WHEN JOHN THOMAS received the letter from the postmaster of Figulus, he was putting the finishing touches on his book tentatively titled: Barefoot Mailman: The Life and Times of an American Legend. He had expanded his five-part Times piece into five hundred manuscript pages, giving finer and finer detail about both the history of the Mailman himself and Thomas’s travels with him. As the book evolved, Thomas also found it necessary to shape the story’s meaning for a public that seemed curiously attracted to the shoeless figure. He found himself digressing into long discursive passages that commented on the man as a symbolic figure for a hero-starved American public, and then digressing even further into an analysis of the public’s need for legends and myths. Thus the book became not just a biography but also a diagnostic summary of the American psyche, its unfulfilled needs and displaced desires, where it was going and where it had been. The total effect was an indictment of the bourgeois status quo that had stagnated the great American Dream: it took a figure like the Barefoot Mailman, rising from the lowest rungs of society, to show Americans that their fate was still in their own hands.
In the afternoon haze of his woody mid-town apartment, John Thomas read Earl Shank’s letter with great interest. He had no way of determining the ghost story’s validity, of course, but it intrigued him nonetheless because it solved a nagging problem in his book, a problem that had caused him to overflow his wastebasket with crumpled paper, cover his desktop with scribbled notes of not-quite-adequate ideas, and make an unprecedented number of trips to the tobacco shop to keep his pipe filled as he thought. As it stood, his final chapter concluded with the Mailman’s reported disappearance (a report brought back by Southwind cruise passengers), and this raised the destructive possibility that the man had either given up or been fired by some postmaster too embarrassed to admit it now. These possibilities were interesting in an ironical sort of way, Thomas had to admit, but they would spell doom for the legend and thus for Thomas’s chances to parlay it into everlasting acknowledgment of his genius.
He couldn’t let that happen; this was his baby, and it had to be nurtured. Now comes this ghost story providing some evidence, no matter how flimsy, that the man had, in fact, died, and that the torment and alienation that drove him through life had continued to drive him even after death, until one man—this cracker postmaster—finally showed him a little compassion. John Thomas recognized this as the best possible conclusion for his book. Even if it was a bit far-fetched, he could just stick it in there and let the readers decide for themselves. He knew which way they’d decide, because he knew how much they wanted this legend to survive, and he knew also that the best security for any legend is the death of the man who fostered it.
A few months later, when the book was published, the final chapter created a stir since the author and the publisher had kept it secret right up until the publication date. The legend, of course, was well known by now, but this ghost story seemed to add a different texture, providing a mysterious yet satisfactory closure to the mailman’s tragic tale. And the book as a whole stirred up the American people, who ceased to be jaded and cynical when they thought of the plight of the Barefoot Mailman, and who felt, at least for a while, they could make a difference after all. Many politicians lost their jobs that year, and the American people again seized the reigns of destiny.
IN FIGULUS, TIME seemed to grind to a halt without the weekly visitation of Yankees. People had been so used to the excitement of Tuesdays, and the quick and easy money, that when the ships stopped coming, they didn’t know what to do with themselves. Earl’s ghost story created some excitement for them and gave them a rich topic for conversation, but when Tuesday came and went without one sale of an embroidered wallhanging saying “Bless This House” or a whittled and painted figure of a pink curlew or a Florida panther, and without a single guest for Earl’s restaurant, people got pretty bored and depressed. They made an effort to recreate their former lives; after all, they’d already made more money than they’d ever need in Figulus. But as they went through the motions, something was missing. They’d tasted the fruit of the Yankee dollar, and that was a taste they could not forget.
They sweated through the summer. The air was heavy, and no matter how little they ate, their bodies seemed to weigh too much for this earth. They didn’t speak much, and when they worked, they didn’t get much done. Everyone prayed for a change of weather, or another ghost story, something to shake things up and take their minds off what now seemed inevitable—that they’d never see another boatload of slumming Yankees again.
For Earl, the air was heavy, too, but with expectation. He was certain that something was astir up north that would have great repercussions in their little town. He was happy and hopeful, and no one could figure out why. He hadn’t told anyone of the letter from the Rathmartin boys, not even Mely, and he hadn’t told anyone of his letter to John Thomas. When people asked him why he was in such a good mood all the time, seeing as how he wasn’t getting any business these days, he’d reply that it was just the off-season, and he was going to relax and enjoy his off-season, because when the boats came in again in the fall, it was going to be nothing but work.
People didn’t say anything because they didn’t want to burst his bubble. They just looked at each other, and in that look was the confirmation that Earl had finally lost his mind, that the touch of a ghost was too much for any mortal to bear, that Earl was showing the symptoms of his exposure to the Beyond, and that it was probably for the best, since the shock of another lost dream would be too much for him to bear, anyway. Even Mely was afraid of what was going to happen in the fall when the cruise ships didn’t show up and Earl stood waiting on the dock with his big hand outstretched and his jaw muscles giving way under the weight of an unreturned smile.
Earl didn’t see how people looked at him with pity. He saw only what was going to happen when his story had made its way into the proper channels and business returned better than ever. He spent much of his days in the restaurant, keeping it clean and fixing it up, and when he couldn’t think of anything to fix, he’d row himself across the lake and spend a little time on the beach, not the least bit bothered by the sun as he walked in the sand and relived his now-famous encounter with the ghost.
It was on one of these afternoon walks, in late September, that he spotted a ship coming from the north. He watched it grow on the horizon, slowly moving just inside the Gulf Stream until it stopped at the inlet, just a few miles up the coast.
He paddled his skiff back to town and ran the length of it, screaming, “I tole ya! I tole ya! The Yankees’ve come again! I seen ’em, and they’ve come again!”
Everyone was shocked, and they made quick preparations, though they all figured it was poor Earl’s mind gone astray for good, that this was just the beginning of a lot of false alarms stemming from Earl’s hallucinations. Still, most of them set up their craft stands and pulled out all the leftover knickknacks, because with something like this it was better to be safe than sorry. Earl even got Mely to fire up something in the kitchen, though she did it with tears in her eyes, thinking she was only doing it to soothe Earl’s deeply troubled mind.
But sure enough, when the Southwind tender pulled up to the dock, the whole town sent up a cheer, and Earl’s hand was shaken heartily and his smile was returned eagerly by two well-dressed men who turned out to be the Rathmartin boys, come personally to offer their apologies to the entire town, and to present Earl with a generous new contract.
The Rathmartins stayed to dinner, and when they’d eaten all the gator they could handle and bought all the crafts they could carry, they posed for pictures taken by a Times photographer they’d brought along just for that purpose. Poof! Like magic, there was Earl signing the contract. There was Earl shaking the hand of Stanislaw, then shaking the hand of Merwyn. There was Earl hugging his wife, and Earl standing outside his restaurant, torches burning and eyes aglow, a smile as big as Florida, and the whole town looking on with a mixture of awe and pride, like they’d just discovered him in their midst as a man whose dreams were as good as a promise.