The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright page

  Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition

  A Note from the Narrator

  Prologue

  Part I: Serendipity

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II: The New Paradise

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part III: The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman

  Chapter 13

  Part IV: The Legend of Josef Steinmetz

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Praise for

  The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman

  “A marvelously piquant satire on the American Dream.... Fleming's insights into mythmaking are keen, and his narrative skills and humor finely honed. A marvelously inventive, thoroughly enjoyable tale about our capacity for self-invention, adaptability, and perseverance.”

  —Booklist (**starred review**)

  “A gem of a first novel...deftly narrated in a wry, tongue-in-cheek style reminiscent of Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce.... Fleming's prose is not only first-rate but ingeniously evocative of 19th-century American parlance.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “An engrossing and highly entertaining tale... The author is a gifted storyteller whose rich style and language provide genuinely treasured moments for all readers.”

  —Library Journal

  “Winningly satiric.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “You have everything in this novel—history, adventure, humor, and a strong study of the American character. The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman is as much Americana as Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, or Huckleberry Finn: all are searching for what is supposed to be the American Dream.”

  —Ernest J. Gaines, author of A Lesson Before Dying

  “A patchwork job perfectly suited to a lazy author who would rather indulge his passing whims than visit a library.”

  —John Thomas, ex-New York Times reporter, deceased (from the introduction)

  The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman

  A NOVEL

  [20th Anniversary Edition]

  John Henry Fleming

  Copyright 2014 by John Henry Fleming

  ISBN: 978-0-9849538-8-2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are imaginary or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art by Jane Mjølsness

  Electronic Reprint Edition, Burrow Press 2014

  Print: burrowpress.com

  Web: burrowpressreview.com

  Flesh: functionallyliterate.org

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION

  by John Thomas, ex-reporter, The New York Times, deceased.

  EVERYONE IN THIS STORY died a long time ago. They condo-ed up to the Sweet Hereafter with a view of the Eternal Strand, while I hitched my star to a legend and stayed put. Now I’m the one who walks the beach, bereft of shoes but also of feet—of bodily substance in general. Yet I’m not bitter.

  So why do I linger?

  I think about it. I have time.

  My own book is forgotten, yet the legend survives. Some time back, gliding the shore at dusk, my moonish glow reflected in the mirrored picture windows of seaside mansions, I paused beside an abandoned beach umbrella. I observed a crab digging a home in the sand and flicking clean a hardcover’s mildewed corner, eventually revealing the book’s dampened-and-dried pages, reshaped by the sea into a wavy image of itself. Soon the entire volume emerged—a discarded ex-library copy, a first edition of the very story in your hands.

  A story I thought I knew.

  Its crusty pages had been marked up in blue ink, edited by an unknown hand. I read it. I was intrigued.

  I don’t come off so well. I had ambitions back then. I was opportunistic and greedy for fame. When I lost it all, I blamed everyone. So far so good. But no accounting of a life can be complete without a view of its entirety. How could this writer leave off my final years? I wasn’t fired by Southwind Cruise Lines, as the book claims; I jumped ship in Biscayne, where I wrote tropical romances for lovelorn ladies under a pseudonym. I don’t deny I drank too much.

  One night, deep in my cups, I was jumped by a wonderfully buxom Indian woman who tossed me into a gator hole. Once sober, I found myself admiring her spunk. I sought her out and wooed her with my advanced vocabulary.

  And so it went. In our later years, we lived on and off as husband and wife. She’d disappear for weeks at a time, during which I’d pen my next romance. When she’d return with money and valuables, I asked no questions. Her thieving and my drinking obtained a delicate balance.

  Until at last she disappeared for good. It didn’t surprise me. She’d been complaining about her eyesight, how everything around her had turned white. I thought she was going blind or senile. Reading this book, I discovered another possibility.

  I wasn’t bitter when she left. I’d had my pleasures and died happy enough. Yet I had unfinished business . . .

  So here I am.

  You’ll find none of these facts in the first edition. And there are other problems. Anachronisms. Historical inaccuracies. Brazen misrepresentations. Rookie mistakes. If I weren’t dead, I might have been outraged.

  But to whom would I complain? I know nothing of the author. And who’s this narrator who introduces himself in a preliminary note, withholds his biography, then promptly unspools his yarn like a self-appointed deputy of fate? I’ve sifted through the narratorial possibilities, deliberating over the minor characters, rooting for one or the other. Mely! Weimy! My very own China! (The exclamation points are added for effect; ghosts don’t exclaim.)

  The mystery rankled.

  I read and re-read the book. I had time.

  This is not, I concluded, a historical novel. Rather, it’s a book about Florida, assembled from, among other things, scraps of Florida’s history—a patchwork job perfectly suited to a lazy author who would rather indulge his passing whims than visit a library. Still, the book has its charms. Whatever the inaccuracies, the story followed a pattern I knew well, having lived it in part, and later having walked its beaches gathering newfound perspective since my death.

