A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  The woman said, “Is that one of the parts of yourself that you left behind? Because if you think so, you’re wrong: it went with you. It’s still with you.”

  “Not any more,” he said, “not since last night,” and he realized, as soon as the words were in flight, that no other words in the language could possibly overtake them.

  “You once asked me how old I was,” the woman said, “and I told you that I was old enough to be your mother. From then on, I was your mother, but as long as you didn’t know it, I was willing to let you do anything with me that you’d’ve done with any other stranger—but I’m not a stranger any more, Dan; deep down in your mind, I’m what you always wanted me to be.” She looked at her hands, at a picture on the wall, at the ceiling, the floor, and then nothing. “But it comes so soon,” she said. “It comes so soon, Dan. I’d hoped to have a few years, three or four at the most, and they’d’ve meant little to you, because you’d still’ve been a young man when they were over, but they’d’ve meant a great deal to me, because I’d’ve been middle-aged. Sooner or later, you’d’ve realized what you were using me for, or found someone your own age, or simply grown out of me, and I’d not’ve minded, because I’d’ve had all the time between now and then, and whatever it amounted to, it would’ve been enough. But I never thought it’d be only one day, Dan—one day!”

  “The way you talk, what I found out today was a bad thing, but I think it was a good thing, and I’m only sorry I didn’t find it out long ago, because then I’d’ve been with you all this time instead of with my mother. As it is, I’ve never really been with you till just now, when I came in here and called you Juno. For four years before that, whether I knew it or not, I was always somewhere else and always with another person. to me, that was the bad thing, and I’m glad it’s over and done with tonight instead of next year, because tonight, for the first time, I can be inside of you.”

  The woman shook her head. “Not tonight, next year, or ever,” she said.

  He responded to a question that had not been asked, saying, “She’ll always be only my mother now …,” and then he paused. “Why do you say that, Juno? What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re going away, and you’re not coming back.”

  “I never said anything about going away.”

  “I know, Dan, but I did.”

  He took a moment to understand and another to believe, and he said, “You don’t mean I’m going, then; you mean you’re putting me out. After four years of being friends and a day of even better, you’re putting me out!”

  “You put yourself out, Dan.”

  “There couldn’t be anything crazier than that on earth! I came back here because there was no other place left that I gave a damn about and no other person that I cared to see—not to say goodbye! If I’d gotten all I wanted in only one night, I’d’ve told you so this morning, and that would’ve been the end of it, but I couldn’t forget four years in a couple of hours even if I tried! Nobody could—nobody but you! You’re the one that’s had enough!”

  “I’ve had what a school always gets from a pupil: nothing. You’ve been graduated, Dan, and now I wish you’d go.”

  [In a little while, she’d turn on the light in the bedroom and draw the shade, and then she’d unpin her watch and wind it (THE TIME NOW IS … a matter of life and death), and then she’d stand before a long narrow glass, staring at a staring image in another room, an identical life in an identical world, and then she’d take off her clothes and begin to brush her hair, and the unspoken word “forest” would be heard, and as she moved her arms, her breasts would swing, making no one lustful except herself—and then she’d be lying in bed in the dark, and there’d be no hands to ply her passion but her own.] He went toward the door.

  “Dan …!” the woman said.

  He felt as if he had been sandbagged to a stop, and there were seconds of silence before he remembered saying, “What?” and letting the door swing shut, he turned.

  Apparent to him at once were the origin and extent of the woman’s disorder, always inoperable and now past even relief: no less than his mother had become his mother again, Miss Forrest had become Miss Forrest, and he knew late what the teacher had known from the beginning, that their union had ended with his first sight of her bare of the raiment worn in his mother’s guise. Adorned as his mother, she had enjoyed an intermission and ripened before ripening eyes, and her day-by-day accumulation of age had gone unseen; stripped to Miss Forrest, she had withered under the sudden weight of time loaded on in mass, and her forty years were evident beyond all chance of change.

