A STRANGE LITTLE FELLA with an accent,” is how Earl described the new resident to Mely. He didn’t know where the man had settled or if he had brought anyone with him. There’d been rumors that a man had been seen across the lake tending to a grove and building a house, but no one had bothered to go find out for sure. In the years since Earl’s last publicity efforts, settlers had occasionally straggled into and out of the area; there was no reason to get excited about one in particular. If he remained more than six months, well maybe then it might be worthwhile to talk to him. Such was the attitude of the townsfolk. But for Earl, a new face always meant new possibilities, a chance, however small, of something exciting coming to pass. That small, wistful pebble would glow briefly with hope, a ruby catching the light, even though nothing had ever come of new blood before. The settlers would always either move away out of fear or boredom, or assimilate into the cowardly, narrow mindset of the town. None of them ever shared Earl’s bent for progress and success, not even in its diminished condition.
For some reason, though, Earl was enthusiastic about this new man. He already remembered the moment in the post office as something significant. He’d looked up from his mail sorting and his pool of regret and saw a picture of startling and dramatic beauty. He couldn’t make out the man’s face because of the glare in the doorway. But he knew that no one he’d met in Figulus had the dramatic awareness or even the dumb luck to make himself part of such a beautiful sight. And then, when the man approached the counter, Earl took in his unusual appearance (unusual for these parts, anyway)—his curly hair and dark, smooth complexion; his painfully erect posture and inscrutable eyes (was that wide-eyed innocence, disaffected irony, or merely a dull-minded glaze?)—and knew that he’d happened onto something remarkable. A man like this had to mean something, and Earl smiled in much the same way he’d smiled at the couple in the rocking chair when he’d first arrived in town.
By the time the man had pulled the envelope from Earl’s hand, Earl already had a feeling that the gesture was of great importance and would one day warrant at least a comment in an autobiography of Earl Shank.
Then, just as suddenly as he’d come in and before another word could be spoken, the man gave Earl a nod of the head—the vestige, Earl figured, of some grand and exotic European greeting—and disappeared into the morning sunlight.
There were a million things he would have liked to have said, beginning with the basics, but of course guiding their words around to something more significant:
Gonna be another hot one. . . . Yep, summer’s here to stay, I reckon. . . . Any breeze over yer place? . . . Oh, didn’t know anyhody’uz livin over there these days. . . . Bring yer wife down with ya? . . . Any little ones? . . . That’s all right, you’ll make some soon enough. . . . Yer young, with plenty a time. . . . Who me? Naw, always been too busy, ah guess—the mail never stops flowin, ya know. Like a mighty river, I reckon. And then there’s always publicity work ta be done. . . . So there’s that, too—that publicity. . . . Yessir, well . . . But say, what y’all growin over there?—Pardon? . . . Oh, you know, I do a little publicity work for the town now and then—attractin settlers, promotin commerce, that sorter thing. Ain’t a big deal. Keeps me busy, I reckon. . . . Oh, why sure, sure. I kin always use a little help when things get too busy. Course, it’d help most of all if ya happened to know a few influential folks up north. . . . Ya don’t say? Well, then . . .
It might not have happened like that, but the results would have been the same, because this was a man who got letters from New York, a man with clean, pressed suspenders and smooth, pink palms, and a man like that would have to know people, a man like that would have to have friends.
Yet he’d let him go. He hadn’t said any of the million things he could have. He’d balked at a beautiful opportunity. Maybe he’d grown rusty, or maybe he was finally beginning to slip and take that long fall into old age and obsolescence. Or maybe he’d gotten so used to failing and trying to forget the failures that he’d grown afraid of success. But then a far more reasonable explanation occurred to him: perhaps he’d happened upon something of such magnitude, such unfathomable importance, that that small, wistful pebble—or his instincts, or whatever it is in a man’s brain that makes him recognize his destiny and reel it in—had told him not to rush into it, had told him, “Whoa, Earl, this is the big one, let’s just slow down and play this thing right.”
