Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen

passed out, champagne-sodden. She told how Inez Melendrez McNamara weighed 350 pounds and that her huge body was cloaked by her coarse black hair, which dragged on the floor, like a shaggy black cape. When the Novitiate sobered up she found herself back in the nunnery, raped so many times that it took some weeks to heal her.
    But time has almost carried off forever the story of Inez Melendrez McNamara. I’ve saved a little of it here.
    O RMSBY
    What is this wild thing that will cut like a shark-toothed blade through a person until it has hacked him to pieces? Or more, what I am interested in is the change that will come over a wild person, as though a devil had suddenly departed him. Where did the devil go? The Bible says into some swine—that, filled of two men’s devils, ran crazy over a cliff and fell into the sea, leaving the two men peaceful after long torment. But I am not interested—right now—in the receivers of the demons that flee insane people, in the swine: it is the wild person that takes my thought right now: a man named Ormsby.
    Now Ormsby was a wild red young nigger come down from a poverty-killed back swamp town near Mobile, Alabama, to get work at a sawmill in Moscow, Texas. He was in trouble from the first because he drank whiskey with the Cushata Indians and fucked them and cut them across their throats and faces with a nasty knife. He was wild with his red dick and mean with his knife and was locked up a lot and bound to posts and trees to keep him from tearing up half a town—or his own self.
    Look how he changed to a pink-headed loving old nigger:
    After the violence in the woods with the raped white girl Louetta, Blanch’s daughter you will recall, he ran back toward the Alabama swamp that he grew up in. He hid in weeds and crawled by rivers and walked highways in rags until he stole some clean clothes off a clothesline and put them on. He finally got on a truck that took him as far as Mobile and from there he got to the hidden swampland that he knew and sank into it, hidden from the world. His wretchedness and his self-loathing made him grovel in the alligator excrement and filth of the shallows of the swamp water. He lay naked among the alligators, hoping they would bite him to pieces and eat him up. They did not touch him. Sometimes, blinking, they lumbered over him as he lay in the steaming swamp mud; their claws left deep bleeding gashes on his body whose white scars he carried to his death. The heat was infernal and fierce swamp insects sang in his ears and stung his naked body until he threw himself into the hot swamp water, howling. He could not die.
    And then one afternoon in his dementia he heard an urging to go back to Moscow, Texas, to the sawmill and stand up and work honestly and earn his pay. When he determined to go, to turn away out of the hell swampland, he stood up and felt the madness in him leave. And he saw the alligators go crazy, as if they were mad as he had been. They thrashed and lept and beat their horned heads against the cedar stumps in the water and all of them that he had lived with battered themselves to death. The water was blood. When the silence that followed filled the swampland, Ormsby the changed man stood up in a peace that he could not understand; but he got himself ready to go back to the sawmill. He found his filthy clothes and washed them in a spring and they dried in an hour while he scoured his filthy body in the clean springwater until he was fresh again. Ormsby then walked out of the dark hidden place of his madness.
    At the sawmill they saw that he was a different man and in trust they gave him a job. Ormsby worked hard and was quiet among the men who could hardly believe that he was the same man who had been chained, hollering and gnashing his teeth, to trees so that others could be safe from him. Because of his long suffering, Ormsby’s hair, which had been red, had turned pink.
    He came one day into the nearby town