The Clean Shirt The Barber Gave

The day the razor started to shake

My father never got sick in his life. He was the kind of seventy that still split his own firewood and climbed up to clean his own gutters, and it half scared me to watch him do it.

So when his hand started to shake, I noticed before he admitted it.

It started last winter. A little tremor in the right hand, the hand that holds the razor. At first it was only in the morning, only when he was tired, and he would shake it out and go on.

By spring it was not only in the morning.

I came up one Saturday and sat in the Koken while he gave an old preacher his trim, and I watched my father’s right hand, and I watched him switch the comb and the scissors to steady the one with the other, and I watched him skip the straight razor on the neck entirely and use the electric trimmer instead, which he had never done in his life. My father finished a neck with a straight razor. It was a point of pride going back to his own father.

That night at the kitchen table I asked him about it.

He did not pretend. He never did. He held his right hand out over the table and we both watched it tremble, soft and steady, like a leaf that will not hold still.

“Doctor’s got a name for it,” he said. “Long name. Comes down to this hand’s not going to get steadier.”

“It doesn’t hurt?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It just won’t mind me.”

We sat a while. Then he said the thing he had plainly already decided, days or weeks before, alone, the way he decided everything.

“A man who can’t hold a razor steady over another man’s throat has got no business behind that chair,” he said. “I’ll not be the barber folks start coming to out of pity, Nora. I’ve spent fifty years being the one they come to for the opposite of that.”

I did not argue. You did not argue my father out of a thing like that, and besides, he was right, and we both knew he was right.

He said he would work through the summer, give folks time to find a new man, and close at the end of September.

He picked a Friday. The last Friday. He wrote it on the calendar by the shop door in pencil, the way he wrote everything, and that was that.