Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [221]
Mikal was gone. They were all gone. She did not know how much was her fault, and how much was the fault of the ongoing world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels in the prairie grass, but they were gone. Gary was away forever, and in her dreams the wind still whistled through the vent in Gaylen's belly that the ice pick made, and Frank Jr. was often gone, and when she saw him on weekends, he lived deep in his own thoughts and rarely spoke, and practiced magic no more, and Frank Sr. was dead and Iong gone.
The sorrows of the family had begun with Gary, and now he wanted to be dead. When he departed, would they all descend another step into that pit where they gave up searching for one another? She lived again through the days when Frank Sr. died.
His bad look, she was fond of saying, was strong enough to push a man across a room. He had been in show business so long his muscles rippled. He was a strong and powerfully built man and she watched him go down to nothing and die.
He had always been very afraid of cancer. His mother died of it, and Frank never said a word, but Bessie knew. There was a straight-out fear. The sound of the word could change the day for him.
She watched him linger in the hospital. He wasted as he went. Once she had been very much in love with him, but there had been so many fights over the boys, over Gary most of all, that toward the end, there was not much feeling. But, oh, it was hard to watch him die. She almost loved him very much again.
To herself she wept when she thought of the first time Gary was brought before a Judge, because that was the first time Frank could be found on Gary's side. "Don't admit a thing," he kept saying to Gary. The wisdom of his life was in the remark. If nothing was admitted, the other side might not be able to start the game of law and justice.
The Judge found Gary guilty anyway.
Gary was playing at the other end of the field. "Kill me," he was saying.
2
When Frank Sr. was in Colorado Prison, she lived for a time with Fay. One night a bat flew into Fay's house. She called the police to get it out. No question of the evil in that bat. Then, a year to the day after Frank died, a bat entered the house with the Philippine mahogany furniture and the turnaround drive. She ran upstairs and called the police again, shivering with a fear twenty years old. It happened near to the day Gary was sitting at her desk holding the birth certificate with the name of Fay Robert Coffman. That was the moment she knew no matter how many years it took, she would lose the house. There was too much hatred in Gary. You did not keep a house on hatred such aas that.
Still, she did try. Tried through the years, and the thickening fingers, the stiffening knees, the slow twisting of her limbs. If the Mormon Church would pay those back taxes, $1,400, no fortune, she would sign the deed over until she repaid the Church in full.
It would be simple, she thought, but the outcome produced new voices in her ear. Real voices. She could hear every ugly thought. The Bishop said, We'll send a man to appraise the property, but when he came, he set the worth at $7,000. She told him that her husband had paid twice the sum ten years ago, and her husband was no fool. He said, "They asked me to appraise it low," and talked of the of the deterioration of the grounds.
Soon the voices began to ask why she didn't agree to live on a lesser basis. Did she have to stay in a big house now? She could always work for one of the rich ladles in the Church, and have her bed and room free.
It didn't seem wise, the Bishop explained, to keep a home she could not maintain physically. As it was, the city threatened suit if she didn't take care of the weeds in the rear. She had four sons, but the rear of the house was a thicket of tall grass, tin cans, cat briars.
The Church