A Man Without Shoes

by John Sanford

  He had something lots better than a fence: he had a sheet of parchment with enough give in it to reach from the Rio de las Plumas to Monterey. Over that he owned everything to the sky, and under it everything to the center of the earth. He owned, when they trespassed on his air, the clouds and the shadow of clouds, the day and the night and passing birds, the wind, the dust, and such sweat as God let fall in the form of rain. He owned without question the Bay of San Francisco, the right of passage into any of its tributaries, and therefore all the fish-choked waters of the great central valley. He owned, nor was this disputed, the mountains that made it a valley and the produce of its floor—more food than he could eat, sell, store, burn, or give away. He owned the timber that covered the hills like hair, timber so thick that Paul couldn’t’ve worked it without forty miles of tape over his calluses. He owned granaries, vineyards, orchards, sweet wells, and ships. He owned one thousand hogs, two thousand horses and mules, twelve thousand head of cattle, and fifteen thousand sheep. He owned ferries, forts, bridges, roads, an army with brass cannon, and a distillery. He owned hides, tools (they say he operated thirty plows at a clip), cloth, gunpowder, cordage, and a warehouse full of Mexican reals. He owned all and sundry—except a saw-mill. His name was Señor Johann Augustus Sutter.

  Marshall, did you say—Jim W. Marshall? Oh, he was nobody in particular, a carpenter, as the story goes, a wagon-builder from the State of Jersey, and they tell of him starting west in ’33 or thereabouts (anyway, it was in Andy Jackson’s second term), and he knocked about Indiana and Illinois for a good ten years before sticking his whiskers out at Oregon. He made it along about snowfall in ’44 and wintered there, but whether that’s true or false, one thing’s sure: he got to drifting southward in ’45, switching back and forth between his old trade and farming, and never setting fire to much beside his pipe. He was an ordinary sort of man, nobody in particular.

  Señor Sutter wanted a saw-mill. For a long time, the richest man in the world had been whipsawing redwood along the coast and shipping it to himself at his fort by way of the bay and the Sacramento. Naturally, that was wasteful: it was big overhead and slow business. Now, if he had his own saw-mill near some of his own timber, and if a tote-road could be built straight overland to the fort, there’d be another smidgeon of profit when accounts were cast up, and the richest man in the world would be a smidgeon richer than before. He wanted a saw-mill, and you couldn’t hardly blame him.

  Where did this Marshall come in—Jim W. Marshall? Some time in the summer of ’47, Jim grew out of a farming-spell and dusted off his hammer in time to be boss-carpenter at the fort when the idea of that mill was riding the Switzer hardest—and one day he found himself packed off to the hills to scout for a site. Pushing up to the headwaters of Weber Creek, he made his way to the South Fork of the American and stumbled onto a little flat name of Coloma. It laid nice, with the river taking a swift bend around a gravel-bank, and the whole shooting-match belted in by a stand of timber lush enough to stop a snake: there was Sutter’s mill-site, and no mistake.

  Back at the fort, Marshall told the Señor about his find, and the two of them entered into a Whereas: the Señor put up the money and the men, and the carpenter threw in his know-how, and when the mill got to running, the profits were to be parted down the middle. Somewhere around September of ’47, Jim Marshall and his gang set out for Coloma Flat, and with winter coming on, the first thing they did was raise them a double cabin, one side for the men, and the other for Pete Wimmer (some spell it Weimer) and his wife, a woman brought along to do the stove-work on the salt salmon and boiled wheat. By New Year’s Day of ’48, the mill-frame was up, and a brush dam and sluice-gate likewise. He knew how to get a job done, that Jim Marshall, and there was only one thing gave him even a little bit of trouble, and that was the tail-race. It hadn’t been dug deep enough for the mill-wheel, so he put a bunch of Indians to work picking out rock, and at night he kept the gate open to sluice off the loose earth.

  One afternoon late in January, Jim Marshall took a stroll along the forty-odd rods of the tail-race to see whether it was coming to hand, and down near where it spilled back into the river, his eye was caught by something laying on the bottom against a slab of granite. He bent over and stuck his hand in, and he pulled it out with a nubbin of yellowish stuff about half the size of a pea.…

  Four days later, a clerk rapped on the door of Señor Sutter’s private office at the fort and announced Mr. Jim Marshall, boss-carpenter. Ah, the mill must be finished!

