forehead, just above his left eyebrow.
“When I woke up on the hospital ship, the metal was still stuck in my head. They were afraid to pull it out, were afraid it would kill me, that it was the only thing keeping my brain from spilling out of my head,” he said. “I told them take it out, I didn’t care, because living with that saw blade of a piece of Japanese metal stuck in my crown made me feel like a traitor, or like some sort of secret weapon they could hear through and send radiation waves through or something, and it gave me a terrible headache right behind my eye. So they took it out and patched over the hole with a piece of tin or something or other and that was that. The only thing that was different after is that now I can’t smell anything and green looks red and sometime I forget who I am for a minute.”
Aloysius had the habit of running one of his forefingers up and down the crease when he was concentrating. It was impossible to tell whether the injury had done anything else to his personality. He did belch, fart, and pick his nose freely, in front of anyone who happened to be nearby, no matter what the occasion—funeral, Memorial Day speech, or smoke break. Sometimes, when I thought about the plate in his head and his old wooden leg, which I fitted in my mind with rusty metal hinges and braces, and even that piece of shrapnel, which appeared in my imagination as a table-saw blade sticking up out of his head like a steel rooster comb, it seemedthat Aloysius was in fact some archaic military experiment gone awry. He was like a vacuum tube Frankenstein. When the Japanese had tried to make a double-agent robot to sabotage the enemy, they had succeeded only in creating a pipe-chomping gravedigger who saw the lush green lawns of the cemetery as blood-red and who had an abiding love for firefighters.
My mother got to know Aloysius when my grandfather died. After my grandfather’s ashes had been buried, my mother walked the two and a half miles from her house to the cemetery so that she could put her hand on top of his stone and talk with him. She wiped pollen and dirt off the top of the stone with the tissues she kept in her purse. Every spring, she planted red geraniums in front of the stone, in time for the Memorial Day parade. She overwatered the flowers, but since the grave was several feet up a slope, the water drained away and didn’t drown them. My mother had spent her whole life in the town, so she knew many people in the cemetery. Besides her father and mother, her paternal grandmother, Kathleen Crosby, was buried there, as well as both of my grandfather’s sisters, Marjorie and Darla, who had followed my grandfather down from Maine and lived within a quarter mile of him until they died (Marjorie of lung cancer, Darla of a stroke, although my grandmother always said that it was a stroke if by stroke you meant gin). Many of the people with whom my grandparents had been friends when my mother was young were buried there, too. My mother could offer a census of the old neighborhood; she knew where every person from her parents’ group of friends was buried, and once my grandfather was there, and soon aftermy grandmother, too, she regularly planted and tended flowers at their stones as well. Since she spent so much time in the graveyard, she and Aloysius got to know each other. When she died, Aloysius planted geraniums in front of the headstone for the first Memorial Day parade after her death. I felt embarrassed, and when I saw him at the ceremony, I thanked him for remembering my mother and for planting the flowers, and said that I’d make sure to plant them the next year.
He said, “We all end up here sooner or later. Your mother was a nice lady.”
I BEGAN TO WALK the length and breadth of Enon every day, as late summer turned into early autumn, wandering paths and the old railroad line, where deer grazed and coyotes sometimes commuted. Since I’d broken my hand so severely, I’d been able
“When I woke up on the hospital ship, the metal was still stuck in my head. They were afraid to pull it out, were afraid it would kill me, that it was the only thing keeping my brain from spilling out of my head,” he said. “I told them take it out, I didn’t care, because living with that saw blade of a piece of Japanese metal stuck in my crown made me feel like a traitor, or like some sort of secret weapon they could hear through and send radiation waves through or something, and it gave me a terrible headache right behind my eye. So they took it out and patched over the hole with a piece of tin or something or other and that was that. The only thing that was different after is that now I can’t smell anything and green looks red and sometime I forget who I am for a minute.”
Aloysius had the habit of running one of his forefingers up and down the crease when he was concentrating. It was impossible to tell whether the injury had done anything else to his personality. He did belch, fart, and pick his nose freely, in front of anyone who happened to be nearby, no matter what the occasion—funeral, Memorial Day speech, or smoke break. Sometimes, when I thought about the plate in his head and his old wooden leg, which I fitted in my mind with rusty metal hinges and braces, and even that piece of shrapnel, which appeared in my imagination as a table-saw blade sticking up out of his head like a steel rooster comb, it seemedthat Aloysius was in fact some archaic military experiment gone awry. He was like a vacuum tube Frankenstein. When the Japanese had tried to make a double-agent robot to sabotage the enemy, they had succeeded only in creating a pipe-chomping gravedigger who saw the lush green lawns of the cemetery as blood-red and who had an abiding love for firefighters.
My mother got to know Aloysius when my grandfather died. After my grandfather’s ashes had been buried, my mother walked the two and a half miles from her house to the cemetery so that she could put her hand on top of his stone and talk with him. She wiped pollen and dirt off the top of the stone with the tissues she kept in her purse. Every spring, she planted red geraniums in front of the stone, in time for the Memorial Day parade. She overwatered the flowers, but since the grave was several feet up a slope, the water drained away and didn’t drown them. My mother had spent her whole life in the town, so she knew many people in the cemetery. Besides her father and mother, her paternal grandmother, Kathleen Crosby, was buried there, as well as both of my grandfather’s sisters, Marjorie and Darla, who had followed my grandfather down from Maine and lived within a quarter mile of him until they died (Marjorie of lung cancer, Darla of a stroke, although my grandmother always said that it was a stroke if by stroke you meant gin). Many of the people with whom my grandparents had been friends when my mother was young were buried there, too. My mother could offer a census of the old neighborhood; she knew where every person from her parents’ group of friends was buried, and once my grandfather was there, and soon aftermy grandmother, too, she regularly planted and tended flowers at their stones as well. Since she spent so much time in the graveyard, she and Aloysius got to know each other. When she died, Aloysius planted geraniums in front of the headstone for the first Memorial Day parade after her death. I felt embarrassed, and when I saw him at the ceremony, I thanked him for remembering my mother and for planting the flowers, and said that I’d make sure to plant them the next year.
He said, “We all end up here sooner or later. Your mother was a nice lady.”
I BEGAN TO WALK the length and breadth of Enon every day, as late summer turned into early autumn, wandering paths and the old railroad line, where deer grazed and coyotes sometimes commuted. Since I’d broken my hand so severely, I’d been able
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