The Persian Helmet

Chapter 5: Memorial Day Parade

  Among the Monday Memorial Day (observed, not actual) festivities was a parade, and as a prominent business owner Clare decided to participate in the cavalcade on the short strip of street from the courthouse to the park. Too bad the ’64 Valiant wasn’t a convertible, but she could ride in the back of her new silver pickup. (She had been informed that the three cool colors for pickups were silver, black, and red.) She got some hay bales to make seats in the back. Jim said he would drive, and Roxy would dress up in a frou-frou dress from the store, circa 1955, with a very full circle skirt and puffy crinolines. Clare had taken the helmet out of the vault on Saturday and filled the empty brackets with candles.

  “OK, Roxy, you’ll light them but be careful. I don’t want the hay to catch on fire.”

  “Uh, that might be hard to control. I mean, sparks could fly out … in other words, are you insane?”

  “Well, I guess we could get something else to sit on besides hay bales. But chairs would be too tippy. What if we totally wrap a couple of bales in heavy aluminum foil? I’m going to go buy some rolls. And it will look fantastic too.”

  Roxy rolled her eyes. “That will be comfy.”

  “Comfort isn’t everything. And it will only be for a few minutes. Too bad I don’t have a horse.”

  “Hmm, maybe you could borrow one. And wrap it in tin foil.”

  “It’s kind of short notice. I’ll go with the truck. Wouldn’t want to hurt a horse.”

  “So what are you going to wear? That will go with a flaming helmet? Fifties frou-frou won’t exactly do it.”

  “Well, armor, but I don’t have any. I do have some leather pants and a leather jacket, and I could wear my silver sequin top. That sort of looks like armor. No one will be looking at my clothes anyway. The real question is how I can keep that helmet on my head. It will just cover my whole head like a bucket.”

  “It would take too long to fit it up with an inner lining, but … maybe some kind of smaller hat, or wrap your head with a turban, a towel maybe … And speaking of buckets, let’s put a bucket of water in the truck just in case.”

  “Ooh ooh,” Clare interjected. “I’ve got just the thing, down in The Cellar, from the flea market. An old Civil Defense helmet. It’s hard and it will probably fit. Maybe. I’ll see if it fits.”

  The helmet was a roaring, or flaming, success, and when they reached the park, Clare walked around for a while talking to people, holding her head carefully upright as the candles burned.

  Small children were entranced and wanted to see it up close, or grab it, or wear it themselves. Dozens of people snapped photos, including Jim, after he parked the truck.

  “Who are you supposed to be?” one old lady asked.

  “I hadn’t thought about it really. Just what you see here,” said Clare.

  “Did you get that okayed by the fire marshal?” Clench asked, but he was smiling.

  “No. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, is my motto,” she answered.

  Clare carried the helmet back with her to the shop, temporarily locking it in the elevator, which required a key to operate, thus keeping nosy shoppers out of it. She was busy in The Rag and Bone Shop after the parade, with a holiday crowd making road trips from all over Ohio and even surrounding states. Jim and Roxy left later Monday afternoon. Nothing more out of the ordinary happened, no attempted break-ins or exciting car chases.

  Clare took the helmet home to look at it more carefully. Maybe she could find out something about it on the Web. One of her worries about moving to this little southern Ohio town was that she wouldn’t have a fast Internet connection, but that proved to be no problem. Everyone was connected to something.

  The problem was how to go about looking up something when you didn’t know what it was. At least, she didn’t know more than that it was a steel helmet, with etchings and a spike and brackets on it. It’s not like you could scan an object and do a search to match the image, although she understood that programs or apps existed to identify music picked up by a mike, but they only matched recorded music in the databank. All she could do was search for word combinations, and see what images turned up.

  A search for “helmet” turned up more than 42 million pages, but that included things like motorcycle helmets. “Steel helmet” turned up more than seven million pages. “Steel helmet with spike”, a mere 589,000. “Conical steel helmet with spike”, 20,300.

  She was pretty sure it wasn’t any kind of German helmet that she’d seen in World War II movies, and she thought it must be older than twentieth century anyway, though not entirely hand-made. The conical helmet must have been machine turned, it was too smoothly symmetrical to have been beaten out by hand. But the etchings must have been done by hand. It was hard to tell what they were. They reminded her somewhat of a primitive form of the face cards in a deck of playing cards, or possibly Tarot cards.

  She shuffled through photos and drawings. The Russians seemed to go in for conical helmets in the old days, but they weren’t the same. A couple of hours of searching and linking and looking brought no answers.

  “Etched spiked helmet” seemed like a long-shot but turned up 8,220,000 listings, and one link near the top of the listings, to a collector’s book, showed a page of catalogue listings including this description: “Dome-shaped helmet with spike finial, inlaid gold inscriptions and leafage, nasal guard and chain mail veil.” A similar description read: “Damascened and deeply etched dome-shaped helmet representing animals and birds; and with bands of inscriptions; nasal guard and chain mail veil.” Unfortunately there were no pictures, but there were other similar descriptions, none of which precisely matched her helmet. She had part of a nasal guard with no veil, but one had probably been attached at one time, and instead of inscriptions or animals and birds, she had human figures.

