Footfalls

== FOOTFALLS ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
Originally published in 2020 and reprinted in The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 2021 
This is an easy story, not a road for tender or for
casual feet. Better the meadows. Let me warn you, it is as hard as that old
man's soul and as sunless as his eyes.' It has its inception in catastrophe,
and its end in an act of almost in- credible violence; between them it tells
barely how a man, being blind, can become also deaf and dumb. 
He lived in one of those old Puritan sea towns where
the strain has come down austere and moribund, so that his act would not be
quite unbelievable. Except that the town is no longer Puritan and Yankee. It
has been betrayed; it has become an outpost of the Portuguese islands. 
This man, this blind cobbler himself, was a
Portuguese, from St. Michael, in the Western Islands, and his name was Boaz
Negro. 
He was happy. An unquenchable exuberance lived in him.
When he arose in the morning he made vast, as it were uncontrollable, gestures
with his stout arms. He came into his shop singing. His voice, strong and deep
as the chest from which it emanated, rolled out through the doorway and along
the street, and the fishermen, done with their morning work and lounging and
smoking along the wharfs, said, "Boaz is to work already." Then they
came up to sit in the shop. 
In that town a cobbler's shop is a club. One sees the
interior always dimly thronged. They sit on the benches watching the artisan at
his work for hours, and they talk about everything in the world. A cobbler is
known by the company he keeps. 
Boaz Negro kept young company. He would have nothing
to do with the old. On his own head the gray hairs set thickly. 
He had a grown son. But the benches in his shop were
for the lusty and valiant young, men who could spend the night drinking and
then at three o'clock in the morning turn out in the rain and dark to pull at
the weirs, sing songs, buffet one another among the slippery fish in the boat's
bottom, and make loud jokes about the fundamental things, love and birth and
death. Hearkening to their boasts and strong prophecies, his breast heaved and
his heart beat faster. He was a large, full-blooded fellow, fashioned for
exploits; the flame in his darkness burned higher even to hear of them. 
It is scarcely conceivable how Boaz Negro could have
come through this much of his life still possessed of that unquenchable and
priceless exuberance; how he would sing in the dawn; how, simply listening to
the recital of deeds in gale or brawl, he could easily forget himself a blind
man, tied to a shop and a last; easily make of himself a lusty young fellow
breasting the sunlit and adven- turous tide of life. 
He had had a wife, whom he had loved. Fate, which had
scourged him with the initial scourge of blindness, had seen fit to take his
Angelina away. He had had four sons. Three, one after another, had been
removed, leaving only Manuel, the youngest. Recovering slowly, with infinite
agony, from each of these recurrent blows, his unquenchable exuberance had
lived. And there was another thing quite as extraordinary. He had never done
anything but work, and that sort of thing may kill the flame where an abrupt
catastrophe fails. Work in the dark. Work, work, work! And accompanied by
privation; an almost miserly scale of personal economy. Yes, indeed, he had
"skinned his fingers," especially in the earlier years. When it tells
most. 
How he had worked! Not alone in the daytime, but also,
some- times, when orders were heavy, far into the night. It was strange for
one, passing along that deserted street at midnight, to hear issuing from the
black shop of Boaz Negro the rhythmical tap-tap-tap of hammer on wooden peg. 
Nor was that sound all: no man in town could get far
past that shop in his nocturnal wandering unobserved. No more than a dozen
footfalls, and from the darkness Boaz's voice rolled forth, fraternal,
stentorian, "Good night, Antone!" "Good night to you, Caleb
Snow!" 
To Boaz Negro it was still broad day. 
Now, because of this, he was what might be called a
substantial man. He owned his place, his shop, opening on the sidewalk, and
behind it the dwelling house with trellised galleries upstairs and down. 
And there was always something for his son, a
"piece for the pocket," a dollar, five, even a ten-dollar bill if he
had "got to have it." Manuel was "a good boy." Boaz not
only said this; he felt that he was assured of it in his understanding, to the
infinite peace of his heart. 
It was curious that he should be ignorant only of the
one nearest to him. Not because he was physically blind. Be certain he knew
more of other men and of other men's sons than they or their neigh- bors did.
More, that is to say, of their hearts, their understandings, their idiosyncrasies,
and their ultimate weight in the balance pan of eternity. 
His simple explanation of Manuel was that Manuel
"wasn't too stout." To others he said this, and to himself. Manuel
was not indeed too robust. How should he be vigorous when he never did anything
to make him so? He never worked. Why should he work, when existence was
provided for, and when there was always that "piece for the pocket"?
Even a ten-dollar bill on a Saturday night! No. Manuel "wasn't too
stout." 
In the shop they let it go at that. The missteps and
frailties of everyone else in the world were canvassed there with the most
shameless publicity. But Boaz Negro was a blind man, and in a sense their host.
Those reckless, strong young fellows respected and loved him. It was allowed to
stand at that. Manuel was "a good boy." Which did not prevent them,
by the way, from joining later in the general condemnation of that father's
laxity— "the ruination of the boy!" 
