Wigford Rememberies. Kyp Harness

      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.”