  Soaking wet like a Hard Shell, and with eyes bugging like apples in a sock, Jim crowded past the clerk and slammed the door in his phiz. “I want two bowls of water!” Jim said. “Two bowls of water!”

  Sutter shrugged and ladled them out of a bucket.

  “Now I want a stick of redwood,” Jim said, “and a length of twine, and two squares of sheet copper!”

  Sutter asked him what all that junk was for.

  “To make scales!” Jim said. “Scales!”

  Scales? But the apothecary had ready-made ones.

  “Send out for them!” Jim said. “Right now!”

  “But, please,” Sutter said, “tell me first of my mill.”

  “God damn your mill!” Jim said. “I want scales!”

  Some clerk made a round-trip in the rain.

  “Lock the door!” Jim said.

  “No more will I do,” Sutter said. “I ask of my mill, and you demand scales. I ask again of my mill, and you order me to lock the door. Are you betrunken, Americano? Are you verrückt?”

  Jim Marshall hauled out his poke and rolled the yellow metal bead into his palm. “Look at this!” he said. “Look at this, you Swiss cheese!”

  Sutter looked. “Iron pyrites,” he said.

  “Guess again!” Jim said.

  “Sulphuret of copper. Mica, maybe.”

  “Jesus Please Christ!” Jim said. “It’s GOLD! I struck GOLD for us—GOLD! What do you think of that?”

  “What do I think?” Sutter said, and he turned to the window and looked out at the pouring-down rain. “I think the richest man in the world is now ruinated.”

  He was right, the Swiss Señor, right as that rain. Oh, he got his mill finally: when every other living soul was out picking up gold-flakes, a band of Mormons stood by him long enough to finish it. He got his mill, all right. But what did his clerks do when the secret broke, and his field-hands, and his ferrymen, and his army? Did they hang around for their thirty bucks a year and found? They did, like hell! They dropped whatever they were lugging—pens, oars, reins, guns—and lit out for the diggings.

  That was only a starter. In a couple of weeks, the Señor was overrun by every ball-bearing man in San Francisco, and six months later the flood rolled in across the plains and around the Horn and over the Isthmus. They took his grain, his grapes, his whisky, and his gunpowder; they took his horses, hogs, mules, and sheep; they took the deer from his forests and the fish from his streams; they took his three sons (shot one, made another shoot himself, and drowned the third); they took the birds from his air and the dust from under his feet; they took his land, they took his clothes, they took all that he owned between the sky and the center of the earth. Maybe he should’ve built that fence.

  He sued. The complaint was thick enough to hide the judge, and it laid claim to San Francisco, Sacramento, and all the rest of the twenty-two-hour Mexican grant, valued at two hundred million dollars American; damages were prayed for from seventeen thousand named defendants, along with the accrued interest on those damages; the sum of twenty-five million dollars was demanded from the State of California for confiscating private roads, bridges, mills, watercourses, piers, and warehouses; and over and above all that, the United States of America was alleged to be responsible for a failure to maintain public order, resulting in a further loss to the plaintiff of fifty million dollars. Señor Sutter sued everybody but the real defendants—God and Columbus.

  Five years after the filing of suit, the highest
court in California (Thompson, Ch.J.) rendered judgment in favor of the plaintiff, and a quarter of a century later, in the city of Washington, D. C, the plaintiff dropped dead on the street: he was still trying to collect.

  Marshall? What happened to Jim W. Marshall? Nothing special: he died too.

  [… The near and the far: the city falling away from your feet, and the blue mountains stopped in their tracks, like waves in a picture. It was time to go, you thought, it was time to see more, and you walked down the hill toward the Ferry Building, the door.…]

  PAUL BUNYAN AND FRIEND

  The trouble with Paul was, he had a big head. He got it from knocking over all those Michigan saplings, and before long he was thinking he could knock over anything made of wood. In Michigan, maybe, but not in Oregon. You ever hear the story?

