The Barber Chair Under the Feed Store Oak

Ransom Coffey handed my grandfather the letter while Grandpa still had a straight razor in his hand and a line of lather on the back of a man’s neck.

I was standing at the little counter by the door with his bank bag, so I saw every bit of it.

“Read that when you get a minute, Elmer,” Ransom said. He laid the envelope on the shelf beside the combs and the jar of blue disinfectant, the way you would lay down a seed catalog.

Grandpa nodded without looking up. He finished the neck in three slow strokes, wiped the blade on the strop towel, and brushed the man off with the soft brush he has used since before I was born.

Ransom was already out the door by then. The bell over it rang twice, once when it opened and once when it swung shut behind him, and the morning sun came across the floor in a long yellow bar.

It was a Tuesday in late June. The shop smelled like talc and hair tonic and the coffee Grandpa makes every morning in a percolator older than my marriage.

Nothing about the day looked like the end of anything.

Grandpa took his customer’s twelve dollars, rang it up on the old brass register, and said, “See you in three weeks.”

Then he picked up the envelope, sat down in the second chair, and opened it.

I watched him read it twice. His glasses were down on the end of his nose, and his lips moved a little on the numbers, the way they do when he is adding up a ticket in his head.

“What is it, Grandpa?”

He folded the letter in thirds and put it in the pocket of his white barber’s jacket. “Ransom is raising the rent,” he said. “Two hundred to six hundred. Starting the first of September.”

I set the bank bag down on the counter. For a second I could not find a single word.

Six hundred dollars a month, for a man who charges twelve dollars a haircut and closes at one on Saturdays.

“That’s three times what you pay,” I said. “He can’t do that.”

“He owns the building, honey. He can do what he wants with it.” Grandpa stood up and started sweeping around the first chair, even though there was hardly any hair on the floor yet.

My name is Lacey Wethington. I am forty-three years old, I keep the books at the feed store across the square, and Elmer Grider is my mother’s daddy.

He has cut hair on the square in Liberty, Kentucky, for sixty-one years.

He opened that shop in 1965, when he was twenty-six and fresh back from barber college in Louisville.

He rented the narrow brick front between the old dime store and the insurance office, and he has paid rent on it every first of the month since.

He bought his chair used that same year, from a shop that was closing over in Russell County.

It is a 1950s chair, red leather and chrome, with a footrest shaped like a little fan and a pump handle that still lifts a grown man with four strokes.

He paid ninety dollars for it. My grandmother Nola told me once that she nearly fainted at the price, because ninety dollars was most of a month’s grocery money for them back then.

The second chair came later, when his brother Ancil was cutting with him.