A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  “…This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth, I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical, and indeed I am a radical. I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian. I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself. But I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already. I have finished. Thank you.”

  [… Nick and Bart had hands too, and they had mouths and feet, but when they shook their fists and said, “Where is liberty?” they didn’t start running to find it, and they never would, not even if the gates were open, and the guards were looking the other way. They’d stand their ground, making beautiful words till they were dead, and they meant it when they said that if they had new lives, they’d only speak them away as they were speaking these.…That wasn’t for you, though, was it, Mr. Lovejoy? No man pursued you, but you wanted to run, didn’t you, Mr. Lovejoy…?] Through the window, Danny saw a silent-film of people in the street. Their lips moved, their heels struck the sidewalk, and their clothing rustled, and they tapped canes, snapped purses, dropped coins, and whistled for cabs. The sound for their soundless animation was in the office: weeping.

  The Boss took the paper from Danny’s hands and scanned the account, and then he said, “Here’s the bitter end, and it’s rich.”

  … JUDGE THAYER: “There is only one duty that now devolves upon this court, and that is to pronounce the sentences. First, the Court pronounces sentence upon Nicola Sacco. It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Nicola Sacco, suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the 10th day of July, in the year of our Lord 1927. This is the sentence of the law. It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Bartolomeo Vanzetti.…”

  MR.VANZETTI: “Wait a minute, please, Your Honor. May I speak for a minute with my lawyer, Mr. Thompson?”

  MR.THOMPSON: “I do not know what he wants to say.”

  JUDGE THAYER: “I think I should pronounce the sentence…. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, suffer the punishment of death….”

  MR.SACCO: “You know I am innocent. That is the same words I pronounced seven years ago. You condemn two innocent men.”

  JUDGE THAYER: “… by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the 10th day of July, in the year of our Lord 1927. We will now take a recess….”

  * * *

  “… And then he folded up the newspaper,” Danny said. “He did it very carefully, straightening the pages and smoothing out the creases—and when he was all finished, he just threw it away and started to flow up and down the aisles like the ocean, like waves breaking. He was so God damn hell-bent that some of the women actually backed themselves up to the wall to avoid him, and the way he swore was like nothing I ever heard in my life—the most terrible curses, the kind you find in the Bible, and on top of those the dirtiest words ever written on a toilet-wall—but nobody seemed to mind, not even the women, because he was really ranting for all of us. ‘I’ve been struggling with some of you hysterical bastards for years,’ he said. ‘I’ve wiped your noses, dried your eyes, and given you pats on the back and shots in the ass—but that’s all over, God damn you, and the first of you sniffling ninnies to shed another tear gets down on the floor and laps it up. We’re finished with tenderness, and we’re finished with love: from here all the way to hell, I want to see hatred! When you come to this dump in the morning, I want you to come hating, and I want you to hate harder all day long and go to bed foaming at the mouth! I want you to hate everything—yourselves, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that stale codfish-cake called Webster Thayer, and the whole sonabitching world! If you’ve got that straight, get up off your fat and try to hate me like I hate you—like I hate everybody on the face of the earth except… except Nick and Bart….’ And then you know what he did when he said those last four words?”

  “What?” Miss Forrest said.

  “He began … he began … began to cry.…”

  NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN

  “Tootsie wrote,”…You talk about Thayer as if you actually expected him to break down at the last minute and give his two worst enemies thirty days in the workhouse. Your trouble is, you think of him as a man when he’s really a class. Vanzetti knows that, and it’s time you knew it too.…”

  Danny wrote, “…You can know a man’s class and yet not know all about him. He can come from kings and be a Thayer, and he can come from nobodies and be a Bartolo—so class can’t be the only thing that makes people what they are, and if you think so, you’re only sizing them up through a crack.…”

  Tootsie wrote, “… By your reasoning, Thayer could’ve been a Brandeis. What stopped him …?”

