The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman

by John Henry Fleming

  Josef felt grave with responsibility. “Postmaster,” he said, “I am ready to accept the duties of United States Postal Carrier, and I pledge to fulfill them to the best of my abilities.”

  Earl couldn’t wait to get home and tell his wife about this, and then have her give him that look, chastising him, yes, but also, Earl knew, sharing at some level in the joke.

  “You’re all right, Mr. Steinmetz,” he said. And he meant it. “I believe you’ll make a fine carrier. I really do.”

  Then, finally, Earl pulled out one last item from behind the counter. “I almost forgot,” he said. “The shoes.”

  These were the official Postal Service shoes, he told Josef. Designed by a team of government scientists for maximum comfort and durability. They had rubber soles and canvas tops and the postal insignia stamped on the side. One size fits all.

  Josef had other ideas about this, though. “Postmaster,” he said, “I have one condition to add to our verbal employment contract. I must be permitted to forgo the use of the Postal Service shoes, though I can see they are fine shoes, well-suited to my walking requirements.”

  “I don’t understand. They’re free.”

  Josef’s face reddened. He hadn’t anticipated any resistance to his idea. “I understand this, sir. But I’ve made the decision to perform my duties without shoes, in honor of my late Uncle Mordy and the fine loafers I never received.”

  Earl wasn’t sure if Josef’s words were a sign of hostility, perhaps a bitterness resulting from what Josef still perceived as Earl’s failure to locate the shoes. He didn’t want to press too hard and upset the man.

  “Wellsir,” he said, “I remain sorry about them shoes. But I wouldn’t suggest you go barefoot out on that beach. Yer feet’ll turn to soup ’fore you get halfway to Biscayne.”

  Still, Josef held firm, explaining that it was a risk he was willing to take, that if he received blisters on his feet, it could only add to the tribute he was paying to his Uncle Mordy, who’d raised him as a son, and whose gift of fine loafers seemed to have been lost forever somewhere between Brooklyn and Figulus.

  So the postmaster could only shake his head, thinking, This is one odd feller. He isn’t gonna last two days, and then where will I be? Earl hadn’t figured that his fortune would have a mind of its own, would acquire a death wish so soon after revealing himself. Perhaps, he thought, fortune is like an excessively modest woman who would rather destroy her body than have it exposed to the world. Another question nagged him from the back reaches of his brain: that perhaps he’d been wrong about everything, that this man was nothing more than a foolish young immigrant who was going to kill himself through his own stubborn ignorance. But the events had been too neatly ordered for that, he knew. There must be some purpose to them all. In any case, there was little he could do now. The mail had to run; fate would have to take its course.

  Josef loaded himself up with the postal sack, the small sack of Mely’s cooking, and a canteen that the postmaster had filled with water for him. He shook hands with Earl one last time and walked proudly out into the early light.

  Earl feared it would be the last he’d ever see of the strange foreigner. That is one odd feller, he thought, trying to laugh to himself, but unable to cover up the feeling that he’d just sent a man to his doom.

  That night, when he told his wife all this, about the pride he’d seen in Josef’s eyes as he accepted the postal sack, and Josef’s firm refusal to accept the postal shoes, and the pain he felt at watching Josef leave, she hugged him and cried at the most genuine display of feeling she’d ever seen in her husband. And when she did so, he suddenly saw it her way, and he had to admit his eyes got kind of cloudy too.

  PART II

  The New Paradise

  Chapter 9

  WHEN JOSEF EMERGED through a path in the sea grapes and took his first step in the sand, he became one of the few travelers on the great Florida highway—the wide, white, powdery beach linking Jacksonville with Biscayne and all points between. This was the route of the U.S. Postal Carrier—no company, no traffic, and long, empty miles between post offices. It was the kind of emptiness to give you the feeling that anything might happen at any time, though usually it did not.

  The morning was blanketed by a ragged cloud cover and at first the sand felt cool and wet, like a sponge bath, on Josef’s bare feet. He felt like a young boy again, curling the sand between his toes as he made tracks in the smooth, white surface. He couldn’t help but think again of those first years in America, when Uncle Mordy had taught him to swim in the Hudson River. He saw himself dog-paddling around Mordy’s big head, frightened at first and throwing his jaw back as though to touch the water with his chin would mean a certain death. He’d gasped then and choked at the thought of water filling his lungs, afraid to cry because those few extra drops of water from his eyes might just be enough to raise the river above his mouth. But soon, with Mordy’s patient, guiding hands and kind words, Josef gained enough confidence to raise one hand out of the water and wave at his Aunt Lois, who smiled from a rock on shore. Then it wasn’t long before Josef was doing the crawl, the breaststroke, even the backstroke. He’d swim races with Mordy, his aunt making the sound of the starter’s pistol. He’d win, too. He became the fastest swimmer in his entire grade school hands down, though some of the kids did not take kindly to being beat and thought they ought to remind Josef of his scrawniness by wrestling him and bloodying his nose afterward.

