The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman

by John Henry Fleming

  Within a few years, after all his plans and his invitations and inquiries were met only with silence, Earl was reduced to desperation. He felt cursed again, and the townsfolk reinforced this notion, peering out of their windows with fright as he walked up and down the paths in a fidgety sweat. He couldn’t stand the sight of those blank faces he’d once thought so beautiful. He started spending his days at the beach, where he jumped and waved at freighters as they passed, hoping to bring someone—anyone—ashore, to show them the town, how beautiful it was and how rich with possibility if only a few investors had a little foresight. He did succeed once. A small trading ship anchored offshore and a small group of the crew paddled in, thinking Earl was a shipwreck survivor. When they found the truth, Earl waving his arms and ranting about natural riches and honest working folk and inlets and harbors, the sailors grew enraged and pummeled Earl to the sand, then buried him up to his neck. It took a couple of concerned townsfolk to travel out to the beach and locate Earl’s mosquito-bitten, delirious head and drag him back to his little shack behind the post office, where they splashed cool water on his sunburned cheeks, saying, “You’re a lucky man, young Shank, a right lucky man.”

  HE REMEMBERED those words against his will this morning as he brushed the mud and grass off the front of his overalls, and the memory brought back all the pain and regret of the failures he’d tried to suppress. It was as if the ghost of his past had taken on a life of its own and now was going to follow him around and, when he least expected it, trip him up and push him in the mud, then whisper those painful words in his ear—“You’re a lucky man.” It wasn’t until much later, when he’d put it all together, that he understood the ghost was really only his bruised and bitter imagination turned sarcastic. Because neither the first time they were uttered by the well-meaning townsfolk nor this morning, when they were whispered to him by what he’d later know was fate itself, did those words have any meaning but God’s Honest Truth.

  He shook the water out of his old shoes and kept down the path toward the post office, the taste of that breeze still on his lips. He knew the U.S. Government would be appalled at him manning his post in these muddy clothes. But he’d done so well in slipping out behind Mely’s back that it would be a shame to ruin that now.

  THE POST OFFICE was located just beside the town’s little dock. It was nothing more than a shack made from the salvage of a shipwreck. Some of the planks of wood were rotted out, so after a hard rain they’d stay waterlogged and creak noisily for several days, as though reliving the gale that had split them apart and washed them ashore. Earl walked around back and was happy to find a mail sack hanging from the Incoming nail. Now he’d have an excuse if Mely came to fetch him.

  The sack was especially light this week, he thought. Couldn’t be more than eight or ten letters and maybe a few packages, none of them big. He pushed in the fine-looking door that had probably once been the entrance to a captain’s quarters. The place was well-enough lit, especially in the morning, from the light that poured in through the porthole he had for a window, through the door that he always kept open during business hours, and through the many chinks in the misaligned driftwood planks. On one end of the table he used for his mail sorting and for his business with customers there were the eighteen boxes stacked three high where the residents of Figulus claimed their mail. By Earl’s count there were now twenty-seven residents at any one time, give or take a few comings and goings no one had noticed yet. He emptied the contents of the mail sack on the other end of the table. Then he pulled up his stool and slumped his chin onto his hand so that his wet belly pushed up against the table’s edge. He leaned forward just slightly to pass a little gas, and then began to sort through the mail, trying not to think about the pool of regret that had seeped into his vision, trying to forget again what he’d worked so hard to forget these past few years, and cursing the salt water and the breeze he should have seen as the first sign of his reawakening. He hadn’t yet noticed the image that had just appeared in his doorway like an apparition. But when he did, he would see that dark little man framed in the sacred light of a summer morning, immobile and waiting for recognition, and much later, he’d recognize it clearly as the second sign.

  Chapter 2

  JOSEF STEINMETZ stood in the open door of the post office and paused to give his eyes time to adjust. He’d planned it this way—a single, confident stride through the door and then a pause. Now he regretted it. He’d really done it so as not to seem overanxious—there was something indecent, he’d always thought, about people in a rush to retrieve their mail. But this was too much, the pause far too dramatic. He felt planted on the spot and couldn’t think of a graceful way to overcome his inertia. He’d wanted so much to make a good impression on his fellow pioneers and already he’d blundered with his first step into their midst. When the postmaster looked up from his duties, he’d surely laugh at the buffoonish sight in his doorway. It occurred to Josef that it might be better to leave now before the postmaster even saw him. He could return another day and begin again without this ill-conceived hesitation. But what would he say to his wife? It was in her honor he’d made the trip into town. To tell her the truth would make him a coward and a fool in her eyes. To tell her a lie would make him the same in his own eyes.

  Though he’d been here nearly ten weeks, this morning was his first trip into town. Prior to this day, he hadn’t considered himself worthy enough to be called a citizen, and thus felt he had no business speaking with other residents, much less retrieving his mail. But this day was special to him. Not because his house was complete—that had been accomplished six weeks ago. Not because his citrus grove had sprouted—happily, he’d seen the first budding even before he’d put the finishing touches on the house. Not because Lena had finally joined him in their new home—he’d retrieved her from the port in Biscayne ten days ago, along with some supplies. But because today was the first day he’d been able to convince her to leave the house and work with him in the grove. Though he didn’t know it, it was also to be the last.

