John Dennis Harris
From: "The Bird-Headed Woman" On an isolated farm near the Black River lived a farmer and his wife who had recently given birth to a child. She quarreled with him because he raged at her in his religion, accusing her of wrongs she had not done to him, and so she left him and took her child to live in the woods where she had found a shack abandoned by loggers. Her husband, alienated by her, began to preach a profound and compelling gospel of sin and the everlasting hell due to sinners, and people from many farms and towns came around to listen to him. She could hear their clamor from the woods where she lived. Like the sound of a train flagged to a sudden halt in the wilderness. Crashing its clashing cars. Seething with hissing steam. At night through the trees she could see the glaring lights of kerosene lamps moving like aural globules upon the lawn and on the porch of the house where men and women gathered to listen to her husband. She went out in the night to listen, leaving her child in the shack, but feared that her child might cry and so went back. The next night she thought: “I will bathe my child in warm water and swaddle him well and put him in his cradle and when he is asleep I will go.” The child fell asleep. She left a kerosene lamp beside him and went to the farmhouse where the pilgrims had gathered. She joined them at the back of the crowd. She could not see her husband but heard him preaching and everyone was enthralled. They did not see her and when the Holy Spirit overtook them – first one woman swayed, then a man jabbered and jigged, then many shouted and danced – she too began to dance and jabber. When the daylight began to filter the night and the trees began to reappear beyond the stubble fields, a wind arose and chilled her and she recalled: “My child. He is crying.” She ran through the woods and found her shack. She heard her child crying as she came to the shack and she reproached herself for leaving it, and flung wide the door. The door was
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