The Barber Chair Under the Feed Store Oak

“I never meant to run him off,” Ransom said. His voice was not steady. “I just needed the building. My girl needs a start. That’s all it was.”

“Then you should have said so,” Hubert said. “To his face. Elmer would have handed you the key.”

Ransom looked at Grandpa. Grandpa finished the last snip around Rollie’s ear, and set down his scissors, and finally turned and looked at Ransom over the top of his glasses.

“I’ll put it back at two hundred, Elmer,” Ransom said. “Two hundred, same as before. You can stay as long as you want.”

The whole lawn went quiet. Even the cicadas seemed to stop. I held on to the barber pole so hard my fingers hurt.

Grandpa thought about it for a moment. Then he shook his head, slowly, the way he does when a customer asks for something that will not suit him.

“No, Ransom,” he said. “Your girl needs that building more than I do. You give it to her. I hope she does real well in it. I mean that.”

Then he picked up his soft brush and dusted the back of Rollie’s neck, and he unfastened the cape and shook it out, and that was the end of it as far as Grandpa was concerned.

Ransom stood there. He stood there in front of all those men with nothing to say, and nobody made it any easier for him, and nobody made it any harder.

I think that was worse for him than if they had shouted.

His brother still had not said a word. He just looked at Ransom, and then he looked down at the cap in his lap, and turned it around once in his hands.

Rollie’s daughter came and helped Rollie out of the chair. Rollie paid his twelve dollars out of a snap coin purse, one bill at a time, and then he put a hand on Grandpa’s arm.

“Same time next month,” Rollie said.

“I’ll be right here,” Grandpa said.

Rollie walked past Ransom on his way to the car. He did not stop. He just nodded, the way old men nod, and kept going with his cane and his daughter’s arm.

Ransom turned around then. I thought he was going to walk back across the street to his office, and I would not have blamed him. But he did not.

He walked down the line, past all thirty men in their folding chairs and their work caps, past his own brother, all the way to the very end, by the road. And he stood there.

He did not have a chair. After a minute, the man in front of him, a dairy farmer I have known my whole life, got up without a word and brought back an empty folding chair from the stack by the tailgate and set it beside him.

Ransom sat down in it. He took off his cap and held it in his lap like everybody else.

The line moved slow after that, the way a barber’s line does. Grandpa took his time with every head. He always has. He says a man who is in a hurry should get a hat.

Around one o’clock my husband came across the square with our son on his hip.

Our boy is two years old, born late, when we had given up on another baby. We named him Elmer, after Grandpa.