  Danny wrote, “…Who ever knows that? Maybe he didn’t have the brains. Maybe he had a weak heart when he was a boy. Maybe he was afraid of the dark, or he was born too soon or too late or in the wrong climate.…”

  Tootsie wrote, “… Wake up, boy. The only thing that stopped him was his class. People don’t turn into Thayers by accident.…”

  Danny wrote, “… I can understand being dialectical about a system, but not about people. They’re all so damn different that you simply can’t make the kind of rules for them that you do. There’s got to be something besides class.…”

  Tootsie wrote, “…Dish up the name of it, partner. Maybe it’ll stop the next lynching.…”

  Danny wrote, “…Remember one day when we were walking home with our shoe-boxes? You asked me what my philosophy was, and I quick made up some shite about doing good by my fellow-man. I still get red in the face when I think of that—I’m red right now. You didn’t fall, though; you were wise to me. I had no philosophy then, not even the Y. M. C. A. crap I tried to palm off on you, and maybe I haven’t any even now, but here’s an odd thing: if I ever do have, it’ll be the same one I tried to fool you with, only I’ll really mean it.…”

  Tootsie wrote, “… Here’s another odd thing: you did fool me. I thought it was pretty fine to like people as much as you did, and I admired you for it. I admire you now for admitting you were a liar, and I’ll admire you even more when you finally make the lie come true—but I’ll admire you most when you realize that liking people isn’t enough, because that’ll only make you a half-assed liberal. You’ve got to like the good in them and hate the bad, and you’ll never be able to do that unless you know what’s at the bottom of both. The bottomest thing is Property, and a man who has it can’t be kind or fair or democratic in the same way as a man without. If he could, I suppose he would, so you see I have as much faith in people as you, but what’s the use of faith if the Italians die in the Chair? And they will die, Danny, because the Judge Thayers and the Governor Fullers aren’t ready to kiss their Property goodbye. They never will be; they aren’t the kissing kind….”

  Danny wrote, “…Your father being up on things like Socialism and Economics, you learned a lot that I didn’t, and, besides, you were a better thinker to begin with. But a guy’s got to get the job done with the tools at hand, and to this cheap brain of mine, you’ve only hit on some of the answer—and I don’t want you to jump me if I can’t come right out with the rest. All I know is, in this world there’s no such thing as a standard man with interchangeable parts. We’re made of the same kind of stuff, but we come in different sizes, different shapes, different colors, and different weights, and when you add differences of place, time, health, environment, and brain-power, you’ve got an assortment that’d make a junk-dealer drool. But being made of the same kind of stuff, we’re something more than a hopeless scramble of junk, and what goes on in one of us—in the head, in the heart—can be understood by t
he others, and therefore a man like Thayer is no stranger to me. He’s a human being who happens to be sour and cruel and selfish and small and full of spite, but that describes me just as well, and knowing that I have moments of kindness and generosity and bravery and maybe even of love, I have to believe that he has too, and that in the end, as I would, he’ll relent. I’m sure I’m right, Tootsie, and you’ll see …!”

  Tootsie wrote, “…All right, I’ll see, but I’ll have to do my seeing from down here. I expected to spend the summer in N.Y.C., but a job in Montgomery came my way, and I’ll be working there till the fall semester begins. I leave tomorrow. Try me care of General Delivery.…”

  Danny wrote, “…The Lowell Commission, appointed by Gov. Fuller to find out if S. & V. had a fair trial, held its opening session on the 1st of July. It’ll take a couple of weeks for them just to read the record, and after that they’ll have to hear witnesses, so one thing we can be sure of is that the executions scheduled for the 10th will be called off.…”

  Tootsie wrote, “… Say postponed.…”

  Danny wrote, “… It’s the 10th, and Nick and Bart aren’t dying this sunny summer day! I told you, Toots! I told you …!”

