The Executioner's Song (61 page)

THE SENTENCE

When they got to the State Prison, the officer in charge ushered them through different gates into the Maximum Security area. There they took the foot braces off, and the shackles, and the handcu and shook him down again, and took him to his cell, and he never said another word. Scott didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t want to agitate him, and such an attempt might seem like heckling. Outside the prison, night had come, and the ridge of the mountain came down to the Interstate like a big dark animal laying out its paw.

That night, Mikal Gilmore, Gary’s youngest brother, received a phone call from Bessie. She told him that Gary received the death penalty. “Mother,” Mikal said, “they haven’t executed anybody in this country for ten years, and they aren’t about to start with Gary.” Still, nausea came up on him as he put down the phone. All he could see for the rest of the night were Gary’s eyes.

Death Row

THE SLAMMER

Soon after high school began in September, another teacher told Grace McGinnis of a story he read in July about a fellow from Port land, arrested for killing two men in Utah. The name, as he recol lected, was Gilmore. Didn’t she have a friend by that name? Grace really didn’t want to hear more. Certain kinds of bad news were like mysterious lumps that went away if you paid no attention.

Now, the story was in the Portland papers again. The killer cer tainly was Gary Gilmore, and he had been sentenced to death in Provo, Utah. Grace thought of calling Bessie. It would be the first phone call in years. But she could hear the conversation before it took place.

“I cannot believe,” Bessie would say, “that the Gary I know, killed those two young men. He Couldn’t have. He had a natural sweetness to him.”

“Yes,” Grace would say, “he really did.”

“I never saw that kind of crueky in Gary,” Bessie would say, and Grace would again agree, and know she was not telling the truth. Gary had never done anything cruel to her, certainly not, but she had seen something awful come into him after his Prolixin treatments, a personality change so drastic that Grace could honestly say she didn’t know the man named Gary Gilmore who existed after taking it. It was as if something obscene had come into his mind. She was not

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very surprised he had killed two people. After the ProIixin, she had always been a little afraid of him.

Grace’s hand was on the phone that day, but she could not call Bessie, not yet. “I am a coward,” said Grace to herself, “I am a devout coward,” and thought of all of them, of Bessie in her trailer, and Frank Sr., dead before she ever met him, but known to her by each and every one of Bessie’s stories, and Bessie’s sons, Frank Jr., who never said a word, .and Gaylen, who had almost .died in Grace’s car, and Mikal, and Gary. A feeling of love, and misery, and anger hot as bile, plus all the woe Grace could carry in her big body, came flooding down, memories as sad as rue, and the horror that told her once to step out of Bessie’s life came back, and she thought of Bessie in her trailer.

Mikal was the first Gilmore that Grace met. In the school year of ‘67-‘68, she had him as a senior in Creative Writing, and he was one of the best students she ever had. Grace’s maiden name was Gilmore, Grace Gilmore McGinnis, although when she and Bessie traced it out, there was no relation, but names aside, Grace was impressed with a long, intelligent conversation she had with Mikal about Tru man Capote. She had assigned In Cold Blood to the class. Mikal showed a lot of insight in talking about that book.

The first time she and Mikal became close, however, was when Grace was asked to do a World Affairs Council Program for local Channel 8, and pick four students she thought could handle a. topic like the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She chose Mikal first.

At that time, his hair was long. Milwaukie, a working-class sub urb of Portland, had its share of red-necks among the teachers, and they thought no student with long hair ought to represent the school on a television program. Grace went to the principal and asked for a faculty meeting to decide the issue. She accused a few teachers of being absolutely warped. She knew she’d never win any contests for being the slenderest middle-aged lady in town, but Grace could use her height and her bulk and her voice — which was not small — to

get a little liberal scorn across. Mikal went on the television pmgrana.

He performed beautifully.

