Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [74]
Some began to arrive as early as ten in the morning on the Fourth of July, and the party lasted till eleven that night. Good sunny weather with nearly everybody sitting out in the front yard which was screened from the canyon road by high bushes. The cars went whipping by outside and sometimes would touch the shoulder and throw up gobbets spat-spat against the bushes. That was a sound they knew from childhood.
It was a big yard which wrapped around the front and side of the house, and Stein had gotten the place kind of cleaned up with the lawn swing and lawn chairs in place and all the food set out in the carport on big tables, the barbecued beef, potato salad and baked beans, the potato chips and various jello salads, the soda pop for the kids and the beer, but you still couldn't help but see into the backyard that was to the rear of the side yard, and that was never going to get cleaned up. It had a huge stack of piled-up grass and other cuttings, and a big old rusting billboard laid on top to keep the cuttings from being scattered by the wind, and Stein's old camper that you lifted onto a pickup truck was next to it, and coils of old hose that had gotten half uncoiled, plus the water-soaked swing hanging from the old tackle pulleys in the tree, the overturned wooden dory that needed painting, and a stove-in old red barrel by the rusted sign. There were gardening tools in a leaning shed and a bunch of old damn black ratty tires strewn around an old car body. The farther back you got in Stein's yard, the more you saw a lifetime of living.
Inside the house, Verna must have put every color God gave the World to the furniture-one color for each of her kids was the family joke: yellow, green, blue, purple, red, orange, black, brown, and white in that living room. There was a hi-fi set for the Country-and-Western, a TV console, couches with different cushions, framed pictures of animals, a BarcaLounger for Stein, and a black leatherette stool with chromium legs for whoever. It probably came out of the bathroom which was white and pink and yellow with big flat rubber flowers pasted to the wallpaper.
It was so large a family, you could hardly count all the members, but nothing compared to the ancestors. On his mother's side, Stein's Mormon grandfather from Kanab, Utah, had been old-style polygamist with six wives and fifty-four children. But you didn't have to go back to Kanab. Stein and Verna had been married since 1929, and there were plenty of memories right here.
It still grated on Stein that starting out as a day laborer and working his way up to be superintendent of the Provo City Water Department, which took 37 years, he still had to quit because the mayor decided to put in an engineering graduate over him. Even had the gall to ask Stein to teach the new boy all about the water business. That was a memory to curdle your good feelings when you give a party to look back over it all.
Charley Baker was in charge of the pit barbecue, and he might as well have planned the goddamned party because he had the major share of the job. He'd bought the beef, a big hindquarter, and marinated it three days in a sauce he prepared himself. Then, that morning he'd carried the beef leg over to Spanish Fork, a trip from Toelle, after first wrapping it in cheesecloth to keep moisture in, then wrapped the hell out of it in brown paper, and in burlap. Of course, he kept it wet all the while he was digging big goddamn hole in Stein's yard, bigger than a slit trench, packed it with rocks he had to dig up himself, then got a fire and watched it burn for hours to get those rocks hot all the way through. You had to get rocks hotter than hell for a pit barbecue to work. The idea was to put the leg in all wrapped up and two theories on this-either pack dirt on