saw my mother’s face framed in the iron bars, the desperate look in her wild eyes, the inhuman sounds that came from her throat as the iron bit pressed hard against her tongue. He had clapped the branks on her after she cursed him in public for his constant drunkenness. She had worn the helmet a night and a day as my father led her around, taunting her, yanking hard on the chain so that the iron sliced her tongue. The sight of her with her head in that fearful cage had terrified me, tiny child that I was, and I’d run off and hidden myself. When my father finally drank himself into
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