The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman

by John Henry Fleming

  “When I was doin publicity, I use ta make the trip ta Biscayne once a week.”

  “That was more’n twenty years ago, Earl, ’fore you had a pot belly the size of Lake Okeechobee. Now set down an finish yer breakfast.”

  “But I got ta do something, Mely. I can’t help feelin guilty about that Steinmetz feller.”

  “If ya got to go down there, at least let Josh McCready paddle ya in his boat.”

  Earl came over and hugged Mely in her chair, covering her ear and neck with dry little kisses. “Yer a wise, wise woman, Mely, and I love ya for it.”

  And then he sat down and finished his grapefruit.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, Earl stopped by Josh McCready’s house and asked when he was making his next trip down to Biscayne. Josh was a retired sea captain, ten years older than Earl, but with twice his strength and five times his stamina. Josh fished now, mostly for himself, but every now and then he had a few good days in a row, and then, weather and seas permitting, he took a boatload of snapper and dolphin down to Biscayne, where he’d sell it to the Biscayne Grand Hotel or one of the other fancy resorts on the beach. “Just to keep myself busy,” Josh would say. And it just so happened that although he had only a few fish to sell in the market, Josh was looking for something to keep himself busy, so he offered to leave for Biscayne. Earl changed his mind about going along. He’d ridden in Josh’s boat before and knew that Josh refused to play the role of anything but captain in his own boat, and thus refused to do any rowing if there was a first mate handy to do it for him.

  Earl told Josh to look for signs of the missing carrier along the beach and then to check in with Postmaster Partridge down in Biscayne. “If he ain’t been seen in Biscayne in the past few days, we’d best hire a new man,” Earl said gravely. And then he got an idea that gave him some hope. Remembering what he could of Josef’s résumé, he dashed off an ad for a new carrier, thinking that if he could get someone with Josef’s qualifications and demeanor, that someone might still deliver Earl his fortune. He knew there was no one left in Figulus who met that description, so he gave the note to Josh and told him to hang it in the Biscayne Post Office.

  WANTED FOR HIRE

  By the Postal Service of the United States of America,

  A Strong, Honest Man

  Who Holds No Grudges

  And Does Not Get Seasick on Small Boats,

  For the Position of

  MAIL CARRIER

  on the

  Figulus to Biscayne “Beach Route”

  with primary obligation to

  THE BEAUTIFUL, BOUNTEOUS

  TOWN OF FIGULUS.

  Apply in person to

  EARL K. SHANK, POSTMASTER,

  Town of Figulus,

  OR TO MR. JOSH MCCREADY WHILE HE IS HERE ON BUSINESS.

  THE MAN WHO took the job, whom McCready brought back with him, was also a retired seafarer, Silas Lautermilch. Earl had his doubts when he saw him. He looked and acted nothing like Josef—he talked too much, and he was short and old, with thick, stumpy legs. This man looked even less able than Josef to hold up against the elements. He could walk all right, but his gait was bowlegged and his steps were about half the length of a normal man’s, meaning, Earl reckoned, it would take him twice as long to walk the route.

  But the new carrier had no intention of walking. He’d brought his own skiff with him, and since he was familiar with the waterways and offshore currents up and down the east coast of Florida, he was going to row and sail his way to Biscayne and back.

  Earl had thought of this before, but had never found anyone with a sailor’s knowledge willing to take the job of mail carrier. This is progress, he thought, which he generally approved of, but which made him anxious now. It reminded him how quickly the state was growing. He’d already heard of a man named Flagler who meant to run a railroad line from Jacksonville all the way to Key West. That would change things faster than he could keep up with. As for this new carrier, he’d be obsolete before he knew what hit him; he’d be transferred down to Biscayne or up to St. Augustine and forced to deliver door to door, like a traveling salesman or a confidence man. But there was another aspect of progress Earl could not even imagine: John Thomas, the New York Times reporter, was at that moment making a legend out of a situation that had already ceased to exist.

