The Barber Chair Under the Feed Store Oak

Ancil was nine years younger, and they worked side by side for nineteen years. Ancil died in 1984, and Grandpa never hired anybody to take that chair.

He just kept it clean. Every Saturday he wipes the red leather on both chairs with a damp rag, and every Saturday the second one stays empty, except when somebody’s wife sits in it to wait.

I grew up in that shop. My mother was a nurse who worked weekends at the hospital in Danville, so on Saturdays I sat on the bench under the window and sorted bobby pins and swept up hair for a dime a pile.

My first haircut was in Grandpa’s red chair. I was two years old, and Grandmother Nola held my hands so I would not grab the scissors.

He saved the curl in an envelope and wrote the date on it in pencil.

So when I tell you I wanted to march straight across the square to Ransom Coffey’s office, I want you to understand where that came from.

It was not about rent. It was about the floor I learned to walk on.

“I’m going over there,” I said.

Grandpa stopped sweeping. He leaned on the broom handle and looked at me over his glasses, and I saw how tired he was in a way I had not let myself see before.

“No, you’re not,” he said quietly. “I’m eighty-seven years old, Lacey. I won’t beg a man for a building. I won’t do it, and I won’t have you doing it for me.”

That was the whole conversation. He went back to sweeping, and I went back across the square to the feed store with his bank bag still in my hand, because I had forgotten to take it to the bank.

I did not call Ransom that day, and I did not call a lawyer, and I did not call my mother in Indiana to stir her up.

Grandpa had said his piece, and going behind his back would have shamed him worse than the letter did.

But I could not stop thinking about it. I sat at my desk in the back office of the feed store with the ledger open in front of me, and the numbers kept turning into six hundred dollars.

Hubert Allen owns the feed store. He is seventy years old and has run it since his father passed, and he has been sweeping hair off his own collar in Grandpa’s chair since he was in grade school.

He came back to the office around noon with two cups of coffee from the pot by the scale.

He set one down on my desk and sat on the corner of the old filing cabinet like he always does.

“You look like somebody ran over your dog,” he said.

So I told him. I told him about the envelope on the shelf, and the two hundred and the six hundred, and the first of September. I told him what Grandpa said about begging.

Hubert did not say anything for a while. He looked out the office window at the square, where you can just see Grandpa’s striped pole turning outside the shop, and he drank his coffee slowly.

“Ransom’s girl came home in the spring,” he finally said.

“Divorced, and broke flat. Her husband took the house in Somerset and left her the car payment. She’s been living in Ransom’s basement with her two kids.”

I had heard something about that at church. I had not put the pieces together.

“Ransom wants to set her up with a dress shop,” Hubert said.