The Executioner's Song

by Norman Mailer

  Since Gary had been at Utah State, Snyder and Esplin had had little communication. They talked to him on the phone a couple of times, and in the beginning, made arrangements for Nicole to get in, but they didn't actually go themselves until a couple of days before the Appeal Hearing on November 1. That day, however, they were given physical contact in the visitors' room at Maximum. Enough space to pace the floor, maybe 15 by 20 feet.

  They were coming as the bearers of good tidings. Their chances of getting the death sentence reduced to life were, they thought, pretty nimble. Number one, as they laid it out for him, the Utah statute on the death penalty passed by the last Legislature did not provide for mandatory review of a death sentence. That was serious.

  Probably, it was constitutionally defective. This criticism, "constitutionally defective," was about as strong as you could get in such areas of the law. A lot of lawyers felt the Utah statute was almost certainly going to be overthrown by the U.S. Supreme Court. So it was Snyder and Esplin's opinion the Utah Supreme Court would now be very hesitant about enforcing a death sentence on November 15th. That Utah Supreme Court would certainly look bad if shortly after they let a man be executed the Supreme Court came down against them.

  Besides, they had another good legal vein to work. During the Mitigation Hearing, Judge Bullock had admitted evidence of the Orem murder. That had to have a big effect on the Jury. It certainly was easier to vote for a man's death if you heard about an additional murder he had committed, therefore, Snyder and Esplin were feeling optimistic. The brunt of their defense had been to maneuver onto these good appeal grounds. Now, they were feeling, in fact, a little excited. Some of this would be brand-new legal stuff for Utah County.

  Gary listened. Then he said, "I've been here for three weeks, and I don't know that I want to live here for the rest of my life." He shook his head. "I came with the idea that maybe I could work it out, but the lights are on 24 hours a day and the noise is too much for me."

  The lawyers kept talking about their grounds for appeal. Wootton's closing argument with his comments on the suffering of Debbie Bushnell could easily be called prejudicial to Gary. The prospects were good, even excellent.

  Gary paced back and forth, and looked a little nervous. He repeated the difficulties he felt with living in Maximum. Finally, he said quietly, "Can I fire you?"

  They replied that they guessed he could. However, they said, they thought they might have to go ahead with the appeal anyway. It was their duty.

  Gilmore said, "Now, don't I have the right to die?" He stared at them. "Can't I accept my punishment?"

  Gary told them of his belief that he had been executed once before, in eighteenth-century England. He said, "I feel I've been here before. There is some crime from my past." He got quiet, and said, "I feel I have to atone for the thing I did then." Esplin couldn't help thinking that this stuff about eighteenth-century England would sure have made a difference with the psychiatrists if they had heard it.

  Gilmore now began to say that his life wouldn't end with this life.

  He would still be in existence after he was dead. It all seemed part of a logical discussion. Esplin finally said, "Gary, we can see your point of view, but we still feel duty bound to go ahead on that appeal."

  When Gary said again, "What can I do about it?" Snyder answered, "Well, I don't know."

  Gary then said, "Can I fire you?"

  Esplin said, "Gary, we'll make the Judge aware that you want to can us, but we're going to file anyway."

  They parted on pretty good terms.

  Noall Wootton was up in San Francisco at a national homicide symposium.

  Went there, as he put it, to learn how to prosecute murder cases, and they even gave him a certificate. He was going to have his wife join him for a few days and have a little fun, but word from his office took care of that. Wootton's secretary phoned to say that Gary Gilmore was going to withdraw his motion for a new trial. He was not going to appeal. He wanted to be executed and Snyder and Esplin were damn upset. Didn't know what their ethical position was supposed to be. Wootton concluded he had better get back. Who knew what con's trick Gilmore had come up with? Wootton couldn't remember a ploy like this before.

  The courtroom on November 1 offered a quiet scene. There not many people seated, and Gary's speech to the Judge, everything considered, was, Wootton thought, kind of open and courteous. It was still off the wall. Wootton got permission from Judge Bullock to make a few inquiries:

  MR. WOOTTON Mr. Gilmore, has your treatment in prison thus far at the Utah State Prison influenced your decision in any way?

  MR. GILMORE No.

  MR. WOOTTON How about your treatment at the Utah County jail?

  MR. GILMORE No.

  MR. WOOTTON Now you have been represented by two attorneys who are paid by Utah County. Do you understand that?

  MR. GILMORE Yes.

  MR. WOOTTON Are you satisfied with the counseling they have given you and the representation that they have made for you?

  MR. GILMORE Not entirely.

  MR. WOOTTON In what way, sir?

  MR. GILMORE I'm satisfied with them.

  MR. WOOTTON So the way they have represented you hasn't necessarily had any influence on your decision, is that correct?

  MR. GILMORE That's my own decision. It's not influenced by anything other than the fact that I don't care to live the rest of my life in jail. That doesn't mean this jail or that jail, but any jail.

  MR. WOOTTON Has anyone else influenced your decision other than your own thoughts, sir?

  MR. GILMORE I make my own decisions.

  MR. WOOTTON Are you under the influence of any alcohol or drugs or other intoxicants at this time?

