They were all to be sent to relatives, some near and some far. Josef, who even at his young age had shown himself to be intelligent and industrious, though not overly robust, was to travel by ship to Brooklyn, to be delivered to Uncle Mordy and Aunt Lois, who only two years before had kissed the whole family goodbye, thinking perhaps forever, and left for America.
This surprise delivery filled Mordy and Lois with delight. They loved children, though they’d been unable to have any themselves, They accepted Josef and raised him as their own, giving thanks daily for the gift they’d always dreamed of. But Josef thought they ought to be thanking Pope.
Josef grew up a city boy, then—a New World boy, his uncle called him—though he never forgot his heritage, and always pledged to return home and care for his parents in their old age. He did well in school, excelling in mathematics and geography, and worked after hours in Mordy’s print shop, where Mordy was training him to take over the business. Then, within a year of Josef’s fourteenth birthday, both his parents died. They’d grown old rapidly after the children left, and though Mordy had sent them what he could out of his modest profits, it was only enough to keep them out of debtor’s prison. They died alone, broken-hearted and broke.
In his youthful frustration, Josef put the blame on his father. He was the one who’d said everything would turn out all right, and Josef had believed him, had been the only one to believe constantly and unquestioningly in him. All those years, Josef had been certain that one day his family would be reunited, that his father would once more gather them in with his strong arms and hold them there forever, to bottle the wine and paste on the labels the way they used to. Josef saw now that it had all been an illusion, like the beautiful scenery on their wine labels. He was angry for a time, and then tried to hold on to his anger as a way of holding off grief. It didn’t work.
After the death of his parents, Josef felt his ropes to the Old World cut all at once. He had to get as far away from that world as possible. Now he had something to prove, and his young mind drifted through his difficult years, sometimes exuberant with possibility, sometimes lost and despairing, but finally floating out into the big sky of American opportunity. He loved and respected his adopted parents more than ever, and perhaps the great love he showed for Mordy was partly a reaction to what he’d concluded about his father, partly a need to attach himself firmly to his life in America. And partly it was a human need for a smiling face over his shoulder—a new set of big arms—though he would never have admitted it then.
Mordy’s print shop, though increasingly successful, wasn’t going to be enough for Josef. He decided instead to become a pioneer, like the great nameless men and women he’d read about in his geography books. As soon as he was old enough, he would set out to carve his name in the finest old tree of the American wilderness.
When he met the young Miss Helena Lenosha, he knew he’d be carving another name beside his own. After a proper courtship, presided over and guided by Mordy himself, they were married in April in the parlor of Mordy’s print shop. There was no honeymoon, because that very same day, before they had even consummated the marriage, Josef set sail to Florida to prepare their new home in the area he’d chosen from his guidebooks and maps because it was “beautiful and bounteous” and full of “hard-working men and women.”
Josef and Lena agreed that their life in Florida would forever be a honeymoon. Now Josef was wondering when that honeymoon would begin. Lena had been so frightened of the insects and small serpents that in nine nights together he and his wife had still not had relations.
As the summer heat intensified, and the tropical nature of the land showed its lusty, primeval face, Josef knew that things were only going to get more trying for them both. He worried for Lena and for their marriage. He clung to the ray of hope she’d given him this morning in coming out to the grove. But now this letter brought news that could threaten the bonds between them. Josef understood that Mordy had always been the cement in their relationship. He had introduced them, had encouraged their courtship, had planned the whole thing out for them—the hours they’d spend together, the chaperoned and unchaperoned outings, even the proper moment for a first kiss. It was almost as though they were characters in a romance of his uncle’s making. But even if they were, the very idea of pleasing his uncle had filled Josef with enormous warmth and gladness. Now his uncle was gone, and with him perhaps the best reason Josef had for feeling good about his marriage.
WHEN THE SMUDGEPOTS had all but hidden their house in an eerie gray smoke, Lena emerged from out of the trees and stepped up to the front porch, coughing at the fumes, but thankful for their effect on the mosquitoes. She had not been in the grove all morning as Josef had hoped. Shortly after Josef left, she’d thrown down her hoe in disgust at the heat and the bugs and the sweat that broke on her small brow and had run out to the ocean, crying, to wash her hands in the surf. There she’d sat all morning on a patch of grass under the shade of a palm, where she was still uncomfortably hot, but where the ocean breeze at least kept the bugs off her skin. She returned now because she’d been frightened away by what appeared to be an Indian woman approaching her up the beach. Of course, she wasn’t going to tell any of this to Josef.
She found him with the letter in his hand and his head hung in sadness, and she knew exactly what the problem was. “Uncle Mordy,” she said, knowing that he’d taken ill before she’d left Brooklyn, but until now keeping it from her husband.
Josef nodded and opened his mouth to pay the man tribute, but before he could get the words out he broke down and buried his face in his wife’s chest. She held him until he breathed a little easier. Then, with his hands resting on her thin hips, he looked up into her eyes.
“But there is something else that troubles me,” he said. “Shoes. Mordy sent me leather shoes for my birthday.”
“That was weeks ago, Josef,” she said, waving the smoke from her face. “Why haven’t I seen you wear them?”