  Now here he was again, walking the beach with a bloody nose, as though he couldn’t get away from it, as though there would always be someone to come around and remind him of his mortality and his weaknesses, usually just when he’d boosted his confidence by proving something else. But what could stop him now? As far as he knew, there was nothing between here and Biscayne but sun and sand. If he made the trip once, he knew he could do it indefinitely. It he didn’t make it, he’d have no one to blame but himself.

  The ocean rolled gently and shimmered now with scattered rays of sunlight. He let the warm water run up around his feet and splash the cuffs of his trousers. A few fiddler crabs dashed in arcs along the dunes, waving their oversized claws at Josef—like angry Brooklyn street vendors, he thought—before squeezing themselves into their holes for the day. A thin line of seaweed marked the highest advance of the tide, like a battle line drawn in a history book. There were dozens of little sandpipers to check the advance of the opposing army; periodic offensives would push them back up the beach, but always the pipers would contain the aggression and send the waves retreating—the ocean would never be entirely defeated, but its imperialist urges could be controlled.

  Josef saw this action as a metaphor for man’s role in nature. Nature could never, should never be defeated, he thought, but it was the duty of mankind to hold its sometimes-malevolent forces in check. Nature was a wild beast to be tamed for the benefit of man and God. It filled Josef’s heart with an exultant sense of purpose to know that he was now playing a part in man’s progress toward that goal.

  This was his destiny, it seemed, the destiny of the torchbearer, to keep the beacon of civilization glowing even in the remotest wilds. He was a link, as the postmaster had said, but more than just a link in the postal chain. He was the only link to civilization for an entire community of settlers who might otherwise be lost and forgotten, their bold experiment in hope and progress left unreported if not for him. This was the highest duty a man could aspire to, he thought.

  The rolling surf and the early sun were so peaceful, and Josef had so much time to walk and think—he felt he had more time now than he’d ever had in his life, as if time had slowed to a near standstill here—that his mind began to wander far into the future, to the implications of this day and the fulfillment of this solemn task, handed to him like both a gift and a challenge from Above. He and other pioneers just like him were at the forefront of mankind’s march into destiny. They were cutting the path and bearing the torches through the dark wild night and into the d
awn, where wonderful things awaited them. Could it be, he thought, that this glorious land called Florida was truly the paradise of Eden, lost once through idle lust, but destined to be regained through the hard work of men like himself who humbled themselves before a higher goal?

  What would such a paradise be like? Man can certainly not improve upon the perfection of God, he thought. It would have to resemble in every way the Eden of the Bible. Yet this Eden would be arrived at through the efforts of man. It would be an exact, man-made replication of Paradise. The New Paradise. The entire history of man would then be seen as a reconstruction of this Edenic framework. It had all been a learning process for the recreation of a single, beautiful, and perfect expression of God. Only then would man truly know and understand something of His nature.

  He thought again of his swimming lessons. He’d seen his uncle’s demonstrations of the proper strokes and he’d heard his uncle’s words describing to him the feeling and the techniques for propelling oneself through water. But never could Josef have imagined fully what the experience was until he replicated his uncle’s movements himself. Of course it was not the same expression as Mordy’s, but a near-exact replication of it. In this way, that experience of learning—indeed, every experience of learning—Josef now saw as an allegory of man’s striving to return to Paradise, of his desire to replicate the Primary Gesture. Josef’s endeavor was but a tiny step in that process—an arching of the elbow or a cupping of the hand to pull back the water—but it was an important one nonetheless. How many men or women had lived knowing they had played a part? The knowledge was a blessing in itself.

  Josef saw before him the world of the future, where whole communities rose up out of the Florida jungle, and men and women lived in great comfort and ease as never before, as carefree as lambs romping across the dunes, soothed by the voice of the sea, or perhaps strolling blissfully through the flat green fields they’d carved out of the once-forbidding wilderness. For Nature had been thoroughly tamed. It had been molded into the harmonious patterns and pure designs of men in touch with their pure hearts, hearts that beat with God. Through his purity of purpose, man had become a conduit between God and Nature, rippling forth the patterns of the Heavens into the Wilds, imposing waves of Order onto the Chaos. Once perfected, the order of the Heavens would be the order of Nature. Man would have held a mirror up to the skies and reflected what he saw onto his own small world.

  For the first time that day, Josef broke a sweat, and he wiped his brow. How long had he been thinking like this? It suddenly seemed too long, and he thought he’d better stop before he overstepped his bounds. Who was he, after all, to guess at the will of the Lord? Still, it was this feeling of duty, of working toward something dangerous even to imagine, that filled him with exhilaration and kept him going through the long, hot hours ahead.

  For it wasn’t long before the clouds dried up and crumbled apart, and the morning began to swelter. Before the sun had risen thirty degrees, Josef was tasting the drops of his sweat and his step had lost its initial jauntiness. His shirt began to collapse inward like a new weight on his skin. The three small straps around his neck—the postal sack, the lunch sack, and the canteen—seemed to add to their weight with each step, as though the distance he traveled was itself an invisible burden. His shoulders and back lost their sprightliness and sank accordingly. As his body sank, so did his thoughts—it was no longer so easy to look to the skies with high-minded thoughts of the future, for above him rose the sun, burning with rage as if it had read his thoughts about taming nature. Or perhaps it was only laughing.

