The Headpiece, Ray Bradbury

The Headpiece

THE parcel arrived in the late afternoon mail. Mr Andrew Lemon knew what was inside by shaking it. It whispered in there like a large hairy tarantula.

It took him some time to get up his courage, tremble the wrappings open, and remove the lid from the white cardboard box.

There the bristly thing lay on its snowy tissue bed, as imper¬sonal as the black horsechair clock-springs stuffed in an old sofa. Andrew Lemon chuckled.

‘Indians come and gone, left this piece of a massacre behind as a sign, a warning. Well. There!’

And he fitted the new patent-leather black shining toupee to his naked scalp. He tugged at it like someone touching his cap to passers-by.

The toupee fitted perfectly, covering the neat coin-round hole which marred the top of his brow. Andrew Lemon gazed at the strange man in the mirror and yelled with delight.

‘Hey there, who’re you? Face’s familiar, but, by gosh now, pass you on the street without looking twice! Why? Because,
it’s gone! Darn hole’s covered, nobody’d guess it was ever there. Happy New Year, man, that’s what it is, Happy New Year!’

He walked around and around his little apartment, smiling, needing to do something, but not yet ready to open the door and surprise the world. He walked by the mirror, glancing sidewise at someone going past there, and each time laughed and shook his head. Then he sat down in the rocker and rocked, grinning, and tried to look at a couple of copies of Wild West Weekly and then Thrilling Movie Magazine.

But he couldn’t keep his right hand from crawling up along his face, tremulously, to feel at the rim of that crisp new sedge above his ears.

‘Let me buy you a drink, young fellow!’
He opened the fly-specked medicine cabinet and took three gulps from a bottle. Eyes watering, he was on the verge of cut¬ting himself a chew of tobacco when he stopped, listening.
Outside, in the dark hallway, there was a sound like a field-mouse moving softly, daintily on the threadbare carpeting.
‘Miss Fremwell!’ he said to the mirror.

Suddenly the toupee was off his head and into the box as if, frightened, it had scuttled back there of itself. He clapped the lid down, sweating cold, afraid of even the sound that woman made moving by like a summer breeze.

He tiptoed to the door that was nailed shut in one wall and bent his raw and now furiously blushing head. He heard Miss Fremwell unlock her door and shut it and move delicately about her room with little tinkles of chinaware and chimes of cutlery, turning in a merry-go-round to make her dinner.

He backed away from that door that was bolted, locked, latched, and driven shut with its four-inch hard-steel nails. He thought of the nights he had flinched in bed, thinking he heard her quietly pulling out the nails, pulling out the nails, touching at the bolts and slithering the latch . . . And how it always took him an hour to turn away towards sleep after that.

Now she would rustle about her room for an hour or so. It would grow dark. The stars would be out and shining when he tapped on her door and asked if she’d sit on the porch or walk in the park. Then the only way she could possibly know of this third blind and staring eye in his head would be to run her hand in a Braille-like motion there. But her small white fingers had never moved within a thousand miles of that scar which was no more to her than, well, one of those pockmarks off on the full moon tonight. His toe brushed a copy of Wonder Science Tales.

He snorted. Perhaps if she thought at all of his damaged head — she wrote songs and poems, didn’t she, once in a while? — she figured that a long time back a meteor had run and hit him and vanished up there where there were no shrubs or trees, where it was just white, above his eyes. He snorted again and shook his head. Perhaps, perhaps. But however she thought, he would see her only when the sun had set.

He waited another hour, from time to time spitting out the window into the warm summer night.
‘Eight-thirty. Here goes.’

He opened the hall door and stood for a moment looking back at that nice new toupee hidden in its box. No, he still could not bring himself to wear it.
He stepped along the hall to Miss Naomi Fremwell’s door, a door so thinly made it seemed to beat with the sound of her small heart there behind it.
‘Miss Fremwell,’ he whispered.