  He come out here a while back to make an estimate on a logging operation, and he no sooner seen his first stand of Douglas fir than he said, “I guess I should’ve brung m’lawn-mower.” That didn’t go down quite like he expected: nobody laughed. We just stood around waiting, and I’m here to say that when an Oregonian waits, he can outwait the Final Judgment. Paul couldn’t take that long to show off, and after a week or so, he said, “Well, what does a man have to do to get a ‘Gee-whiz!’ out of you Modocs?”

  We kept on whittling, and he got sore, and taking out a jackknife of his own, he grabbed the top of the nearest tree and said, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to snip this sprout clean through the butt!” and slaunch! he made a cruel swipe at that fir. A long strip of something peeled back over his fist, and he stuck out a finger to stop the tree from falling. Nothing fell. What’d peeled off was a layer of the knife-blade.

  “Must be that diamond-wood I hear about,” he said, and strink! he took another slash. That time the blade broke off and flowed away red-hot. “Mighty hard piece of wood,” he said. “I better yank it up by the tail.” He took a good holt—only one hand, of course—and give an honest tug. The tree didn’t budge enough to shake the smell off it. Paul was owly-eyed by then, and he tried to hide it by saying, “Must’ve lost m’balance,” but we noticed that when he clapped a fresh holt on, he was using both his graspers.

  We’d heard that when Paul really fastened onto a stick, the pulp oozed out between his fingers like mud, but he couldn’t squeeze this one enough to make a wood-borer switch holes. With both arms around the butt, he foamed and faunched till Oregon spun twice counterclockwise underfoot, but nothing else moved except a stream of pure block-salt down Paul’s back. He looked bad.

  Well, we were still waiting for something out of the ordinary to happen, and finally Paul put on a silly sort of a grin and said, “No damn hands at all,” and down he knelt and went to work with his choppers. He gnawed for two hours and a half, but when he got done, all he had to show us was a hogshead of tooth-tartar. Somebody let out a laugh.

  That was all Paul had to hear, and cupping his hands, he bellowed, “Babe, come on out here to this unnatural state and bring m’private ax!”

  He must’ve used two lungs, because before the echo died away, the Blue Ox was in from Michigan with the ax in his mouth. We moved in a little for a look at the tool, and there’s no denying it was the finest double-bitter ever made. The blade’d been tempered in a forest fire fanned by a cyclone and a tidal wave raised by a typhoon, the cutting-edges’d been ground so keen they only had two dimensions left, and the helve was one whole petrified hickory.

  “I’m just going to use the flat of it,” Paul said. “That’ll be sharp enough,” and squinch! he swang. The side of that blade cut a hole in the air that never healed, but that’s all it did cut, and a couple of people yawned.

  “Oregon’s sure hell for rusting tools,” Paul said, and splinch! he swang a second swing. All that happened was, that ax-head puckered up like a tin bottle-cap and fell off.

  Paul laughed, but the laugh was so full of hollowness that there wasn’t any room for the sound to make a noise in, and it came out silent. “Only been horsing all along,” he said, and he turned to the Blue Ox. “Been saving this weed for you, Babe. Push it over, and let’s get on home.”

  I’ll say this for Babe: he was ready. And I’ll say this too; he was willing. But that’s all I’ll say, because he wasn’t able. He set his poll against that fir, and he shoved so fierce that his hind legs passed his front legs, and he had to move backwards to go forwards, and all of a sudden he quit altogether and sat down. Paul rushed over to see what the matter was, and it didn’t take him long. “Hernia!” he said, and he laid down and started to cry.

  At that instant, the sun skipped four hours and set in four seconds, and we were all about to go home for supper when a voice came out of darkness so dark that you had to light a match to see whether the match you just struck was lit. The voice said, “You ought to call in another man, Mr. Bunyan.”

  Paul stopped crying long enough to roar, “Ain’t no other man can do what I can’t, and if there was, he couldn’t do it!”

  The voice said, “I hear some pure things about a natural man from down south.”

  “Can’t none of ’em be true,” Paul said. “There never was a southern man could fight his way out of his mother’s belly.”

  “The one I’ve got in mind has quite a name down home,” the voice said.

  “Local boy,” Paul said. “Couldn’t heft a box-car.”

