“Lucas, I’m gonna run over to Dothan tonight to see sister. I’ll try to get away early, but if not I’ll stop the night. Don’t worry now. You remember she don’t have a phone, so I can’t call. Here’s a kiss.”
She left then, sashaying herself out the screen door in perfume and her best dress, lips scarlet. His cheek felt the burning Judas kiss.
A sky full of the 4th, sparks and sulfur, the firmament cracking over the town, a dry arsenal exploding, the man’s fireworks also went up. Mimicking the sky, and as intense in color and exuberance, he celebrated his anger, moving, standing, breathing alone in the oven hot house. Insects and the neighbors’ children screamed, rockets whistled, there were sparklers on the lawn across the street. The summer evening filled with ashes and spent powder.
Even before Confederate Day he’d felt an intimation, the town folks beginning to avoid his eyes. In a month he heard laughter here and there going silent when they saw him look. The men had come into his shop and told him nothing. Their women had giggled, cast glances. They smiled at him generously in church, they even dawdled along Main Street to peep at him. Voices, distant, frightening, had followed him out of stores, rumbled in deep registers, which he strained for and failed to catch. In broad daylight the voices boomed pregnant with meaning, when his back turned. And their shifting eyes had branded him, fired by some other’s passion.
That passion excited the town beyond the end of spring. Then sudden quiet. With the summer the people’s eyes had dulled, were brown, blue, green again. They weren’t interested any longer, titillation and curiosity no longer surrounded him‑‑the pain remained. Its mystery, something vital, hid shamefully from him in the heat and humidity of the days.
Tensed in pain, he fumbled for a cure. The trace of a dangerous perfume haunted his rooms, overpowering the scent of cut grass, obliterating blackbird and nightingale songs. Beckoning through windows, through doors, all of Red Level languished drowsy, lazily stretched in hammocks and lawn chairs. The lustful life of insects filled the air.
In his home, though, something alien lingered, and as a hunter is held to its prey he remained inside the gloom of the house’s winter, searching for its origin. Small shapes and insignificant situations commanded his attention: the lay of a book, the surface of his bed, the kitchen chairs, the contents of ashtrays. He would stand in the closet sniffing his wife’s clothes.
As his neighbor’s interest cooled he tended his. It was his altar fire. He knew revelation was at hand.
One night at the beginning of July he lay stiff in bed, tangled in sheets, whispers running like knives over his chest. Beside him, her shape dimmed by the bedclothes, his wife slept wrapped in womanly amplitude. He could see her teeth, hear her heartbeat, study the curves of her body damp bedding. Her hair was matted in a strange sweat about her face and that was when she first softly moaned, rocking gently as if that were how she breathed.
A decibel had stirred him, too dim to be understood, yet again her mouth twitched. An animal buried beneath layers of darkness and dreams, her whispers came dry as if she spoke with a mouth full of leaves. He heard distinctly, and his search ended.
That name she spilled even fireworks would not dislodge. For two days after he had carried it about dumbly as an overburdened mule. At first the name had seemed a solace. He too held the secret. He could smile, shift, speak darkly to himself. The drawling farmers, their grimy necks, the red earth caked under their nails, no longer tormented him with their toothless slurs. He no longer feared what they might know because he realized they knew nothing of the truth. All might be fine if it stayed hidden. The name would have shocked them speechless. He alone had that knowledge, of that he was certain and pride for sure kept him from telling.
Yet in his relief, pain endured, mounted, threw him about. No one in Red Level cared what he knew. It didn’t make the least difference. There is, he came to understand, more than knowledge. It demanded action to purge the summer.
Rocking on his front porch to stir the air, his mouth was so parched he could barely mutter to her. She had said there was a Dr. Pepper left in the ice box, but he found that someone else had drunk it and left the empty bottle in a ring of water on the sill. He went to the toilet and found the seat up, as he never left it in consideration of her. A splash of urine on the linoleum—the Barber never missed. Sniffing about on his hands his hair bristled at the base of his skull. It was not his.
The violence of Independence Day rockets freed him. In powder‑burnt darkness he saw a gullet split, blood splashing like sparks. His nemesis would squirm, a phantom pleading in the moonlight. When the blood flowed the body relaxed while its life drained away. Eyes went stupidly wide. Mouth gaped stupidly wide. He could hear one cry breaking from the ripped throat.
Of course such justice is intangible. He and she were flesh and blood, as was the man behind the name. Before he could rest he required an ultimate judgment. If the 4th of July fireworks celebrated his escape from pain they also signaled his revenge.