  For two months, he’d slept in a canvas hammock, working on his house in the mornings and tending to his budding citrus grove in the afternoon. Only when the young trees looked green and firm enough to survive did he send for his bride, Helena. She was the woman he’d shared all his dreams with and the one he wanted there with him when those dreams took shape and became ripe for picking.

  He hadn’t expected her enthusiasm to wither so quickly. The boat ride up from Biscayne had been a horrifying experience for her. Josef paddled up the coast by river and ocean while Lena tried to shield herself from the constant rainstorms. The storms hadn’t been heavy and the seas hadn’t been dangerous, but Lena was unprepared for even that much exposure. She shivered, though the temperature was at least eighty degrees. She began to cry, too, and pleaded with Josef to take her home, though she knew full well that they were headed for home—their new home. When Josef tried his best to comfort her, she became still more frightened and angry and stopped just short of cursing him. Josef trembled at the strength of her reaction. It was a side of Lena he had never seen back in Brooklyn, and her rejection of their new home felt to him like a rejection of their marriage vows.

  Like Josef, Lena was an immigrant from the Old Country who’d then lived most of her life in Brooklyn. Somehow she’d become more citified than Josef, and she wasn’t adapting well to the tropics—to a place without theaters, or great marketplaces, or fashionable shops and broad avenues. She’d collected herself and said nothing more since she’d arrived at Figulus, but Josef could see the way she looked at him while the bugs swirled her head—her squinting eyes, her pouting lips. He’d hoped she would share the excitement of the grove and help him tend to the oranges and grapefruits. He’d hoped that they would become partners in the field the way they were partners in life. That was how he remembered husbands and wives back in Austria. So far, it hadn’t worked that way.

  Still, while Lena had sat indoors these first
nine days, Josef remained hopeful and continued to make plans. As his trees matured, he thought, he’d plant even more, and eventually he’d need to hire men to help him harvest. He hoped to make Figulus the regular stop of one of the growing number of freighters that passed by out in the Gulf Stream, freighters now laden with tropical fruits from the huge Caribbean plantations. Perhaps one day his fruits would be sold in the street markets of Brooklyn, where his Aunt Lois and his Uncle Mordy could pick them up and taste their sweet, exotic flavor. Nothing would make him prouder.

  Then just this morning, Lena stopped him on his way out to the grove, held his arm and asked if she might come with him. “The beasts there can’t be much worse than they are in the house,” she said. She must have known how much this meant to him, and he smiled at her courage and her willingness to please him. He kissed her temple and led her out to their burgeoning little grove. When he’d showed her its progress and instructed her in certain aspects of its care, he handed her the hoe, took a deep breath of the dewy morning air, and announced, “Lena, today I will go into town and announce our presence in the area. I’ll secure for us a box at the post office and receive the postal well-wishes of our relatives in Brooklyn. Because today not only are we man and wife in the eyes of God and the law, we are man and wife in the eyes of our fellow pioneers. We’re working together for progress and the betterment of mankind.”

  It was the proudest moment of Josef’s young life. His eyes were so glazed with pride that he didn’t see the look of distress on Lena’s face nor the awkward way she held the hoe in her fingertips, as though disdainful of even touching it.

  His proud feeling had stayed with him all through the morning to this very moment when he stood inside the post office door, shamed into immobility by the drama of his own entrance.

  AFTER A FEW TENSE moments, the postmaster finally looked up from his mail sorting, and this gave Josef the impetus to move out of the light. He didn’t notice the postmaster’s dirty wet overalls or the curious way he was looking at him. He regretted later that he was so nervous and out of sorts that he didn’t even wait for the postmaster to address him.

  “My name is Josef Steinmetz,” he blurted in his not fully suppressed Austrian accent, “and I would like to receive my mail.”

  The postmaster looked him over and gave him a strange smile, which Josef read as a clear indication of his own impropriety.

  “Wellsir, lemme just see here.” After a few thankfully brief moments, he held up an envelope. “Wouldn’t ya know.”

  Josef took it from him. Then, anxious to remove himself from a disaster of his own making, he nodded his head and backed his way out into the hot morning.

  JOSEF ROWED BACK across Lake Worth to his little house on the opposite shore, replaying the events of this first meeting with the postmaster. He hadn’t made the impression he’d wanted. Perhaps the man had overlooked the foolish dramatics of his entrance. But he couldn’t have missed the stumbling way he’d approached the counter. And then he’d rushed right into asking for his mail. That was all wrong, he saw now. He should have made small talk. He should have brought up the latest advancements in horticulture or inquired about the weather patterns this time of year. Instead, he’d fallen into the trap of the overanxious postal customer. He’d practically yanked the letter out of the postmaster’s steady grip. That was the kind of faux pas to start rumors, to turn his fellow pioneers against him. He’d have to be more careful.

