The Braid Nobody in Town Understood
I weld for a feedlot nine miles south. Pens, gates, pipe fence, feed trucks, whatever forty thousand head of cattle can bend or break. I leave the house at ten till six and I am home by five. I am a big man with burn scars on both wrists, and I do not talk much, and I know how that looks walking into an elementary school.
And what they saw, every morning, was that big quiet man’s daughter climbing down from the bus with a blond braid as thick as my wrist that hung to the backs of her knees.
They saw her gather it up in both arms to sit down in the cafetorium, the way you would gather a long skirt. They saw her hold it against her chest to run. They saw it catch in the hinge of a folding chair, and in the zipper of her own backpack, and once in the door of the bus, which hauled her back two steps before the driver heard her.
They saw her tip her head a little to the left by the end of the day, because of the weight.
What they did not see was a quarter past five in the morning.
That was when I got her up. She would sit sideways in a kitchen chair with a blanket around her, half asleep, and I would stand behind her with a wide comb and a spray bottle and start at the ends. You always start at the ends. If you start at the top with hair that long, you pull every tangle down into one knot the size of a biscuit, and then you have a crying child and forty-five minutes gone.
Loose, it came to the middle of her calves. It took me forty minutes on a good morning. Three strands, each one thicker than my thumb, over and over, keeping the tension even so it would not twist on her by lunch.
I learned in the shop at the feedlot. I clamped three lengths of nylon rope in the bench vise and practiced on my dinner break until I could do it without looking, and a man named Jeff, who runs the mill and has known me since high school, stood in the door one day and watched me for a full minute.
“I’m not going to ask,” he said.
“I’d appreciate that.”
He never did. He is about the only one.
The others asked, at first. When are you going to trim that up, Travis. Does she not want bangs.
I said the same thing every time. “We’re not cutting it yet.”
Somewhere along in there, somebody overheard a piece of something. I think it was Hailey herself, in second grade, telling a girl on the playground, “Not till seventeen.” It went through that town like a grass fire, and by the time it came back around to me it had grown legs.
Travis won’t let that child cut her hair until she is seventeen years old.
I heard it at the co-op. I heard it in the checkout line at the United in Canyon, from two women who did not know I was behind them. I paid for my groceries and I did not correct them.
I could have. One sentence would have done it.
Pam Dunn caught me in the pickup line the Monday after the note.