Wigford Rememberies. Kyp Harness

Handicapped, is he?” Sam notes. “And your mother, she’s not around?”

      “Oh no, no,” says Henry emphatically, shaking his head from side to side, closing his eyes. “She… went away after… She was sick for a long time and she went away… an’… then we buried her away in the ground… because she was sick and then she went away…” he stutters quickly, his voice like a recording played at double speed, high and nasal.

      “Hm,” says the stranger. “Died, did she?”

      “But… but… she was a sinner,” murmurs Henry, his eyes glazing over as his mouth moves awkwardly, straining, little drops of spit jumping from the furiously working lips. “She said no to the Lord Jesus, and she used many curse words, even though she was sick for a long time in the bed. She… closed her heart against Jesus and cursed Him and cursed Father and Father was very angry, an’… said she was damned to go to hell… an’… even though Father told her many times, she cursed Jesus and cursed Father, an’… even when her legs turned black… an’… she was very sick…”

      “Mm-hm,” says the stranger, nodding slightly, his features taking on a serious cast, his eyebrows narrowing as if deeply involved in the problem being discussed.

      “An’… an’… me and Father prayed for her even though Father told me and told her she was damned to go to hell and she shouted curse words back at him still. Father said we should pray for her soul, but not after she went away… for Father said we shouldn’t pray for her then, not then when she was gone,” Henry says hurriedly.

      As Henry says this, the veil in his mind splits and parts like a curtain and opens onto the scene of an aged man sitting in a wooden kitchen chair, naked, a dusty blanket over his lap and resting upon the blanket an open bible. He sits before an old-fashioned wood stove glowing red with the crackling fire within it, his deep-set furious eyes staring at the stove, gold and yellow shards of reflected light from the flames dancing over his clenched, wizened features, his creased forehead, his hollow cheeks, his grimly compressed mouth.

      The old man’s long, white, snowy hair sweeps from his temples and tumbles back from behind his ears onto his thin bony shoulders and his wrinkled, sinewy hands grasp at the arms of the wooden chair with such force that the veins along the backs of them stand up in thin, bluish ridges and his chest heaves as he breathes long, quavering, determined draughts of air in and out through his nostrils, his chest red and weathered beneath coils of wiry white hairs.

      He stares into the fire of the stove angrily, his jaw working back and forth with an outraged, livid fury not entirely of this world. A wooden cross is nailed to the wall above the stove and on the wall behind him his saviour stares skyward with large, long-suffering, soulful eyes from an oval-shaped framed print, His right hand uplifted in a gesture of peace and also of supplication. Pieces of broken glass lie on the floor at the old man’s feet, and at the side of his chair is an overturned dish caked with the congealed remains of a long ago, half-eaten dinner.

      The old man sits and stares, and around and above and piercing through the rumble of his sonorous breathing are ravening, cascading sheets of sound, the brash, pure, high, metallic shattering sounds of a woman’s screams, breaking over his head and ears, the white, blasting, frozen, howling, consciousness-shredding sounds of hysteria and gut-wrenching, horror-filled pain, the broken anguished words rawly torn from the lungs and bloodily hurling the vilest and most graphically wounding curses invented since the dawn of the spoken word, the ringing gale of vengeance and hatred and disgust wrenched from the marrow of the bone and sent screaming in delirious, scalding waves of white noise crashing through the room, the voice breaking and splintering into rough, moaning gasps from time to time as if in disbelief at the extremity of its own suffering.

      The old man sits like a stone carving in the midst of it, his large, clear, pain-filled eyes unblinking. His thin, parched lips can be seen to be moving slightly, mechanically, as if repeating a vow or an oath or a ritualistic chant. “The mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth…” his low rumbling voice repeats, trembling with emotion, “…drunken with the blood of the saints, and the martyrs of Jesus.”

      “And then Father said that it was well that she died,” Henry says. “For she had so offended the Lord that surely misfortune and enmity would be visited upon her the rest of her days, for she was BAD,” Henry says, nodding solemnly to himself. “She… was a BAD woman.”

      “Mm-hm,” Sam says, gazing out the window abstractedly.

      “An’… an’ so we buried her in the ground and Father took her picture down,” Happy Henry concludes.