  Earl felt no nostalgia, since it had never occurred to him that the beach route was anything but painful drudgery. He didn’t have the genius of a John Thomas; he had only his ambitions and the purity of his mediocrity. But he did feel anxiety, because he knew there wasn’t much time left before his dreams of success would be pilfered completely by the millionaire carpetbaggers who knew potential when they saw it and had the money and the power to take advantage of it.

  For the first time in his life, Earl felt old. He figured his last opportunity to make good had disappeared with Josef Steinmetz. He saw it all now as a stupid pipe dream, carried with him all these years only because of his childhood failures, a dream he’d clung to so foolishly and desperately that he’d let his last hopes rest on a scrawny little Yankee immigrant. He’d become so single-minded that he was willing to send an innocent man out to walk the beach in his bare feet, knowing full well the consequences but denying them with his selfishness. Well now there’d be no more self-deception; he’d sent a man to his death. Earl K. Shank was a murderer.

  “Quit indulging in self-pity,” said Mely, finally fed up after Earl had moped around the house muttering for a week straight. “You flatter yerself when ya say ya killed a man. I see the workins of that yarn spinner that rolls between yer fat ears. Yer makin yerself a story ta tell yer cronies when yer settin around playin cards and drinkin whiskey ten years from now. So nip it in the bud, Earl. Ya ain’t killed a man, and ya ain’t got no business makin up stories that ya did.”

  “But I did, Mely, and there ain’t no denyin it.”

  “Ya done no such thing. Ya ain’t killed him any more’n the mail sack ya gave ’im. Ya ain’t killed ’im any more’n the President of the United States killed ’im. So stop yer mopin and go ’bout yer business again. Ya ain’t been in the restaurant in weeks now. lt’s liable to crumble if ya don’t keep it patched up.”

  “Let it crumble.”

  “You big baby. It ain’t filled with ghosts, Earl.”

  “Yes it is, Mely. The ghosts of all my ruined dreams. The ghosts of my dark, murderer’s soul.”

  “Stop it, Earl. If you ain’t going in there, I’ll go m’self. I’m thinking maybe I’ll open her up tomorrow, invite folks in fer some of that leftover boar we bought off Nathan. Lord knows we need somethin to cut the gloom around here.”

  Earl could only hang his head and stare at his shoes, amazed at how a few thin strips of leather could separate an honest man from a murderer.

  Mely walked next door to the restaurant and pried open the door that Earl had nailed shut.

  If Earl had been in a better state of mind, he’d have seen the good omen in this. Maybe it was a change of heart or maybe just a gift, but Mely had taken the smallest of steps toward his way of seeing things. She was opening the restaurant and giving away free food. What better publicity than that?

  THE NEXT DAY, Silas Lautermilch returned from Biscayne after his first mail run. Everything had gone fine, and he’d made the journey in record time, even though, he admitted, he’d stayed an extra day in Biscayne to drink with some old friends there.

  Besides the regular mail, he handed over a package addressed to “Postmaster, Town of Figulus.” Earl weighed it in his hands and trembled in fear of the worst; the package seemed just the right size and weight to contain the gruesome evidence of Josef’s fate. What a perfect item to hang around the neck of a fool who’d gone too far.

  Fingers shaking, he loaded up Silas with the south-bound mail and sent him off without more than a few words. It took ten minutes for his curiosity to overcome his fear, but it did at last, and Earl sliced open the package, trying to avoid touching it too much, expecting some
thing thick and red to ooze out onto the counter. Instead, he found another package inside with a letter attached:

  Dear Postmaster:

  Enclosed please find a package recovered from the wreckage of the SS Hudson Valley, of which I had, until recently, been captain.

  Let me explain. At the hour of dusk on September 7, I spotted something bobbing in the waves about fifteen degrees off our starboard bow. I directed the helmsman to steer her in for a closer look.

  In hindsight, this was an unwise maneuver. My mate caught this box up in a net, but we’d steered her in too close. Before I had so much as weighed the package in my hands, my ship ran aground on the reef off Biscayne. This you have certainly read of in newspaper accounts. Let me tell you that the reports of mesmerizing mermaids are false. I may have uttered some such nonsense in my grievous delirium, and when the press got wind of it, they locked onto it and embellished it with all their imaginative powers (despite my subsequent letters to the editor).

