Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [426]
Hansen was worrying again about the scheduling of the execution. "As soon as we get there," he repeated to Schwendiman, "I want you on the phone." Judith was thinking: The Utah law says you must go before the Court, but it's all being done by telephone. This is spooky.
She decided to be as nasty as she could. Kept turning to them with a smile to ask, "What did you say again?" Hansen would reply, "I said to call this person," gave the name. She wrote it all down. She was feeling awfully hostile. When he asked the pilot if the motor was in good enough shape to keep up its present air speed, she thought: It ought to be, brother. It's half Mormon-owned, just like half of downtown.
Mormonism, thought Judy, plain old primitive Christianity. So literal. She thought of devout Mormons, like her grandparents, still wearing undergarments they never took off, not even when they went to bed or copulated. Once a week, maybe, they dared to expose their skin to the contaminating air. Might just as well be Pharisees.
Always the letter of the law.
She hated blood atonement. A perfect belief for a desert people, she thought, desperate for survival, like those old Mormons way back. They had believed in a cruel and jealous Lord. Vengeful. Of course, they grabbed onto blood atonement. She could hear Brigham Young saying, "There are sins that can be atoned for by an offering on an altar . . . and there are sins that the blood of a lamb, or a calf, or of a turtle dove, cannot remit. They must be atoned for by the blood of a man."
Yessir, satisfy your blood lust, and tell yourself you were good to the victim because blood atonement remitted the sin. You gave the fellow a chance to get to the hereafter, after all. This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war. Why, Brigham Young with his countless wives pining on the vine had the gall to state that if you discovered one of your women in adultery, it would behoove you as a good and Christian act to hold her on your lap and run a knife through her breast. That way she'd have her whack at the hereafter. Wouldn't be relegated to the outer darkness. Judy made a noise of disgust. Primitive Christianity!
She was glad she'd gone to Berkeley.
After Ms. Wolbach stopped asking questions, Earl went over portions of his oral argument, then tried to get a little sleep. But it was a dark night and a bumpy flight. A very strong tailwind kept slamming them through more and more turbulence. With the engines now souped up to full thrust, a full load of sound vibrated through the cabin. Dorius began to worry that the craft might be getting unmanageable. It certainly was flying in heavy, erratic fashion. Fifteen or twenty minutes from Denver, they hit exceptionally powerful turbulence, and dropped several hundred feet in one big jolt. Dorius happened to be looking to the rear when it happened, and saw Judge Lewis fly up in the air, bang his head against the low ceiling, and immediately throw the documents he was reading onto the floor so he could hold onto the roof of the fuselage and keep from banging his head again.
Earl was terrified. The sound was the most violent caterwauling of wind and motor, and the turbulence had to be the worst he had ever flown through. The thought passed through his head, Boy, if I go down and Gilmore lives-wouldn't that be something!
Earl didn't see God as rewarding people for righteousness or punishing them for misconduct. In fact, it might even be the reverse.
Religion didn't make you safer, not that way. The current leader of the Mormon Church, Spencer Kimball, had had, for instance, a life of one tragedy after another. His mother died when he was twelve, and he came down, in later years, with throat cancer, and half his throat was removed. Yet, he continued to be an orator. Then, he had open-heart surgery. A man of impeccable virtue, but he had passed through one catastrophe after another. It could be that the more righteous you