Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [344]
Shirley Pedler had Christmas dinner at her parents' house. They were pretty conservative people, and her father worked for the State, but never, until this meal, had they had a knock-down drag-out about capital punishment. Today, however, her brother started to attack her on the ACLU position, and Shirley had to defend it. Her brother kept saying, "What about the victims and the families?"
It escalated. Shirley had been going in a different direction from her family anyway, but the discussion did ruin the dinner and she felt bad about that. None of them was able to get really comfortable after that.
GILMORE Would you like to hear a poem?
STANGER Sure.
GILMORE I'll give you a little preamble to it. You know prisons are noisy places. And I talked about that guard blowing his nose for five minutes. And this morning he carried on a two-hour conversation, and I finally asked him to shut up. This poem is in the book that I wrote for Nicole. This is the preamble: I get irritable at the noise I have to listen to, toilets flushing, water pipes jarring, stupid conversations, screened conversation Now here's the poem:
Dark thots of mayhem on a cold steel nite, when the little noises won't let you sleep.
Dark thots of mayhem, murder and gore.
A bore. Too few dark debts are ever paid.
A fool down the way laughs at the loss of day, another sighs and another cries at the lies of their lives.
Dark thots of mayhem murder and gore, too few dark debts are ever paid
More owed.
I wrote that poem in '74 listening to noise I didn't want to hear. I like it quiet. I would love an absence of sound so profound I could hear my blood. I guess that's one of the things I've always hated worst about prison, the noise, listening to motherfuckers barf and cough, and listening to frustration. On the seventeenth of January I hope to hear my last harsh noise.
STANGER Hum, it's a good poem.
Chapter 21
THE OCTAVE OF CHRISTMAS
Julie Jacoby had a good opinion of Shirley Pedler and thought her very attractive with that long thin build and her beautiful long hands.
The strain of the Gilmore situation, however, was really making Shirley lose too much weight. She had been a pretty intense woman to begin with, but after these last weeks, she was beginning to resemble a cigarette.
Although Shirley was twenty-four years younger, Julie Jacoby thought they were a lot alike. They would both rather be reclusive, yet were always in the middle of political activity. So Julie was not surprised when Shirley, during Christmas week, asked her to aid in the formation of the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
Of course Julie had not been doing a great deal in the year since she and her husband moved from Chicago to Utah. It was nothing like the Days of Rage in Chicago in the summer of 1968 when people were beaten by the police. That was when, in her own mind, she moved on from being little more than just another society lady from the North Shore who came down to United Charities twice a week to spend an afternoon sympathizing with the mothers of black children who came into the office in various states of coma from eating lead paint that had peeled off the walls. Some of those society ladies used to appear for work wearing diamond rings, and Julie had spent time trying to get the idea across that these ladies ought not to carry more wealth on their finger than the person in need across the desk could make in a year.
Her husband was an executive and Julie would say that he seemed never to have recovered from a shock in the womb that left him a deep-dyed forever Republican. Julie, Phi Beta in medieval history from the University of Michigan, had gone to Chicago to seek her fortune, and found it in the good German fellow she married, for he rose in the ranks of his corporation while Julie brought up their children and became-her first clue to future shifts-a lapsed Episcopalian. She might have done no more than join the League of Women Voters, read the National Observer, the New York Review of Books and I. F. Stone, but the Days of Rage on Michigan Boulevard