  He’d built his house on this thin strip of land between Lake Worth and the Atlantic Ocean, a short canoe’s ride from the town proper of Figulus. Like other houses in the area, it was pieced together with driftwood from shipwrecks—always abundant from the nearby beach—and its roof was thatched with palmetto leaves. It was somewhat cruder than most, owing to his determination to do the job himself, even though he had little experience in carpentry. There were embarrassing cracks in the walls where bugs and rain would enter uninvited, and every now and then a piece of the roof would fall in, bringing with it the scurry of a half dozen cockroaches and small snakes who’d made their homes up there. Such an event would also send his wife scurrying to a corner of the room, where she trembled and cried out in squeaks and gasps until the beasts had been removed or destroyed.

  Still, he had built the house himself, and he considered it to be one of the greatest accomplishments of his young life—he was just twenty-four.

  As he stepped onto the porch he called to his wife and got no answer. Ah, he thought, she’s probably hard at work in the grove. This idea improved his attitude greatly, and he suddenly remembered the letter he’d held in his hand all the way across the lake. He’d crumpled it against the handle of his oar, and now sat down and straightened it out to read. He saw by the handwriting that it was from his Aunt Lois.

  As he read, his face contorted in a mixture of sadness and pain. He’d plucked it so quickly and innocently from the postmaster’s hand, unaware that its words would change him forever.

  June 3

  My Dearest Josef,

  It is my sad duty to bear the news that your Uncle Mordecai has passed on. He left us quietly, his favorite pipe, filled with his favorite tobacco, still dangling from his mouth when I tried to rouse him. I have no last words to report. He’d had some breathing problems, and Doctor Fremdlich said he’d likely taken in some bad air. We will miss him always.

  I am pleased that Mordy was able to send off your birthday present before he was taken from us. I hope you are getting some use out of the loafers. Mordy picked them from the finest shop in Brooklyn, and they are made of the finest leather, imported from the Old Country. He did not want you to forget the craftsmanship of your forefathers, nor the grand style of the American city you once called home. Give my love to Lena.

  With Fondest Affection,

  Your Aunt Lois

  All the good feeling drained from Josef’s body, and he wept quietly and for a long time on the step of the porch. His Uncle Mordy was the man who’d raised him as a son. He was the man who’d nurtured him and taught him the ways of the New World. For the first time, Josef realized that everything he’d done since he was old enough to do anything worthwhile, and most of all what he’d accomplished so far as a pioneer, had been with a mind to pleasing Mordy. Mordy had always been there over Josef’s shoulder, smiling on him, guiding him, the supreme earthly judge of his actions. Now, suddenly, he was gone.

  The air had grown still and heavy and the mosquitoes had begun to swarm. Josef collected himself a moment, struck a match and lit the smudgepots around the house. Then, trembling, he looked at the letter again, staring at the words but unable to read them, thinking, What are these shoes she speaks of? Why did I not receive them?

  JOSEPH, LIKE HIS father, and his father before him, and his patrilineage for as long as anyone could ever remember, had been born in the town of Melk, on the great Donau River. The nuns at the convent there made the finest wine in Austria. For generations, Josef’s family had held the exclusive right to sell that wine, through a small retail shop in town, and also in larger quantities up and down the Donau. Josef’s fondest memories of Austria were the times his family gathered around a huge tub of wine bottles, pulling them out one by one and labeling them with the intricate labels designed by his Uncle Mordy—“MelkWein” in tall, ornate script, and in the background, a beautiful rendering of a convent on a cliff, the river running below it. It was a beautiful scene to look at, even though the convent on the label looked nothing like the real convent. Not that the real convent was ugly, but it wasn’t the kind of convent to grace a wine label. The real convent was a long, low, barn-shaped building made of ancient stones, sitting in a grassy field—a nice field, always meticulously groomed and smelling of wildflowers in spring, but a field just the same—not the majestic, craggy cliff in the rendering, with its treacherous path winding up from the river. The few times that Josef went out to the convent when his father had business there, he could not even see the river from it. He could look out acro
ss the long, low field and see in the distance a great old castle that stood above a bend in the river. Maybe this is Uncle Mordy’s model for the label, he thought. Still, the castle looked nothing like a convent.

  When Josef was only six, his world was shattered by a mysterious chain of events that he felt ought to have little to do with him. As his father explained it, in a far off country, a man called Pope had died, and a new man was chosen to replace him. His name, too, was Pope. This new man had new ideas, and issued orders that, interpreted by men in Austria, prohibited the nuns from making their wine.

  That was all it took to ruin the Steinmetz family. Josef’s father had no other skills, and in such a small town as Melk there were few opportunities, particularly for a man well into his forties. For a time, they tried to make their own wine, having transplanted some of the nuns’ vineyard into their own little backyard. They bottled it and sold it under the old name, but the taste was not so good, and some jealous neighbor started a rumor that the new wine might cause corns.

  In debt and tearful, Josef’s father gathered the children together in the room they used to label the wine. He told them that circumstances had forced him into some terrible decisions, and now their little family, like their business, would have to be dissolved. Josef’s mother broke into desperate, defiant sobs and tried to run out the door, screaming that she would rather leave now than see all her children sent away. But his father stopped her and held her close, squeezing her shoulders and calming her the way he always did, making the whole family believe that things would be all right, though for most of them the feeling was short-lived.