The Barber Chair Under the Feed Store Oak

“The usual?” Grandpa asked.

“The usual, Elmer,” Ransom said, and his voice cracked on the name.

Grandpa had been cutting Ransom Coffey’s hair since Ransom was three years old. I did not know that until that afternoon.

Hubert told me later. He said Ransom’s daddy used to bring him in on Saturdays and set him on a board across the armrests.

Grandpa cut his hair the same way he had cut every other head that day. No faster, no slower.

He did not say anything about the rent, and Ransom did not say anything either. They talked about the weather and the tobacco crop.

When it was finished, Grandpa dusted his neck with the soft brush and held up the hand mirror. Ransom looked at himself for a long time.

Then he got out of the chair and reached for his wallet. He took out a twenty and held it out.

Grandpa took the twenty. He opened the cigar box and counted out eight dollars in change, slowly, one bill at a time, and put it in Ransom’s hand.

“Twelve dollars,” Grandpa said.

Ransom looked at the eight dollars in his hand. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and then he closed it again.

He put the money in his wallet, and put on his cap, and walked back across the street to his office.

Grandpa cut hair until supper, until the last man in line was done and the shade of the oak had reached all the way across the road to the curb of the square.

Thirty-eight haircuts in one Saturday. He has never cut that many in one day in his life.

When it was over, he sat down in the red chair himself, for the first time all day.

He tipped his head back and closed his eyes and let the box fan blow on his face.

“Well,” he said. “Ancil would have liked that.”

He never went back to the shop on the square. In August, Ransom’s daughter opened her boutique in the narrow brick front, with a pink awning and dresses in the window.

Grandpa took her a potted fern on opening day and wished her well.

Hubert built a little shed with a tin roof under the oak, open on the side facing the square, with a wood stove for the winter.

The men from the county road garage poured a concrete pad for it on a Saturday morning and would not take a dime.

Grandpa cuts hair there three days a week now, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

The red chair is still bolted to the same plywood, and the old striped pole leans against the oak where I set it that first morning.

There is always a line. Men bring their own chairs. Rollie comes the first Saturday of every month, and the men still stand up and wave him through.

My son’s curl and mine are in the same envelope, in a frame on my kitchen wall now, under glass, with both dates in Grandpa’s pencil.

Ransom comes every three weeks. He sits in a folding chair like everybody else and waits his turn. He has never asked to go ahead, and nobody has ever offered.

Thirty-one men were in line by noon, and his brother was one of them, and Rollie Spears was in the chair at ninety-two.

Ransom got in line, and Elmer cut his hair too, $12, no tip.