  In the end, a second edition seemed in order. Clearly, the author is not around to do it himself. If he was indeed the owner of that beach umbrella, he may have been washed to sea by a rogue wave and drifts now in the Gulf Stream or cavorts with mer-people in the murky depths. Those are best-case scenarios.

  Besides, in addition to adventure, love, and laughs, the story has me. Me, the centerpiece of the whole enterprise, the only man with a dedicated part. That’s Part III, if you’re keeping track. As the man who begat the legend, it is right and proper that I should disseminate accordingly.

  I honored those edits uncovered by the crab, resisting the urge to rewrite the whole thing myself, deciding only to add this introduction to set the record straight.

  Time has passed. The world has changed. The beaches today are squeezed between a swelling ocean and a crowded shore. Yet I’m not bitter. It’s bee
n a century since I was bitter. I’m just incomplete.

  And now a little less so.

  A NOTE FROM THE NARRATOR

  THIS IS A STORY of fortune, which to my mind is not unlike a miscarried letter. It is passed from hand to hand, from mail carrier to mail carrier, from post office to post office in a desperate search for its rightful owner. Too often it remains undelivered, thanks to the postal service’s lack of perseverance or the smeared and cryptic handwriting of the address. Sometimes it is delivered into the wrong hands, and then it may as well end up in the dead-letter box, since the fate of one man can do no good—indeed, may even do harm—to another. But then there is that happy circumstance where, usually by sheer good luck, such a package falls into the lap of its intended, and a man receives what is justly his. Here is the story of one such happy coincidence.

  Prologue

  IT BEGAN ON THE first day of an unusually hot summer in the latter half of the previous century. A carrier for the United States Postal Service walked the Florida beach route between the Town of Biscayne (on Biscayne Bay) and the Town of Figulus (on Lake Worth). The man was friend to no one and acquaintance to few. There wasn’t a soul within five hundred miles who’d even know his name, and that was probably for the best. It had been so long since he’d heard his own name spoken that it is not impossible he’d forgotten it himself.

  Though not yet forty, the man was old before his time. Too old, he knew, for what was surely the most strenuous mail route in America—sixty miles each way on an empty, superheated beach, with nothing to break the monotony or ease the pain.

  He tottered achingly as he moved, falling forward to be caught always at the last instant by his unsteady legs. His hunched shoulders and overtanned skin seemed fixed in a squint, as though his body had collapsed inward in a kind of desperate, protective measure and now had the look of something impenetrable that nevertheless would be beaten in the end—by sheer persistence, by something as slow and constant as the sun. And if he were to meet a fellow traveler and exchange a few words, the traveler would come away with a similar impression of the man’s personality—bitter, self-reliant, and inevitably beaten.

  But the carrier was unlikely to cross another’s path here. South Florida was then still a frontier, and one that had been passed over by the hordes of westward-looking pioneers. Its beaches were empty but for the refuse of shipwrecks, its settlements few and far between, its native presence dwindling from years of brutal wars, deportation, and disease. This stretch of beach was lonelier and wilder than it had been in perhaps thousands of years, before the Spanish had built forts here to keep watch while they siphoned off the Fountain of Youth, and even before the natives had begun to clear land and plant their way into a short-lived prosperity.

  The carrier would not find more than a few ghostly remnants of these civilizations: shards of a Spanish cannon sticking from the sand just far enough to stub his toes, or clumps of burial mounds fading like blemishes on the dense, flat coastal jungle.

  Most of all the carrier would find heat. This day signaled only the beginning of summer’s long and hellish reign, an endless succession of unbearable heat and humidity, enough to drive any man to delirium. His shirt was already drenched in sweat, though he dared not remove it and expose himself to the blistering sunlight. His pants were rolled above his ankles, starched by the sun, and jeweled with crystallized seawater. From time to time the lip of a swell would creep up the beach and soak his feet, but the water was too warm to provide much relief. And these feet, in any case, were being crucified by his shoes—the standard, government-issue, rubber-and-canvas carrier’s shoes, not designed by any person familiar with the heat of a Florida summer.