That summer Red Level folks began to wonder about their barber‑‑for them it was an odd sensation. As warm days grew shorter they watched him shrink back into hollow cheeks, a long lank body, a pair of intimidating eyes. He would give them a naked shake, muffle his words, slack his hand in mid‑air above a farmer’s head. Their barber would stop his work, menace like a dog, and throw his fist at the church tower. The town Church stood clearly visible from his shop, the barbershop from the open windows of its whitewashed sanctuary.
In August the barber, who had always sat with them ever since he was a boy, began refusing their company on Sundays. The congregation discovered him ensconced in his own barber chair, rigid against the high back, the black leather, the brass glinting around him, a still figure dressed in Sunday black, a white face glaring out of its empty shop at the empty street. They couldn’t take their eyes off him.
Although they saw him every day of the week as natural to them as the weather, as unnatural as a storm, they couldn’t understand the change. Businessmen began to whine beneath his shears, and farmers for the first time felt the sting of his razor, he drew their blood more than once. The man was savage until Saturdays, when his dandy hands became less brutal, his growls lilting into murmurs. Saturdays the customers greeted a bland face, his hair scrupulously combed‑‑some whispered that it shone. He gave little boys handfuls of gum. The busiest day for Red Level, and their barber whirled among them in stiff trousers, fleeting, ethereal.
Then Sunday morning‑‑after walking his wife to church, he would leave her on the steps, stand smoking over the town dogs in the shade and dust of Main Street and later, to the strains of the first hymn, stride board straight and haughty, across to his own mysteries, in his own chair. When they asked, he told them he was a freethinker.
Obsessed by these mysteries, the congregation huddled in their pews, lost to the old secrets that flowed from the pulpit. They cast glances, almost flirtingly, out the windows at the solitary vigilant, the voluntary outcast who stared back boldly, furiously. Hymns were sung spiritlessly. Too much money or none at all dropped into the collection plate. The ushers forgot their duties. The chorus of ladies and widowers held their paper fans still, engrossed in the dark watcher‑‑something was about to happen, they could feel the news in their old bones.
A handsome young preacher thundered at them from the pulpit, his hair waving, thighs like oak trunks. His brown eyes struggled to hold their attention, flashing from face to face. Some Sundays he puffed up his barrel chest, stroked his hair, and surged, holding them with his most beautiful words, his pictures of a ravishing hell or stories to delight children, filled with battle and courage. Most often, however, he lost, particularly when he spoke of love and understanding. The people of Red Level knew about love. They were possessed by it on summer nights. Love heated their beds in winter. And understanding was how they stood each other, a mass of understandings from one side of town to the other.
Red Level folk growled for a bit of reassurance, a morsel of terror. They were thirsty for a mystery. They wanted that more than bread or wine. Like a fickle woman they turned from the preacher towards the barber.
Still smoldering, all ashes inside, he reveled in heat and its power. When his feet left the porch, stepping so not to wake her, he wanted to open his mouth and breathe fire down Main Street. It would announce his coming before the dawn could.
Fingers of red held the town as he turned the key and pushed open the door. His barbershop was dim but he required no light. Slowly, imperceptibly, light came, lodging in polished brass, his mugs, the steel razors. Looming large and solid in its special place, the chair stood vacant. Light filled it too, changed its character. Darkness reserved it for unusual practices, destined it to be the seat of plotting and torture. In morning light it became the worn barbershop chair, repository for a multitude of buttocks.
Swiveling in his chair, a lit cigar in his mouth, the barber combed himself‑‑long strands, coal black, parted for the metal teeth. He wiped the comb, rubbed at a fly speck on the mirror. Like a surgeon he inspected his instruments, cleaned and spread them shining on a white towel. As he worked he hummed a tune too old to be a hymn.
He had left her queen of his bed, her arms and legs flung across it. At night, and at dawn, he saw her most often, her gown loose about her. To him she lived as a night creature. Thinking of her now, he saw clearly how she prepared for bed, how she slept, and how she curled in the early morning around his waist. When he met her in daylight, walked with her, ate her food, or waved as she passed the shop, she was almost a stranger.
No, night suited her far better. Made her flesh feminine and his alone. He no longer cared for her daytime person, it seemed too sharp and glossy. Then in the full light she might as well have been a man dressed as a woman. Had she grown thighs of oak and red pubic hair?
Sometimes, he could imagine no other touching her‑‑she would vanish in air if anyone dared. He alone had the right to stroke her thigh or tongue her ear‑‑pink and fragile as a daisy. Sometimes as he worked, the razor clenched too tightly in his hand, he saw another man’s legs entwined in hers, beefy arms encircling her, a blockhead rooting in her charms.