Once in a while, Grace had a student she didn’t have to teach at, as she would put it, but could teach to. Mikal was that kind of stu, dent. Grace would look up things she thought would take his inter est. She would frankly confess to a bit of prejudice in his favor. It didn’t seem exceptional to her, therefore, that he came to her one day and said his mother was going to lose her home for back taxes, and he didn’t know anybody to go to for advice. Would she talk to them? Grace went over to Oakhill Road one Saturday and her first thought when she saw the house with the circle driveway was, ‘!My God, this place is haunted.” Something about the vegetation in the back creep ing up.

It was just a first impression, but she had been interested in psychic phenomena for quite a while, so the thought caused no great agitation. Grace just went in to a large dark living room, furnished sparsely in what Grace called Portland Gothic. A collection of nice postwar Philippine mahogany pieces.

Bessie was slight, with dark gray hair tied back in a bun to show the most interesting face, the kind you wanted to know more about. She looked like a woman who, at the least, would have made an excellent housemother in a sorority. But then Grace thought Bessie really he-longed in a mansion. She could have been the widow of the president of a utility company who dressed all the way down in grays as if she wouldn’t give an inch to money. Grace loved her on sight. All that class and dignity, all that quietly accumulated reserve.

Loved her more when they started to talk. The moment Grace mentioned that her maiden name was Gilmore, it commenced a con versation that went on for three hours. They covered a lot of the uni verse.

After a while, Bessie got into her problems with the house. Frank had bought it outright, and there was no mortgage, but it was still hard to keep up. He hadn’t left insurance and she was earning less

than $200 a month working as a bus girl at a tavern called Speed’s. She couldn’t advance up to waitressing, because she was getting too slow and arthritic. At present, she was in her sixth year of arrears on taxes, and the city was going after her property. She had received a notice they were going to foreclose. Well, she didn’t want to lose the house while Mikal was in school. Indeed, she wanted to keep it as the place for her boys to come back to. She wanted them to have the home they had known before they left. So, she was hoping to get the Mormon Church to pay the taxes, and she, in turn, would deed the house to the Church after she died. She hoped they would consider it a worthy investment.

Grace couldn’t help her with that. Grace knew little enough about Mormons, and the solution here had to do with the local Bishop and his attitude. So they moved on to other matters. Bessie proved a delightful conversationalist.

She told how at the restaurant where she worked, they only gave her a little time to eat. “We have thirty minutes to order our food from an ornery chef, run to the back and try to get it swallowed. They could see I wasn’t finishing, so the chef said, ‘I’m going to cut you way down.’ ‘Please do,’ I said, ‘I can’t eat all you give me unless you give me another thirty minutes to eat it.’ Besides, I like,” she said, “to leave food on my plate. I cannot clean up a plate. Never have in my entire life. The day I clean a plate will take me right out to the other side. It’ll send me home — wherever home is.”

Yesterday, Bessie had said to the bus driver, “Do you know there was a dead possum right in front of my gate?” The bus driver said, “Why didn’t you pick it up and make stew?” She said, “You know, Glen, I’m never going to speak to you again.” He said, “The possum couldn’t hurt you if it was dead.” She said, “It could me. It might have fleas.”

Grace enjoyed her more and more. They talked of how they both disliked synthetic fabrics, yet who could afford wool or cotton or silk anymore? “I just go on year after year with no clothes,” said Bess. “Not exactly nude, however-that would be enough to cure the country of sex.”

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She came to tell Grace about Gary. At Speed’s, nobody knew she had a son in the penitentiary. One lady even said, “You are a fortu nate person to have lived as long as you have, and haven’t had one heartbreak in your entire life.”

Grace thought Bessie had a remarkable voice. It was not exactly cultivated or grand, but it sure was unusual. Bette Davis playing a pi oneer woman. Grace asked to see a picture of Bessie when young, and thought she was beautiful then. Grace decided that what had rubbed off on Bessie over the years was stoicism.

Their conversation only ended when Bessie had to go to work. She left wearing a white blouse and dark skirt and navy blue sweater. Carried an apron over her arm. She was wearing flats, and did not walk like a woman who had once been told she would make a good ballet dancer. The arthritis was already in her hands and in her knees and ankles.

Grace drove her, and had a cup of coffee, and watched her pick ing up plates at Speed’s. She was appalled that Bess had to do such work.