  MR. GILMORE No. Of course not.

  MR. WOOTTON Have you been under the influence of any such thing, sir, in the course of your thoughts concerning this decision?

  MR. GILMORE No. I'm in jail. They don't serve beer, whiskey, or anything.

  MR. WOOTTON Sir, in your own judgment, do you feel that you are mentally and emotionally competent to make this decision at this time?

  MR. GILMORE Yes.

  MR. WOOTTON Do you make any claims of being insane or mentally disturbed at this point?

  MR. GILMORE No. I know what I'm doing.

  MR. WOOTTON Sir, would you request that the Court extend the execution date beyond the normal appeal time in order to give you additional time to think this decision out?

  MR. GILMORE I'm not going to think differently about it at any time.

  DESERET NEWS

  Slayer Wants To Keep Death Date

  Provo (AP) Nov. 1—Unless he changes his mind and appeals, or the courts and the governor intervene, a 35-year-old parolee convicted of murdering a hotel clerk will keep his Nov. 15 execution date.

  "You sentenced me to die. Unless it's a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it," Gilmore said yesterday.

  Fourth District Court Judge Bullock told Gilmore he could still change his mind and appeal, and an attorney for Gilmore said he would prepare appeal papers just in case Gilmore decides to appeal.

  DESERET NEWS

  Houdini Didn't Show

  Nov.—Halloween was a disappointment to groups trying to make contact with the spirit of escape artist Harry Houdini who died on Halloween 50 years ago, Several magicians gathered Sunday in the Detroit hospital room where Houdini died, hoping for a message from the master. All they got on a video tape machine brought to record the event, was interference from a local rock station.

  "It's not even very good music," said one magician.

  Chapter 32

  OLD CANCER, NEW MADNESS

  By the second day of November, after all the phone calls came Bessie began to hear echoes again. The past rang in Bessie's ear, the past reverberated in her head. Steel bars slammed into stone.

  "The fool," Mikal screamed at her. "Doesn't he know he's in Utah? They will kill him, if he pushes it." She tried to calm her youngest son, and all the wh
ile she was thinking that from the time Gary was 3 years old, she knew he was going to be executed. He had been a dear little guy, but she had lived with that fear since he was 3. That was when he began to show a side she could not go near.

  One time, in that endless year when Frank was away in the Colorado jail, she sat in her mother's house and watched Gary play in the yard. There was a mud puddle she had told him to stay away from. Two minutes after she went inside, he then sat down in the middle.

  It put a fear through her. Would he always be so defiant?

  Now, the walls of the trailer closed in again. Somebody asked her once if it had been difficult to learn to live in the trailer, and she said no, not difficult at all. That was because she had never lived there, but died the day she moved in.

  It was an ugly place, and she hated ugly places. Her health went down. She had only, she thought, inherited enough art from Uncle George, the painter, to know how to decorate a home, but she had done that much for the last house. It had been nice. Now, she lived in a narrow room, and her arthritis got worse as she sat through the days and years at a table in the kitchen end of the thing with the radio stacked on the telephone books and the sore bones of her pelvis installed on a pillow.

  Everything was shades of brown. One poverty after another. Even the icebox was brown. It was that shade of gloom which would not lift. The color of clay. Nothing could grow.

  Outside were fifty trailers in this lot off the highway they called a Park. It parked old people. At little expense. Had her trailer cost $3,500? She could no longer remember. When people asked if it had one bedroom or two, she would say, "It's got one and a half bedrooms, if you can believe it." It also had a half porch with a half awning.

  Sometimes she didn't get out for weeks at a time. The arthritis got worse. At Speed's, she couldn't keep up with her work. Those twisted fingers ached with every plate she lifted from a table. Each move felt like the beginning of a disagreeable transaction. Sometimes she had to figure out in the middle how to shift her course so that the repercussion of the pain would not freeze her spine. Finally, the boss said he had to let her go, and gave her final pay. She was making $10 a week. Once she stopped working, the arthritis got worse. One knee started to bother her, then the other.

  A doctor said he could operate on her arthritic knees and put in plastic ones. She said no. She had a picture of living in this plastic house with plastic knees. The long hair that fell to her waist turned gray, and she kept it in a bun. What with the difficulty of raising her arms, it usually stayed in the bun. "I'm ugly," Bessie would say herself. It was as if, in losing the house, she must also lose her looks.

  She moved in the year Mikal graduated from high school. He went to college in Portland, and put himself through. He was brilliant and got good marks, and had to think of his own life. There were periods when he would visit less. The day she lost the ten-room house with the marble-top furniture, Mikal went north, she went south, and they never lived under the same roof again.

  She had only moved a little farther south on McLaughlin Boulevard in Milwaukie south of the Portland City line, moved farther down that four-lane avenue of bars and eateries and discount stores. One gas station even had an old World War II Boeing bomber stuck up in the air above its gasoline pumps. That was about as surplus as you could get. Since she stayed in the trailer more and more, she passed that silly airplane on beat-up old McLaughlin Boulevard less and less.