"He should have put him to work, that's
what." 
"He should have said to Manuel, 'Look here, if
you want a dollar, go earn it first.' " 
As a matter of fact, only one man ever gave Boaz the
advice direct. That was Campbell Wood. And Wood never sat in that shop. 
In every small town there is one young man who is
spoken of as "rising." As often as not he is not a native, but
"from away." 
In this town Campbell Wood was that man. He had come
from another part of the state to take a place in the bank. He lived in the
upper story of Boaz Negro's house, the ground floor now doing for Boaz and the
meager remnant of his family. The old woman who came in to tidy up for the
cobbler looked after Wood's rooms as well. 
Dealing with Wood, one had first of all the sense of
his in- corruptibility. A little ruthless perhaps, as if one could imagine him,
in defense of his integrity, cutting off his friend, cutting off his own hand,
cutting off the very stream flowing out from the wellsprings of human kindness.
An exaggeration, perhaps. 
He was by long odds the most eligible young man in
town, good- looking in a spare, ruddy, sandy-haired Scottish fashion,
important, incorruptible, "rising." But he took good care of his
heart. Precisely that; like a sharp-eyed duenna to his own heart. One felt that
here was the man, if ever was the man, who held his destiny in his own hand.
Failing, of course, some quite gratuitous and unforeseeable catastrophe. 
Not that he was not human, or even incapable of
laughter or passion. He was, in a way, immensely accessible. He never clapped
one on the shoulder; on the other hand, he never failed to speak. Not even to
Boaz. 
Returning from the bank in the afternoon, he had always
a word for the cobbler. Passing out again to supper at his boarding place, he
had another, about the weather, the prospects of rain. And if Boaz was at work
in the dark when he returned from an evening at the Board of Trade, there was a
"Good night, Mr. Negro!" 
On Boaz's part, his attitude toward his lodger was
curious and paradoxical. He did not pretend to anything less than reverence for
the young man's position; precisely on account of that position he was
conscious toward Wood of a vague distrust. This was because he was an
uneducated fellow. 
To the uneducated the idea of large finance is as
uncomfortable as the idea of the law. It must be said for Boaz that, responsive
to Wood's unfailing civility, he fought against the sensation of dim and
somehow shameful distrust. 
Nevertheless his whole parental soul was in arms that
evening when, returning from the bank and finding the shop empty of loungers,
Wood paused a moment to propose the bit of advice al- ready referred to. 
"Haven't you ever thought of having Manuel learn
the trade?" 
A suspicion, a kind of premonition, lighted the fires
of defense. 
"Shoemaking," said Boaz, "is good
enough for a blind man." 
"Oh, I don't know. At least it's better than
doing nothing at all." 
Boaz's hammer was still. He sat silent, monumental.
Outwardly. For once his unfailing response had failed him, "Manuel ain't
too stout, you know." Perhaps it had become suddenly inadequate. 
He hated Wood; he despised Wood; more than ever
before, a hundredfold more, quite abruptly, he distrusted Wood. 
How could a man say such things as Wood had said? And
where Manuel himself might hear! 
Where Manuel had heard! Boaz's other emotions— hatred
and con- tempt and distrust— were overshadowed. Sitting in darkness, no sound
had come to his ears, no footfall, no infinitesimal creaking of a floor plank.
Yet by some sixth uncanny sense of the blind he was aware that Manuel was
standing in the dusk of the entry joining the shop to the house. 
Boaz made a Herculean effort. The voice came out of his
throat, harsh, bitter, and loud enough to have carried ten times the distance
to his son's ears. 
"Manuel is a good boy!" 
"Yes— h'm— yes— I suppose so." 
Wood shifted his weight. He seemed uncomfortable. 
"Well, I'll be running along, I— ugh!
Heavens!" 
Something was happening. Boaz heard exclamations,
breathings, the rustle of sleeve cloth in large, frantic, and futile graspings—
all without understanding. Immediately there was an impact on the floor, and
with it the unmistakable clink of metal. Boaz even heard that the metal was
minted, and that the coins were gold. He under- stood. A coin sack, gripped not
quite carefully enough for a moment under the other's overcoat, had shifted,
slipped, escaped, and fallen. 
And Manuel had heard! 
It was a dreadful moment for Boaz, dreadful in its
native sense, as full of dread. Why? It was a moment of horrid revelation,
ruthless clarification. His son, his link with the departed Angelina, that
"good boy"— Manuel, standing in the shadow of the entry, visible
alone to the blind, had heard the clink of falling gold, and— and Boaz wished
that he had not! 
There, amazing, disconcerting, destroying, stood the
sudden fact. 
Sitting as impassive and monumental as ever, his
strong, bleached hands at rest on his work, round drops of sweat came out on
Boaz's forehead. He scarcely took the sense of what Wood was saying. Only
fragments. 
