Wendell Pike told me the rest sitting in his wheelchair in the middle of my garage, with the scorched barber pole across his knees and his thin hands trembling on the wooden frame. In 1974, thirteen years after the fire, he had walked into the new shop of Virgil on Noble Street with his cap in his hand. He was thirty two years old and ashamed beyond words. He sat down in the red porcelain chair, and the barber behind him lifted a razor and met his eyes in the mirror. Wendell, he said, thought he was about to die.
“Your husband looked at me for a long time,” Wendell said, “and then he said, Mister, I know who you are. I have known for thirteen years.” My heart stopped. I turned and looked at Dana, and she was standing beside me with her hand over her mouth. “He knew I was the one who threw the can. A man in town had told him. And do you know what he did, Mrs. Mabe? He lathered up my face, and he shaved me, slowly, and he gave me the best haircut I ever had. And he said, You are welcome in this chair.”
I sat down on an overturned bucket because my legs would not hold me. All my married years, Virgil had talked about the old days of the shop on Noble Street, and the funny customers, and the baseball games on the radio. Not once had he mentioned a fire. He had carried it in his chest for fifty years, in the same careful silence in which he had trimmed the hair of three generations. I looked at the empty chair and I thought, Virgil, you foolish, gentle man.
Forgiveness given in a barber chair does not make the news, but it may be the thing a town remembers longest when the old men begin telling stories.
Mr. Crum cleared his throat, leaning on his cane. He said that Virgil had hired Wendell as a sweeper that very week, in 1974, over the objections of two of his customers. Wendell had swept that floor for eleven years.
He had learned to cut hair himself, and had gone on to run a shop of his own in Gadsden. In all that time, the two men had never discussed the night of the fire. They had simply worked side by side, one white and one Black, one forgiven and one forgiving, in a town that had not yet learned how.
“The pole was in the ashes,” Wendell said. “I took it that night. I kept it for forty years in my attic, because I could not bring myself to burn it or throw it away. When I heard that Virgil had passed, I knew it was time to bring it home.” He held it out to me with both hands. The stripes, black on one side and red and white on the other, were as bright as new paint. The brass plate gleamed. I took it and held it against my chest, and for a moment I could not speak.
Dana was weeping openly now. She knelt beside my stool and put her head in my lap. “Mama,” she said, “I am so sorry. I called it a dead man chair. I did not know. I did not know what it meant.” I stroked her hair, as I had when she was a little girl with a scraped knee. I told her that she had not been wrong to want me to have a life. She had only been wrong to think the way to do it was to sell the past for a dollar.
We hung the pole that autumn on the front of the garage, where the whole street could see it, and Mr. Crum installed it himself with a ladder and a level. A small brass sign beneath it reads, Mabe Barbershop, Est. 1958. On the first Saturday of every month, the garage fills with old men and young ones, with veterans and farmers and a few high school boys with their hats in their hands. My nephew cuts, and Wendell, in his wheelchair, hands out the towels and tells the youngest ones how to hold a razor.
Isaiah Crum comes every month, in a pressed suit, for the shave. He sits in the red chair like a man at church, with his eyes closed, and says very little. Last month, I asked him, as he stepped down, why he had stayed quiet for sixty years about the fire. He thought for a long while. “Mrs. Mabe,” he said, “your husband did not need me to tell the story. He told it every day, with a razor in his hand.” Then he put on his fedora and walked out into the sun.
Dana comes every first Saturday now, with the grandbabies. She sweeps the floor herself, a task she insists upon. And in the evenings, when the last customer has gone and the garage is quiet, I sit alone in the red chair for a little while with a cup of coffee, the way Virgil used to. I look at the burned pole through the open door. I think about forgiveness and how heavy it is to carry, and how much lighter it becomes when you finally set it down.
