I stopped for a moment to take a closer look at the miniatures in the window. The owner was clearly a religious man: There were little saints and scenes from Scripture along with the crusading knights I’d noticed earlier, all of it made out of scraps of shoe leather and bits of old tools. Sharp tacks found use in a crucifixion scene, and beside the workbench I recognized the guests at the Last Supper, carved out of blocks of saddle soap. The fellow was quite a craftsman; he’d managed delicate expressions with a few twists of an awl in soft wax. Good hands, my Aunt Cat would have said. She had them too, fingers that understood pressure and give and suited their strength to the task. She could wring the neck of an old chicken with a quick snap of her wrist or splice the tiny wires of a toy locomotive, and a pinch on the ear hurt just exactly as much as she meant it to.
I got my share of spankings from those hands, but I have my fond memories too, and these came back to me with unusual clarity as I stood in front of the cobbler’s window. I remembered how my Aunt Cat used to scoop finger-fulls of something called Chap-Chap Balm for Irritated Udders out of a giant jar she’d brought from the old Beart family dairy, its label gone translucent with grease. Each night before bed she’d coat her hands with it, wrap them up in dishcloths, and sleep like that, and for all they did, my Aunt Cat’s hands stayed smooth. I remembered when that case of scarlet fever landed me in a big city hospital, how all through the days or weeks of quarantine in a tiny room that seemed to list from side to side, its round little windows looking at me like animal eyes, the only points of solidness as the whole world tilted and lurched were my Aunt Cat’s cool hands cupping my cheeks.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed those hands. I recognized them the first time I came across the character of Verna in Inga Beart’s last novel. A dairyman’s daughter with braids down her back and fine-work hands; she takes a cactus spine out of the barn cat’s paw and wins a yellow ribbon for her needlework. She appears later in the novel, briefly, as the mother of a boy and girl, a hardworking rancher’s wife who takes care of her hands, as if she’s saving them for something.
The biographers say Inga Beart never came back to see her sister or anyone else after she left home at the age of seventeen. But the portrait of Verna, fingers still quick and supple as she grows into a woman of steely middle age, so resembles my Aunt Cat that even if I didn’t have my own memory of that day under the table I’d still be certain Inga Beart visited her sister later in life. And in any case, there is a needlework ribbon—yellow for grand champion, going yellower with age—hanging above the telephone back home, in the frame it’s been in since my Aunt Cat won it at the county fair in 1939, three years after Inga Beart left her parents’ home for good and ran off with her Hungarian.
Next to the apostles in the window a little Madonna held the baby Jesus wrapped in moleskin in her arms. After all the walking I’d done that day I could feel the heat of a blister-to-be on my foot. A square of moleskin was exactly what I needed. But by then it was getting late and the shop was dark. I leaned in to see if anyone was still inside, and when I cupped my hands against the window to block the glare my palm stuck to the glass. Someone had left their chewing gum. The gum had gone stringy in the heat of the afternoon and when I pulled my hand away a sticky thread stretched between my palm and the shop window, then broke and reattached itself to the glass. Having taught the middle grades for so many years I’ve found plenty of chewing gum in unwanted places. I got out my handkerchief and cleaned it off as best I could.
It took some doing, and I may have only made things worse. A man had come out of a shop across the street and was standing in the doorway, watching me while he filled his pipe. In another moment he started toward me.
“The proprietor is away,” he said, nodding to the shoe repair shop. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he spoke to me in English; I must have looked like Yankee Doodle in my old sun hat and the gym shoes I’d brought for walking in.
“I see,” I said.
The man didn’t seem concerned by the smudges on the window, because he said, “If you have left something to be repaired, I have the possibility to go into the shop and take it for you. I keep a key.”
“Oh, well thank you,” I said. “I was only going to ask about something for a blister.”
“Ah, then perhaps they will help you at the pharmacy. The owner, it will be some weeks until he returns.”
“Is he a friend of yours?” I asked.
“Well, we are here day by day, the same street, which is not so full of people, as you see, and so we talk to one another. I watch his shop while he takes his lunch, and sometimes he watches mine.” And then, as if he had just noticed that my handkerchief was stuck to my fingers and there was still a gob of gum on the glass, he said, “Ah, this again. I find it happens on my windows too. The children, they pass just here on their way to school.”
“A bit of some kind of oil would do the trick,” I said. “I used to teach school, and I always kept a bottle of oil soap in my desk. It takes chewing gum right off.”
“Mm, yes, I may have something,” the man said. “One moment.” He crossed the street and went into a small art gallery I hadn’t noticed before. After a minute he came back out, carrying a box filled with tubes of paint.
“You’re an artist?” I asked.
“No, no,” he said. He shrugged in the direction of the gallery and gave a little laugh. “I hope you will say nothing to my clients, but these days it is very difficult to find at once an artist and a master of technique. And so I keep a few things—” He dug around in the box until he found a can of painter’s oil and handed it to me. “This I use for fattening the paints. One never knows when one will be required to adjust the perspective, to add a spot of color that must be there.”
My handkerchief was ruined anyway, so I used it to daub some oil on the window. I let it sit for a moment. The man gave me a palette knife and I scraped the glass as gently as I could. The oil did the trick, the gum came off. I did my best to wipe the window clean.
“Bravo,” the man said. “I will try this myself the next time. You say you are a schoolteacher?”
“Retired,” I said. I didn’t want to discuss it, so I said, “I was admiring these little figures in the window.”
“Ah yes. Well, the owner, he is a funny sort. Every year he makes a pèlerinage, a trip for the purposes of religious devotion, to visit the bones of, I believe, this one here—” The man pointed inside to one of the little figures. “He has to walk to the very end of land, as they call it, which is in the north of Spain.”
“My goodness,” I said.
“Yes, he does this every year in June, and every year I would say it takes some weeks. And when he comes back he has got sore feet and he has missed the customers like yourself. But he has been going now for many years. He tells me there was a time when all the men of his profession were quite devoted to this saint, who made such business for the shoemakers. People would walk great distances to make a visit to his tomb, and when they did, they must have boots. For many centuries the travelers to this site, they have left from just there—” he pointed over the rooftops to the same tower I’d been using as a landmark. “It is the tower of Saint Jacques. Saint James, I believe you say in English.”
“I can see why they chose that tower,” I said. “I noticed it the first morning I was here. It’s been keeping me from getting lost, my hotel is just on the other side.”