"Government money, understand— for the breakwater
workings- huge— too many people know, here, everywhere— don't trust the safe —tin
safe— 'Noah's Ark'— give you my word— heavens, no!" 
It boiled down to this— the money, more money than was
good for that antiquated "Noah's Ark" at the bank— and whose contem-
plated sojourn there overnight was public to too many minds— in short, Wood was
not only incorruptible, he was canny. To what one of those minds, now, would it
occur that he should take away that money bodily, under casual cover of his
coat, to his own lodgings behind the cobbler shop of Boaz Negro? For this one,
this important, night! 
He was sorry the coin sack had slipped, because he did
not like to have the responsibility of secret sharer cast upon anyone, even
upon Boaz, even by accident. On the other hand, how tremendously fortunate that
it had been Boaz and not another. So far as that went, Wood had no more anxiety
now than before. One incorruptible knows another. 
"I'd trust you, Mr. Negro" (that was one of
the fragments which came and stuck in the cobbler's brain), "as far as I
would myself. As long as it's only you. I'm just going up here and throw it
under the bed. Oh yes, certainly." 
Boaz ate no supper. For the first time in his life
food was dry in his gullet. Even under those other successive crushing blows of
Fate the full and generous habit of his functionings had carried on un- abated;
he had always eaten what was set before him. Tonight, over his untouched plate,
he watched Manuel with his sightless eyes, keeping track of his every mouthful,
word, intonation, breath. What profit he expected to extract from this catlike
surveillance it is im- possible to say. 
When they arose from the supper table Boaz made
another Herculean effort. "Manuel, you're a good boy!" 
The formula had a quality of appeal, of despair, and
of command. 
"Manuel, you should be short of money, maybe.
Look, what's this? A tenner? Well, there's a piece for the pocket; go and enjoy
yourself." 
He would have been frightened had Manuel, upsetting
tradition, declined the offering. With the morbid contrariness of the human
imagination, the boy's avid grasping gave him no comfort. 
He went out into the shop, where it was already dark,
drew to him his last, his tools, mallets, cutters, pegs, leather. And having
prepared to work, he remained idle. He found himself listening. 
It has been observed that the large phenomena of
sunlight and darkness were nothing to Boaz Negro. A busy night was broad day.
Yet there was a difference; he knew it with the blind man's eyes, the ears. 
Day was a vast confusion, or rather a wide fabric, of
sounds; great and little sounds all woven together, voices, footfalls, wheels,
far-off whistles and foghorns, flies buzzing in the sun. Night was another
thing. Still there were voices and footfalls, but rare v emerg- ing from the
large, pure body of silence as definite, surprising, and yet familiar entities.
Tonight there was an easterly wind coming off the
water and carrying the sound of waves. So far as other fugitive sounds were
concerned it was the same as silence. The wind made little difference to the
ears. It nullified, from one direction at least, the other two visual processes
of the blind, the sense of touch and the sense of smell. It blew away from the
shop, toward the living house. 
As has been said, Boaz found himself listening, scrutinizing
with an extraordinary attention this immense background of sound. He heard
footfalls. The story of that night was written, for him, in footfalls. 
He heard them moving about the house, the lower floor,
prowling here, there, halting for long spaces, advancing, retreating softly on
the planks. About this aimless, interminable perambulation there was something
to twist the nerves, something led and at the same time driven, like a
succession of frail and indecisive charges. 
Boaz lifted himself from his chair. All his impulse
called him to make a stir, join battle, cast in the breach the reinforcement of
his presence, authority, good will. He sank back again; his hands fell down.
The curious impotence of the spectator held him. 
He heard footfalls, too, on the upper floor, a little
fainter, borne to the inner rather than the outer ear, along the solid causeway
of partitions and floor, the legs of his chair, the bony framework of his body.
Very faint indeed. Sinking back easily into the background of the wind. They,
too, came and went, this room, that, to the passage, the stairhead, and away.
About them too there was the same quality of being led and at the same time of
being driven. 
Time went by. In his darkness it seemed to Boaz that
hours must have passed. He heard voices. Together with the footfalls, that
abrupt, brief, and (in view of Wood's position) astounding inter- change of
sentences made up his history of the night. Wood must have opened the door at
the head of the stair; by the sound of his voice he would be standing there,
peering below perhaps; perhaps listening. 
"What's wrong down there?" he called.
"Why don't you go to bed?" 
After a moment came Manuel's voice, "Ain't
sleepy." 
"Neither am I. Look here, do you like to play
cards?" 
"What kind? Euchre? I like euchre all right. Or
pitch." 
"Well, what would you say to coming up and having
a game of pitch then, Manuel? If you can't sleep?" 
"That'd be all right." 
The lower footfalls ascended to join the footfalls on
the upper floor. There was the sound of a door closing. 
Boaz sat still. In the gloom he might have been taken
for a piece of furniture, of machinery, an extraordinary lay figure, perhaps,
for the trying on of the boots he made. He seemed scarcely to breathe, only the
sweat starting from his brow giving him an aspect of life. 
