The Haircuts I Gave at the Nursing Home

Daddy was seventy-one. The stroke took the use of his right hand and a good deal of his speech, and my mother had been gone four years by then.

There was no one at home to care for him.

So he went to Cedar Knob Care Center, out past the stoplight on the Berea road. It was a low brick building with a flagpole and a row of rocking chairs on the porch that nobody rocked in.

To be fair to Cedar Knob, the people there have been good to me for forty years. In 1985 it had thirty-eight residents and a staff that was always one person short.

The aides were kind. I never saw one of them be anything but kind. They were also doing forty things at once, and a haircut was number forty-one.

On the Tuesday after his second week, somebody took a pair of kitchen scissors to my father. I do not blame her.

His hair had gotten into his collar and she meant well, and she did the best she could do in four minutes with the wrong tool.

I came by that evening after closing and found him in the chair by the window with his good hand over the side of his head.

He would not let me look. When I finally eased his fingers away, I saw what had been done to him.

It was chopped, uneven, a step cut at the back like a bowl had been turned over it.

The man had given a clean neckline to half the county for fifty-one years. And there he sat.

There was a mirror above his dresser. The aides had turned it to the wall. I found that out later, and I never asked who did it, because I think I knew. He had asked them to.

I did not say anything. I went home, and I did not sleep, and on Wednesday I stood in the shop and looked at my chair for a long time.

Thursday morning I put a sign on the door in my own handwriting. It said Closed at noon, back Friday. I did not know yet that I would write that same sentence for forty years.

I loaded a feed sack with my good clippers, two combs, a cape, a neck strip, a spray bottle, and a jar of blue disinfectant. I added the hand mirror from the third drawer.

I drove out to Cedar Knob at a quarter to one and walked down the hall to his room with the sack on my shoulder like a man coming to deliver feed.

He was awake. He looked at the sack. He looked at me.

I snapped the cape open, and the sound of it filled that little room the way it has filled my shop every working day since I was nineteen.

What I saw happen to my father was this. His shoulders came down. His whole face rearranged itself. He leaned his head back an inch, the way a man does in a chair he trusts.