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concert_goer
Многоплановая история безумия столь густого, что его можно брать в руки и резать ножом. Или серпом. Главному герою вполне можно посочувствовать: американский Юг — явно не то место, в котором можно демонстрировать отклонения от нормы, даже если все вокруг те ещё маргиналы. Книга написана потрясающим языком, отдельные описания хочется прямо-таки смаковать, перечитывая заново. Очень сильно.
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Date: 2010-03-22 10:22 pm (UTC)ну и насчет колодца (там, похоже, как бы не вся книжка и лежит):
There upon its little slab wall she rested the spirit lamp. Then she tied one end of the rope she had brought to the central crankshaft of the hoist, and composed a crude hangman's knot at the other. <...> From the pocket of her discarded nightdress she took the plastic bag which contained her suicide note – this she stuffed between two of the piled slabs of the wall, up onto which she duly climbed. Lifting the halter, she clapped on the noose and pulled it over her head, tugging the rope till it fitted snugly about her throat.
Tottering a little beneath the great knotted growth that sat grotesquely upon her right shoulder, she wavered a brief moment upon the brink of the well, then leapt naked into the dark hole.
At the well's mouth the spirit lamp flickered lowly like a vigil light.
Wondering why he still bothered to look out his window of a morning, a certain early riser and creature of habit, Baker Wiggam, did just that and was greeted by the lamp's last waning light calling from the well. Baker Wiggam grabbed his coat and pocketed a large torch.
Thirty minutes later, Wiggam's fat and evil son Fitzgerald – known to one and all as "Fists" – bowled through Sardus Swift's open backdoor and, without so much as a knock, burst into his bedroom. Grabbing hold of the foot of the four-poster, he bullied its brass rail violently. A shaken Sardus awoke to the sight of Fists Wiggam grinning and rolling on the spot like a bad penny, the terrible news a trembling bubble on the top of the boy's fat tongue.
The boy chuckled as Sardus rubbed his face with one hand and explored the empty space beside him with the other. Both hands fell still as it dawned upon him that there was no wife in his bed; he lay there with the one frozen upon his face, the other outstretched to where the barren belly of his woman should have been.
The boy drew breath and spoke:
"Not dere, Brudder Sawdus. Wife not dere. Tain't cookin' neither. Tain't moppin'. Tain't scrubbin'. Tain't even in da house, Brudder! Nope! But ah know where dat woman is, Brudder Sawdus! Know where?!! Ya wife done backa our well wit not a stitch on!! Ha! Ha! Stark naked assa babe!!"
Later, as he stood between the murmurous circle of public outrage and the dark shape of the well, Sardus Swift bent visibly beneath his grief and shame. Hunched over, he stared hopelessly at the dogged and beaten face in the puddle between his feet, unable to recognize it.
His ears rang with a string of the most wicked expletives and curses, to which the town's citizenry also was subjected as it huddled around the well, clucking and gasping as the stream of filth spewed from its nether-regions.
Baker Wiggam and Doc Morrow fished the mad woman out of the well, naked save a few livid leeches fatted to the size of thumbs. Beneath the collar of rope, a rubescent wound oozed pink water. Her delicate little hands were worn raw, flayed by the coarse fibre of the rope, the rough rope that she had clung to all through the late spring night as she bobbed in the near-brimming well, her "long drop" a mere two feet down.
Over the following days, the faces of the townsfolk began to look to Sardus like a gallery of crude portraits which, framed in their window squares, gazed vacantly down upon him as he doggedly awaited the specially-equipped ambulance to drive the four hundred miles from Marilyn Cottages, Delaware, on Cape le Winn.
When, after much delay, they had finished signing the final committal papers, Sardus and Doc Morrow watched the grey windowless Maria plunge into the hyaline midnight sky and disappear behind its starless screen to become yet another puddle of no-colour, its wriggling cargo jacketed in soft grey pads and grey leather straps, seized in a convulsion of grey insanity, borne off to Marilyn Cottages, off to Marilyn Cottages, off to Marilyn Cottages.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 08:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 09:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-23 09:34 am (UTC)Not dere, Brudder Sawdus. Wife not dere. Tain't cookin' neither. Tain't moppin'. Tain't scrubbin'. Tain't even in da house, Brudder! Nope! But ah know where dat woman is, Brudder Sawdus! Know where?!! Ya wife done backa our well wit not a stitch on!! Ha! Ha! Stark naked assa babe!!"
Нет ее тут, брат Сардус. Нет вашей жены. И на кухне нет. И в прихожей нет. И в доме нет ее, брат! Вот оно как. Но я–то знаю, где ваша баба, брат Сардус! Знаете где? Ваша женушка сиганула в наш колодец совсем голая! Ха! Ха! Совсем голая, прямо как маленькая лялька.