He ought to have run, and leaped up that inner stair
and pounded with his fists on that door. He seemed unable to move. At rare
inter- vals feet passed on the sidewalk outside, just at his elbow, so to say,
and yet somehow, tonight, immeasurably far away. Beyond the orbit of the moon.
He heard Rugg, the policeman, noting the silence of the shop, muttering,
"Boaz is to bed tonight," as he passed. 
The wind increased. It poured against the shop with
its deep, continuous sound of a river. Submerged in its body, Boaz caught the
note of the town bell striking midnight. 
Once more, after a long time, he heard footfalls. He
heard them coming around the corner of the shop from the house, footfalls half
swallowed by the wind, passing discreetly, without haste, retreating, merging
step by step with the huge, incessant background of the wind. 
Boaz's muscles tightened all over him. He had the
impulse to start up, to fling open the door, shout into the night, "What
are you do- ing? Stop there! Say! What are you doing and where are you
going?" 
And as before, the curious impotence of the spectator
held him motionless. He had not stirred in his chair. And those footfalls, upon
which hinged, as it were, that momentous decade of his life, were gone. 
There was nothing to listen for now. Yet he continued
to listen. Once or twice, half arousing himself, he drew toward him his un-
finished work. And then relapsed into immobility. 
As has been said, the wind, making little difference to
the ears, made all the difference in the world with the sense of feeling and
the sense of smell. From the one important direction of the house. That is how
it could come about that Boaz Negro could sit, waiting and listening to
nothing, in the shop and remain ignorant of disaster until the alarm had gone
away and come back again, pounding, shouting, clanging. 
"Fire!" he heard them bawling in the street.
"Fire! Fire!" 
Only slowly did he understand that the fire was in his
own house. 
There is nothing stiller in the world than the
skeleton of a house in the dawn after a fire. It is as if everything living,
positive, violent,, had been completely drained in the one flaming act of
violence, leaving nothing but negation till the end of time. It is worse than a
tomb. A monstrous stillness! Even the footfalls of the searchers cannot disturb
it, for they are separate and superficial. In its presence they are almost
frivolous. 
Half an hour after dawn the searchers found the body,
if what was left from that consuming ordeal might be called a body. The
discovery came as a shock. It seemed incredible that the occupant of that
house, no cripple or invalid, but an able man in the prime of youth, should not
have awakened and made good his escape. It was the upper floor which had
caught; the stairs had stood to the last. It was beyond calculation. Even if he
had been asleep! 
And he had not been asleep. This second and infinitely
more ap- palling discovery began to be known. Slowly. By a hint, a breath of
rumor here; there an allusion, half taken back. The man whose in- cinerated
body still lay curled in its bed of cinders had been dressed at the moment of
disaster; even to the watch, the cuff buttons, the studs, the very scarf pin.
Fully clothed to the last detail, precisely as those who had dealings at the
bank might have seen Campbell Wood any weekday morning for the past eight
months. A man does not sleep with his clothes on. The skull of the man had been
broken, as if with a blunt instrument of iron. On the charred lacework of the
floor lay the leg of an old andiron with which Boaz Negro and his Angelina had
set up housekeeping in that new house. 
It needed only Mr. Asa Whitelaw, coming up the street
from that gaping "Noah's Ark" at the bank, to round out the
scandalous cir- cle of circumstance. 
"Where is Manuel?" 
Boaz Negro still sat in his shop, impassive,
monumental, his thick, hairy arms resting on the arms of his chair. The tools
and materials of his work remained scattered about him, as his irresolute
gathering of the night before had left them. Into his eyes no change could
come. He had lost his house, the visible monument of all those years of
"skinning his fingers." It would seem that he had lost his son. And
he had lost something incalculably precious— that hitherto un- quenchable
exuberance of the man. 
"Where is Manuel?" 
When he spoke his voice was unaccented and stale, like
the voice of a man already dead. 
"Yes, where is Manuel?" 
He had answered them with their own question. 
"When did you last see him?" 
Neither he nor they seemed to take note of that
profound irony. 
"At supper." 
"Tell us, Boaz, you knew about this money?" 
The cobbler nodded his head. 
"And did Manuel?" 
He might have taken sanctuary in a legal doubt. How
did he know what Manuel knew? Precisely! As before, he nodded his head. 
"After supper, Boaz, you were in the shop? But
you heard some- thing?" 
"Yes." 
He went on to tell them what he had heard, the
footfalls, below and above, the extraordinary conversation which had broken for
a moment the silence of the inner hall. The account was bare, the phrases
monosyllabic. He reported only what had been registered on the sensitive
tympanums of his ears, to the last whisper of footfalls stealing past the dark
wall of the shop. Of all the formless tangle of thoughts, suspicions,
interpretations, and the special and personal knowledge given to the blind
which moved in his brain, he said nothing. 