If the young man was a Yankee, he wasn’t the first to settle here—there were several long-time Yankee residents, though they tried their best to make people forget that fact. And if he was an immigrant, he wouldn’t be the first of these either—in the early days of the town, a pair of Finnish brothers had settled here, until they heard about a pair of Finnish sisters living in St. Augustine. So there was no explaining it, not completely. The little man had done nothing more yesterday morning than pick up his mail and leave. You couldn’t even say they’d had a chat. Earl hadn’t even introduced himself, fool that he was. There was something, though, in the man’s eyes and his perfect posture and the deliberate way he walked that told Earl, Now here’s a young fella who might just stir things up. Though they looked nothing alike and probably had little in common, the immigrant couldn’t help but remind Earl of himself as a young man—determined, forward-looking, courageous and foolish at the same time. Still, even this didn’t explain completely what he’d sensed in those moments; if he were later asked to write his memoirs, he’d finally have to give in to the dramatic and the serendipitous, knowing full well the outrage of the critics, and call it by name: destiny.
“A strange little fella with an accent,” said Earl.
“I know what you’re thinking, Earl,” said Mely. She’d caught him before he slipped away this morning. “You leave that poor man alone,” she said. “A new settler’s got enough to worry about without you filling his head with your loony ideas.”
“I just want to make the man feel welcome. Besides, hon, you know I’ve given up the loony ideas. I just got you, now.” Earl grinned.
Mely tried to ignore him. “There’s a leak in the roof needs fixin today,” she said.
“Have to wait for the afternoon. Mail’s in and there’ll be people comin around all morning to check their boxes, you know.”
“Seems to me the government could find a lot better things to do with their money than pay a man to sit all day on a stool and brush the mosquitoes off his face.”
“Maybe so,” said Earl, “but to me it’s a kind and gen’rous government that provides us so.”
Earl kissed his wife and left for the post office before she had a chance to make him feel guilty again.
Mely was a good woman who’d softened the blow of his failures, but she seemed to want to make him atone for them through hard labor. They’d married five years ago, when Earl was thirty-six. Old Jake Morris was her first husband; when he’d drowned in a fishing accident out on the lake, he’d left poor Mely a lonely widow. She was known by everyone as the best cook in town, and more than likely the best in the whole state of Florida, but Earl had never once tried her alligator stew or her coconut cream pie. That all changed when he decided he’d played the sad and lonely bachelor for too long. If he was ever going to have satisfaction in his life, he ought to find himself a good, solid woman. That was Mely all over—a strong, thick Southern Country Woman, six years his senior. He began to call on her after waiting five weeks, which he calculated as a proper grieving period for a guy like Jake.
Earl and Mely got along fine, and even better when he tasted her coconut pie. One bite, and some of the old fire at last came back to him. He was in love, and he looked deep into her cool brown eyes and a word popped into his head that would one day change his life: “restaurant.”
He didn’t tell her the plans until after they were married at the judge’s chambers in St. Augustine. On their wedding night at the Augustine Inn, he asked her if she’d ever thought about cooking professionally.
“I ain’t that kind of girl,” she said in that matter-of-fact tone she used with all men.
“That ain’t what I mean, hon,” said Earl. “I’m talking chefs, restaurants, maitre d’s, that sort of thing.”
She was amenable to the idea. She admitted that she’d had a dream about it once.
Two days later, when they returned to Figulus, Earl started work on the restaurant. The newlyweds moved into Mely’s house, which was bigger and more comfortable than Earl’s, and Earl used the wood from his old shack to make the restaurant an addition to his new home. They’d start small, he thought, a seating capacity of maybe twenty, but eventually the restaurant would be known throughout Florida—just Florida, because Earl was getting older now, and he couldn’t think any bigger than that, especially after his previous experiences.
Two months later, Earl and Mely’s was open for business. The locals came out of respect for Mely’s cooking, but they weren’t rich and couldn’t afford to eat out much. Everyone soon realized that this was just another of Earl’s schemes doomed to failure. Earl sent out flyers to other communities up and down the coast, but there wasn’t a meal in this world good enough to make someone sail for three days in unpredictable weather to a small town in the middle of nowhere.