“That’s just it, Lena. I don’t have them. They’ve never arrived, and now I fear they never will.”
“Oh, don’t say so, Josef,” said Lena.
Before he’d left Brooklyn, Josef had read about the mail delivery in South Florida. Because the deliveries from the North were often erratic and far between, weeks of mail might be delivered all at once. It occurred to him that the package from Mordy and the news of his death might have been scheduled to arrive at the same time. He marveled at how, this far from home, time could fall together like that, so that a celebration and a mourning could occur here all at once, while back in Brooklyn they’d been separated by weeks. Now all he had was Mordy’s death and the horrible knowledge of this final gesture, forever incomplete unless the shoes found their way to the little post office across the lake.
He stood up, echoes of these thoughts thumping in his chest. Lena rubbed his shoulders, smoothed down the straps of his suspenders. She could not fully read his pain because of the smoke from the smudgepots, which drifted over and between them in waves, hiding and changing their features like magician’s dust. At one moment Lena thought her husband looked angry and wicked, the next, brooding and insane. When she chastised herself for seeing him in this light, she looked closer and decided that maybe he was just broken and frightened and in need of her comfort. For a moment, she forgot all her fears about their new life together and the doubts about her ability to stick by him as she’d promised so many times. In the closeness and comfort of the smoke she felt love, the way she’d felt it before they were married, when nothing else mattered but that they were happy and together.
“Listen, Josef,” she said, speaking softly and reassuringly. “You will go to the post office tomorrow and inquire about the missing loafers. I think they will be found, and then things will be better. We’ll have something to remind us of Mordy, and that will make us stronger.”
Josef looked at her deeply, unsure of her expression but confident of the strength behind her words. He took her hand and k
issed it.
“I shall,” he said, repeating the words of his marriage vow.
The smoke wrapped around them like a pair of strong arms, and Josef prayed the feeling was no illusion.
Chapter 3
A STRANGE LITTLE FELLA with an accent,” is how Earl described the new resident to Mely. He didn’t know where the man had settled or if he had brought anyone with him. There’d been rumors that a man had been seen across the lake tending to a grove and building a house, but no one had bothered to go find out for sure. In the years since Earl’s last publicity efforts, settlers had occasionally straggled into and out of the area; there was no reason to get excited about one in particular. If he remained more than six months, well maybe then it might be worthwhile to talk to him. Such was the attitude of the townsfolk. But for Earl, a new face always meant new possibilities, a chance, however small, of something exciting coming to pass. That small, wistful pebble would glow briefly with hope, a ruby catching the light, even though nothing had ever come of new blood before. The settlers would always either move away out of fear or boredom, or assimilate into the cowardly, narrow mindset of the town. None of them ever shared Earl’s bent for progress and success, not even in its diminished condition.
For some reason, though, Earl was enthusiastic about this new man. He already remembered the moment in the post office as something significant. He’d looked up from his mail sorting and his pool of regret and saw a picture of startling and dramatic beauty. He couldn’t make out the man’s face because of the glare in the doorway. But he knew that no one he’d met in Figulus had the dramatic awareness or even the dumb luck to make himself part of such a beautiful sight. And then, when the man approached the counter, Earl took in his unusual appearance (unusual for these parts, anyway)—his curly hair and dark, smooth complexion; his painfully erect posture and inscrutable eyes (was that wide-eyed innocence, disaffected irony, or merely a dull-minded glaze?)—and knew that he’d happened onto something remarkable. A man like this had to mean something, and Earl smiled in much the same way he’d smiled at the couple in the rocking chair when he’d first arrived in town.
By the time the man had pulled the envelope from Earl’s hand, Earl already had a feeling that the gesture was of great importance and would one day warrant at least a comment in an autobiography of Earl Shank.
Then, just as suddenly as he’d come in and before another word could be spoken, the man gave Earl a nod of the head—the vestige, Earl figured, of some grand and exotic European greeting—and disappeared into the morning sunlight.
There were a million things he would have liked to have said, beginning with the basics, but of course guiding their words around to something more significant:
Gonna be another hot one. . . . Yep, summer’s here to stay, I reckon. . . . Any breeze over yer place? . . . Oh, didn’t know anyhody’uz livin over there these days. . . . Bring yer wife down with ya? . . . Any little ones? . . . That’s all right, you’ll make some soon enough. . . . Yer young, with plenty a time. . . . Who me? Naw, always been too busy, ah guess—the mail never stops flowin, ya know. Like a mighty river, I reckon. And then there’s always publicity work ta be done. . . . So there’s that, too—that publicity. . . . Yessir, well . . . But say, what y’all growin over there?—Pardon? . . . Oh, you know, I do a little publicity work for the town now and then—attractin settlers, promotin commerce, that sorter thing. Ain’t a big deal. Keeps me busy, I reckon. . . . Oh, why sure, sure. I kin always use a little help when things get too busy. Course, it’d help most of all if ya happened to know a few influential folks up north. . . . Ya don’t say? Well, then . . .
It might not have happened like that, but the results would have been the same, because this was a man who got letters from New York, a man with clean, pressed suspenders and smooth, pink palms, and a man like that would have to know people, a man like that would have to have friends.