He shut his lips there. He felt himself on the
defensive. Just as he distrusted the higher ramifications of finance (his house
had gone down uninsured), so before the rites and processes of that inscrutable
creature, the law, he felt himself menaced by the invisible and the unknown,
helpless, oppressed; in an abject sense, skeptical. 
"Keep clear of the law!" they had told him
in his youth. The monster his imagination had summoned then still stood beside
him in his age. 
Having exhausted his monosyllabic and superficial
evidence, they could move him no farther. He became deaf and dumb. He sat be-
fore them, an image cast in some immensely heavy stuff, inanimate. His lack of
visible emotion impressed them. Remembering his ex- uberance, it was only the
stranger to see him unmoving and un- moved. Only once did they catch sight of
something beyond. As they were preparing to leave he opened his mouth. What he
said was like a swan song to the years of his exuberant happiness. Even now
there was no color of expression in his words, which sounded mechanical. 
"Now I have lost everything. My house. My last
son. Even my honor. You would not think I would like to live. But I go to live.
I go to work. That cachorra, one day he shall come back again, in the dark
night, to have a look. I shall go to show you all. That cachorra!" 
(And from that time on, it was noted, he never
referred to the fugitive by any other name than cachorra, which is a gender of
dog. "That cachorra!" As if he had forfeited the relationship not
only of the family, but of the very genus, the very race! "That
cachorra!") 
He pronounced this resolution without passion. When
they as- sured him that the culprit would come back again indeed, much sooner
than he expected, "with a rope around his neck," he shook his head
slowly. 
"No, you shall not catch that cachorra now. But
one day . . ." 
There was something about its very colorlessness which
made it sound oracular. It was at least prophetic. They searched, laid their
traps, proceeded with all their placards, descriptions, rewards, clues, trails.
But on Manuel Negro they never laid their hands. 
Months passed and became years. Boaz Negro did not
rebuild his house. He might have done so, out of his earnings, for upon himself
he spent scarcely anything, reverting to his old habit of an almost miserly
economy. Yet perhaps it would have been harder after all. For his earnings were
less and less. In that town a cobbler who sits in an empty shop is apt to want
for trade. Folk take their boots to mend where they take their bodies to rest
and their minds to be edified. 
No longer did the walls of Boaz's shop resound to the
boastful recollections of young men. Boaz had changed. He had become not only
different, but opposite. A metaphor will do best. The spirit of Boaz Negro had
been a meadowed hillside giving upon the open sea, the sun, the warm, wild winds
from beyond the blue horizon. And covered with flowers, always hungry and
thirsty for the sun and the fabulous wind and bright showers of rain. It had
become an en- trenched camp, lying silent, sullen, verdureless, under a gray
sky. He stood solitary against the world. His approaches were closed. He was
blind, and he was also deaf and dumb. 
Against that, what can young fellows do who wish for
nothing but to rest themselves and talk about their friends and enemies? They
had come and they had tried. They had raised their voices even higher than
before. Their boasts had grown louder, more pre- sumptuous, more preposterous,
until, before the cold separation of that unmoving and as if contemptuous
presence in the cobbler's chair, they burst of their own air, like toy
balloons. And they went and left Boaz alone. 
There was another thing which served, if not to keep
them away, at least not to entice them back. That was the aspect of the place.
It was not cheerful. It invited no one. In its way that fire-bitten ruin grew
to be almost as great a scandal as the act itself had been. It was plainly an
eyesore. A valuable property, on the town's main thoroughfare— and an eyesore!
The neighboring owners protested. 
Their protestations might as well have gone against a
stone wall. That man was deaf and dumb. He had become, in a way, a kind of
vegetable, for the quality of a vegetable is that, while it is endowed with
life, it remains fixed in one spot. For years Boaz was scarcely seen to move
foot out of that shop which was left him, a small, square, blistered promontory
on the shores of ruin. 
He must indeed have carried out some rudimentary sort
of a do- mestic program under the debris at the rear (he certainly did not
sleep or eat in the shop). One or two lower rooms were left fairly intact. The
outward aspect of the place was formless; it grew to be no more than a mound in
time; the charred timbers, one or two still standing, lean and naked against
the sky, lost their blackness and faded to a silvery gray. It would have seemed
strange, had they not grown accustomed to the thought, to imagine that blind
man, like a mole, or some slow slug, turning himself mysteriously in the bowels
of that gray mound— that time-silvered "eyesore." 
When they saw him, however, he was in the shop. They
opened the door to take in their work (when other cobblers turned them off),
and they saw him seated in his chair in the half-darkness, his whole person,
legs, torso, neck, head, as motionless as the vegetable of which we have
spoken— only his hands and his bare arms endowed with visible life. The gloom
had bleached the skin to the color of damp ivory, and against the background of
his immobility they moved with a certain amazing monstrousness, interminably.
