The Barber Chair Under the Feed Store Oak

The chair weighs close to two hundred pounds. Those old chairs have a cast iron base and a hydraulic pump in the column, and you do not just pick one up and carry it like a kitchen stool.

My husband unbolted it from the shop floor while Grandpa watched from the doorway.

The bolts had not been turned in sixty years, and they groaned coming out, and the floor underneath was a lighter color, the shape of the base, like a shadow.

Grandpa looked at that pale spot on the boards for a long time. I saw him swallow.

“Easy with her,” was all he said.

It took four of us to walk the chair up two planks into the truck bed.

We laid moving blankets around it and strapped it down to the stake pockets with ratchet straps, and Grandpa rode in the cab with his hand out the window, holding on to the top of the chair.

Under the oak, my husband had already laid the plywood flat and leveled it with shims.

We set the chair down on it, and he drilled the base and ran the lag bolts through, and then he stood up and shook the chair hard with both hands.

It did not move an inch.

“That chair’s going nowhere,” he said. “You could cut hair in a tornado.”

Grandpa sat down in it. He pumped the handle four times and rose up slow, and then he let the valve go and came back down with a soft hiss, the same sound I have heard since I was a baby.

He smiled for the first time in two weeks.

Saturday came up bright and hot, the way July does in south-central Kentucky.

By six-thirty the sun was over the courthouse and the dew was burning off the grass, and the cicadas were already going in the oak.

I got there at six. I wore my white feed store polo and my jeans, because I was on the clock for Hubert in the afternoon, and I twisted my hair up in a bun because there was no point fighting it in that heat.

I carried Grandpa’s old striped pole out of the back of my car. It is the original pole from his shop, glass and painted tin, and it does not turn anymore without its motor.

I leaned it against the trunk of the oak where folks could see it from the road.

Grandpa came at a quarter to seven. He had on his white barber’s jacket, pressed, and his white hair was combed straight back with tonic the way he has worn it since 1965.

He had his black case of scissors and clippers and his strop.

There were already four men waiting.

They had brought their own folding chairs. Two of them were brothers who run cattle out past Yosemite, the little community, and one was a retired mail carrier, and one was a boy about sixteen whose daddy had sent him over with a twenty-dollar bill.

Nobody said much. They nodded at Grandpa, and he nodded back, and the first brother sat down in the red chair and took his cap off and set it on his knee.

Grandpa snapped the cape out with a crack like a bedsheet on a clothesline. He fastened it at the back of the man’s neck, took out his comb, and started cutting.

I sat down on an upturned feed bucket by the oak and counted the men in line. Then I counted them again every fifteen minutes, because I could not help myself.