Before she died, Paul’s mother would always thrust herself between them and their father, sweet-talking the old man down or taking the brunt when life put hard upon him. Back then, it was only open hands, or maybe a fist when he was up with shine. On nights when the blocking and the sweet-talk failed them, she would gather up the hurt, usually just Paul because he was small and slow and lacking in guile, and hold him close for hours, drawing out the pain like a madstone for poison.
With her gone, the rage came sure as thunder, delivered from a hickory stave instead of hands. Afterward, Paul would walk up Cheek Mountain, high above the cabin, to a quiet place that looked out across the hollow toward Indian Head. He would dig out a shallow dint in the cool loam, just long enough for his ten-year-old body, strip to underwear, and lay down in the wallow, covering himself with the soothing dirt and leaves the way kids in a wholly different universe sometimes bury themselves in beach sand.
Once he was interred, the mountain became his new madstone, extracting the hurt of beatings or the sting of schoolyard spites until he was cleansed and healed and delivered back pure. After the earth had done its work, he would sing up at the sky, in a voice that church folks said was gifted from God.
His brothers, Jacob and Wagner, lit out on their eighteenth birthdays: Jacob for West Texas and Wagner for whatever wind. But by then, the old man was stooped and Paul was large enough to fight back. He distinctly remembered the last time his father beat him, when the seventeen-year cicadas emerged that spring, bedlamming the woods with a shrill that cloaked the cabin shouts.
In his teen years, after the beatings stopped, he would go to the mountain hoping the cool earth would draw out the strange, disturbing desires he felt. But as the years passed, the stirrings became robust, then relentless, as he stopped trying to blunt them or even understand them; he just pushed them down inside the mantle of his soul.
Paul joined the army at eighteen, thinking it would merit some respect from his father, but when the service deemed him unsuited for infantry, the old man just laughed. He was billeted to the administrative pool at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and soon won a spot with the newly formed U.S. Army Chorus as first tenor. The Army Band and Chorus toured the U.S. and most of Europe west of the Iron Curtain: London, Stockholm, Madrid, Brussels, and, of course, Paris.
But the burning desires continued and the unslaking made them compound on themselves until they took him dizzy and fixated to the dark corners of parks in Paris, to right-angle alleys in Earls Court, and to the murky edges of monuments in Washington, D.C., furtive in the dark with the other nervous shadows. One night in the bushes by the Iwo Jima memorial, the police swooped and Paul pleaded to indecent exposure and a general discharge.
In shame, he drifted down to Nashville, bunking with an Army Band buddy who had just gotten a session gig with Decca. Paul sat openmouthed in the corner of the studio watching Patsy Cline and Owen Bradley fight over the thirteenth take of “Crazy.” When the backing tenor took sick, Paul pushed himself to audition. He opened with “Wings of a Dove,” and after the first bar, the great Owen Bradley himself looked up from the soundboard with a smile broad as the twelve-track console.
“Hello, young man, I’m Mr. Paul, how are you? Just fine? That’s nice. What sort of haircut would you like today?”
I mumbled something and he went straight to work, scissors and syllables flashing with equal pace and precision.
“So how are you finding Medgar so far? Good? Well, don’t you listen to what people may be telling you about this town. I’ve lived here nearly all my life and it’s a fine town. Ask your grandaddy what a fine town this is. How is he, by the way? I hear you’re helping him with the vet business now. That’s a fine thing. You know, I’ve known him since I was a boy. It seems he’s as much a part of this town as the mountains. And your granmomma Miss Sarah, now, there’s a lady who had class. I first saw her when I was thirteen and she and your grandaddy had just moved back into town. One day she walked into church, tall as timber, with this big red hat that she took off and laid on the pew next to her. Took up two places, that hat did. Lands… the way she used to go into town so pretty and straight like an ad in Look magazine. All the girls took to walking like her and wearing their hair like her, and one time when I was in Dempsey’s with Jane she came in, smiling as ever, and says to us, ‘Good morning, Master Paul, Miss Jane,’ like we were best friends, and I say, ‘Good morning, Miss Sarah,’ back to her, and then Jane says, ‘That’s a might pretty hair ribbon, Miss Sarah’—she had this bright red ribbon in her hair—and she says to Jane, ‘Oh, do you think so?’ and she takes the ribbon out and sits Jane down and ties it in her hair and gives both her shoulders a squeeze and says, ‘Miss Jane, you have such exceptional hair, will you do me the honor of wearing my ribbon?’ ”
Mr. Paul paused with his scissors for a few seconds as if to consider the memory, then continued cutting and talking.
“… ‘such exceptional hair,’ she told us. When she died, a bit of this town died with her. Is this part too high for you? Okay? But you know, she did get some people’s backs up. Some ladies sniffed at her, and she made a mortal enemy of a few men.”
Mr. Paul looked toward the lobby and lowered his voice. “I tell you, I remember her ruction with some local bullyboys like it was this morning. Two of those boys were out front of Hivey’s giving a black girl the business, you know, touching her and so forth and saying rude things. I was sitting on the bench out front of Smith’s Ice Cream and this poor girl didn’t know what to do because back then black folks didn’t give sass to whites, especially young men like these. One of them grabs her and starts pulling her into their truck. And she just keeps saying, ‘Please, sir, just stop it, please, sir.’
“I go on up and tell them to quit. But they just laughed at me and called me rude names. So I grab the girl’s arm and try to pull her back to the sidewalk. But they were too strong. We were in a tug-of-war for that girl and I was losing. Then your granmomma, she walks out of Dempsey’s, arms fulled up with parcels, and sees what’s going on, and she knew what those boys were gonna do. So she sets everything down, your granmomma does, and walks over to the one boy and slaps him across the face so hard it sounded like a rifle shot. And she says, real quiet, ‘Don’t you ever touch a woman against her will again, do you understand?’ And they were so surprised they all just stood there like a bunch of dumb stones. She took the black girl by the arm—she was shaking like sixty that black girl—and Miss Sarah calmly led her off like they were going to a party. And those boys just skunked away, but you know they never did anything like that again. Jane wore that ribbon to her funeral. She still has it.”