No, they were never still. One wondered what they could be at. Surely he could
not have had enough work now to keep those insatiable hands so monstrously in
motion. Even far into the night. Tap-tap-tap! Blows continuous and powerful. On
what? On nothing? On the bare iron last? And for what purpose? To what
conceivable end? 
Well, one could imagine those arms, growing paler,
also growing thicker and more formidable with that unceasing labor; the muscles
feeding themselves omnivorously on their own waste, the cords toughening, the
bone tissues revitalizing themselves without end. One could imagine the whole
aspiration of that mute and motionless man pouring itself out into those pallid
arms, and the arms taking it up with a kind of blind greed. Storing it up.
Against a day! 
"That cachorra! One day . . ." 
What were the thoughts of the man? What moved within
that motionless cranium covered with long hair? Who can say? Behind everything,
of course, stood that bitterness against the world— the blind world— blinder
than he would ever be. And against "that cach- orra." But this was no
longer a thought; it was the man. 
Just as all muscular aspiration flowed into his arms,
so all the energies of his senses turned to his ears. The man had become, you
might say, two arms and two ears. Can you imagine a man listening, in- tently,
through the waking hours of nine years? 
Listening to footfalls. Marking with a special
emphasis of concen- tration the beginning, rise, full passage, falling away,
and dying of all the footfalls. By day, by night, winter and summer and winter
again. Unraveling the skein of footfalls passing up and down the street! 
For three years he wondered when they would come. For
the next three years he wondered if they would ever come. It was during the
last three that a doubt began to trouble him. It gnawed at his huge moral
strength. Like a hidden seepage of water, it undermined (in anticipation) his
terrible resolution. It was a sign perhaps of age, a slipping away of the
reckless infallibility of youth. 
Supposing, after all, that his ears should fail him?
Supposing they were capable of being tricked, without his being able to know
it? Supposing that that cachorra should come and go, and he, Boaz, living in
some vast delusion, some unrealized distortion of memory, should let him pass unknown?
Supposing precisely this thing had already happened! 
Or the other way around. What if he should hear the
footfalls coming, even into the very shop itself? What if he should be as sure
of them as of his own. soul? What, then, if he should strike? And what, then,
if it were not that cachorra after all? How many tens and hundreds of millions
of people were there in the world? Was it possible for them all to have
footfalls distinct and different? 
Then they would take him and hang him. And that
cachorra might then come and go at his own will, undisturbed. 
As he sat there sometimes the sweat rolled down his
nose, cold as rain. 
Supposing! 
Sometimes, quite suddenly, in broad day, in the
booming silence of the night, he would start. Not outwardly. But beneath the
pale integument of his skin all his muscles tightened and his nerves sang. His
breathing stopped. It seemed almost as if his heart stopped. 
Was that it? Were those the feet, there, emerging
faintly from the distance? Yes, there was something about them. Yes! Memory was
in travail. Yes, yes, yes! No! How could he be sure? Ice ran down into his
empty eyes. The footfalls were already passing. They were gone, swallowed up
already by time and space. Had that been that cachorra? 
Nothing in his life had been so hard to meet as this
insidious drain of distrust in his own powers; this sense of a traitor within
the walls. His iron-gray hair had turned white. It was always this now, from
the beginning of the day to the end of the night; how was he to know? How was
he to be inevitably, unshakably sure? 
Curiously, after all this purgatory of doubts, he did
know them. For a moment at least, when he had heard them, he was unshakably
sure. 
It was on an evening of the winter holidays, the
Portuguese festi- val of Menin' Jesus. Christ was born again in a hundred
mangers on a hundred tiny altars; there was cake and wine; songs went shouting
by to the accompaniment of mandolins and tramping feet. The wind blew cold
under a clear sky. In all the houses there were lights; even in Boaz Negro's
shop a lamp was lit just now, for a man had been in for a pair of boots which
Boaz had patched. The man had gone out again. Boaz was thinking of blowing out
the light. It meant nothing to him. 
He leaned forward, judging the position of the lamp
chimney by the heat on his face, and puffed out his cheeks to blow. Then his
cheeks collapsed suddenly, and he sat back again. 
It was not odd that he had failed to hear the
footfalls until they were actually within the door. A crowd of merrymakers was
passing just then; their songs and tramping almost shook the shop. 
Boaz sat back. Beneath his passive exterior his nerves
thrummed; his muscles had grown as hard as wood. Yes! Yes! But no! He had heard
nothing; no more than a single step, a single foot pressure on the planks
within the door. Dear God! He could not tell! 
Going through the pain of an enormous effort, he
opened his lips. 
"What can I do for you?" 
"Well, I-I don't know. To tell the truth " 
The voice was unfamiliar, but it might be assumed.
Boaz held him- self. His face remained blank, interrogating, slightly helpless.
"I am a little deaf," he said. "Come
nearer." 
The footfalls came halfway across the intervening
floor, and there appeared to hesitate. The voice, too, had a note of
uncertainty. 