He wanted to cup her like a small white bird in his great bowled hands, speak soft to her quietness. But then, in wiping the sudden perspiration from his brow, he found again the pit and only at the last quick moment saved himself from falling over, in, and screaming, down! He clapped his hand to that place to cover that emptiness. After he had held his hand tight tight to the hole for a long moment he was then afraid to pull his hand away. It had changed. Instead of being afraid he might fall in there, he was afraid something terrible, something secret, something private, might gush out and drown him.

He brushed his free hand across her door, disturbing little more than dust.
‘Miss Fremwell?’

He looked to see if there were too many lamps lit under her doorsill, the light of which might strike out at him when she swung the door wide. The very thrust of lamplight alone might knock his hand away, and reveal that sunken wound. Then mightn’t she peer through it like a keyhole, into his life?

The light was dim under the doorsill.
He made a fist of one hand and brought it down gently, three times, on Miss Fremwell’s door.
The door opened and moved slowly back.

Later, on the front porch, feverishly adjusting and re-adjust¬ing his senseless legs, perspiring, he tried to work around to ask¬ing her to marry him. When the moon rose high, the hole in his brow looked like a leaf-shadow fallen there. If he kept one profile to her, the crater did not show, it was hidden away over on the other side of his world. It seemed that when he did this, though, he only had half as many words and felt only half a man.

‘Miss Fremwell,’ he managed to say, at last.
‘Yes?’ She looked at him as if she didn’t quite see him.
‘Miss Naomi, I don’t suppose you ever really noticed me, lately.’
She waited. He went on.

‘I’ve been noticing you. Fact is, well, I might as well put it right out on the line and get it over with. We been sitting out here on the porch for quite a few months. I mean we’ve known each other a long time. Sure, you’re good fifteen years younger than me, but would there be anything wrong with our getting engaged, do you think?’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Lemon,’ she said quickly. She was very polite. ‘But — ‘
‘Oh, I know,’ he said, edging forward with the words. ‘I know! It’s my head, it’s always this darn thing up here on my head!’
She looked at his turned-away profile in the uncertain light.

‘Why, no, Mr Lemon, I don’t think I would say that, I don’t think that’s it at all. I have wondered a bit about it, certainly, but I don’t think it’s an interference in any way. A friend of mine, a very dear friend, married a man once, I recall, who had a wooden leg. She told me she didn’t even know he had it, after a while.’

‘It’s always this darn hole,’ cried Mr Lemon bitterly. He took out his plug of tobacco, looked at it as if he might bite it, decided not to and put it away. He formed a couple of fists and stared at them bleakly as if they were big rocks. ‘Well, I’ll tell you all about it, Miss Naomi. I’ll tell you how it happened.’

‘You don’t have to if you don’t want.’

‘I was married once, Miss Naomi. Yes, I was, darn it. And one day my wife she just took hold of a hammer and hit me right on the head!’
Miss Fremwell gasped. It was as if she had been struck her¬self.

Mr Lemon brought one clenching fist down through the warm air.

‘Yes, ma’am, she hit me straight-on with that hammer, she did. I tell you, the world blew up on me. Everything fell down on me. It was like the house coming down in one heap. That one little hammer buried me, buried me! The pain? I can’t tell you!’

Miss Fremwell turned in on herself. She shut her eyes and thought, biting her lips. Then she said, ‘Oh, poor Mr Lemon.’

‘She did it so calm,’ said Mr Lemon, puzzled. ‘She just stood over me where I lay on the couch and it was a Tuesday afternoon about two o’clock and she said, “Andrew, wake up!” and I opened my eyes and looked at her is all and then she hit me with that hammer. Oh, Lord.’

‘But why?’ asked Miss Fremwell.
‘For no reason, no reason at all. Oh, what an ornery woman.’
‘But why should she do a thing like that?’ said Miss Fremwell.
‘I told you: for no reason.’
‘She was crazy?’

‘Must have been. Oh, yes, she must of been.’

‘Did you prosecute her?’
‘Well, no, I didn’t. After all, she didn’t know what she was doing.’
‘Did it knock you out?’

Mr Lemon paused and there it was again,