Bred by the Bootmaker

MERRITT

I decide to marry Teagan Zielinski on my knees on the fellowship hall floor, with her foot on the brown paper and her hand on my shoulder.

Pastor Lindell is selling a gooseberry pie for forty-one dollars, and I'm not bidding on it.

The fellowship hall is full. Folding tables in three rows, paper on the tables, the coffee urn going in the corner by the kitchen hatch. Somebody's propped the back door open with a cinder block, and the October air coming in smells of leaf smoke and cold gravel. Lindell has his reading glasses up on his head and his shirtsleeves rolled twice, and he's holding the gooseberry pie over his head like it might get away from him.

"Forty-one," he says. "It's for the roof. Think about the roof."

I'm at the end of the second row because that's where there's room for my legs. Rhett Ottinger is at the next table with Neely, a week out from their wedding. He has his arm along the back of her chair. She is telling the table about a boy who came into the clinic with a fishhook in his ear, and she's laughing so hard she can't get to the end of it. Rhett nods at me over her head. I nod back.

Then the woman across from Neely puts her foot up on the bench.

"No, look at this," she says. "Look. This is what five years does."

She's got her boot up on the end of the bench and her hands around her knee, and she's turning the boot to the light so the table can see. It's a guide boot, a good one once, and the outsole has come away from the welt across the whole toe. It opens when she flexes her foot. It looks like it's talking.

"I put it back together with Aquaseal in August," she says. "And then with duct tape. And then with more duct tape. It's held through a whole float season and two trips on the tailwater and I'm not sure anything is holding it now except my good attitude."

The table laughs. Neely says something about tetanus. I don't hear it. I'm looking at her.

Dark hair. Near black. One thick braid down her back, as long as my forearm, and a few pieces of it come loose at her temples. Green eyes. Fair skin, winter coming on in it already, gone pink across her cheeks from the warm room and from laughing. She's wearing a green sweater that fits her close, and jeans, and she is big up top and soft at the middle and round through the hips, and her thighs fill the jeans. Strong shoulders. Her shoulders are a paddler's, rounded, and the sweater pulls across them when she holds her knee.

She laughs with her whole mouth. It's a wide mouth.

I get up.

It's three steps to her table. Neely sees me coming and stops talking, and Rhett takes his arm off her chair. The woman with the boot looks up. She looks a long way up. She takes her time about it, and I let her.

"Hi," she says.

"That's the welt," I say. "The stitching's rotted through. The tape won't hold it."

"Okay." She looks at the boot and then at me. "Are you a doctor? Because I've had a lot of people tell me what's wrong with these boots tonight, and none of them could do anything about it."

"I make boots."

"For a living?"

"Yes."

Rhett says, "He does," as if that settles something.

"Merritt Gilliland," Neely says. "Cane Ridge. Merritt, this is Teagan. She's with Boyd at the floats."

"Teagan Zielinski," she says. She holds her hand out across the bench. I take it. It's a working hand, calloused across the palm under the fingers where a paddle shaft sits, and warm from the coffee cup. My hand goes all the way around hers with room left.

"Can I trace your feet," I say.

She doesn't let go of my hand. "Can you what?"

"Trace them. On paper. Both. I'll need the measurements if I'm going to make you a pair."

"Make me a pair of boots."

"Yes."

She opens her mouth. She shuts it. She looks at Neely, and Neely raises her eyebrows and doesn't help.

"Here?" Teagan says.

"It won't take long."

"I'm going to want to know what that costs," she says. "Before you get down on the floor."

I don't answer that. I go to the pie table, where the pies are set out on a long sheet of brown butcher paper, and I ask the woman minding them if I can have the end of the roll under the table. She looks at me, and at Teagan, and hands it over without asking what for. I tear off two lengths. There's a carpenter's pencil in my shirt pocket and a cloth tape in my jeans. I carry them both because people ask.

When I come back Teagan has her boots off. She's sitting on the bench in her wool socks with her feet flat on the linoleum, and her face is red, and she's grinning.

"I can't believe I'm doing this," she says. "These socks have been on a river."

"Stand up," I say.

She stands. I put the first sheet down in front of her and kneel. I'm on one knee and my head is about level with her breastbone.

"Left foot first," I say. "Weight on it. Like you're standing in the boat."

"You don't stand in a canoe," she says. "That's the first thing I teach anybody." But she steps onto the paper and puts her weight down, and she has to lean to do it, and her hand comes down on my shoulder and stays there. Her fingers spread through my flannel. She holds on.

I hold the pencil straight up and down and run it around her foot. Heel, the outside edge, the little toe, across the front of the toes, back down the inside past the ball and the arch. She has a wide foot at the ball and a narrow heel. A high instep. The second toe is longer than the first. I mark the ball joint on both sides and the back of the heel. I don't hurry it.

The hall's gone quieter. Lindell has sold the gooseberry pie to somebody, and he's started on a chess pie, and he keeps looking over at us, and losing his place.

"So people just let you do this," Teagan says. Her voice is above my head. "Strange men in church basements. Tracing their feet."

"It's not the basement."

"Strange men in church fellowship halls."

"Usually they come up to the shop."

"And you didn't think I'd come up to the shop."

"No," I say. "You said you were leaving."

