Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [220]
"It's not even very good music," said one magician.
Chapter 32
OLD CANCER, NEW MADNESS
By the second day of November, after all the phone calls came Bessie began to hear echoes again. The past rang in Bessie's ear, the past reverberated in her head. Steel bars slammed into stone.
"The fool," Mikal screamed at her. "Doesn't he know he's in Utah? They will kill him, if he pushes it." She tried to calm her youngest son, and all the while she was thinking that from the time Gary was 3 years old, she knew he was going to be executed. He had been a dear little guy, but she had lived with that fear since he was 3. That was when he began to show a side she could not go near.
One time, in that endless year when Frank was away in the Colorado jail, she sat in her mother's house and watched Gary play in the yard. There was a mud puddle she had told him to stay away from. Two minutes after she went inside, he then sat down in the middle.
It put a fear through her. Would he always be so defiant?
Now, the walls of the trailer closed in again. Somebody asked her once if it had been difficult to learn to live in the trailer, and she said no, not difficult at all. That was because she had never lived there, but died the day she moved in.
It was an ugly place, and she hated ugly places. Her health went down. She had only, she thought, inherited enough art from Uncle George, the painter, to know how to decorate a home, but she had done that much for the last house. It had been nice. Now, she lived in a narrow room, and her arthritis got worse as she sat through the days and years at a table in the kitchen end of the thing with the radio stacked on the telephone books and the sore bones of her pelvis installed on a pillow.
Everything was shades of brown. One poverty after another. Even the icebox was brown. It was that shade of gloom which would not lift. The color of clay. Nothing could grow.
Outside were fifty trailers in this lot off the highway they called a Park. It parked old people. At little expense. Had her trailer cost $3,500? She could no longer remember. When people asked if it had one bedroom or two, she would say, "It's got one and a half bedrooms, if you can believe it." It also had a half porch with a half awning.
Sometimes she didn't get out for weeks at a time. The arthritis got worse. At Speed's, she couldn't keep up with her work. Those twisted fingers ached with every plate she lifted from a table. Each move felt like the beginning of a disagreeable transaction. Sometimes she had to figure out in the middle how to shift her course so that the repercussion of the pain would not freeze her spine. Finally, the boss said he had to let her go, and gave her final pay. She was making $10 a week. Once she stopped working, the arthritis got worse. One knee started to bother her, then the other.
A doctor said he could operate on her arthritic knees and put in plastic ones. She said no. She had a picture of living in this plastic house with plastic knees. The long hair that fell to her waist turned gray, and she kept it in a bun. What with the difficulty of raising her arms, it usually stayed in the bun. "I'm ugly," Bessie would say herself. It was as if, in losing the house, she must also lose her looks.
She moved in the year Mikal graduated from high school. He went to college in Portland, and put himself through. He was brilliant and got good marks, and had to think of his own life. There were periods when he would visit less. The day she lost the ten-room house with the marble-top furniture, Mikal went north, she went south, and they never lived under the same roof again.
She had only moved a little farther south on McLaughlin Boulevard in Milwaukie south of the Portland City line, moved farther down that four-lane avenue of bars and eateries and discount stores. One gas station even had an old World