  “That’s true,” the voice said. “I’d tip over. I have to have one in each hand.”

  “I!” Paul said, and he sat up. “Who the hell’re you?”

  “The name’s John Henry,” the voice said, and then the darkness moved aside and got out of the sun’s way, and what we saw was a nice-looking colored lad dressed in a fresh suit of overhalls.

  “Pure proud to know you, Mr. Bunyan,” he said.

  “By the jowls of the Great Hog!” Paul said. “A junior eight-ball!”

  “A Negro,” John said, “and a natural man.”

  “Natural man!” Paul said. “How old are you, son?”

  “Eleven,” John said. “Eleven, going on twenty-two.”

  “Holy Ham-hock!” Paul said. “You ain’t even learned to count yet. For your benefit, twelve comes after eleven.”

  “That’s Michigan-counting,” John said. “I don’t grow one year at a time. I double.”

  Paul stared at him. “That means you ain’t had but one birthday so far!” he said.

  “Naturally,” John said. “I’m a natural man.”

  “Well, you ain’t going to look so natural when you get back to New Orleens,” Paul said. “Put up your feelers and square off!”

  “I don’t want to fight you, Mr. Bunyan,” John said.

  Paul’s lip curled so hard that his teeth curled with it. “I thought you was black,” he said, “but I guess you’re a colored boy of a different color.”

  “I’m black, all right,” John said. “I’m a natural black man.”

  “Black, nothing!” Paul said. “You’re as yellow as a quarantine flag!”

  “I was brought up not to hit an old man,” John said.

  Paul got madder than God ever did at Old Horny. He swole up like a toad, and he kept right on swelling. He pumped rage into his skin till his pores opened wide enough to hold silver dollars. His hair uncoiled, split nine ways, and knotted itself. He began to sweat live steam, and he ground his grinders so hard that his spit turned to glass, all the while stomping with such power that he made footprints through his boot-soles. He sure looked put out.

  “You’re colored,” he said, “but that’s only a crime in Dixie. And you’re just a pukey boy, but that ain’t a crime nowhere, only a misdemeanor. But you don’t have respect, and that’s a felony even in hell. I hate to do it, son, but I’ve got to learn you better, so wrap yourself around something and hold on tight: I’m going to put the clouts to you.”

  Paul snaked off his belt, and while he was taking a few practice-swings, the boy walked over to that troublesome fir, and without so much as
a wheeze, he yanked half a mile of it out of the ground. Paul was dumb-struck.

  “It’s in kind of tight,” John said, “but it isn’t pure stuck,” and again he heaved, and another nine hundred yards of timber came up.

  Paul put his belt on again. “Typey type of tree,” he said.

  “It ought to be rooting out real soon,” John said, and now he began to pull the tree up hand-over-hand, like it was a fish-line. The more that came out, the more there was left, and the going got harder all the time. The boy fell to unscrewing it, and that helped for a while, but it wasn’t long before he was sweating sheets of water like plate-glass. Paul swabbed him off with his shirt, but when he came to wringing it out, it was bone-dry. “I don’t sweat out” the boy said. “I sweat in”

  Now the tree wouldn’t even unscrew. The boy tried it first one way and then the other, but it seemed to be jammed for fair. He lost his temper, and drawing back, he cocked a fist and threw it: it only went in elbow-deep. “Like a little old peckerwood!” he cried. “I must be losing my natural power!”

  “Listen,” Paul said. “I been measuring this wood, and you’ve tore up a good seven thousand miles of it. If that’s losing your power, you ought to be glad. You might kill yourself just by staying alive.”

  But all the boy could say was, “Only eleven years old, and I’m losing my power!”

  “You ain’t losing it,” Paul said. “You just ain’t got all of it yet. When you’re full-growed, son, you’ll move the globe without a pry.”

  Well, Paul might’ve been no great shakes as a logger any more, but that was a fine remark even for a has-been, and it pleasured the boy. “Maybe you’re right, Mr. Bunyan,” he said. “Here I’ve been thinking all along I was a natural man. I guess I’m still only a natural boy.”

  “And boys get wore out,” Paul said. “I just wanted to see how long you’d last.”