  The pain he felt in his feet had intensified through years of walking the beach, had gradually worked its way into his consciousness, and now threatened to occupy his every waking thought with itself and with its source: the shoes. As he walked in agony, he cursed the stupidity of the shoes’ design, the way the material sponged up the water and heat, the way the low tops let in just enough dirt and grit to sandpaper his feet as he walked, and the way the buckles cut into the skin on his ankles if they were loosened enough to make the shoes fit properly. He imagined the committee of Yankee politicians who’d commissioned the design of the shoes, specifying the need to keep the postman’s feet warm during the sleet, hail, and snow of a northern winter. He pictured the unveiling of the prototype before the committee some months later, and the politicians smiling approvingly and passing the shoe around as they comment on the uniqueness of the design and its pliable, one-size-fits-all material. Reporters ask them questions; pictures are taken with the politicians gathered behind the shoe as it sits on a pedestal in the middle of a huge oak table. Then one reporter suggests that someone try on the shoe, and the politician from New York volunteers laughingly as he curls one end of his waxed moustache and wedges a foot into the prototype. He is a fat politician, and the shoe doesn’t fit him properly, though he smiles anyway. Everyone sees that the shoe is about to burst from the pressure of the politician’s foot, but no one says anything, and the one-size-fits-all claim is carefully avoided for the rest of the press conference. For in reality, the shoes fit well only on a man whose feet are exactly average in every way. Average, that is, according to statistics compiled by a government committee.

  This postal carrier’s feet were not average by any measure. They were a basic ingredient of his lurching gait and a souvenir of his duty to the Confederacy. Early in the war, he’d done battle with a Union scouting balloon, running swiftly and fearlessly into harm’s way when he saw it float into view above the Tennessee treetops. He’d leapt over bushes and torn his shoulders on the thorns and bark, firing with his rifle when the forest allowed him a glimpse of the sky. At last he broke into a meadow and saw that the balloon had begun to sink. He waited directly below it, imagining with great pride how he was going to take this Yankee back to camp, dead or alive. It was his first encounter with the enemy, and this victory was sure to mark him for a hero, was sure to lead to high praise and a rapid series of promotions and commendations.

  The balloon fired up like an injured beast, sinking anyway, its roar sounding to him like little more than a death rattle. He smiled as he watched it grow, the basket like a neatly wrapped gift falling from the heavens into his open arms. He remembered his rifle then and turned his head down briefly to reload the barrel. When he heard a snap and looked up again, he saw the Yankee scout peering over his basket not more than sixty feet above and a sudden, disorienting upward motion to the balloon, though there wasn’t time for his brain to register that fully. Later he’d remember, too, that in those few moments of heightened reality he’d also seen a knife in the scout’s hand and a rope dangling over the side of the basket.

  But at the time he saw only a blur of the sandbag that hit him, heard only the fuzzy crescendo of the cracking bones in his feet. And so crazed with pain was he that his first and only thought was a strange one indeed, that the scream he heard was coming from the sandbag itself and not from his open mouth.

  He felt the pain all over again when the field doctor ordered the bag lifted from his feet. Unveiled before him were the flattened and misshapen dogs that would never fit properly into any pair of shoes again.

  This was the incident that had embittered him for life and aged him prematurely. Rather than become the brunt of jokes and the object of pitying stares, he retired from the military and withdrew from society altogether, eventually landing this painful but solitary job with the postal service. He didn’t care that a walking job was probably not the best line of work for a man with his condition; he could tolerate the physical pain so long as he was left alone with his bitterness, his self-pity, and his occasional drunken binges. He carried the mail all day long in isolation, pacing himself so that he always arrived at his P.O. stops in the dead of night. That was an arrangement he’d made with the government man in St. Augustine who’d hired him: he’d never have to speak with a pos
tmaster unless he chose to. Instead, he’d hang his sack of mail on the “Incoming” sign nailed to the back of the post office, he’d take a second sack off the “Outgoing” nail, and then he’d disappear into the hot, silent night.

  So of course he blamed the government shoes for his pain, transferring his guilt and his self-loathing onto the generous dispensation of the conquerors who’d crippled him for life. Yet there was nothing he could do about it, because he could not afford or could not bring himself to purchase a more comfortable pair of shoes, and because the only alternative was to walk in his bare feet, which, under present conditions, would mean a slow, certain descent to the human limits of pain.

  This frustrating knowledge now made him all the more angry. It intensified the pain and the heat and made the salty air sting like pin pricks on his cracked lips and his brittle lungs. It made the postal sack heavier until the strap seemed to gouge his neck and shoulders with every chafing step. It drove him to delirium and made him search for something—anything—that might serve as a better scapegoat and so provide some temporary relief.

  To this end he stopped, trembling and out of breath, removed his sack and rifled through its contents, searching angrily for the heaviest offending package. He dug from the bottom one thick box, tidily wrapped in brown paper and twine and addressed to “Josef Steinmetz, Town of Figulus.” He weighed it in his hands while he cursed its sender, its intended recipient, and the entire U.S. Postal Service for allowing such a heavy wrench to fall into the delicate machinery of mail delivery. All of his delirious anger and intense discomfort suddenly took a new shape. To him the box was monstrous and single-mindedly evil.

  It had come from Brooklyn, and, like most mail out of the North, by steamer to Key West, and then up to Biscayne on a little mail skiff. The journey could take anywhere from three weeks to three months, depending on the weather and the dispositions of its handlers. But this package, now only twenty miles from its destination, was about to take a long and scenic detour.