Mr. Paul was silent for half a minute, reflecting on the ribbon and the rifle-shot slap. Fingers working so fast it looked like he was trimming air.
I imagined what my grandmother must have been like: a quiet confidence that marked every gesture, a bounding laugh, the simple joy she took in even the most mundane chores. I looked over at Mom sitting in the waiting room and tried to imagine what her mother would say to her to set things right, but my mind went empty. I took a deep breath to try and crowd out the despair tightening me.
“You know, in the years after she passed, your grandaddy was a prime catch among the single ladies in Medgar. He even caught Jane’s fancy for a time, once she became a successful businesswoman, but he wouldn’t have none of it.”
I thought about Pops’ pain and sadness on losing my grandmother and tried to measure it against my own. But mine was shot through with guilt and anger built on blame rather than lost love.
“There aren’t many like your grandaddy,” Mr. Paul continued. “Don’t tell him I know this, but for the last four Christmases he’s been secretly delivering toys and turkeys to about forty of the poorest families. He doesn’t think anybody knows, but most of us do.” There was a moment of quiet while Mr. Paul searched for another topic. “This is a fine town, you know. Best folks in the world live here.” From outside the salon came the sound of a muffled explosion. Mr. Paul’s face darkened. He stopped cutting and closed his eyes and gathered in a deep breath. “I will not abide what they are doing up there,” he said in precisely measured syllables. His eyes shot open, anger flaring them out. “Do you know what Bubba Boyd’s done to the streams and the wells around here? Poisoned. The water from the taps up Corbin Hollow comes out gray now. Everyone up there is getting sick from it. Their slurry pond is all filled up and we think they’re pumping the slurry into one of the abandoned mines, which is totally illegal.”
“What’s slurry?” I asked, although I knew it didn’t sound like a good thing.
He paused and put down his scissors, folded his hands across his chest. “When they bring the coal up it’s all dirty and dusty so they have to wash it before it can go on the train. The slurry is what comes off the chunks of coal—dust, dirt, nasty chemicals, all mixed in water. If he’s pumping it into the mines, guess where it ends up?”
“Uhhhmm, in the drinking water?”
“That’s exactly correct.” His picked up his scissors and began cutting again, faster, purposeful, his mouth a single taut line. After a while he softened. “I’m sorry, I just get so angry at that Bubba Boyd… what he’s doing to this place.
“Well now, let’s just see,” he said, holding up a hand mirror so I could see the clown smile of white skin at the nape of my neck. “I think you’re ready for the prom, young sir.” He dusted off the snips of hair clinging to my shirt and escorted me to one of the orange vinyl chairs in reception next to Audy Rae and Mom.
“You just have a seat while I do your mom special. Normally Mary Alice does the cuts and I do the perms and posture, but seeing as you’re Arthur’s kin and Mary Alice just quit, I thought I’d do you both special.” He went to my mother, freshly combed out by Levona and sitting calmly in a blue pastel dress, fingers shuffled into Audy Rae’s right hand. Lips set to flat, neither frowning nor smiling.
“Annie, I’m Mr. Paul, remember me?” Mr. Paul said loudly, as if Mom’s trauma had left her deaf as well. “I’m gonna do you special today.” Mom looked to Audy Rae for consent. Audy Rae nodded. Mom offered a tired smile as she gave Mr. Paul her arm and was led to the first station.
Mr. Paul parted her hair, pinned the left side, and began cutting and combing, checking the mirror as if he expected a wince of pain with each snip. He saw none and began speaking in bromides.
“Is this weather too hot for you? They say it’s gonna cool soon.” Mr. Paul had a habit of asking questions and never waiting for the answers. “Personally, I like the hot weather. Is it hot like this in Indiana? I heard in Texas it’s gonna be a hundred and eight degrees today.” And so it went.
“… well, since Jane’s been poorly, I just threw myself into this place, but with most of the mines closed, business is off a fair patch. And Mary Alice, she just got tired of cutting hair, I suppose, but me, I love it.”
Petunia Wickle, who had been idled in the washing department, breezed past Mr. Paul and announced, “I’m goin to Biddle’s for lunch.” She opened the door with a ring of the synthetic bell and was halfway across the street by the time it closed, vertebrae in the small of her back actioning with every step.
Mr. Paul finished cutting and wrapped my mother’s hair in chrome curlers and led her to a bank of ancient floor-standing silver-domed hair dryers. He fired one to a vacuum whirl, carefully fitting the half-egg-shaped dome on my mother’s head.
Two ladies, freshly washed by Levona and ready for service, were sitting on the vinyl chairs opposite Audy Rae and me.
“That’s her,” the first whispered.
“Who?” the other said, not looking up from Soap Opera Digest.
“You know, the lady that’s gone nuts cause her little boy died. That’s Dr. Peebles’ daughter.”
The other looked up from the magazine and squinted to focus. Audy Rae darted up from her book and fixed the women with a withering glare.
“That’s her, then? Heard about her; they say she’s gone plumb crazy,” the second lady said, returning to her magazine. “What her little boy die of?”
“Shish, Lorraine, don’t be ignorant; she’ll hear you.”
I shrank in my seat on the embarrassment of it and took up a Ladies’ Home Journal to hide behind.
Lorraine put her magazine down. “Under that dryer? She couldn’t hear a hammer to pavement.”
Audy Rae cleared her throat loudly—gave them butcher knives.