The Clean Shirt The Barber Gave

The last Friday

I drove up the night before and stayed in my old room at the farm, and in the morning I went down to the square with my father in the dark, the way he had opened that shop his whole life, so we could turn the pole on one last time at seven.

I meant to run the day for him. Sweep the floor, work the cigar box, keep him company, make sure he ate something, and be there to help him lock the door at the end so he did not have to do that part alone.

I had it in my head that it would be a slow, sweet, sad little day. A handful of regulars. A quiet square. Two of us closing a door that had been open for a hundred years.

I want you to understand how wrong I was.

At ten minutes to eight, before my father had the lights all the way on, there was a man at the glass.

It was Dale Furman. I knew Dale a little. He runs the lumberyard out on the highway now, has for years, a big steady man in his fifties.

Dale was not in his lumberyard clothes. He was in a white dress shirt, pressed, buttoned all the way to the collar, on a Friday, with no tie and no reason I could see.

My father let him in and started to say good morning, and Dale could not quite get his own words out. He just stood there holding his cap in his two hands.

“Virgil,” he finally said. “You remember a shirt you gave a scared kid in 1996?”

My father, who remembered everything but never let on, said, “I’ve given out a shirt or two.”

“You gave me this one,” Dale said, and he tugged at the front of it. “I wore it to my dad’s funeral on a Tuesday and to the plant interview on a Thursday, same week, because it was the only clean good shirt I had, and you’re the one put it on my back. I kept it thirty years, Virgil. I ironed it last night.”

My father did not know what to say. I had almost never seen that in my life.

And then I looked past Dale, out the window, and there was another man coming up the sidewalk. In a white shirt.

And behind him, another.

They came in white shirts

They did not stop coming until past noon.

Grown men, most of them past fifty now, some of them I knew and some I had never laid eyes on, and every last one of them in a clean white shirt buttoned to the collar on a workday morning.

I understood it about the fourth man in. They were his shirts. Or they were the shirt, the idea of it: the clean white shirt my father had put on their backs on the worst morning of their lives, kept or bought again or borrowed from a brother, worn today on purpose so he would see.

An old man close to eighty now told me my father cut his hair and gave him a shirt for his wife’s funeral in 1981, and that he had worn the same shirt to church every Easter since, and he turned his face to the mirror so I would not see it.