A Metal Plate in His Head

By Robert J. Marton

 Gloria didn’t remember her father or mother.  They disappeared from her life when she was two years old.  She was raised by her grandmother: a joyless and unhappy childhood.

She didn’t remember them, but she had heard their story many times.

Jack Haskell, her father, returned from World War II with a metal plate in his head.

His bald head was misshapen – the left side smashed in and scarred.

He had been shot in the head by the Japs, which even in the 1960’s we still called our WWII foes.  It wasn’t until we started driving their cars and buying their televisions that we began to refer to them as Japanese.

Almost everyone in Mayefield talked about Jack Haskell and the metal plate in his head. The mean kids –and sometimes the not so mean ones—teased him and called him names.  Jack quickly lost his temper and would run at the kids, chasing them down the street.  But the plate in his head must have slowed him down because he never caught any of them.  Which was a good thing, because Jack was a big man with huge hands that could easily crush a kid.

Jack had a violent temper even before he went off to war.  He had been a schoolyard bully as a boy, with a fondness for picking out the most vulnerable of classmates and pushing them to the point of tears.  Once his victims cried, Jack lost interest in them and moved on to bully someone else.  In high school, he was a star football player – a bruising fullback who punished would-be defenders before and after they tackled him.  He was suspended from the team in both his junior and senior years for fighting with members of opposing teams on the field and pursuing them in the locker room after games.

Jack couldn’t keep a job after he returned from the war.  He resumed his prewar job at Cole’s Hardware Store, but threw a tantrum one day and destroyed hundreds of dollars in merchandise, so Mr. Cole had to let him go.  He ran the projector at the movie theater for a few months, but occasionally he went into some kind of trance and forgot to change the reel on time, allowing the screen to go black and causing the theater patrons to yell and throw popcorn tubs and drink cups at the ushers.

Eventually his father-in-law took him on as a partner in the family liquor store.  It wasn’t an ideal situation.  He dropped bottles, some he smashed in anger.  The register was often short – was he stealing or just charging customers wrong amounts?  Several times a week, kids would open the front door; yell something unkind to Jack (something as innocuous as “Metal head! Metal head!”) and he would run after them, leaving the store unattended.  He argued with customers, with salesmen, with beer delivery guys, with co-workers, and with his father-in-law.  But it was a family business, and he was family, and you don’t fire family.

Jack had married Marian, his high school girlfriend, in the year between graduation and being drafted.  They would have gotten married anyway, they believed, but Marion’s pregnancy moved things along.  They lived in a two-room apartment above Cole’s Hardware, which they got rent-free as a result of Jack’s employment there.  They had a happy year together before Jack went away.  As violent as he could be with other people, he was almost meek with Marian.  Everyone agreed she was a good influence on him.

While Jack was in the army, Marian had their baby, Gloria, and moved back into her parent’s house on Maple Street, which is where they continued to live after Jack returned.

Even Marian’s reprieve from his hostility dissolved when he returned with the metal plate in his head.  His temper was short; his moods gloomy and persistent.  He yelled, then sulked, then screamed loudly, seemingly at the world in general

When he hit Marian for the first time and she screamed in pain, her father roared up the stairs to their bedroom, burst in the room, and confronted Jack with a baseball bat. He had barely raised the bat to swing at his son-in-law when Jack shot him in the face with a war souvenir revolver.

Marian screamed.

Jack screamed.

Her father didn’t scream, just silently fell dead.

Baby Gloria didn’t scream either.  She just stared curiously at all the commotion and noise around her.

Jack turned toward Marian and shot her dead.

Then Gloria screamed.

Jack pointed the gun at his own head and fired.  Something, maybe the metal plate, stopped the bullet before it penetrated his brain.  Instead of dying, he sat down, stared at his bloody bride, his bloody hands, and his crying baby, and waited for the police to arrive.

Jack Haskell spent the remainder of his life in a veterans hospital, along with other men who returned from World War II, some with metal plates in their heads.

(Robert J. Marton)