He cut my hair on the porch

Vern closed the shop in February. Forty-one years on the north side of the highway. Two chairs in there and he only ever used the one. At the end he taped a piece of paper in the window that said THANK YOU RUGBY. His daughter's down in Bismarck. Somebody said he's got a place by her now with a garage he'll never fill up.

So there's nowhere. Minot's ninety miles. I'm not driving ninety miles to sit in a chair.

Anyway. By the end of April it was over my collar and down under the hat band, and it's been grey since I was about forty. Dale said something. He comes Saturdays, sits in the chair at the table our mother used to sit in, and he asked was I starting a band, and he thought that was good enough to say twice. There's a hearing aid in the drawer of that table. I carry it to town in my shirt pocket and that's as far as it ever gets.

Odell's across the fence. Bought the Halvorson place in ninety-four and he's been there since. We've got a well agreement between us, two pages, filed at the courthouse, written up by a lawyer in Devils Lake who's been dead a long while now. His line runs under the section road. Thirty-two years and neither of us has had to go look at that paper once. He's a good neighbor.

He came over on a Tuesday with a box on the seat of the pickup. Wahl clippers, the kind with the guards that snap on, and a comb he kept in his shirt pocket. Said he'd been doing his own since the shop went and it came out no worse than what Vern was doing there at the end. Which is true. Vern's hands were gone the last couple years. Two times running I came out of there with a step in the back of my head and I never said anything to him about it.

We did it outside on account of the mess. I carried out one of the kitchen chairs, the wood ones, and he put a bath towel around my shoulders and pinned it with a clothespin off the line. Wind was northwest that day, twenty or better, and it took the hair right off the boards and into the caragana.

He went around the sides with a guard on. Then the scissors up top, and he kept stopping and coming around front to look at it. Then he took the guard off for the neck. That bare blade is cold. He had his fingers on top of my head to put it where he wanted it and he'd say down, and I'd put my chin down.

Twenty minutes, maybe. Ruth used to do it before, when she was still here, and she wasn't any good at it either, so it's not like I had a standard.

When he finished he brushed the back of my neck off with his hand instead of the towel. And then he left his hand there.

I've got a swather that's been down since last August. Header drive belt went, and then when I got into it the idler was shot too, and you can't buy that part, they quit making it, you have to find a man parting one out. Ryan over by Leeds has got one sitting in his trees. I keep saying I'll drive over and look at it.

Anyway. The clippers were still running. He'd set them down on the step and never shut them off, and after a while he reached over and shut them off left-handed. His other hand was still on my neck. I didn't move. Then he took it off and sat down on the step.

We sat there about ten minutes.

I'm not going to tell you all of it. Some of it was the well. Pressure's been off since spring. Some of it was nothing at all.

He said he'd been thinking about it. He didn't say about what and I didn't ask.

I said Odell, I don't think I'm anything. He said that was all right. He said his wife went in 2011 and he'd never said one word about any of it to anybody, and now he had.

Then the dog came around the corner of the house dragging part of something and we both sat and watched that.

He put the clippers in the box and said he'd come do it again in six weeks or so if I wanted. I said all right. He backed the truck around and went.

That was the eleventh of May. Nothing's been said since. He's been over twice. Once for a cow that got through on the north quarter where the fence is bad, and once to bring the post driver back. Both times we stood in the yard and talked about what we always talk about, and both times I figured he might say something and he didn't.

Dale was here Saturday. Looked at my head and said somebody finally got a hold of you. I said Odell did it. He said huh and put his sugar in and then told me about a fellow up by Rolla renting his ground out for cash instead of shares and what he thinks of a man who'd do that. Four hundred and eighty acres of what I farm is still in both our names, his and mine, from when the folks went. We've never talked about that.

It's dry. Wheat came up all right but there's nothing behind it, and the second week of June is when it'll tell you one way or the other. Forty head on grass and the dugout's down further than it ought to be for this time of year.

Anyway. That fence on the north quarter is two hundred rods of thirty-year-old wire and better than half the posts are rotted off at the ground line. It's a two-man job. We'll get at it after harvest same as every year since ninety-four. Two hundred rods is a little better than half a mile.

There's a heifer on the east side with pinkeye. I've been going out to look at her every night since Thursday and it's no better. I'll take the light out here in a while.