Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [446]
3
All through the night before Gary was executed, Pete Galovan had been working at the city swimming pool. He was very tired when he got home early that morning, and he knelt down and prayed. Asked the Lord to forgive him for some of the harsh feelings he had had toward Gary. He didn't want to hate him in any way. He felt concerned about that. In fact, Pete got so concerned he began to cry.
Then he felt Gary come into the room.
Pete was there praying on his knees, and Gary came into the room accompanied by two other men. Gary was wearing a white shirt and white pants, and the two men with him were dressed in white suits and wore ties. They might be relatives of some sort from the past or the future. Pete didn't know.
Gary now said to Pete that he did not hold anything against him. He explained that right after his execution, his relatives had been there to receive his spirit. The Lord had sent them. It was very very clear to Pete that this was exactly what Gary was saying.
Gary was in a good mood and said he was experiencing all kinds of new sensations. They were really funny. He told Pete he was walking through walls, and it was an experience. He felt like a kid in an amusement park. He would now be able to visit every prison in the world, he said, and he planned to go all over as soon as his ashes were cast from the plane. Then he would come back to Provo from time to time.
Gary now revealed that because he had been full of valiant feeling at the end, the Lord was planning to use him as an example for people who had problems similar to his. At the end of a thousand years of peace, his spirit would come forth. He told Pete he had a very good chance of becoming one of the higher people. He had been told he was a dynamic spiritual person who had made a very deep choice in this life, and that could counteract a lot of bad decisions earlier. If he faced up to things now, the Lord was really going to use him.
Right after Gary left, Pete called Elizabeth, and told her about it, and said he would slip Gary's name onto the prayer rolls, so that Gary M. Gilmore would be in every Mormon temple in the world, and every day countless people would be praying for him.
4
From a memo by Earl Dorius on the events of January 17:
The taxi driver heard us talking and toward the end of the ride, he asked whether we had anything to do with the Gilmore case, and we all smiled and filled him in on what had happened.
When we arrived at the airport, I remember that in the waiting area there was a group of people watching the news on television.
They told us they had just heard that Gary Gilmore had been shot and is dead. I remember Jack Ford asking them in disbelief how they knew this, and acted like he did not know anything about it. I turned to Jack and told him he was cruel in leading on the people when in fact we were the ones that had argued the case, but we joked and then boarded the plane and flew back to Utah. The plane trip back was much more relaxing. We talked about subjects other than Gilmore but it seemingly took longer to return home than it took to get to Denver.
When we arrived back in Utah, there was not a single member of the news media at the airport. Salt Lake City seemed extremely quiet. We deplaned and walked to our car alone with no news reporters asking us any questions. It seemed fitting that with the death of Gary Gilmore the publicity also ended.
But on the last leg from the airport, not a block from his home, Earl saw an empty billboard on which somebody had painted, "Robert Hansen, Hitlerite." He didn't know if it had been put up because Bill Barrett and he lived out there, and somebody in the community wanted to let them know what they thought, or if it was just a coincidence.
5
Brenda had gone into the hospital on the tenth of January and surgery was the eleventh. Six days later, the execution came right in the middle of feeling surgically