The Missouri Review

THE BEAUTICIAN AND THE ONE-LEGGED MAN / Will Baker WEEKENDS THE SAWMILL SHUT DOWN, and only chuffed an occasional white plume into the blue air to show the boiler was still alive. So Saturday morning, when I got up early to drive Aunt Lucille to the post office, the town was quiet, only a few farm pickups and dogs hanging around the corner store. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but as she got out of the car and stepped onto the board sidewalk, she said quickly over her shoulder, "I want to see if there's a letter from my honey." Then the door slammed and she was striding to the paintless little building where the flag hung limp. Aunt Lucille was the tallest woman in town, thin as a rake, with a horse face and hands and feet as big as a man's. The family word was that a tumor had pressed on her pituitary for a time before going dormant, and she still suffered from terrible migraines. Her gray hair was gathered in a tight bun and she wore one of her straight, plain dresses, this one with shorter sleeves and a loose collar, as a concession to summer. She nodded at an old rancher exiting the post office with his newspaper and a couple of bills, and he respectfully tipped his hat. Despite the ultimate failure of her two decrepit hotels and the Beauty Salon, Aunt Lucille commanded respect everywhere, because for a decade she had been Justice of the Peace, holding court in the hotel lobby. She was the moral conscience of the community, and it was possible to tell, just by the way she inclined her head or shaped her mouth when she examined a miscreant, exactly where he stood in her estimation. I waited, half stunned, the engine idling. I was trying to grasp all the implications of that word. My honey! If we excluded Candy—her ancient Cocker Spaniel—it was inconceivable that Aunt Lucille would call any creature in the universe by that name. Yet we all knew there had been a time when such a vocabulary must have been possible. On her dresser, cluttered with hair clips, lotions, lacquered boxes, thimbles, crochet hooks and stale gumdrops in a blue glass bowl, stood a framed picture of a handsome young man in a World War I uniform. In spite of the silly flat-brimmed hat and odd brass buttons, Clyde was not like the people in most old photographs. He looked forthright and strong, with a jaw and brows like the men in the picture shows. But this sepia image bore no relation to the Clyde who was around for the first eight years of my life, a half-bald man with a gut hanging over 252 · The Missouri Review his belt buckle and a big nose intricately netted with tiny red and purple veins. In the few minutes I had to myself while Aunt Lucille tarried inside, chatting formally with the postmistress through the iron grillwork, I thought mostly about the last time I had seen him, at the family picnic ten years ago. We could all tell, even my cousins not yet in school, that there was something strange happening that afternoon. We had spread blankets in a meadow out in Scott Valley near the site of the original family homestead. I sat with the men, stuffed with chicken and potato salad and ice cream, while the women jabbered and clattered dishes, cleaning up. There was my blood uncle who fixed cats and loaders and trucks for the loggers, so he always smelled a little like gasoline and grease; my youngest in-law uncle who was a packer for the Forest Service—a horse smell to him—and my father, who always bore the aroma of yellow pine pitch from the woods. Clyde, I had noticed, smelled like soap and whiskey. They talked about the old times for a while, bear-hunting and building road into the Deadwood mine, and told some well-worn yarns about Grandfather. My father did this well, and related with gusto his favorite, about an old prospector in the Thunder Mountain boom who...