Fall days possessed cooled her, not him. She was busy with fruits, vegetables, wax and jars. It shamed him to be jealous of the days. He thought of her as plump and ripe, ready herself to be put up for winter. It awed him that she could be so preoccupied, and never warm to his fire or tremble in his explosions. She existed in her own distance amid others, with dresses, and vegetables. She was brighter than he, everyone knew that for good reason. Yet he lived deeper, a cavern of flames.
The cigar fell in a heap of ashes. He had opened his shop to morning light and Saturday business. The barber sat in his chair, he and the chair large, stern, expectant. It was their long‑awaited day.
The reverend had beautiful hair, almost red with light. Stroking his hair, threading it between his fingers, he pushed it into place. His bulging thighs rested on the bed. He shook himself and snorted. Only half out of sleep, his sermon tangled in his thoughts; Philistines, Samson and Delilah, dark limbs and eyes, tinkling bells. His dreams had resounded with pipes and cymbals, and Delilah’s fingers had twined in her hero’s curls. But he needed a high art to wield such gold, because tomorrow his children would fidget in their pews. For days he had sought those perfect words and images to exert his ancient authority. He wanted to pound at their hearts, Samson sweating before Delilah, wild piping on fall nights in Red Level.
Dropping the night shirt around his feet, he stood stretching before his bedroom mirror‑‑a white Titan with streaming hair. He practiced his smile, learned in seminary where he had perfected it on a professor’s daughter. His manhood stirred between his legs. The smile broadened. A magnificent sermon, it would still the people into a fresco, flat into the walls of his church, mouths open to sing Hosanna.
His own mouth had turned down over the knot in his tie‑‑tomorrow was the Lord’s Day, today the barber’s. The barbershop held no terror for him, but like the knot to his fingers it did confound him. In the steam of its small room, surrounded by a club of townsmen, cast up on shore as any other fish, he, a Fisher of Men, resented the egalitarianism. He felt mildly discomfited by the place’s intensity, its smells. Most of all the barber repelled him, fastening him with leadened fingers. The barber would stand behind, like judgment itself bearing down on his shoulders. A man he felt heating the air.
Undaunted, his tie fastened, he checked his zipper, his smile and breath. The young preacher adjusted his penis too for more visibility in his trousers. For extra effect he hitched up his trousers. Prepared for his place of importance he went to town.
Dust hanging over their heads, the people shopped and talked, making their Saturday noises. He knew them all, children and their mothers, the old women with canes. He nodded to the men who lounged in the doorways or followed their wives burdened with packages.
“See you in church, Brother Henry . . . How’s your cold, Sister Alice?”
He patted them, shook their hands, lifted his hat to them, counted them off like a flock.
Over the worn surface of the town their motions were repeated week after week, year upon year. Among them the preacher caused no stir. There was nothing out of the ordinary in his greeting, or how he paused and then disappeared into the barbershop. That happened every Saturday.
But as the doorknob slipped in his palm, the young man had an extraordinary thought, and he hesitated to ponder it. Of all thoughts to dawn when entering any barbershop, particularly this one, his was almost outrageous: “Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw an harlot, and went in unto her.”
The preacher decided he was pleased with himself; to be sermonizing wherever he went, for the holy word to be dripping from his brain like manna, those where the signs of a great preacher. Tomorrow would mark his ascendance‑‑someday he would wear a bishop’s stole.
As he pushed open the door the young preacher brushed a hand over his hair, the sign of his pleasure, feeling frisky and more than a mite beautiful.
Sitting proud, a divinity of Barbers, he had waited for a first customer, his chair a throne. Red Level woke to the drumming of his fingers; curling and uncurling. They were warming up for action. His hands were original, not like other men’s. One glance and you knew the barber’s hands were dangerous, they moved quickly, rested too long. They were hot to the touch.
“Good morning, Lucas. Nice morning, ain’t it.”
“Morning Sam, you’re the first today.”
Suddenly empty, the chair cranked up, spun round, the farmer eased into it clutching the arm rests, propping up his feet. A breathless old man, moisture still dripping from his boots, and already scissors snapped at his ears.
“Never waste a second, do you Lucas!”
The barber held the head between his hands, examined it closely, tapped it speculatively with his comb as if it were an egg.
“No sir. You want it close?”
The head bobbed, patiently the barber moved it back. “Don’t move now. You don’t want it too close.” Ha, ha. The old joke.