  Tootsie wrote, “.. I’m glad too, boy.…”

  Danny wrote, “… I came up here with the Boss on the 11th—my third trip. We expected to sit in on the hearings of the Commission, but it’s meeting behind closed doors. Even so, we have high hopes. I look at it this way: Fuller never would’ve appointed the Commission if he didn’t mean to commute the sentences. He’s a politician, and with an eye on the White House, he needs the support of labor. How would he get that if he let Nick and Bart die in the Chair? Not quite having the guts to come right out and say they were railroaded, he’s going to let the Commission pave the way and then grab the credit. You watch.…”

  Tootsie wrote, “…Watch what? You don’t seem to realize who’s on that Commission. The head of it is Abbott Lowell, president of Harvard, and the others are this Stratton, president of M.I.T., and a writing-guy name of Robert Grant. You watch, boy. I haven’t got the heart. All three of those babies wear white silk stockings, and none of them means to die on the barricades. Lowell, Stratton, Grant—you ask me, those are just three different ways of spelling Thayer.…”

  * * *

  Miss Forrest wrote, “… I see where the hearings ended today, and I know you and all the others must be very much on edge while awaiting the decision of the Commission. I trust that it’s favorable and that it comes soon, because I miss our evening walks, but you’re doing valuable work up there, and nothing should be allowed to interfere with it. My dearest hope is that some day you will be able to say you played a part in obtaining justice for innocent men. I’ve thought many times of that first talk we had about Sacco and Vanzetti—I remember so very well the green throw-away you had in one of your schoolbooks—and it seems strange to me now that I could ever have had the opinions I then expressed.…”

  Danny wrote, “… I miss them too, Miss Forrest….”

  Miss Forrest wrote,“… It won’t seem so lonely if you write….”

  Danny wrote, “…It’s a little after seven in the evening, and I’m dashing this off in a lunch-wagon just before going back to the State House. The Governor was supposed to announce the Commission’s report at five this afternoon, but he didn’t show up, and after waiting around for a couple of hours, we rushed out for coffee-and. We’re rushing right back in a minute.…”

  And Danny wrote, “… I’ve written and written, and still I haven’t said what I did after the Boss told me to get out and go to bed. I got out, all right, but bed tonight would’ve been like a grave, so I went for a walk. I walked for a long time, and finally, around two in the morning, I found myself back on Beacon Hill. I don’t know what I expected to find there in all those fine old houses that stare at you from rumple-glass windows, like eyes with cataracts—but it wasn’t all those lights upstairs and down, as if it was early in the evening. There were lights everywhere, along Beacon and Charles, all around Louisburg Square, and up and down the crooked lanes between the Common and the Embankment, and there were many people in the streets, going slowly and talking quietly and never laughing, and there were policemen in many doorways, and they watched everybody that went by, but very few of us looked very long at them. It was as if we were ashamed—and we were ashamed, really, because every part of America is American, and the dirty things that happen in one part make every other part dirty too. Boston belongs to me as much as it belongs to the Bostonians, and the whole history of New England is as much mine as theirs (more mine, maybe), and I knew as I walked the streets tonight that I carried more dirt on me than I’d ever be able to wash away.…”

  THE TIME NOW IS….

  Saying little, they went northward through the lamplit park, across the groundswell of the Green, along the Mall, and over a hunchbacked bridge to the Ramble and the Reservoir, and then, saying nothing at all, they left the park and went westward to the black Hudson below the Drive, and there, on the splintered stringers of a dock, they paused for a while to watch the moving water and the broken candles of light that lay upon it. A gull came from the darkness to perch on a pile, and beyond it, on the far bank, the running legend of an electric-sign ran off to make way for running time.