  Clare thought these descriptions were close enough, and they were all labeled Indo-Persian. Further searches for Indo-Persian helmets produced a lot of photos of helmets similar to hers, though none were identical to hers, or to each other. They could not have been mass produced. But she felt confident that she was on the right track.

  So, Persian. Or Indian? Which was it? One similar helmet she found online was inscribed with Arabic writing, so she’d go with Persian.

  Some helmets were for sale on Ebay and elsewhere, priced at hundreds to thousands of dollars. The helmet had better go back into the vault.

  But the question remained, why would someone throw this out? Another question was what was it doing in Akron in the first place? Anybody could be a collector, but collectors generally didn’t just throw things out on the curb for trash pickup.

  Clare felt she had made some progress, though to what end she could not tell. She became drowsy and dozed off on the couch with visions of The Arabian Nights playing in her mind.

  Suddenly she woke up. Aunt Del’s cat Smoky jumped up beside her with a tinkle of the tiny bell on its collar. Clare thought she heard a sound outside, like someone walking, but the wind was blowing and rattling the windows so it was impossible to distinguish sounds. She got up and turned on the porch light without opening the door, and the big spotlight out back like those that many farmers installed on poles in their barnyards. Lawns and barnyards were kept clear of unwanted overgrowth to keep varmints away from the house, and bright lights helped. Ordinarily Clare liked the dark, away from town, where you could actually see millions of stars, but tonight she didn’t want to wander around outside and gaze into the sky.

  “I have to buy a gun and take that class,” she thought.

  She collected a few of Del’s old Sears catalogues and sat down with a glass of wine to look through the gun pages. She thought the war years might be good — or maybe not, maybe the gun companies were doing all their work or their best work for the military. Maybe the newest catalogues would be best. She knew nothing about guns, but she thought she’d like a small one for her purse and pocket, and a bigger pistol for the house
, plus a shotgun and a rifle. And if Clench advised her to, she could go to the nearest gun dealer. She filled out the order form and smiled, wondering what Jackson would think.

  The next day she found Clench downtown and told him about the Sears guns.

  “Well, there’s gonna be a gun show next week, in the next county,” he said.

  “A gun show?”

  “It’s where a lot of dealers get together in a big building and sell guns, ammo, knives, and so on. A lot of people around here go.”

  “Oh. Well, that would be interesting, but I’m still not sure what I should get. Although I did already order four different ones.” She told him what she’d order from Sears.

  “Well, you did all right, but you definitely need some training. And you’ve got to get licensed, especially if you want to carry that little firecracker in your purse. Say, you know you have to pick up the guns from an FFL. You think this Jackson guy is going to bring ‘em to your house in his truck?”

  Clench had of course seen Jackson many times, but didn’t exactly know or understand how the Sears connection worked.

  “What’s an FFL?”

  “Federal Firearms Licensee. You still have to get a background check even if you order by mail or online.”

  “Oh. Well, no, there was nothing in the catalogue. I guess they’ll let me know if I have to do it.”

  “You’d better just get started doing that anyway.”

  “OK.”

  “And let me know if Jackson brings those guns.”

  Clare didn’t answer.

  “And let me know if you want to go to that gun show. I could go along and help you out. My dad wants to go anyway.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Clare wondered if Clench was getting personally interested in her. She still felt a kind of connection with Jackson, something unexplained and unlike anything she’d experienced before. But he was still a will o’ the wisp. She only saw him when he delivered her Sears orders, and then not for long. He didn’t talk much although he always seemed to be looking at her with unspoken meaning. Sometimes she thought he wouldn’t cast a shadow, but he did; she had checked. But what did Jackson ever do besides drive a truck and unload it? And he wasn’t around regularly anyway.

  Clench was the opposite. Very real and solid and tough and grounded, although she’d heard rumors that he suffered from bouts of PTSD after his Afghanistan tours. But he belonged to two of the most solid and real professions: farmer and soldier, and now he was even a lawman. He had practical skills and ambitions and always seemed straightforward. He’d gone away to war, then came back to his home. He was farming with his father, as they always had, while starting a new venture. He would probably always stay there.

  Clare asked herself what skills she had. Buying and selling? She had something of a business head, but was that a skill? She vaguely remembered something she’d learned in college, some economist had called England a nation of shopkeepers. Was that bad? A nation of skilled artisans would sound better, but should the artisans and manufacturers have to waste time flogging their own wares? Shopkeepers provided a much needed service.

  She poured herself another glass of wine and turned on the TV. She would add to her skills. She would learn about guns.

  She heard, or imagined, no more unfamiliar sounds that night other than a couple of cars on the road.