Then the Barber’s hands came alive, shaking the farmer in obscure gestures. Like a fired engine, the chair moved, the scissors worked, the razor scraped Suddenly pushed back and around, the farmer stared helplessly, like a dog in thrown water, at his image in the mirror.
“Three bits.”
The old man walked stiffly out, afraid to dislodge a hair.
All morning hair piled at the foot of the chair. Falling in clumps, brown wires, black locks, gold, silver strands, a mountain of cuttings rose from an assortment of men. Indifferent, dropping their hair on his floor, the barber called for more. Watching him in a row, his customers huddled together, magazines spread across their laps, conversation cut off by his barber’s tools.
By eleven the shop had filled. Determined, his chair empty, the barber paused to light a cigar. Resting on the window ledge, a yellow cat licked her paws, her tongue stopped when the door opened.
It was the preacher grinning at each man in turn, saying “howdy,” and making his way toward the end of the line.
Without a word of greeting the barber grabbed the preacher and twirled him down into his chair.
“Preacher’s first in line, can’t keep the Lord’s Man waiting.”
Nothing passed between them, but their eyes like horns locked together in the mirror. They menaced one another, the barber looming above an uneasy preacher. Behind them, an audience for a provincial opera, the banker’s moonfaced beamed, one pair of wolfish nostrils flared, two boys sawed their knees together. They sat dumb, their mouths open.
“Now this isn’t right, Lucas. I’ll wait my turn like any other man.” The preacher motioned to get up.
A heavy hand clamped him back and the white sheet spread over his chest, trapping him in the chair. His smile was precarious as the barber stroked his head. There were mysterious movements behind his back which he didn’t understand, faint sounds which he’d never heard before, a swift and frightening preparation.
Rising, a pair of scissors sparkled. Snip. One curl dangled from their blades. The barber held scissors and curl towards the mid‑day sun‑the hair blossoming a deep red.
Like puppets his customers nodded, smoke hiding their faces, jaws working like machines.
“Hey, Brother Lucas! This isn’t the way to cut a man’s hair!”
Taking the cigar from his lips, the barber tapped its ash to the floor. He bowed with an amazing, grace, even ceremoniously, towards the young man’s ear. A shapely ear, like his wife’s, and the older man’s lips touched it as they moved in whispers.
“Don’t move now. Don’t struggle. A razor has its own soul, you know. It moves sometimes beyond my power.”
Once more he struggled to be free, but the touch of steel on the flesh of his throat made him whimper instead. “Lucas, don’t!”
In a booming voice, one to raise even puppets from their graves, the barber spoke.
“It’s a shame, preacher, a head of hair like yours. Sometimes it happens to the cleanest of us, the best too.” His words were punctuated by the scissors, clipping, clipping, thundering in the little shop.
“Why I seen a lion in Mobile‑‑the king of beasts with a harem of plump lionesses‑‑poor fella had the mange too. Was he a dismal sight.”
A pale young preacher croaked for help. Around him whirled the barber.
“Please, Lucas. It isn’t what you think!”
“What do I think? I think it strange as I ain’t heard of any mange in town, except they say the widow Martin’s got it. You two can sympathize with each other. Be careful, preacher, I hear she’s got something else, and it’s more trouble.”
Crumpling magazines between their knees, the boys rubbed their legs together like crickets. The farmer stared sharply. The banker looked hard at the preacher while his tight mouth sucked up tighter.
Clipping, clipping, one last clip and his scissors were stilled. He held the head still for a moment longer, lathered it, scraped the scalp clean with his razor. Like a fallen mane over the preacher’s shoulders, chest, and lap, the hair was a heavy load.
The beautiful hair lay all about the shop. It clung to the barber’s coat sleeves, a few strands wrapped in his fist. It lay brown and luxuriant on the arms of the chair, on the foot rest, on the banker’s shoe tops. The farmer blew some of it off his open Andalusia Star-News.
Gently, almost playfully, the barber loosened the cloth from around the preacher’s neck. Taking each corner, holding them together, he lifted the weight off the young man’s body. One shake, and it tumbled, a harvest of hair to the threshing floor.
The preacher bleated once as he gained the door‑‑the yellow cat arched, spitting at him. The preacher of Red Level made a feeble dash down Main Street, his face in his hands, his head a naked bulb.
His congregation stopped in their tracks to watch him run, more excited than they’d been in years. The barber also watched him, then turned, cooling as an autumn wind with the first hint of cold to come.
To the barbershop full of wonder, the barber of Red Level said, “See there, now that’s a haircut. He’s smooth and sweet as a baby’s ass. Next.”
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Originally published in The Carolina Quarterly, literary magazine of The University of North Carolina.