  Mikal was gone. They were all gone. She did not know how much was her fault, and how much was the fault of the ongoing world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels in the prairie grass, but they were gone. Gary was away forever, and in her dreams the wind still whistled through the vent in Gaylen's belly that the ice pick made, and Frank Jr. was often gone, and when she saw him on weekends, he lived deep in his own thoughts and rarely spoke, and practiced magic no more, and Frank Sr. was dead and Iong gone.

  The sorrows of the family had begun with Gary, and now he wanted to be dead. When he departed, would they all descend another step into that pit where they gave up searching for one another? She lived again through the days when Frank Sr. died.

  His bad look, she was fond of saying, was strong enough to push a man across a room. He had been in show business so long his muscles rippled. He was a strong and powerfully built man and she watched him go down to nothing and die.

  He had always been very afraid of cancer. His mother died of it, and Frank never said a word, but Bessie knew. There was a straight-out fear. The sound of the word could change the day for him.

  She watched him linger in the hospital. He wasted as he went. Once she had been very much in love with him, but there had been so many fights over the boys, over Gary most of all, that toward the end, there was not much feeling. But, oh, it was hard to watch him die. She almost loved him very much again.

  To herself she wept when she thought of the first time Gary was brought before a Judge, because that was the first time Frank could be found on Gary's side. "Don't admit a thing," he kept saying to Gary. The wisdom of his life was in the remark. If nothing was admitted, the other side might not be able to start the game of law and justice.

  The Judge found Gary guilty anyway.

  Gary was playing at the other end of the field. "Kill me," he was saying.

  When Frank Sr. was in Colorado Prison, she lived for a time with Fay. One night a bat flew into Fay's house. She called the police to get it out. No question of the evil in that bat. Then, a year to the day after Frank died, a bat entered the house with the Philippine mahogany furniture and the turnaround drive. She ran upstairs and called the police again, shivering with a fear twenty years old. It happened near to the day Gary was sitting at her desk holding the birth certificate with the name of Fay Robert Coffman. That was the moment she knew no matter how many years it took, she would lose the house. There was too much hatred in Gary. You did not keep a house on hatred such aas that.

  Still, she did try. Tried through the years, and the thickening fingers, the stiffening knees, the slow twisting of her limbs. If the Mormon Church would pay those back taxes, $1,400, no fortune, she would sign the deed over until she repaid the Church in full.

  It would be simple, she thought, but the outcome produced new voices in her ear. Real voices. She could hear every ugly thought. The Bishop said, We'll send a man to appraise the property, but when he came, he set the worth at $7,000. She told him that her husband had paid twice the sum ten years ago, and her husband was no fool. He said, "They asked me to appraise it low," and talked of the of the deterioration of the grounds.

  Soon the voices began to ask why she didn't agree to live on a lesser basis. Did she have to stay in a big house now? She could always work for one of the rich ladles in the Church, and have her bed and room free.

  It didn't seem wise, the Bishop explained, to keep a home she could not maintain physically. As it was, the city threatened suit if she didn't take care of the weeds in the rear. She had four sons, but the rear of the house was a thicket of tall grass, tin cans, cat briars.

  The Church sent young people over to try to clear it, but that was a large job. Couldn't Mikal help?

  He had, explained Bessie, his studies. After this reply, there was a crevasse of ice between the Bishop and herself.

  She heard the voices talking of the financial situation. The home, if you included the expense of keeping it up, would not be worth what it would cost to buy back the arrears on the taxes. They told her again that the grounds to the house were ill kept, and choked with weeds, and her sons had not kept it up. She felt able to kill. She didn't like someone telling her what her sons ought to do. Nor those voices saying that the wise course was to find a mobile home she could live in and handle.

  Of all the people, she said to herself, who ever hurt me, it's been only Mormons, nobody else ever could. She remembered the terrible hatred in Gary's face on the day she told him in the visiting room at Oregon State that the Church never helped her to save the house.<
br />
  There was a look in his eyes then as if he had found an enemy worthy of his stature.

  Now, she was in the trailer sitting in the dark, TV not on, radio not on, her legs in wrapping, and her nightgown looking like it was a hundred and two years old. She could hear the boy from the Mormon Church rapping on the door, breaking the silence, the boy who came over to help her. He would do the dirty dishes that were all over the table and all over the sink, pick up after the trail of the immediate past of the day before, and the five days before, all that record of living from day to day through the twisting of her limbs. Sometimes she would sit and not reply to the boy's knock, sit in the dark, and feel him looking through the panes of the door to see if he could find her shadow sitting there. Finally, she would say, "Go away."

  "I love you, Bessie," the Mormon boy would tell her through the door, and leave on his rounds to help another old lady even as Benny Bushnell once had done.

  "Gary cannot want to die," she would say to herself in the dark.

  Nov. 2—76

  Milw. Oregon

  Gary Gilmore

  No. 3871

  Dear Gary:

  I heard the news at noon, and Gary, my dear, I could hardly stand it. I love you & I want you to live.

  Gary, Mikal loves you and he is your friend & you know I wouldn't lie to you. He took this real hard but he will try very hard to help you.

  If you have 4 or 5 people who really love you, you are lucky. So please hold on.