Proudly, licking his burned fingers, Henry peels off the singed burlap, then the smoking cheesecloth, to unveil the sacrifice. The hard little head with its horns and blank broasted eyeballs stares at the guests. A woman screams. Only the gourmets of tongue and brain find the head appealing but elsewhere, below the neck, the flesh is a tasty light brown, like breast of turkey, and falls easily from the bones. Bildad, a vegetarian, turns away, chanting his mantra in horror.

Lacking enough flatware, Henry serves the meat buffet-style on paper picnic plates. A few of the women hesitate at first (Good God Henry did you have to leave the head on?) but not for long. He manages to get fair portions to the members of the orchestra and to some of his shyer, soberer village neighbors before the goat is reduced to skull and bones, a rack of ribs, tibia, femur, vertebrae and feet—the mute cloven lightfoot hooves of Pan.

Success. The orchestra, fed and lubricated, resumes its music, the fire rumbles in the stove, the wind fumbles and mumbles under the eaves outside, through the loft, into and out of the attic; sheet metal rattles on the roof. One of the dancers peels down to a black leotard; another leaps onto the table and strips off her dress, revealing her artist-model’s figure clothed in nothing but blue and yellow body paint. Inspired, Willem van Hoss advances to the table, bellowing like a bull, unbuttons his fly and lays his great rubicund cock, semierect, upon the boards. He challenges any female in the hall to have a crack at that. Myra picks up a carving knife, van Hoss retreats. Some of the neighbors depart, crossing themselves. Henry delivers his set speech on the joys of voluntary poverty. The dance goes on, the party rages forward, upward, outward, in all directions. Everything that rises must diverge—like a fountain, like the universe, like the branches of the tree of life itself.

HE DREAMED, a downward dream. He dreamed of Hell. He smelled the odor of burning brains, heard the sound of falling iron. Something like a ball peen hammer kept rapping, gently tapping, on his skull. He sensed deep trouble in his entrails, smelled death on his breath.

Henry opened leaden eyelids in the gray miasma of his bedroom. A bare-shouldered woman lay across his right arm, her nose in his armpit, snoring through open mouth. Not his wife. Not Myra. Nor was it the girl with the bell of golden hair. This was a stranger, a complete stranger, someone he could swear he’d never seen before, a sad worn-out woman with bad breath, bad teeth, skinny wrinkled neck and a little purple pouch of flesh under each eye. He felt sorry for her, his heart went out to her, but he knew at once that more than anything else in the world he wanted to get out of that bed without waking her up. Had to. But how? He thought of a fox in a steel trap, patiently at work on itself: yes, he would gnaw his arm off.