The Barber Chair Under the Feed Store Oak

He had never had a haircut. His hair was blond and soft and curled over his ears, and I had been putting it off because I wanted Grandpa to do it, and I had been afraid there would not be a shop to do it in.

The men in line saw them coming. The man whose turn was next stood up out of his folding chair and waved my husband on ahead, and then the next man did the same.

I looked at Grandpa. He was already wiping down the red leather with his damp rag, the way he does on Saturdays.

“Bring him here,” Grandpa said.

My husband set our boy in my lap, and I sat down in the red chair with him, the same chair, and held his little hands so he would not grab the scissors.

Grandpa bent down slow, all eighty-seven years of him, and took the first curl from behind my son’s ear. He held it up in the sunlight and looked at it for a long moment.

Then he reached into the pocket of his white jacket and took out a small envelope. On the front, in pencil, faded almost to nothing, was my name and a date from forty-one years ago.

He had kept it all that time. He had carried it in his jacket pocket, he told me later, every working day since Grandmother Nola passed, because she had saved it and he did not want to lose it.

He slipped my son’s curl into the same envelope, right beside mine. Then he wrote the new date underneath the old one with a stub of pencil, and handed it to me.

I could not speak. I just held that envelope against my chest and held my boy, and Grandpa finished the haircut, slow and careful, while my son tried to eat the comb.

When it was done, my son looked in the hand mirror Grandpa held up and laughed out loud.

Grandpa laughed too. He would not take my twelve dollars. That was the only free haircut he gave all day.

The afternoon wore on. The shade moved around the oak like the hand of a clock, and the men moved their chairs with it.

Grandpa cut steady, and hummed, and drank his water, and never once sat down.

Ransom’s brother got his haircut around two. When he stood up out of the chair, he paid his twelve dollars and walked down the line to the end, where Ransom was still sitting, and sat down in the grass beside him.

I could not hear what they said. They talked for a long time, low, with their heads close together.

At one point Ransom put his hand over his eyes. His brother put a hand on his back.

Then his brother got up and went home, and Ransom stayed in line.

He moved up one chair at a time, all afternoon, in the heat. Nobody brought him a biscuit, but somebody brought him a cup of water, and he said thank you.

It was close to four o’clock when the man in front of Ransom got out of the red chair.

The shadow of the oak had stretched halfway across the road by then, long and blue, and the sun was still high and hot over the courthouse.

Ransom stood up. He looked at the chair, and then at Grandpa, and he hesitated.

“Sit down, Ransom,” Grandpa said. “I don’t bite.”

Ransom sat in the red chair. Grandpa snapped out the cape and fastened it at his neck, gentle, the same as he had for every other man that day. He picked up his comb and his scissors.