Part 1: Chapter 1
I remember meeting Earl for the first time as if it’d happened yesterday. I’m no spring-chicken like I was back then, but Earl was a man that I’ll never forget.
I was sitting in the barber shop---that’d be Ray’s Barber Shop---one afternoon waiting on a haircut and browsing through the latest copy of Popular Mechanics. I was twenty-something at the time, down on my luck, and looking for a job, and figured the best way to go about it was to start out with a fresh haircut.
There were a few other old fogies in there as well, discussing politics and such, and whether it’d rain or not. I remember Jeb Pruitt being there with a chaw of tobacco in his cheek and spitting out streams of tar juice. He was pushing seventy back then and was as blind as an owl. Jeb didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to, because Jeb was a good listener and I guess the two of those facts put together made sense somehow.
Sitting beside me was a crotchety old bastard by the name of Lucas Poke, or just plain old Poke as most folks called him. Poke didn’t like much, and what he did like he did so with a begrudging attitude that he would never admit to. Poke was in his mid-sixties and wore a pair of red suspenders most times. He’d come into Ray’s once a week wearing sunglasses (I think he thought they were cool), announce how the world was going to hell in a hand basket, and then take his usual chair and sit down with a paring knife in one hand and a piece of wood in the other. Poke liked whittling out small figurines of animals and was actually quite good at it when his arthritis wasn’t flaring and causing him the ‘grips’ as he called it.
I sat there flipping through the pages of my magazine but not reading it. I was listening to Poke instead, fussing at Jeb about what a nuisance life was and at how the younger generation (which included me at the time) didn’t have any respect for authority.
Jeb was nodding in his head in the right places and answering Poke in-between spits of tobacco juice, letting them land where they may in dark splotches of wisdom. And I say wisdom here, because Jeb knew that it was better to let Poke go ahead and have his say about something instead of arguing with him. An argument with Poke was something akin to arguing with a polecat: Nobody won.
“Anybody seen Earl this morning?” someone asked.
And that someone turned out to be Ray, the only barber in Lincoln County and sole proprietor of Ray’s Barber Shop. He was busy clipping at the hair on Bob Hope’s head (not the famous Bob Hope from stage and screen, and who would later entertain thousands of soldiers in Vietnam) and looking at it dubiously, as if Bob’s hair might suddenly sprout into wild grass and come crawling across the floor.
“Not this morning,” Jeb replied.
“Me either,” Poke said crossly, “and I don’t care to. The old man talks too much. He’s like a flock of crows in the middle of high summer’s corn. CAW! CAW! CAW! That’s all he ever does! CAW! CAW! CAW!”
“That he does, Poke,” Ray said smiling. “That he does. I was just wondering if anybody might have seen him that’s all.”
And I remember sitting there thinking about this man named Earl; this man who seemed to have a propensity for words and the ability to use them during social conversation whether they be appropriate or not. Politicians were experts in the field, as were ministers, but for the common man---as I assumed Earl to be---it was a rarity, something I would find out later to be a genuine diamond in the rough.