  “You tell me to get out,” he said, “and when I start to go, you stop me, and last night it was all right to do a certain thing, and to-night it’s all wrong, a crime, a sin. I’m twisted around. I’m covered with hands, picking and picking at me. I don’t know what you want any more. I don’t understand you.”

  The woman looked at him, saying nothing, and in a spasm of dismay that clenched within him like a cold hand, he saw her fumble for the long line of buttons that fastened her dress. He thought of escape, but powerless to inflict so deep an injury on her, he remained to watch her inflict one equally deep on herself, and when the dress parted, he was seized of the sense that she had made an incision in her own body. The few pieces of pink silk that she displayed for him seemed somehow public now, and they had no meaning other than the meaning of laundry. He stood with his back against the door, staring at what he had tried for so long to visualize, and shrunk with regret, he knew at last how much more perfect than the actual had been his dreams.

  “You can’t go away now, Dan,” the woman said. “If you stay, I’ll let you do whatever you want to me, the thing we did last night or any other thing you ever thought of, dirty as well as clean. I won’t mind so long as you don’t go away.” [But you did worse: you stayed where you were, helplessly watching a vast and suicidal error.] “For God’s sake, Dan, don’t let me stand here like this!”

  “You don’t have to stand there,” he said, and he thought it strange that he sounded so pitiless when all he felt was pity. “You can go inside and lie down.”

  She turned away, and he watched her in anguish, knowing that this last of many views of her would supersede the rest, and that henceforth, whenever he brought her back to mind, he would see her body in silk like flaccid flesh, her legs in sagging stockings, and her feet in sensible shoes. He shivered a little, and then he followed her into the bedroom.

  * * *

  When he left the woman, shortly before midnight, he crossed town to Madison Avenue, and there he boarded a Harlem-bound trolley, riding the rear platform and looking back over the spun-out rails. Near 72nd Street, a passenger signaled for a stop, and before alighting, he thrust a newspaper behind the controller against which Dan was leaning. Part of a caption was visible—“…EXECUTED IN BAY STATE”—and part of a column:

  … to the very shadow of the Chair, the murderer Vanzetti clung to the fiction of innocence. In a statement made on the eve of paying the penalty for his crimes, the convicted killer declared: “If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street-corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of men as now we do by accident. Our words, our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives, lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph! “To this stubborn unrepentance, the doomed radical’s final utterance was in marked contrast. With Madeiros and Sacco already out of the way, Vanzetti was brought into the death-chamber, where he shook hands with Warden Hendry and thanked him for his kindness. He shook hands also with Deputy Warden Hogsett, Prison Physician McLaughlin, and two of the four guards. While the straps were being adjusted about his arms and body, he said, quite gently for an anarchist, “I now wish to forgive
some people for what they are doing to me.” He did not speak again, and thus ended a case that.…

  [“In the end,” you’d said “they must’ve hated all they’d ever loved” and the words—like stepped-on ants, they kept on crawling—were hard to kill. How could you have been so wholly wrong? How could you have learned so little from the good shoemaker and the poor fish-peddler? How could you have breathed the same air and been rained on by the same rain—and grown down while they grew tall?]

  IF IT HAD NOT BEEN FOR THIS THING

  Walking from the car-line, he passed people sprawled on the steps of brownstone stoops, and people framed in the light or dark squares of windows, and people strolling in the warm night, and people squatting along the curbs, and people [living out their lives talking at street-corners to scorning men]. When he reached his house, he paused for a moment [to take one more last look at yourself, you wondered, or at the stars and the spaces between the stars, or at the funeral of God, or merely at the beginning of another day?], and then he went indoors and upstairs.