  Here, then, is the package, which I have instructed the local sheriff to forward to you, as “Figulus” is the only portion of the address still legible. It has not been opened or tampered with, damaged only by the natural force of the sea. I hope you can find its rightful owner.

  Sincerely,

  Capt. Melman Scrotch

  Inmate, Biscayne City Jail

  Even before he sliced open the inside box and pulled out the loafers, Earl knew that fate had once again smiled upon him. He was a fool indeed—a fool to ever doubt that good fortune would find its way back to him even if that young immigrant didn’t. Because it was his good fortune—of course—and that little foreigner had been only its carrier; he’d brought Earl’s fortune here from God-knows-where, and he’d tried his best to run away with it again. But if nothing else was yet clear to Earl, this one fact was: that when a man’s fortune discovers the whereabouts of its rightful owner, it will always find its way home, no matter who takes it or how far astray. And later, when the implications of this event and the discovery of its hidden meaning became fully known to him, Earl would know that in the autobiography of Earl Shank, this one shining moment, this single and never-to-be-repeated gesture of slicing open the box and pulling out a pair of loafers, would warrant an entire chapter.

  It was a single, fluid, and intensely meaningful motion that produced the shoes for him—a gesture of religious significance, a high priest reaching into the sacrificial lamb and pulling forth the still-beating heart. There they were, cherry brown, made of the finest imported leather, supple and alive to the touch. A film of dried seawater coated the shoes inside and out, and Earl instinctively went to work with a cloth, rubbing and buffing and blowing off the dust, and thinking, This is a sign of forgiveness, and it’s tellin me somethin like, “Earl, ya ain’t no murderer after all, yer jest a man doin his job and tryin ta work through his destiny, and sometimes the path ta that destiny crosses through some dang’res territory, but there’s always some high ground jest ahead, and a pair a shoes ta get ya there.”

  And even if he ain’t dead, thought Earl, slipping into the shoes, there ain’t no way of findin where he is. And seein, then, that these here shoes ain’t got a rightful owner, I reckon I’m the next best thing . . .

  They were narrow in the toes, and there was no way he was going to get his heels in there, but they were still the finest shoes he had ever worn. The finest he’d ever seen, even. When he wore these shoes he could feel their soft glow as if the moon itself begged at his feet. He felt, too, the stirring of the old fire, as if now he could hope against all hope that his dreams would not be crushed in the end.

  Chapter 15

  CAPTAIN MELMAN SCROTCH had lied in his letter to the postmaster of Figulus. He was not the one who’d given the order to move in and retrieve the package of shoes. In fact, he’d strongly advised against it, given the rough seas and the ship’s proximity to the reef. But a ship’s captain is not truly the master of his ship when the ship’s owner is aboard, and Captain Scrotch had had the dubious honor of playing host to Mr. Elias Rathmartin, millionaire adventurer and owner of Southwind Cruise Lines and Shipping and Trading Company, New York, New York.

  If anyone had made good the promise of the American Dream, it was Elias Rathmartin. He was a poor orphan who’d climbed his way up the great ladder, and he hadn’t stepped on all that many hands in the process. In past years, Mr. Rathmartin had liked to boast that his company had more ships in its fleet than the United States Navy. He was proud of Southwind; he’d built it from the ground up. He was proud of himself, too. But there came a time, at sixty-eight years old, when his business stopped being the most important thing in his life, and he at last began to break his inveterate work habits and live just as he’d always wanted to.

  Over the last two years, he’d slowly relieved himself of responsibilities to his company, leaving the day-to-day operations to his sons, Merwyn and Stanislaw. Then he took to the sea. It was a funny thing for a shipping magnate, but he’d never once stepped foot in the ocean. As a youth, he’d devoured the high-seas adventure tales that had been donated to his orphanage. The whaling adventures, the conquests of new lands, the shipwreck tales, the tales of bare-breasted island women and nose-ringed cannibals—all of these had filled his youthful fantasies and led him, when he was just nineteen, to seek investors for the purchase of a well-worn trading ship. Still, though he continued to read the adventure tales throughout his adult life, he’d never once ventured out of his home port, on vacation or business or otherwise. He was too caught up in the day-to-day operation in his New York offices, too driven to tear himself away.