Yet he’d let him go. He hadn’t said any of the million things he could have. He’d balked at a beautiful opportunity. Maybe he’d grown rusty, or maybe he was finally beginning to slip and take that long fall into old age and obsolescence. Or maybe he’d gotten so used to failing and trying to forget the failures that he’d grown afraid of success. But then a far more reasonable explanation occurred to him: perhaps he’d happened upon something of such magnitude, such unfathomable importance, that that small, wistful pebble—or his instincts, or whatever it is in a man’s brain that makes him recognize his destiny and reel it in—had told him not to rush into it, had told him, “Whoa, Earl, this is the big one, let’s just slow down and play this thing right.”
If the young man was a Yankee, he wasn’t the first to settle here—there were several long-time Yankee residents, though they tried their best to make people forget that fact. And if he was an immigrant, he wouldn’t be the first of these either—in the early days of the town, a pair of Finnish brothers had settled here, until they heard about a pair of Finnish sisters living in St. Augustine. So there was no explaining it, not completely. The little man had done nothing more yesterday morning than pick up his mail and leave. You couldn’t even say they’d had a chat. Earl hadn’t even introduced himself, fool that he was. There was something, though, in the man’s eyes and his perfect posture and the deliberate way he walked that told Earl, Now here’s a young fella who might just stir things up. Though they looked nothing alike and probably had little in common, the immigrant couldn’t help but remind Earl of himself as a young man—determined, forward-looking, courageous and foolish at the same time. Still, even this didn’t explain completely what he’d sensed in those moments; if he were later asked to write his memoirs, he’d finally have to give in to the dramatic and the serendipitous, knowing full well the outrage of the critics, and call it by name: destiny.
“A strange little fella with an accent,” said Earl.
“I know what you’re thinking, Earl,” said Mely. She’d caught him before he slipped away this morning. “You leave that poor man alone,” she said. “A new settler’s got enough to worry about without you filling his head with your loony ideas.”
“I just want to make the man feel welcome. Besides, hon, you know I’ve given up the loony ideas. I just got you, now.” Earl grinned.
Mely tried to ignore him. “There’s a leak in the roof needs fixin today,” she said.
“Have to wait for the afternoon. Mail’s in and there’ll be people comin around all morning to check their boxes, you know.”
“Seems to me the government could find a lot better things to do with their money than pay a man to sit all day on a stool and brush the mosquitoes off his face.”
“Maybe so,” said Earl, “but to me it’s a kind and gen’rous government that provides us so.”
Earl kissed his wife and left for the post office before she had a chance to make him feel guilty again.
Mely was a good woman who’d softened the blow of his failures, but she seemed to want to make him atone for them through hard labor. They’d married five years ago, when Earl was thirty-six. Old Jake Morris was her first husband; when he’d drowned in a fishing accident out on the lake, he’d left poor Mely a lonely widow. She was known by everyone as the best cook in town, and more than likely the best in the whole state of Florida, but Earl had never once tried her alligator stew or her coconut cream pie. That all changed when he decided he’d played the sad and lonely bachelor for too long. If he was ever going to have satisfaction in his life, he ought to find himself a good, solid woman. That was Mely all over—a strong, thick Southern Country Woman, six years his senior. He began to call on her after waiting five weeks, which he calculated as a proper grieving period for a guy like Jake.
Earl and Mely got along fine, and even better when he tasted her coconut pie. One bite, and some of the old fire at last came back to him. He was in love, and he looked deep into her cool brown eyes and a word popped into his head that would one day change his life: “restaurant.”
He didn’t te
ll her the plans until after they were married at the judge’s chambers in St. Augustine. On their wedding night at the Augustine Inn, he asked her if she’d ever thought about cooking professionally.
“I ain’t that kind of girl,” she said in that matter-of-fact tone she used with all men.
“That ain’t what I mean, hon,” said Earl. “I’m talking chefs, restaurants, maitre d’s, that sort of thing.”
She was amenable to the idea. She admitted that she’d had a dream about it once.
Two days later, when they returned to Figulus, Earl started work on the restaurant. The newlyweds moved into Mely’s house, which was bigger and more comfortable than Earl’s, and Earl used the wood from his old shack to make the restaurant an addition to his new home. They’d start small, he thought, a seating capacity of maybe twenty, but eventually the restaurant would be known throughout Florida—just Florida, because Earl was getting older now, and he couldn’t think any bigger than that, especially after his previous experiences.
Two months later, Earl and Mely’s was open for business. The locals came out of respect for Mely’s cooking, but they weren’t rich and couldn’t afford to eat out much. Everyone soon realized that this was just another of Earl’s schemes doomed to failure. Earl sent out flyers to other communities up and down the coast, but there wasn’t a meal in this world good enough to make someone sail for three days in unpredictable weather to a small town in the middle of nowhere.
After a few long months of empty tables and food that had to be given away because it was spoiling, the restaurant opened its doors only on demand, and then the guests usually brought their own food for Mely to cook. A small fee was charged then, and a little profit made. But for Earl, the money wasn’t the thing.
The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman Page 4
