The Executioner's Song (64 page)

Grace thought Bessie had a remarkable voice. It was not exactly cultivated or grand, but it sure was unusual. Bette Davis playing a pioneer 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 picking 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 alI 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 terrible sound. It was almost as if something grabbed him and hurled him 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 Sr. 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."

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 well built 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.

                There were also the prisoners. Some looked like the downtrodden, to say the least. They were simpleminded, or misshapen in body or posture, furtive, or stolid, or cowed, or stupid. They were men who looked like they had grown up in barnyards and had the logic of louts.

                Then there were men who carried themselves as if they were true figures of interest. They looked as if they belonged to an exclusive society. They would have a little smile on their faces as if they knew more about life, living, and the world, than the people who came to visit. They were usually lithe in appearance or downright powerful. Moved with the skill of tightrope walkers. They were arrogant as hell in the mocking way they had of looking at visitors and tourists. It was as if they were accustomed to being looked at, and were worth being looked at. They would keep such expressions on their faces until they sat down with their visitors. Then other looks might appear. Half an hour later, one could see vulnerability, or tenderness, or just plain misery.

Later, when she got to know Gary better, he explained carefully that there were two kinds of prisoners: inmates and convicts. The way he said it indicated that the second category was the superior one and he belonged to it. Grace would have put him there herself.

                He wore his clothes that way. Very neat in his pale blue shirt and light blue prison dungarees. Convicts, as opposed to inmates, wore their shirts as if they were tailored. After a while, the difference in the two groups was apparent. She could compare it to a high school where all the class leaders, athletes, and attractive kids always formed an in-group. Then there was the general population.

Gary, however, was never arrogant around his mother. He would talk to her with great seriousness. They would be so deep in their conversation that Grace would look around the room so as not to be too much on top of them. Then Bessie or Gary would say something funny. They would both laugh in absolute merriment. They laughed an awful lot in that visiting room.

                He always devoted a few minutes to Grace. He would be gentle in his talk, but with a touch of irony. Would always want to know which Spook Grace had met in her thoughts this week, and then they would talk about spooks. He would also ask Grace's opinion of the books he was reading, The one he liked most was The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy. Once she bought Gary a subscription to Art Today.

                She thought his pictures of children were worthy of superlatives.

The only time she saw him get angry was on the day Bessie told him she had definitely lost the house. He was so angry at the Mormon Church that even the recollection of his wrath years later made Grace think, "I'll bet a nickel he knew those boys were Mormon before he killed them."

He would also ask how Mikal was getting along in college. Mikal the Mysterious, he would call him, because he never came to visit.

                Grace could hear him say, "I just don't know Gary," and that was true, considering that Mikal had only been four years old when his brother went to Reform School. Grace also thought Mikal's long hair might have something to do with it. He would be uncomfortable in that visiting room under the eyes of. the convicts.

At such times, Bessie would divert Gary with funny stories of his father. It was impossible not to recognize that the father and son never got along, but now, somehow, it was funny stories about Frank Sr. that would make Gary laugh the most.

Frank had been bragging of the somersault he used to do off the top of some piled-up chairs into the orchestra pit, and once in Denver, Frank decided to show her. Bess told him she didn't think he should try it. He was too drunk. "I've done this all my life," he told her, "I know how." He got up, and the chairs fell, and he knocked the wind out of himself so badly she thought he was dead. "I kept trying to give him mouth-to-mouth whatever-you-call-it."

Or the time with the sheep. Gaylen had a black sheep, and Mikal cried, "I want one." What Mikal wanted, Mikal got. "Sure, sure," she said, "sheep, horse, cow, whatever, get it for the kid." Frank came back from the stockyards with a white sheep who had a black face and pulled it out of the back of the station wagon. Bess was angry.

                She didn't like animals, and the back of the car would have to be cleaned. That damned sheep.

                The lady next door had three yapping dogs. As Frank came around the corner, the sheep turned unmanageable. All the boys began to scream, "Help Father get the sheep in the pen." It went on for a half hour. Bess stayed up on the porch. She cried out, "Twist his tail, Frank, and he will go right ahead of you," but Frank couldn't hear what she was saying, and told Gaylen, "Kick the damned thing in the ass." Gaylen would go to launch his foot, the sheep would turn around and get kicked in the face. Frank would say, "Don't you know the goddamn face from the butt?"

                All at once the animal turned. Frank got his foot caught in the rope, fell, and the sheep began to drag him. That sheep laid a slide of green diarrhea, while Frank was pulled across the lawn, the sidewalk, and the gravel in the shoulder of the road. Before they got Frank up, he had one sore bottom. "Look at me," he said, brushing himself, "grass all over."

                "Frank," Bessie said, "it isn't grass."

                Between her sobs of laughter, she would say, "That was the one funniest thing I ever watched."

"Remember," said Gary, "how Dad was the worst driver in the world?" He turned to Grace. "My father caused more wrecks. When people would start honking at him, he'd put his thumb to his nose. Or he'd let go of the steering wheel and wiggle all of his fingers next to his ears like Bullwinkle the Moose. They'd go crazy till he put his hands back on the wheel. We kids used to think he was hot stuff. We'd wiggle our fingers at the other cars, too."

After the laughter, in all the thought that followed on memories, Gary said, "I wish Dad was still alive. He would have gotten me out of here years ago."

                "I know that, Gary," Bessie said, "but I can't get you out. I don't have the money and the know-how. I don't have the bearing your father had."

                "Well," said Gary, "I have laid awake a lot of nights wishing my dad was still here."

"They were two bulls locking horns," Bessie said to Grace on the way home, "but, Gary is right. His dad would never have let him stay in prison. Frank would have known the people to see and what to say. I just grew up on a stupid farm back in stupid Utah. All I ever knew was cows, pigs, chickens, goats, horses, and sheep, so I'm no use to Gary." She sighed. "I just wish Frank had gotten closer to that boy while he was living."

They would take the drive forward and back, forty miles each way, every other Sunday, and the echoes of the past would reverberate like the slamming of the steel doors. Bessie had a fund of stories and passed them out like confections. It was as if she naturally preferred tasty little stories to the depth of those echoes that came up from the past.

She explained to Grace how she and Frank had been traveling through Texas by bus when Gary was born on an overnight stop at the Burleson Hotel in McCamey. They couldn't move until he was six weeks old. Enough to make him think of himself as a Texan forever.