  In the parlor, long since his bedroom, a light had been left on in the chandelier, and the cover of the couch had been turned down, but knowing that sleep could not yet dominate him, he seated himself at the table, and for a while he watched the smoke of his cigarette climb the static air and disappear. Behind him, a door opened, and he heard bare feet brush across the floor, but he sat motionless until his mother spoke his name and put her hands on his shoulders, and then, rising quickly, he moved away. He was under a compulsion to look at her, however, and he turned to dwell briefly on the insinuations her body made against her nightgown. Beyond her, in the doorway, stood the hack-driver.

  “You look tired, son,” the woman said.

  “I could fall on my face.”

  “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “I’ve been going to bed for over eighteen years. You’d think I’d be rested by this time.”

  “That depends on what you do to need a rest from.”

  “I do a most exhausting thing: I live all day.”

  “All day and half the night,” the woman said.

  “I live every single minute, and it’s killing me.”

  “I believe you. When did you eat last?’

  “I don’t remember. I’m trying to see how far I’ll get on nothing.”

  “I can tell you,” the woman said. “On the kind of living you’ve been doing, you’ll get nowhere.”

  “Nowhere,” her son said, and then he stood listening. Twenty-four blocks down Park Avenue, the head-end of the Owl, bound for Boston, broke from the tunnel with a mounting drumfire of trucks on track. “Nowhere,” he said, “but I’m not on rails, God damn it—not me!” and he strode to the map, and tearing loose the dangling crayon, he jabbed it at the red blot in the east, saying, “This is nowhere,” and then violently scoring the map from east to west and north to south, he said, “And this is somewhere, and I’m a son-of-a-bitch and a bastard if I don’t see it all! Those God damn lines are for me, because, God damn it, one of us Johnsons is going to die satisfied!” and then he dropped the crayon and covered his face and began to cry, and for a moment, as the Owl passed by, no one heard him.

  PART THREE

  MY OWN, MY NATIVE LAND

  Beyond fall fields candlewicked with cut-down corn, thinning maples rose red and yellow against the Jersey hills, and in the early-morning air hung a fine bitter smoke of smoldering leaves. A faint frost still clung to surfaces hidden from the sun, and birds like quarter-notes of music shook dew-diamonds from the long staff made by the telegraph-wires.

  [You stood at the roadside, looking back at the Pierce-Arrow, now just disappearing over a rise, and the last thing your father had said revived itself in your mind: “God knows I’m crazy about your mother, kid, but if I was your age all over again, she’d have to do more to catch me than lay down twice without a license. She’d have to get up and run like hell afterwards, because I’d be on my way to the Wind River Range, and Jackson Hole, and Tanforan, and The Dalles—all those places that’ll always be only names on a map. I swapped ’em for a wife, and (who knows?) maybe I got the best of the bargain. She’s still a lot softer to make love to than a mountain—and come to think of it, there’s a sure cure for my blues. Drop in on us when you get back, kid, but knock first” And then he’d laughed, you remembered, and gone.]

  A southbound truck slowed down, and Dan caught it in motion and slid in alongside the driver, saying, “Thanks. Going far?”

  “Camden,” the driver said. “That far enough?”

  “Not quite, but it’ll help.”

  “Where you bound for?”

  Dan pointed straight ahead through the windshield. “There,” he said.

  “That takes in all but what’s in back of us.”

  “That too, if the world’s as round as they say.”

  [The blood had faded, and the meat-wagons had hauled away the entrails and the amputations, and the souvenir-hunters had long since picked over and pocketed the buttons, the buckles, the odds and ends of battle, but the black guns were still here and their spare rounds still neatly stacked near the limbers, and the rifle-pits and the lunettes, a little shallower now, a little worn by the snow and rain, were still concaved in the ground, and the same scarred boulders lay on Little Round Top, and the same trees, only sixty-four years older, screened the High Water Mark from the Angle, and there were stone words on stone memorials for the nine thousand dead, the tar-heels and shoeless crackers of Marse Robert and the foreigners and blue bummers of Meade, yet for all the torn-off legs tumbled end-over-end through the wheat, for all the furrows plowed with faces and the holes dug with shattered bone, nothing had been lost here but lives and nothing won but praise: there were more slaves than ever, and there would be more Gettysburgs until they were free.]

