Richmond, VA.
I’m sick of being here.
After Ed Gein’s arrest, he would be asked the same question, time and again: “Tell us something about her, Eddie. “What was your mother like?” As soon as he started to think about her, his eyes would fill with tears and his throat grow so swollen that he’d have trouble swallowing. She was pure goodness, he’d finally say. Not like the others. They got what was coming to them. But she didn’t deserve so much suffering. All her life, she had slaved and prayed and struggled to save him from the evils of the world. And he had tried to be as good as possible. But somehow, he always seeme to fail her. He remembered the time she had put a few coins in his hand and instructed him to go to the German bakery a block from their home to buy a loaf of bread. They were still living in La Crosse, so he couldn’t have been more than seven. Somehow, by the time he reached the shop, the coins were gone. For a long time, he stood on the street corner, fighting back tears, terrified to go home. When he finally did find the courage to return and confess, his voice convulsed by sobs, she looked down at him with that mixture of bitterness and sorrow that never failed to fill him with the deepest self-hatred. “You dreadful child.” she had said in a quiet, heartbroken voice more awful than any scream. “Only a mother could love you.”
A scorched and disheveled male mannequin clad in dark business suit standing in the desert with a female mannequin in the background, 7000 ft. from the 44th nuclear test explosion, a day after the blast, indicating that humans could be burnt but still alive. Photograph by Loomis Dean. Nevada, USA, May 1955.