"I was just looking around. I have a pair of—
well, you mend shoes?" 
Boaz nodded his head. It was not in response to the words,
for they meant nothing. What he had heard were the footfalls on the floor. 
Now he was sure. As has been said, for a moment at
least after he had heard them he was unshakably sure. The congestion of his
mus- cles had passed. He was at peace. 
The voice became audible once more. Before the massive
preoccu- pation of the blind man it became still less certain of itself. 
"Well, I haven't got the shoes with me. I was—
just looking around." 
It was amazing to Boaz, this miraculous sensation of
peace. 
"Wait!" Then, bending his head as if
listening to the winter wind, "It's cold tonight. You've left the door
open. But wait!" Leaning down, his hand fell on a rope's end hanging by
the chair. The gesture was one continuous, undeviating movement of the hand. No
hesi- tation. No groping. How many hundreds, how many thousands of times had
his hand schooled itself in that gesture! 
A single strong pull. With a little bang the front
door had swung to and latched itself. Not only the front door. The other door,
lead- ing to the rear, had closed too and latched itself with a little bang.
And leaning forward from his chair, Boaz blew out the light. 
There was not a sound in the shop. Outside, feet
continued to go by, ringing on the frozen road; voices were lifted; the wind
hustled about the corners of the wooden shell with a continuous, shrill note of
whistling. All of this outside, as on another planet. Within the blackness of
the shop the complete silence persisted. 
Boaz listened. Sitting on the edge of his chair, half
couching, his head, with its long, unkempt white hair, bent slightly to one
side, he concentrated upon this chambered silence the full powers of his
senses. He hardly breathed. The other person in that room could not be
breathing at all, it seemed. 
No, there was not a breath, not the stirring of a sole
on wood, not the infinitesimal rustle of any fabric. It was as if in this utter
stoppage of sound, even the blood had ceased to flow in the veins and arteries
of that man, who was like a rat caught in a trap. 
It was appalling even to Boaz; even to the cat.
Listening became more than a labor. He began to have to fight against a growing
im- pulse to shout out loud, to leap, sprawl forward without aim in that
unstirred darkness— do something. Sweat rolled down from behind his ears, into
his shirt collar. He gripped the chair arms. To keep quiet he sank his teeth
into his lower lip. He would not! He would not! 
And of a sudden he heard before him, in the center of
the room, an outburst of breath, an outrush from lungs in the extremity of
pain, thick, laborious, fearful. A coughing up of dammed air. 
Pushing himself from the arms of the chair, Boaz
leaped. 
His fingers, passing swiftly through the air, closed
on something. It was a sheaf of hair, bristly and thick. It was a man's beard. 
On the road outside, up and down the street for a
hundred yards, merrymaking people turned to look at one another. With an abrupt
cessation of laughter, of speech. Inquiringly. Even with an unconscious
dilation of the pupils of their eyes. 
"What was that?" 
There had been a scream. There could be no doubt of
that. A single, long-drawn note. Immensely high-pitched. Not as if it were
human. 
"God's sake! What was that? Where'd it come
from?" 
Those nearest said it came from the cobbler shop of
Boaz Negro. 
They went and tried the door. It was closed; even
locked, as if for the night. There was no light behind the window shade. But
Boaz would not have a light. They beat on the door. No answer. 
But from where, then, had that prolonged, as if
animal, note come? 
They ran about, penetrating into the side lanes,
interrogating, prying. Coming back at last, inevitably, to the neighborhood of
Boaz Negro's shop. 
The body lay on the floor at Boaz's feet, where it had
tumbled down slowly after a moment from the spasmodic embrace of his arms;
those ivory-colored arms which had beaten so long upon the bare iron surface of
a last. Blows continuous and powerful! It seemed incredible. They were so weak
now. They could not have lifted the hammer now. 
But that beard! That bristly, thick, square beard of a
stranger! 
His hands remembered it. Standing with his shoulders
fallen for- ward and his weak arms hanging down, Boaz began to shiver. The
whole thing was incredible. What was on the floor there, upheld in the vast
gulf of darkness, he could not see. Neither could he hear it; smell it. Nor (if
he did not move his foot) could he feel it. What he did not hear, smell, or touch
did not exist. It was not there. In- credible! 
But that beard! All the accumulated doubtings of those
years fell down upon him. After all, the thing he had been so fearful of in his
weak imaginings had happened. He had killed a stranger. He, Boaz Negro, had
murdered an innocent man! 
And all on account of that beard. His deep panic made
him light- headed. He began to confuse cause and effect. If it were not for
that beard, it would have been that cachorra. 
On this basis he began to reason with a crazy directness.
And to act. He went and pried open the door into the entry. From a shelf he
took down his razor. A big, heavy-heeled blade, made long ago for a beard which
turned the jaw black again an hour after shaving. And the old, brown, polished
strop. His hands began to hurry. And the mug, half full of soap. And water. It
would have to be cold water. But after all, he thought (lightheadedly), at this
time of night . . . 
