[Jeanette-Marie Mirich] The Helmet

My father thought sideways. It happens. Probably stemmed from the shrapnel imbedded in his head at a hillside in Italy—it happened in March with a dismal rain slanting onto his upturned face.

1945 proved a momentous year for my father. Invalided home as the war was ending. Brain surgery. A newborn boy. Moving with wife and baby to restart college courtesy of the G.I Bill.

I came along when the dust had settled and the poetry began to flow again. His poetry cascaded through my childhood like the rapids along the Columbia before man belted the river with concrete. My earliest memories are words rippling together and tiptoeing through the house because his ever-present headaches raged.

Heads weren’t created to have metal plates inserted. I don’t know if his vibrated, but first sopranos in the church choir made him wince.

I was five when an office was created in the attic on the opposite side of the house far from the wild-eyed boy next door and his yappy dog. Their constant din drove Dad to Thurber and P.G. Wodehouse. By the time the concert violinist next door, Mrs. Gilkey, resided across the fence, Dad usually spent his mornings marinating words in his dust-green aerie. He missed her Julliard-trained fingers. I didn’t. It was magic to hear her practice.

There were other secrets above my bedroom and the living room. A single light bulb with a metal cord hung to illume the ‘real’ attic. Beyond Dad’s office was a door leading to suitcases, trunks, boxes, and pipes nestled in floaty insulation.

Don’t sneeze!

Don’t step off the wooden two-by-eights holding the house together . . .

We crawled on rafters to avoid falling through the ceiling to our bedrooms, terrified that each knee wobble would bring us to the edge of doom. And we showed off the space to visiting cousins who sweated with fear as they followed us to Dad’s old army trunk, the one tucked to the right of the door and wedged under an eave. The paint had faded from army green to the color of mud, grass, and blood stirred with silver rain.

We’d lift the lid and wait. Their eyes would grow to the size of baseballs. Little fingers wiggled, eager to palpate the contents. Dad’s brown officer’s cap came out first because it resided on top. Kids would put it on, oldest to youngest. In hushed silence, the boy cousins would stare at Dad’s helmet—the one with the shrapnel hole to the right-of-center.

“Can we touch it?” they’d always ask. My brother would gingerly roll it from the far back corner then reverently lift it to their fingers into the jagged edge. They’d turn it over, suck in their breaths, and stare at the red-brown of the dried blood.

My brother has the helmet now. I don’t want to know where he placed it. When I close my eyes I still see the attic and the shadows as if something remains hidden in the dark.