "they haven't executed anybody in this country for ten years, and they aren't about to start with Gary." Still, nausea came up on him as he put down the phone. All he could see for the rest of the night were Gary's eyes.
PART SEVEN
Death Row
Chapter 30
THE SLAMMER
Soon after high school began in September, another teacher told Grace McGinnis of a story he read in July about a fellow from Portland, arrested for killing two men in Utah. The name, as he recollected, was Gilmore. Didn't she have a friend by that name? Grace really didn't want to hear more. Certain kinds of bad news were like mysterious lumps that went away if you paid no attention.
Now, the story was in the Portland papers again. The killer certainly was Gary Gilmore, and he had been sentenced to death in Provo, Utah. Grace thought of calling Bessie. It would be the first phone call in years. But she could hear the conversation before it took place.
"I cannot believe," Bessie would say, "that the Gary I know, killed those two young men. He couldn't have. He had a natural sweetness to him."
"Yes," Grace would say, "he really did."
"I never saw that kind of cruelty in Gary," Bessie would say, and Grace would again agree, and know she was not telling the truth.
Gary had never done anything cruel to her, certainly not, but she had seen something awful come into him after his Prolixin treatments, a personality change so drastic that Grace could honestly say she didn't know the man named Gary Gilmore who existed after taking it. It was as if something obscene had come into his mind. She was not very surprised he had killed two people. After the Prolixin, she had always been a little afraid of him.
Grace's hand was on the phone that day, but she could not call Bessie, not yet. "I am a coward," said Grace to herself, "I am a devout coward," and thought of all of them, of Bessie in her trailer, and Frank Sr., dead before she ever met him, but known to her by each and every one of Bessie's stories, and Bessie's sons, Frank Jr., who never said a word, and Gaylen, who had almost died in Grace's car, and Mikal, and Gary. A feeling of love, and misery, and anger hot as bile, plus all the woe Grace could carry in her big body, came flooding down, memories as sad as rue, and the horror that told her once to step out of Bessie's life came back, and she thought of Bessie in her trailer.
Mikal was the first Gilmore that Grace met. In the school year of '67-'68, she had him as a senior in Creative Writing, and he was one of the best students she ever had. Grace's maiden name was Gilmore, Grace Gilmore McGinnis, although when she and Bessie traced it out, there was no relation, but names aside, Grace was impressed with a long, intelligent conversation she had with Mikal about Truman Capote. She had assigned In Cold Blood to the class. Mikal showed a lot of insight in talking about that book.
The first time she and Mikal became close, however, was when Grace was asked to do a World Affairs Council Program for local Channel 8, and pick four students she thought could handle a topic like the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She chose Mikal first.
At that time, his hair was long. Milwaukie, a working-class suburb of Portland, had its share of red-necks among the teachers, and they thought no student with long hair ought to represent the school on a television program. Grace went to the principal and asked for a faculty meeting to decide the issue. She accused a few teachers of being absolutely warped. She knew she'd never win any contests for being