The Clean Shirt The Barber Gave

The men had bought the building. Dale had started it in the spring, the week he heard the shop was closing, going quiet from man to man, and more than two hundred of them had put in what they could, five dollars or five hundred, until between them they bought the shop outright off the old estate that had owned the block for forty years.

They had put it in a little trust. And the paper my father was holding made him, for as long as he lived, the owner of the shop he had rented his whole working life.

“It is not closing, Virgil,” Dale said. “Your chair is not leaving this square. Nora is going to run it. And any man in this county who has got a funeral to get to, or a job to go after, and nothing good to wear, is going to walk in there and get a clean shirt and a cut, free, the way you did it, for as long as there is a town here to need it. We are calling it what everybody has called it for thirty years anyway. We are calling it Virgil’s.”

My father stood on the sidewalk with the deed in his shaking hand and two hundred men in white shirts in front of him, and he could not say one word. My father, who always had the last quiet word. He put his free hand flat over his mouth and he bowed his head, and his shoulders went, and Dale stepped up and put an arm around him, and the whole line of them just let him be, out there in the gold light, for as long as he needed.

Virgil’s

That was three weeks ago.

We open Virgil’s on the first Saturday of next month. The Koken stays in the window where it has always been. My father’s apron stays on its hook, and I have told him he is not allowed to take it down, because the men want to see it there when they walk in.

I cannot cut hair, and I am honest about that, so a young barber who apprenticed over in Delphi is coming on three days a week to run the chair. My father is going to sit in the shop as much as his legs will let him, in one of the four wooden chairs under the window, and talk to the men, and keep his mouth shut when a man needs him to, which is the real trade and the one thing his shaking hand cannot take from him.

I am going to run the rack.