The Clean Shirt The Barber Gave

Telling the town

A thing I have learned about a small town is that you cannot keep a date like that quiet, no matter how little you say about it.

My father did not announce anything. He did not put a sign in the window. He just mentioned to a few of his regulars, when they asked about next month’s appointment, that the shop would be closing up at the end of September and they ought to find themselves somebody over in Delphi.

That was all he did. And it went through this county like water finds the low ground.

By August, men I had not seen in years were stopping into the shop, making an appointment they did not need, just to sit in the Koken one more time and have my father run the clippers over a head that did not have much left on it to cut.

He knew what they were doing. He let them. He charged them the same ten dollars he had always charged and he did not say anything soft or final, because that was not his way.

I came up most weekends that last summer to help him close down the parts of a life that do not close themselves. We sorted fifty years of things. The old hand clippers that worked on a spring before there was electricity in the shop. A coffee can of foreign coins men had left over the years. A shoebox of photographs, mostly of men in that chair, boys getting first cuts, a whole town aging one haircut at a time in black and white and then in color.

And the shirts. The rack still held eleven pressed white shirts the week before he closed. I asked him what he wanted to do with them.

He looked at the rack a long moment.

“Leave them,” he said. “Somebody might still need one.”

I did not know yet how right he was about that, or in how strange a way.