When he reached the building he saw that it was an appliance shop. COME ON IN! it said on a sign in the window, so he reached high and opened the glass door and entered. This wasn’t a large store, but it was the largest he had ever seen, bright white with fluorescent light like the inside of a tooth. He walked down the four aisles slowly, hands in his pockets, passing blenders and sewing machines and vacuums and toasters. Finally he came across the assortment of irons in the middle of aisle three, and here he stopped. There were four or five different styles, some in boxes with photos on them, some freestanding, chin up. He settled himself down across from the irons and looked up at them. He imagined it was a family reunion. Hello, everybody. Nice to see you. He greeted his aunt, his uncle, his cousins. Reaching out, he took the boxes from the shelves one by one and set them in a semicircle around him. They were silent and price tagged and cold company. The ironhead sat there all day long, from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon, breathing a slow hush of steam, and no one in the store even talked to him. Finally the cashier’s boss entered, and when he found out how long the ironhead had been there, he called the police. “This is not a public park,” he said. “We are trying, after all, to make some money here.” In ten minutes, the cop car pulled up, and the two policemen walked over to the ironhead sitting quietly in aisle three trying to take that ever-elusive nap. One cop laughed out loud and the other pretended to pull out his gun in fake terror. “You never know what you’re going to see in this podunk town,” the laughing one said. “Got any wrinkles on your shirt there, mac?” His partner smirked. The ironhead leaned down and put his head on the white tile so that the boxes of irons rose over him like buildings.
The cashier, who was not unkind, put in a call to the iron-head’s worried parents; they drove right on over, hurried in, hugged their son close. One of the policemen cracked a Halloween joke which made the mother livid but she was more concerned when she saw the half-moon of irons around her son’s head; she asked him what it meant on the drive home but he just shook his head, snuggling against her warm hip. That night, he lay in bed awake again, for the thousandth night of insomnia, listening to the sounds of his sisters and parents sleeping in the next rooms, which was the most lonesome sound in the world, and by morning was so exhausted, down to the root of his bone, that he begged to stay home from school. Because she loved him dearly, almost more so because he had been a complete and utter surprise, his mother gave him a good lunch of hot dogs and potato chips and chili and milk, set him in front of the TV with a blanket, and left for work herself.
When she came home at five, her ironhead was dead. He was in front of the TV with his ironhead turned toward the sofa, away from the screen, and when he didn’t respond to her inquiries, she went to check on him, listening for his breath in its small steamy gasps, and she heard nothing coming out of him at all. She was so used to the slow steady hushed sound of his breathing that it was only the abrupt silence of him that convinced her he wasn’t there anymore. She crumpled by his side and held him close and cried and cried and when the little girls came home from soccer practice they didn’t know what to do and couldn’t stand to watch their mother crying like that and so they got mad at each other and screamed and kicked on the front lawn. The mother held her little ironhead close and his body felt cool and distant. She stroked down the plastic handle and when her husband came home she nearly fell against him.
The doctor who came by that night to state the cause of death said that the ironhead had died of utter exhaustion, that it had nothing to do with the chili or the journey across the field or the iron in boxes or the laughing policemen. He weighed the iron and said that the weight of it was completely out of proportion with the rest of the body, and that it was frankly incredible that the boy had lived at all, carrying a head like that around all day. “This is rock-solid iron, and you can imagine-” he declared. The mother stood still as a stone; the father nodded slowly. The doctor didn’t finish his sentence, and bowed his head in the face of their grief. The pumpkinhead family buried the ironhead in the cemetery which was only a few blocks away, and at the funeral, children from the school filled buckets with dirt and then submerged them in dirt. A few well-meaning but thoughtless types brought irons to put on his grave, but the mother, her body taut and loosening at the same time, flung them as far away as she could, flying irons, until they crashed among the trees, shading boat-shaped imprints into the earth. One thrifty mourner secretly collected them and took them with her and sold them for half price back to the appliance shop where they crowded the aisle, chins up. The pumpkinhead family sat together at the cemetery and the mother kept uncovering dishes of warm food so she could release steam on his grave, because she wanted to give him voice, to give him breath again.
For many weeks, all they ate were the casseroles brought by the neighbors. When they ran out of those, the mother went into the kitchen, gathered ingredients, and made spaghetti. She was slow and heavied, but she did it, and the family ate together that night: four. While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.
Thirty years later when the girls were having their own children, they had mostly pumpkinheads, but the recessive gene did rear its head once more and the second daughter’s third child emerged with the head of a teapot. This seemed less difficult to live with than a pointy heavy head of iron and the teapothead child did just fine, made many friends, and slept without trouble. She breathed steam just like her uncle had, and so they sometimes called her ironhead as a pet name even though it didn’t fit. She was very good at soccer. The mother and father pumpkinhead still visited the cemetery regularly and sat there with their backs against the dates of their child’s birth and death and the mother said, “I can feel my head softening,” and the father said, “My shoulders are shrinking and my knuckles are growing,” and they sat with their heads orange globes against the gray stone and green grass and after a few hours walked home together.
Part Three
Job’s Jobs
God put a gun to the writer’s head.
I’m making a rule, said God. You can’t write another word or I’ll shoot you. Agreed? God had an East Coast accent, tough like a mobster, but his lined face was frail and ethereal.
The writer agreed. He had a wife and family. He was sad because he loved words as much as he loved people, because words were the way he said what he wanted about people, but this was God and God was the real deal, and he didn’t want to spend too much time dwelling on it. So he packed up his typewriter and paper and tucked them in the hall closet, and within two days, to comfort his loss, went to the art supply store and bought oil paints and a canvas and a palette and set up in the garage among the old clothes and broken appliances. He’d always liked painting. He thought he had a good sense of color. He painted every morning for hours, until he started to paint something real.