After a few long months of empty tables and food that had to be given away because it was spoiling, the restaurant opened its doors only on demand, and then the guests usually brought their own food for Mely to cook. A small fee was charged then, and a little profit made. But for Earl, the money wasn’t the thing.
Back then, it had felt like the final blow, like he’d have to resign himself to a small, comfortable life of forgetting, until he no longer remembered he had anything to forget. Now he felt a flicker of hope, and he was determined to nurture its flame.
IT WAS ONLY EIGHT A.M. when Earl arrived at the office, but Josef Steinmetz was already there waiting for him. Josef had risen before dawn, having lain awake most of the night trying to think of a way to secure the missing loafers. As with all obstacles facing Josef, it was only a matter of methodically and logically thinking the problem through. Here was a problem: a misplaced pair of loafers. The proper solution had to be a simple, stepwise procedure. He had only to determine which tasks must be performed and then—the hardest part—order the tasks correctly to ensure success. Usually, thought Josef, when people fail it is because they don’t think things through in an orderly fashion, and thus don’t arrange the steps in the one proper building-block technique that will get the job done. Thus, Josef worried throughout the night exactly what he’d say to the postmaster and when, and what actions would be performed and when. The timing was so important.
Before Lena had so much as stirred, Josef crawled out from under their mosquito netting, dressed himself carefully to make a strong impression on the postmaster, and as the sun began its rise over the Atlantic, rowed his canoe the half mile across the lake to the little dock that marked the town of Figulus. Josef tied up his boat and stood outside the post office even though there was no lock on the door, because he thought it irreverent to wait inside a government building when there was no official on duty.
He waited two hours, sweating in the sunlight and afraid to move into the shade because the postmaster might show up at the wrong time and think he was loitering. Finally, Earl arrived and greeted him with a firm handshake.
“Pleasure to see you again, Mr. Steinmetz,” he said, and he showed him into the office. Earl wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that the man had returned the very next day; it only confirmed his belief in the significance of that first meeting. Wouldn’t it be a funny thing, he thought, if after all these years of pain and struggle, things’d finally fall into place on their own? It occurred to him that such an easy success might well make a mockery of his earlier efforts, but he decided he could live with that.
Josef was silent and uncomfortable until Earl walked around behind the counter and they could address each other as postmaster and postal patron.
“What kin I do for ya?” asked Earl, resting his big hands on the counter.
“I am here to make inquiry concerning a missing postal item,” said Josef, reciting exactly the line he’d rehearsed a hundred times on the canoe ride over and during his wait outside the door.
“Wellsir,” said Earl, “what might that item be?”
Josef grew flustered already, not having written this part of the script. He’d been so concerned about making the proper impression himself that he hadn’t anticipated the postmaster’s responses to his inquiries; already, there was a hole in his plan. He was angry with himself and paused, stone-faced, while he decided what to do next. He debated whether he should reveal the exact nature of his package. Though he had great trust in his fellow man, he didn’t think it wise to tempt the postmaster with a full description of the fine leather loafers a person can buy in the shopping district of Brooklyn.
“This would be a package,” began Josef, now with diminished self-confidence marked by a slight hesitation and an even greater formality in his tone. “This would be a package containing a pair of shoes, addressed to myself, Josef Steinmetz, and originating from the city of Brooklyn.”
Earl thought for a moment, stroking his chin. He wasn’t thinking about the package, because he knew right away he hadn’t seen anything that big come through. He was thinking that right at this moment he felt more like a postmaster than ever before. Or, more accurately, he felt more like a man playing the role of postmaster than ever before. The formality of this young man was like a gift of respect, far beyond what he received from his other postal customers. It made the whole transaction seem theatrical, and this brought Earl back all at once to his youth on the stage, a memory that previously had brought only the pain of his first failures. But now the fourth wall of the post office seemed to magically fall away and reveal a thousand pairs of eyes captivated by his remarkable and realistic performance as The Postmaster. It was a brief taste of the stage success he’d been denied in his youth. How sweet it felt to twist a past failure into something so satisfying. He was thankful for it, and for Josef Steinmetz, the supporting actor who’d made it possible.
