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.
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