Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [394]
In about 30 hrs. I will be dead.
Thats what they call it-death. Its just a release-a change of form.
I hope I've done it all right.
God Nicole. I feel such power in our love. I don't think we're s'posed to know right now what this is about. We're just supposed to do it right. It's inside of us, the knowledge. But we can't consciously know it till later.
Angel its a quarter to 3 in the mornin. I'm gonna get some shut-eye. Write you some more in a little . . .
9
The Mormon boy whom the Church sent to look after Bessie was a young married man named Doug Hiblar, and he felt he had come a little closer to Bessie in the last month. Sometimes, she still would not let him in, and he would just tell her through the door that he loved her, and leave, but there were days when she was receptive, and encouraged by that, he once made the mistake of telling her he understood how she felt. That was an error. Bessie said, "You don't know." He thought about it and recognized he didn't, and would never know, and did not use such words with her again. Perhaps it made a difference. She seemed to talk to him more after that.
Saturday night, he went to visit her, even as he had been visiting all week, and she seemed calm. It was as if she expected the Courts would postpone things. She had been talking the week before of going to Utah, but he got the idea Gary convinced her not to. Doug figured it would take from her son's strength if he saw her.
Bessie may have looked calm, but she couldn't sleep. All week she had been afraid of a night when she would go to bed and come awake with Gary dead. So, each night, she spent most of the hours sitting up. After Mikal's call came in each evening from Salt Lake, she might drowse, but then she would stir again, and there would be no more sleep. Just the long storm of insomnia to travel through. In her mind, like telegrams she could not bear to open, would appear the words, "How can I reach Gary? How can I tell him what it will do?" For she felt as if a sword would sever one half of herself from the other when the moment came.
She would think of Y Mountain in Provo and of the day she went back to Utah when her father was dying. Mikal was with her, and the boy had said, "Will you show me your mountain?" It was night and she answered, "I'll show you in the morning." The dawn, however, came in with fog, and Mikal remarked, "I don't see a mountain." He was eight years old.
"It's there," Bessie said. "The mountain is telling me that my dad is not going to live." Indeed he died, a few days later.
One of those nights in Provo, waiting for her father to pass away, there had been a rally for a football game, and BYU students went filing up the mountain with torches. Mikal said, "Mother, come out and look. You have never seen anything like this."
"Oh, Mikal, I have seen it before," she told him. "Remember, this is my mountain."
All her nieces and nephews looked at her as if to say, "Who do you think you are? You don't even live around here." She would smile at them. They did not understand. When people asked her, "Don't you get homesick to come back?" she would reply, "No, but I get homesick for my mountain. Because I own that." She knew they thought she was uppity.
On this recollection, she said goodbye to Saturday night and greeted the dawn.
Chapter 30
SUNDAY MORNING, SUNDAY AFTERNOON
It's 10 A.M. Sun Morn. I got up and showered and shaved-well first I did my exercise, 10 minutes running. These fucking guards think I'm nuts when I run up and down the tier. Almost all these guards are fat lazy fuckers.
Hey you're an elf, ain't ya?!
They asked me who I invite to watch me get shot. I said
Number One: Nicole
Two: Vern Damico
Three: Ron Stanger, lawyer
Four: Bob Moody, lawyer
Five: Lawrence Schiller, big Wheeler dealer from Hollywood.
I knew they wouldn't let you come, so I said to just reserve a place in your honor.
The New York Post said I was auctioning off seats. Lot of people write a lot of shit in the paper.
Baby