Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [207]
"I know that, Gary," Bessie said, "but I can't get you out. I don't have the money and the know-how. I don't have the bearing your father had."
"Well," said Gary, "I have laid awake a lot of nights wishing my dad was still here."
"They were two bulls locking horns," Bessie said to Grace on the way home, "but, Gary is right. His dad would never have let him stay in prison. Frank would have known the people to see and what to say. I just grew up on a stupid farm back in stupid Utah. All I ever knew was cows, pigs, chickens, goats, horses, and sheep, so I'm no use to Gary." She sighed. "I just wish Frank had gotten closer to that boy while he was living."
They would take the drive forward and back, forty miles each way, every other Sunday, and the echoes of the past would reverberate like the slamming of the steel doors. Bessie had a fund of stories and passed them out like confections. It was as if she naturally preferred tasty little stories to the depth of those echoes that came up from the past.
She explained to Grace how she and Frank had been traveling through Texas by bus when Gary was born on an overnight stop at the Burleson Hotel in McCamey. They couldn't move until he was six weeks old. Enough to make him think of himself as a Texan forever.
"Did you like to travel with two babies?" asked Grace.
No, she didn't, but her attitude remained: she would love Frank as he was. Not try to change him. So they traveled. She kept waiting for trouble.
In Colorado, Frank got arrested for passing a bad check and was sentenced to three years. Bessie went back to Provo and waited.
There was no money to go anywhere else.
She thought it was the end of everything. Her family was not friendly. She had been away a couple of years and came back with two kids and a husband in jail. But she waited. She never thought of another man. It was a long wait, but it wasn't the end. Frank got out in eighteen months and took her to California and worked in a defense plant and then they traveled again. By the time the boys were six and seven and Gaylen was born, she managed to talk Frank into buying a house on the outskirts of Portland. That was a lot better than letting the boys sleep nights in bus depots and feast on hot dogs.
Frank started rewriting the Building Code digests of cities like Portland and Seattle and Tacoma. He would put them into clear language so that by buying his manual, people could understand how to build or renovate their house in accordance with the city codes. Then he sold advertising for the manuals. Over the years it got profitable.
There was a time when Frank had checks rolling in every day.
7
The boys went to Our Lady of Sorrows parochial school, and Gary thought he'd be a priest. Bess loved their house on Crystal Springs Boulevard. It was small but she did her best cooking and sewing there. Then Frank had to move to Salt Lake for a year. That was the time, she told Grace, when an apparition attached itself to Gary.
She blamed it on the house in which they lived. Even Frank agreed it was haunted, and he was not a man partial to such ideas, but one time they were in the bedroom feeding Mikal, who had just been born, and they could hear somebody talking and laughing in the kitchen. When they ran down, nobody was there.
Then a flood came, and the safety valve in the basement heater failed to turn off after the fire went out. Gas started bubbling up along the walls. Frank said, "That's it, We're getting out." It was as if they saw a picture of themselves in the newspapers. Father, Mother, Four Sons Dead.
She had been happy to say goodbye to the house, but not to her neighbor, Mrs. Cohen, who was a sweet old lady. Bess met her because Mrs. Cohen's bedroom window was right across from the boys, and Gary would shoot his water pistol right through the window-pssst. Mrs. Cohen talked to him and said: Don't you do this. I'm an old lady, and you shouldn't be doing this. Finally, she said to her brother, Well, I'm going to tell his