The woman stayed on her mind. Bess, living in that haunted house, and wanting to keep it. Grace would visit Bess from time to time and talk to her about taxes and the Church. Later, after it was MI lost, other stories came out, and Grace would wonder why Bess ever wanted to keep the place. “The house was haunted, Grace,” she told her once, “No one but me would have stayed so long. If you were to go upstairs, you would have felt it. One night when my husband was very sick, just a few months before he died, he got up and started down the hall to the bathroom and fell down those stairs with a terri ble sound. It was almost as if something grabbed him and hurled hitn to the very bottom. His long years of acrobatic training is all that kept him from getting killed. I screamed as I went past, and I was banging on every one of the boys’ doors. ‘Get up, your father’s fallen down.’ They came running out, and Frank Jr: picked him up and carried him back. Then, after Frank St. died, I and Mikal got ready to go to bed one night, and in the hallway on ‘the ground floor, between the bedroom and the kitchen, I heard the worst noise ever in my life. It was a frightening place to live, really.”

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Of course, Grace only heard those stories after Mikal was in college, and Bess was in the trailer she had bought with a little help from the Church and the sale of her Philippine mahogany furniture.

Bessie mentioned that on Sunday, the only day she was free from work, there was no round-trip bus service between Portland and Salem. Grace said, “There’s no reason why I can’t take you over to the prison.” The visits were only twice a month and Grace’s kids were married. She had no heavy family obligations. Besides, Grace loved to read. She took along a book to enjoy in the car while waiting through the visit, and they had a fine time driving there and back, and talked about witches. Bessie said she was only a step away from being a creature of the woods. She respected witches, she said, and didn’t want to be in their powers. “Do you know,” she said, “I’m frightened of riding in a car next to someone who has dealings with them, because I believe they can wreck your car. One has to be on guard against every strong and evil vibration that comes along.”

Grace sat in the car for a couple of hours that day and read her book while Bessie was inside the prison. Afterward, Bessie said that Gary had put Grace’s name on the visiting list. Grace had no particular interest in meeting him, but thought, Well, if Bessie wants this, okay.

The visits went on for two years. They went almost every other week. Sometimes they would get there and the authorities would say, You can’t see him today, He is in the pokey, all locked up. They would never tell Bess before she came.

The first time that Grace went into the prison itself, she was overcome with the power of the echoes. Otherwise, it was not as bad as prisons she had seen in movies. There was a big gray stone wall around it, and that was depressing enough, but the place was situated casually enough across a field from a heavy-trafficked road on the edge of Salem, and the administration building was only two stories high. Its entrance was through a small door. The reception

room looked like the shabby lobby of a small factory or a supply-parts house. There was a big circular desk for information, and on the walls were paintings of deer and horses done by convicts. There was also a sliding barred gate to a small room with a second gate on the other side. Given word, the visitors would all crowd into this space, then the gate behind them would slam, there would be a pause, and the gate in front would open. Those gates would send out echoes. Down the long stone walls those echoes went out as loud as boxcars slamming into one another. Then everybody would pass into the visiting room.

That looked like a conference area for PTA meetings at the high school. Lots of pale orange, pale blue, pale yellow and pale green stack-up plastic chairs were placed around cheap blond wood tables. Cigarette machines were along the wall, Coke machines, candy machines. Just a guard or two, and thirty or forty people talking across the tables, often two or three visitors for each convict.

Grace saw all kinds of visitors. Sad working-class fathers and mothers, harried-looking wives with babies on their arms, a little curd on the corner of the babies’ mouths. A considerable number of very fat women waddled in through the gates. They were usually having a heavyweight romance with a very thin convict. A few young wellbuilt girls would be there with a look Grace came to recognize. They wore a lot of lipstick and had the look of belonging to a special culture. They obviously had boy friends in the prison, and Grace came to learn from Gary that a lot of them also had boy friends on the outside who had been in prison, were now out, and would doubtless soon be back. It was perfectly possible those girls were more in love with the man they were visiting here than the fellow they were living with outside.