Outside, they were at the shop again. The crowd's
habit is to for- get a thing quickly, once it is out of sight and hearing. But
there had been something about that solitary cry which continued to bother
them, even in memory. Where had it been? Where had it come from? And those who
had stood nearest the cobbler shop were heard again. They were certain now,
dead certain. They could swear! 
In the end they broke down the door. 
If Boaz heard them he gave no sign. An absorption as
complete as it was monstrous wrapped him. Kneeling in the glare of the lantern
they had brought, as impervious as his own shadow sprawling behind him, he
continued to shave the dead man on the floor. 
No one touched him. Their minds and imaginations were
arrested by the gigantic proportions of the act. The unfathomable presump- tion
of the act. As throwing murder in their faces to the tune of a jig in a
barbershop. It is a fact that none of them so much as thought of touching him.
No less than all of them, together with all other men, shorn of their
imaginations— that is to say, the expressionless and imperturbable creature of
the Law— would be sufficient to touch that ghastly man. 
On the other hand, they could not leave him alone.
They could not go away. They watched. They saw the damp, lather-soaked beard of
that victimized stranger falling away, stroke by stroke of the flashing, heavy
razor. The dead denuded by the blind! 
It was seen that Boaz was about to speak. It was
something important he was to utter; something, one would say, fatal. The words
would not come all at once. They swelled his cheeks out. His razor was
arrested. Lifting his face, he encircled the watchers with a gaze at once of
imploration and of command. As if he could see them. As if he could read his
answer in the expressions of their faces. 
"Tell me one thing now. Is it that
cachorra?" 
For the first time those men in the room made sounds.
They shuffled their feet. It was as if an uncontrollable impulse to ejacu-
lation, laughter, derision, forbidden by the presence of death, had gone down
into their boot soles. 
"Manuel?" one of them said. "You mean
Manuel?" 
Boaz laid the razor down on the floor beside its work.
He got up from his knees slowly, as if his joints hurt. He sat down in his
chair, rested his hands on the arms, and once more encircled the company with
his sightless gaze. 
"Not Manuel. Manuel was a good boy. But tell me
now, is it that cachorra?" 
Here was something out of their calculations;
something for them, mentally, to chew on. Mystification is a good thing
sometimes. It gives the brain a fillip, stirs memory, puts the gears of
imagination in mesh. One man, an old, tobacco-chewing fellow, began to stare
harder at the face on the floor. Something moved in his intellect. 
"No, but look here now, by God — " 
He had even stopped chewing. But he was forestalled by
another. 
"Say now, if it don't look like that fellow Wood,
himself. The bank fellow— that was burned— remember? Himself." 
"That cachorra was not burned. Not that Wood. You
damned fool!" 
Boaz spoke from his chair. They hardly knew his voice,
emerging from its long silence; it was so didactic and arid. 
"That cachorra was not burned. It was my boy that
was burned. It was that cachorra called my boy upstairs. That cachorra killed
my boy. That cachorra put his clothes on my boy, and he set my house on fire. I
knew that all the time. Because when I heard those feet come out of my house
and go away, I knew they were the feet of that cachorra from the bank. I did
not know where he was going to. Something said to me, 'You better ask him where
he is going to.' But then I said, 'You are foolish.' He had the money from the
bank. I did not know. And then my house was on fire. No, it was not my boy that
went away; it was that cachorra all the time. You damned fools! Did you think I
was waiting for my own boy? 
"Now I show you all," he said at the end.
"And now I can get hanged." 
No one ever touched Boaz Negro for that murder. For
murder it was in the eye and letter of the Law. But the Law in a small town is
sometimes a curious creature; it is sometimes blind only in one eye. 
Their minds and imaginations in that town were
arrested by the romantic proportions of the act. Simply, no one took it up. I
believe the man, Wood, was understood to have died of heart failure. 
When they asked Boaz why he had not told what he knew
as to the identity of that fugitive in the night, he seemed to find it hard to
say exactly. How could a man of no education define for them his own but
half-defined misgivings about the Law, his sense of op- pression, constraint,
and awe, of being on the defensive, even, in an abject way, his skepticism?
About his wanting, come what might, to "keep clear of the Law"? 
He did say this, "You would have laughed at
me." 
And this, "If I told folks it was Wood went away,
then I say he would not dare come back again." 
That was the last. Very shortly he began to refuse to
talk about the thing at all. The act was completed. Like the creature of fable,
it had consumed itself. Out of that old man's consciousness it had de- parted.
Amazingly. Like a dream dreamed out. 
Slowly at first, in a makeshift, piece-at-a-time, poor
man's way, Boaz commenced to rebuild his house. That "eyesore"
vanished. 
And slowly at first, like the miracle of a green shoot
pressing out from the dead earth, that priceless and unquenchable exuberance of
the man was seen returning. Unquenchable, after all.
Category:Steele
Category:Published