The Jeremiah Saga Part 6: The Aftermath

The face that came out of the water dripped black lines of soot and was a good deal more pink than it should have been.  His eyes looked strange too.  It took me a second to figure out why.

Jeremiah had no eyebrows.  None.  They'd been blown clean off.  I imagine that at this point they hadn't yet floated back down to earth and that a flock of geese was passing them around, laughing and pretending they were mustaches.  His forehead was too big too.  It was more like a five (or even a six) head.  Where once had lived the front half of Jeremiahs proud bowl cut was now bare skin, his locks singed back almost to the middle of the top of his still smoldering dome.

My youthful mind scrambled with possible avenues of escape from the doom I knew we were about to face, but the reality of the situation set in quickly.  In Manchu China, it was all the rage to sport a six-head around town, but the style had somehow not caught on yet in Vermont, and no amount of wearing a hat would cover up that glistening pink melon.  Jeremiah would have to face the world with a hairless (yet strangely radiant) moon-face for quite a while.  

Truth be told, in the ten or fifteen seconds I spent staring stupidly at him, I entertained quite a few ridiculous ideas about how I could get away with all this.  Swamp gas, drive-by shavings, fire breathing dragonflies, spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, bullies, acid rain... nothing seemed to fit the bill.  I might have come up with something better but Jeremiah was rapidly realizing that burns hurt.  The only relief for him was to stick his head back in the water for as long as possible.  Each time he did, the black cloud was less and less thick and the shiny pinkness of his head stood out more and more.

I felt my own head and was terrified when my hand came back black as night and stinking to high heaven like burnt hair.  The wave of heat had been enough to singe my hair even from where I had stood quite a few feet away.  It reeked the way only burnt hair can reek.

Even as stupid as we were, we knew that eventually we'd have to go back to the house and face the music.  I soaked my shirt in the pond, wrapped Jeremiahs head in it and we beat feet back to the house.  
I think my mom smelled the odor of singed head and shame long before we ever got to the house, me wild-eyed and shirtless with poor Jeremiah in tow, lurching along with a poorly-wrapped, soggy turban covering his entire head.  I don't remember the run back, to be honest.  I remember being at the pond, and then standing with a permanent wince in front of my mother as wave after wave of unflattering words poured over us.

It felt as if someone had replaced the water in Niagara with disgrace, and we were standing at the bottom looking up as it pounded us endlessly in our faces.  I'm not sure how long the initial berating lasted before my mother decided it was a good time to take Jeremiah home, but it seemed like forever.  In the end, she filled up a bowl of water for him to stick his face in and I watched them pull out of the driveway with a heavy dread in my heart.

When his father asked, the father of my country was honest about cutting down the cherry tree.  That was mighty good of him, but then again I'm no George Washington.  In the end it boiled down to this: "Blame Jeremiah".

The fact that I still had hair on my face and head was a testament to my innocence, and I played to that thin fact with the expertise of a career politician.  I still caught hell, don't get me wrong, but it was tempered I think by parents subconscious (but understandable) desire to remain oblivious to the sheer force of my rampant stupidity.  The important thing was that I learned my lesson.  In fact I learned a few lessons from it all that I still carry with me.  Among them are these:  Filter the chunks out of explosive powder, don't give up on the fuse, keep water handy, and don't push your luck.   

I don't know if Jeremiah learned any lessons that day.  It was the last time I would ever see him; hunched over in the passengers seat of my moms car with his head in a bowl of water.  Our friendship, however brief, had been memorable.

Jeremiah, wherever you are, here's to you:  May your eagerness never dwindle, and may the bushiness of your eyebrows forever be an inspiration.  


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Next - If you enjoyed this, you might also like:  The Airplane Saga - Part 1