A woman kept getting caught shop lifting. She just took little things. Perfume, jewelry, anchovy paste. She was married to a man who was in prison for stripping an abandoned car. She had a little boy who she adored.
The judge was irritated at the woman and her persistent habit.
``You're wasting everybody's time,'' he said. He sentenced her to a class a term at Community College for a year.
The woman was angry.
``That's not a proper sentence! That shouldn't be allowed! That's interfering with my life!'' she said.
She looked through the class catalog and picked a class that fit her schedule. Beginning sculpture.
At the class she felt a little out of place among the other students, most of whom had aspirations to being artists. But she loved the feel of wet clay under her hands, and she got to work on a bust of Lyle, her son. In a few weeks it was obvious to the entire class that the woman was the star student. The head of her son was perfect. Lyle, face slightly upturned, eyes and lips about to ask a question. Perfect. She got an A.
The next term she carved in wood. Another head of Lyle. She loved to shape the wood, to sense the direction of the grain. The texture of the cut. Soon another Lyle sprang out of the wood. Tenderly she sanded and burnished. She rubbed linseed oil into the features. A calm, intelligent Lyle this time. Another A.
The next class was stone carving. The woman loved the idea of chipping the harsh and ancient medium into a creation from her mind. The instructor had heard about the woman.
``Not Lyle this time,'' he said, ``you must try something else.''
But the woman chipped out another splendid likeness of her son.
For the next forty-one years the woman carved a stone bust of her son each year.
When she died her husband had a garage sale and he set the forty-two stone heads out in four rows with the oldest and youngest Lyles leading out front.
Lyle did not want the busts. He was embarrassed by them. Lyle's dad thought that if the heads didn't sell he could use them in a retaining wall he was thinking of building.
A TV reporter who did Local Color features had a minute on the late news about the heads of Lyle. The station was bounced by satellite to a small community in Montana, where the owner of a roadside museum saw the heads and decided he must have them.
Transporting them cost more than buying them. He installed the heads in a white painted gallery between Guns of the Old West and a glowing rock exhibit.
The heads of Lyle still face each other on each wall, and tourists and school children pause to ponder the gentle cruelties of transition from youth to middle age before they continue on to marvel at a gun found buried with the bones of a young cowboy with no boots on.