The Barber Chair Under the Feed Store Oak

I saw them look at each other, and then the man at the front of the line stood up out of his folding chair.

“Rollie,” he said. “You go on ahead of me.”

The next man stood up too. And the next. Every man at the front of the line stood up out of his chair, one after another, all the way down, and waved Rollie through.

Rollie did not say a word. He just touched the brim of his cap to them as he went by.

His daughter had to stop and wipe her eyes before she got him to the chair.

Grandpa held the chair steady while Rollie lowered himself into it. He snapped the cape, fastened it, and stood there a second with his hand on Rollie’s shoulder.

“Morning, Rollie,” he said.

“Morning, Elmer,” Rollie said. “Heard you moved.”

“Just across the street.”

“Better shade over here anyhow.”

Grandpa laughed, and started combing out Rollie’s thin white hair the same way he has combed it for sixty-one years.

I stood at the oak with my hand on the old striped pole, and I was crying, and I did not care who saw.

That was when I saw Ransom.

He had come out of his office on the far side of the square.

His office is above the hardware store, and he has a window that looks right down at the feed store lawn, so he had been able to see all morning.

He stood on the curb for a while. Then he looked both ways, the way you would for a car, and started across the street toward the oak.

I counted the line while he walked. I could not help it. I counted every man in a folding chair, every man standing in the shade, every man leaning on the tailgate of a truck.

Thirty-one men.

The ninth man in the line was Ransom’s own brother.

He is four years younger than Ransom and retired from the gas company, and he had been sitting there since ten o’clock with his cap in his lap, not saying a word to anybody.

Ransom saw him. I watched it happen. He stopped at the edge of the grass, right where the shade began, and he looked at his brother, and his brother looked back at him.

Neither one of them said anything.

Grandpa kept cutting. He did not look up. He turned Rollie’s chair a quarter turn with his foot and went to work on the other side, snip, snip, the comb and the scissors moving together like they always have.

Rollie opened one eye and looked at Ransom.

“Morning, Ransom,” Rollie said. “You’re behind thirty men.”

Nobody laughed. That was the thing. If they had laughed, it would have been mean, and that is not what that morning was.

The men just looked at Ransom, quiet and plain, the way you look at somebody who has walked into church late.

Then the feed store door opened, and Hubert came down the steps wiping his hands on a shop rag. He walked across the lawn without hurrying and stopped about three feet from Ransom.

“Ransom,” he said. He did not raise his voice, but it carried.

“This lawn is Elmer’s as long as he wants it. Rain or shine, winter or summer. I wanted you to hear that from me.”

Ransom’s face went red, then pale. He looked at Hubert, and then at the chair, and then at the long line of men in the shade, men he went to school with, men he sold land to, men who sat behind him at church.