The Shoes I Kept Polished for Renae

Harvest Days

On Saturday morning, by half past seven, I had carried the big bench out onto the sidewalk in front of the shop.

It took Booker and Verl and me and a hand truck. Verl’s hands are not what they were, and he stood behind me with a bucket of waxed thread and would not let anyone else carry it.

By eight, there were thirty people in the street. Marlow was there with his apron on. Dub Kessler had come out from the barber’s with his comb behind his ear. Pastor Hobart stood by the curb with his coffee, and half the Baptist ladies were with him, which is not a thing you see.

Orrin parked the brown truck at the corner and got out in his uniform, though it was his day off.

I stood on a milk crate. I am not a woman who speaks in public, and my voice shook, and I let it.

“Some of you were in my shop one April morning eight and a half years ago, or heard about it after. I said a sentence to my daughter at this counter. I will say it again so you know exactly which one.”

“I will not fix the shoes of a girl who walked the wrong road.”

You could hear the flag rope ticking on the bank pole.

“I said it because I was afraid. I called it standards. My daughter has spent four years turning her husband in a bed so he does not get sores, and she has done it alone, seventy miles from here, because I would not look at the man.”

“She did not do one thing wrong, except to marry somebody I did not approve of. I was wrong. I am not asking anyone here to carry a word to her. I am telling you so that I have said it out loud, where the first thing was said.”

Nobody spoke. Then Marlow Pruitt said, “Tildy, we’ve all got our road,” and went back to wiping his hands.

I got down from the crate.

“I’m not charging for repairs today,” I said. “Any pair, any person, whatever road you’re on. Heels, soles, zippers. Put a coin in the jar if you want. Whatever’s in it goes to the hospice fund at the Methodist church.”

Booker, from his folding chair, said, “That’s nine hundred dollars, Tildy.”

“I know what it is,” I said.

I was at that bench for eleven hours. I did forty-one pairs. I did a farmer’s work boots and a little girl’s patent shoes and the Baptist deacon’s good black Sunday pair, and I did them right.

Between pairs I sat on a stool by the vise and stitched a child’s shoe by hand. Black calf, a plain oxford, size one and a half, a half-inch of growth room in the toe.