“Nosir,” said Earl, with a confidence that shone in the strength and depth of his drawl, a drawl straight from his diaphragm, “I ain’t seen such a package come through here.”
Josef stared at him like he’d forgotten a line, and Earl thrilled with the nervous energy this gave to the scene.
“No way of telling where that package is,” laughed Earl. “Them folks in New York are liable to’ve shipped it off to Persia for all we know, and it’s a funny thing to me that they don’t more often.”
“What about the carrier,” said Josef, his plan collapsing in on him, his voice on the verge of cracking. “Can you not ask him?”
“Well, he don’t like folks all that much, I guess. He drops the mail off after midnight, in the back there, and then he skips out of town ’fore anyone kin talk to him. T’tell the truth, I ain’t never seen ’im,” and he held up his hand like he was taking an oath to that effect. “Nosir, I reckon that’s a dead end, there.”
Josef looked down at his feet, at the pair of shoes he’d worn for three years. How pathetic they looked now when he compared them with the image of his uncle’s gift. He felt defeated and embarrassed and could think of nothing more to say, so he went to the door slowly, head hanging, his brow breaking a sweat.
Something made him stop. His best laid plans had crumbled before his eyes, but he owed it to Uncle Mordy, if not to himself, to take some sort of action. And then there was Lena to think about. Only yesterday, she’d begun to make progress in adjusting to their new home. She’d worked in the grove! That thought alone filled his heart and restored a little of his confidence. But he knew her faith in him had been shaken by her experience here. How could he face her after this? If he couldn’t even get the postmaster to locate a missing package for him, how was he to tame the subtropical wilderness into a livelihood for himself and his wife?
He stopped in the light of the doorway. Then, looking up at the postmaster, approached the table again.
“Can I not leave a note for this carrier, perhaps on the back wall, where, as you have stated, he drops the mail?”
“It’ll be dark out there,” said Earl. “And I ain’t even sure the fella can read.”
Josef thought some more, determined to maintain eye contact. “If I were to supply you with candles,” he said, “perhaps you could . . .”
Earl admired the man’s determination. He was reminded again of his younger self, which saddened and exhilarated him all at once. This here’s a man who gets things done, he thought. Maybe when I was younger if I’d just stuck with it . . . But maybe that don’t matter now, maybe I kin ferget about that.
The importance of the moment made him pause. What if he were to make the wrong move and destroy everything before it had even begun? It would be just like me, he thought.
“Hell, don’t pay no mind about the candles,” he said, finally. “I’ll jes set my oil lamp out there. Course, I still ain’t sure he can read, but there’s a risk in everything, way I see it.”
Josef nodded, bursting with the satisfaction of a task fulfilled. Earl brought out a fountain pen and sheet of paper from under the counter, and Josef wrote slowly, choosing each word carefully, taking a full fifteen minutes to complete it. Earl could only watch with amazement and admire the man’s penmanship.
Dear Postal Officer,
My dear uncle, who raised me like his own son, has recently passed from this earth. But some weeks before his death, he sent me a pair of fine leather shoes in a box from Brooklyn. This package has never arrived. Please, could you check if it has been misplaced or misdelivered. My uncle was not a rich man, this is the one treasure he could afford me, and it is more precious to me than a chest of rubies or a team of strong mules. To aid in your search, here is the address from whence the package came. If found, please deliver to this postal office.
Your Faithful Customer,
Josef Steinmetz
Josef unrolled a piece of scrap paper from his pocket and copied down his aunt’s address. And then, with a nod, he passed the pen and paper back to the postmaster and exited out into the morning, leaving Earl in an odd state of anxiety and excitement. And, of course, with a rousing applause ringing in his ears.