  So it wasn’t until he was seventy years old that Elias Rathmartin even stood on one of his ships while it was docked in the harbor. Only then did he set off in search of the great adventure he’d always read about. But no one had ever dared to tell Elias Rathmartin that mermaids and sea monsters weren’t real, or that lost cities of gold didn’t sometimes reappear from the depths. Respectful acquaintances and Southwind employees might call him eccentric; another possibility occurred to those who knew him best.

  One ship in the company’s fleet was commissioned for his personal use, for netting mermaids and tempting the monsters of the Sargasso Sea. This was distressing to his tightfisted sons, who wanted nothing more than to keep careful account of their much-deserved inheritance. But they dared not say anything to his face.

  It was on one of these adventures that Rathmartin had ordered Captain Scrotch in for a closer look at what he suspected was a foundering mermaid. The results of this maneuver landed Rathmartin in the hospital in Biscayne and landed Captain Scrotch in jail. Scrotch had only obeyed orders, but he was a company man, and he took the fall to save his boss the embarrassment, knowing he’d be restored to captain after a few unpaid weeks in jail.

  The experience of the shipwreck, although every bit as perilous and exciting as he’d always hoped, turned out to be a bit much for Elias Rathmartin. Though he’d never once touched the water—the ship’s mate had lifted him into the lifeboat and lifted him out again when they reached the shore—his personal physician had detected a slight murmur of the heart and thought it best that Elias rest up for a few weeks in the local hospital.

  Always a man of action, Rathmartin scribbled a note as soon as he got ashore, assuring his wife and two sons that all was well and requesting that they send another ship as soon as possible, for he’d heard of several recent mermaid sightings down off the north coast of Barbados and was most anxious to check into it. He had his traveling companion, the good Dr. Weimaraner, post the letter for him while he checked into the twelve-room Biscayne Hospital.

  It was an untimely posting, however, for no sooner had Weimaraner left the Biscayne Post Office than our friend Josef Steinmetz showed up and retrieved the northbound mail on that fateful day, only to fling it with laughter out into the hot blue sea. Perhaps someday a few tattered fragments of the letter would wash up unnoticed on a beach in Long Island, carried there by the cur
rent of the Gulf Stream, but it would certainly never reach the offices of the Southwind company in Manhattan.

  So Rathmartin waited, recovering at first, and then merely relaxing in the tropical environs. When he checked out of the hospital, he moved to a suite at the Biscayne Grand and rented a room for his doctor right next door. He began to relish the Florida tropics, the way he could wander just a few hundred yards up the beach and feel absolutely free of the encumbrances and responsibilities of civilization, yet still know, somewhere in the back of his mind, that there was a comfortable bed, a swimming pool, and a fully stocked bar just a stone’s throw away. So, during the day, unbothered by the heat, Elias took long, boyish hikes up and down the beach, sometimes venturing a little ways into the bush, imagining that he was the sole shipwreck survivor on an island full of hungry cannibals and sensuous women. When the good doctor Weimaraner tagged along, Rathmartin referred to him as “Friday,” and the doctor answered to it because he knew that somewhere in his contract there was probably a line that required him to do so. Then, each evening, they’d retire beside the swimming pool for some French cuisine and a bottle of Biscayne’s best.

  They waited, and still no ship came. But Elias Rathmartin was having such a time that he accepted the insult without the slightest hint of anger. “Well, Weimy,” he’d say to the doctor, “no ship again today. I’ll bet my boys have got things running so smoothly that every ship is out earning me profit.” And the doctor would answer, “Yes, Admiral, I believe you’re right,” though inside he was fuming with impatience. The doctor was anxious to escape the heat and the mosquitoes and the mediocre service at the hotel, and he’d come to hate Rathmartin, because Rathmartin was the kind of man who wouldn’t notice the heat or the service when he had other things to occupy him. And Rathmartin was the kind of man who didn’t get bit by mosquitoes.