  The sun was going down when he crossed the fields among trees that, standing in their fallen leaves, seemed to be disrobing for the night, and when he reached the first open barn on the road to Chambersburg, he walked into its dark blue gloom and stretched himself out on a skiff of hay. He heard a meadow-lark practicing on a flute, and he heard sparrows making cheap talk in the loft, and he heard a truck pass along the pike, its tire-treads sounding like adhesive-tape torn, and then he heard nothing.

  [To see it all—the whole brawling, bullying, bragging, bamboozling, cant-ranting, horny, leather-necked, high-riding, sweet-talking, home-hungry, and heart-racingly handsome mongrel called America ! to see it all, you dreamed, to see it all…!]

  BUCKEYE JOHNNY APPLESEED

  They say he first turned up in Ohio around about 1801—on Zane’s Trace, it was, along Licking Creek—and they say he came leading a pack-horse loaded to the hocks with burlap bags, but they didn’t say (because they didn’t know) what the bags contained. Being he was a black-eyed man, a queer thing in those parts, and being he kind of kept to himself, all the queerer for a stranger, he let himself in for a little side-watching, and no matter if he did overlook to bring a gun. They say, the ones that made it their business, that he marched out onto a cleared piece of land and drawed something out of the topmost of his bags, which he buried it in a slew of shallow holes and went away, and when he was gone, it still being their business, they say they got down on their shins and poked about for whatever he’d cached (it figured to be gold), but only finding dirt as deep as they dug, they tried to pass him off as addled, but all the same they felt like chumps for being hankypankied by an out-of-stater.

  They say this identical black-eyed man shown up next along the Muskingum, still with that pack-animal and still with those bags, and they say that there too he made some hocus-pocus over holes in the ground, and there too nobody got richer for scratching where it itched. And now the story began to get around, to pass from hand to hand (instead of the gold that was never found), and you heard that the black-eyed man, and his monkeyshines, had been seen wherever there was bottom-land and topsoil—on the Scioto and the Hocking, on White Woman Cre
ek, on all the Miamis and the Maumee, on the Big Walnut and the Black Fork of the Mohican—and you heard other things as well, how he played with bear-cubs while the bear looked on or snoozed, how he walked barefoot and damn near b. a. in the snow, how he found his way just by following his nose, like a bee or a bird, and you heard how he’d douse his fire if insects flew too near the flames.

  After a time, they say they took to expecting him in the spring, looking forward to his queer but quiet ways, and when he would finally arrive—with his horse and his bags, but never with a gun—they would feel good, like they did about a rain, and they would talk to him sometimes, and some would be sad as he went about his fruitless work of hiding nothing in plain view of all, and now they dug no more in the loose soil after he’d moved on. They let it lay—out of respect, you might say.

  Fruitless? Not the longest day a man ever lived. Nobody said fruitless when the apple-trees came, because that’s what he’d had in those burlap bags: orchards for Ohio!

  [It’s a good thing you’re dead, Johnny. It’s a good thing you didn’t live to see what they did to your well-loved trees. The trees are gone, Johnny, the trees and the plants from the other seed you scattered: catnip, snakeweed, hoarhound, dog-fennel, and pennyroyal. It’s a good thing you’re all done coming down the pike in your coffee-sack clothes and that stew-kettle you wore for a hat—you’d’ve been hot, Johnny, because there’s very little shade.

  [They say you could stick pins in your flesh and feel no pain, but you’d’ve flinched for your trees if you’d been here to see them brought to their knees with a double-bitted ax. They took fifteen years to grow and fifteen minutes to kill, and even that was held to be slow (only one tree would fall at a time), and people fell to using fire, and whole groves were sent to hell in a hand-basket. It’s a good thing you’re some place else now, Johnny. It’s a good thing you’re never coming back to spoiled soil held together by concrete and lashed down with steel rail and copper wire.