  Worst of all, the sand began to heat as rapidly as an iron skillet, and as it did so its whiteness brightened until it became not a color at all, but a light itself that pierced Josef’s dry eyes from every direction. He could close his eyes for steps at a time, but he could not walk on air, and thus with every step his feet felt the hot, unrelenting grinding of the sand, which seemed to peel away the skin, layer by layer, bringing the heat to epidermal regions unused to and offended by such exposure. This was a pain he hadn’t imagined possible in his feet—a region of the body so remote as to have seemed to him practically noncorporeal. Now these feet were very much a part of him, and very real in their pain. Despite months of working in his orchards, these were still the soft, uncalloused feet of a Brooklynite.

  Almost as soon as his vision of Paradise had perfected itself in his mind, it had begun to evaporate and retreat. He could no longer grasp the beauty and perfection he’d just understood. The harmonious whole had quickly shredded itself into scraps. He saw only obstacles now, and his faith in man’s ability to overcome them was shaken ever so slightly. How could this truly be Paradise, he thought, until man finds a way to cool the air? But Josef’s overheated brain could not satisfactorily work out a solution. He thought of ferrying in huge icebergs from the Arctic. He thought of huge fans to redirect the wind from the North. But what was to prevent the icebergs from melting before they reached their destination? And who was to operate such gigantic fans? Would mankind have to redesign itself, too, in order to be comfortable in the overpowering heat and burdensome humidity of this New Paradise? It suddenly seemed beyond comprehension, and thus difficult to believe with complete faith. He had been given a beautiful and perfect vision of the Paradise to come, only to have it torn away by something as trivial as his bodily discomfort. What did that say about him?

  He moved down the beach and walked along the shoreline, where the waves could cool his feet. With the sun not yet quite overhead, he decided he’d better rest. He still had many miles to go. There was no sense in wearing himself out.

  He dragged himself up the dune with a singleness of purpose and crawled into a little clearing beneath the sea grapes. It was cooler there, and the change in temperature put him to sleep for a full hour, until the sun had risen directly above him and the cool shade evaporated.

  His throat was brittle; it hurt to breathe too deeply. He put the canteen to his lips, then jerked his head back when the metal burned him. Half the water spilled out onto the sand. Then he ate one of the hot, dry fish fillets and began to peel a warm grapefruit when he heard a noise rustling in the palmetto bushes behind him. There was a flash of gray, and suddenly a wild boar was bearing down on him, tusks glistening with reflected sunshine.

  Josef dropped the grapefruit and ran for shore, having only time to pull his mail sack with him. Grunts and snorts ringing in his ears, he dashed into the water holding the mail sack above his head so as not to soak its contents with his frenzied splashing. The water was to his waist when he finally stopped. He turned around and there was the huge, ugly gray boar standing midway up the beach, pawing the sand like a bull and holding Josef’s grapefruit in its mouth.

  The boar snorted, pacing back and forth in nervous little jumps, keeping an eye on Josef, who now and then splashed at it with one hand and shouted “Ya! Ya!” hoping to frighten it off. This only angered it more, and it would charge down to the very edge of the water, retreating only when a wave broke at its feet. Josef’s heart seemed to beat in his throat. Standing there in the hot ocean, blinded by the reflected sunlight and holding the mail sack above his head, he had never felt more foolish and uncomfortable in his life.

  After what seemed like hours, but was really only minutes, the boar turned its back and showed Josef its curly pigtail as it headed up the dune and into the bush, where Josef had left his food and water.

  It was another long wait until the grunts trailed off and Josef felt it was safe enough to come out of the water. Nervously, he peeked under the sea grapes, and found the boar gone. And with it his food. The beast had even been malicious enough to spill the rest of the water out of his canteen.

  Josef took a deep breath. He still had two and a half days of traveling to reach Biscayne. He began to walk again, slowly and soberly. What did he think now of the New Paradise? There was this problem of the beasts to contend with. It was clear that this place was full of fearsome creatures. They wo
uld have to be tamed like the land. They would have to do their part or stay out of the way.

  He was thirsty and hungry and this made his indignation rankle. Animals, he thought, should not be allowed to stand in the way of man’s salvation. Those who would submit to man’s will and high purpose would be allowed a spot in Eden. But those like the boar who were full of the pride and fury of Satan would have to be locked up in cages and fences, living monuments to the triumph of good over evil.

  A graceful row of seagulls passed overhead. Josef returned their gaze suspiciously. He wondered what might lurk in the hearts of these creatures, which had always seemed good-natured. Were their cries a scornful malediction of humankind? Was the release of their excrement timed solely by biological need, or something more sinister?

  These thoughts, though painful to his moral sense, actually provided some momentary relief to his physical pain. But it wasn’t long before his feet made themselves known again. Their tops were raw and beet-colored. He tried to pack a layer of wet sand over them, but the sun now burned in all its midafternoon fury. The white sand had become a crackling griddle that cooked his soles alive, and he had to walk in the water, which washed away any covering he could think of to put over his feet.