  [THE TIME NOW IS … 10:04. In an hour and fifty-six minutes, seven years of agony would end, as Nick and Bart had always known they would end, in death. The peddler of fish and the shoemaker, the simple and ignorant foreigners that spoke your own language in such a way as to make you the alien, the gentler-than-Jesus wops, the stainless among the stained—they had known the finish from the start. You had known nothing at any time, and even now, with only a hundred and sixteen minutes left of their lives, you still knew nothing because you still had hope. Judge Thayer had said, “Did you see what I did to those anarchistic bastards?” but you still had hope. For what, though? In the name of Christ, for what—a miracle? Yes! You believed in God, then? Yes! Enough to say a prayer? Yes! Then why in hell didn’t you say it?]

  They stood very close to each other in the spiced and small-sound night. They heard the same river-rustle, the same city-murmur, and the same muffled cough of West Shore locomotives. They heard the same footsteps in the distance and the dark, the same fragments of speech and laughter, and they were served the same flavors by the same currents of air—the flavor leached by the river out of three hundred miles of New York, the flavor of cut grass, of roofing-tar, of damp ground and dry stone, of burnt gasoline and seven million burning lives. They stood very close together, and each could smell the other’s hair.

  [THE TIME NOW IS … 10:21. They knew the exact time they were going to die, and they knew the exact place, and they knew that nothing would change that time and place, and they knew too that they would die there and then not by accident but by design—and it was beyond you to stop wondering how you would feel if this were the far end of your own life, and all that remained of you belonged to a piece of machinery called a clock, which, wound, relentlessly told you the rate at which you were dying, THE TIME NOW IS … 10:29.]

  He struck a match and touched it to a cigarette, and a milk of smoke flowed into the sphere of light, and then he flicked the flame away, and it shocked itself out on the dock. He drew a few times, looking at the woman’s profile as it brightened for the fire and dimmed for the ember, and then she turned full-face to him, and suddenly the spaces they had lived in alone for so long merged, and they stood mouth to mouth, each seeking to absorb and be absorbed.

  [THE TIME NOW IS … 10:38, and while you watched, the 8 vanished, and a 9 appeared, and then directly all four digits were gone, and a minute-long parade of letters began, its incandescence emerging from nowhere on the right and marching straight to nowhere on the left, THE TIME NOW is … 10:40.]

  “I’ve always thought you had the most beautiful name in the world,” he said, “a name to be whispered, a whisper in itself, a sound I’ve always been ab
le to hear simply by thinking the words. I’m thinking them now, and they’re saying themselves to me, but very softly, and they fade like a breath on a windowpane.”

  [THE TIME NOW IS … 10:51, and you knew that the time was over when what you wanted so much had to be taken in dreams. There was no need for dreams now, unless this too was a dream, and there was nothing to wait long for, nothing to stop you—except two lives that still had sixty-nine minutes to run. The thought shamed you, and you felt heavy in the heart, because the shame could never now be shaken.]

  Neither of them spoke as they turned from the river to the park and entered upon a dark path among the granite boulders and the trees. They walked with their arms touching, as if manacled, and now and then they pressed closer to touch at the hips and thighs, and once each felt the other tremble and for a moment broke away.

  [You were far downstream now, and the sign was hidden behind rises in the ground, but time was an always-outgoing tide, and once you were aware of it, you could tell its flow with your mind, THE TIME NOW IS … 11:19.]

  From the lower end of the Drive, they went eastward to Amsterdam, down Amsterdam (soon Tenth) to the school, and then across town again along a block of brass-railed brownstones (he remembered four years of afternoons, four years of waiting)—and they were on the diagonal orange gash of Broadway.

  [THE TIME NOW IS … 11:53.]

  Not far from the entrance to the teacher’s house, a small crowd had collected around a news-stand in front of a cigar-store. On the stacked papers stood a loud-speaker, and from its tin throat came tin words. The gathering listened in silence, and people passing listened too, some lingering to hear more and others moving on without pause. Above heads turned sideways and cocked to catch the crackled broadcast, Dan saw a clock in the window of the store.

  [THE TIME NOW IS … 11:59.]

  The long needle of the second-hand moved into still another sweep, and the final minute for two lives began.