Before the boot went up on the bench, she told Neely she'd be gone by the middle of January. I heard it from my table. Something out west, she said. Somewhere with moving water. She said it the way you'd say what time it is.

Her hand tightens on my shoulder, and then lets go a little.

"I did say that," she says.

I take the tape around the ball of her foot and read it. I take it over the instep and around under the arch, and around the heel and the instep both. I write the numbers in pencil on the paper beside the tracing. Her foot is warm through the wool. I hold it at the heel with my left hand while I measure, and her heel fits in my palm.

There are two people standing at my elbow. I know them without looking up. They are wearing yellow and blue.

"Well," says Bea Kesterson. "Isn't this something."

Lou Kesterson has her glasses on. "She's standing on the pie paper," she says.

"I asked for it," I say.

"We know you asked for it, Merritt. We watched you ask for it." Bea has the notebook open on her forearm and the pencil out. She looks at Teagan. "Honey, how old are you?"

Teagan laughs. "Is that for the paper too?"

"It's for our book."

"I'm twenty-six," Teagan says. "What book?"

"Don't worry about the book," Lou says.

"She's got it written down on a corkboard card that she's gone in January," Bea says to Lou. She is writing. "Della told me."

"Then she's long odds," Lou says.

"She's fifteen to one," Bea says. "I'm being generous." She looks down at me on the floor with Teagan's foot in my hand. "I'm being very generous."

"Right foot," I say.

Teagan steps off the paper and onto the second sheet. Her hand comes back to my shoulder. Her other hand goes to her mouth, and she's laughing behind it.

"Fifteen to one on what?" she says.

Nobody tells her. I trace the right foot. It's a quarter inch shorter than the left and the same width. That's common. I mark it. The twins stay and watch me take every measurement, and Lou says, "He's thorough," and Bea says, "He's always been thorough," and writes that down too.

I'm thirty-six. I've lived on Cane Ridge alone since my grandfather died. I built the house myself over seven years: the stone first, then the logs, then the roof. It has three bedrooms upstairs I don't use. I built them anyway, because I knew what they were for. I didn't know who.

I'm kneeling on the floor of the fellowship hall with a pencil in my hand, and her fingers are pressing into my shoulder through my shirt.

I'm going to marry Teagan Zielinski.

I write the date on both tracings. 10/10. I write her name across the top of the left one in capitals. I roll them together, not tight, and put a rubber band around them from my pocket.

"Okay," Teagan says. She sits back down on the bench and pulls her split boots on. She's flushed down her neck now, under the collar of the sweater. "What do I owe you? Seriously. I'm a river guide. I need to know whether I'm eating in December."

"Nothing tonight."

"That's not a number."

"No," I say.

"Then when are they going to be ready? I'm gone in January."

I stand up. She tips her head back to follow me, all the way back.

"When they're right," I say.

She looks at me for a while. Her mouth goes flat, like she's going to argue with that, and then it doesn't.

"You're not going to tell me a price," she says.

"No."

"Or a date."

"No."

"Okay," she says. "Okay. You're very strange." She's smiling. "Thank you, Merritt."

"You're welcome."

I go back to my table. Neely is looking at Rhett, and Rhett is looking at the ceiling. Lindell sells the chess pie for thirty dollars to someone who wasn't listening. I buy a buttermilk pie for sixty-five, because it's for the roof and because I'm not going to remember any of the rest of this evening except the part on the floor.

On the twelfth of January the radio says freezing rain by noon. At nine in the morning it's already sleet.

I'm on the porch splitting kindling for the box by the stove. The sleet comes in sideways off the hollow and ticks on the tin roof over my head, steady and fine, and when it hits the porch boards past the eaves it doesn't melt. The cedars along the road below the house have gone stiff and pale. Every needle has a coat on it. Across the hollow the ridges are gray, then grayer, then gone.

I've got the generator gassed and the woodshed full. Two weeks of wood split and under cover, and more in the rick by the shed. Water drawn in the kitchen in every pot I own. I filled the lamps last night. When the lines come down, and they're going to come down, the stove will heat the main room and the kitchen, and I can run the well pump and the freezer an hour at a time.

The co-op man on the radio says crews are staged in Harrison. He says it's coming in faster than forecast. He says stay off the roads.

I set another round on the block and split it in four.

Her boots are on my bench. They've been there since November. The uppers are cut from a chestnut-brown hide I picked out the week after the pie supper and lasted on a pair of lasts I built up to her tracings, a quarter inch shorter on the right. I've been stitching the welts in the evenings. I'm not finished. I'm not going to rush them, and I'm not going to bring them down to the hollow half done.

Della told me on Saturday that Teagan is leaving Friday. Della says she has it on a card on the corkboard, and the twins have been writing under it.

I split the last round and stack the kindling in the box. My hands are cold. The sleet is coming harder now, and the gravel on the road below the house has a shine to it that wasn't there an hour ago.

Then I hear an engine.

Nobody comes up Cane Ridge without a reason. The road climbs a mile and a half from the mailbox through the oaks and the cedar glades, and the last half mile is steep, and in weather it's the worst road on this side of the hollow. I put the hatchet down on the block and walk out to the top step.

A silver pickup comes up out of the cedars. Wisconsin plates. A canoe rack over the cab, empty. There's a blue tarp tied down over the bed, and the ends of two paddles stick out under the back of it, and a dry bag's yellow roll top shows at one corner where the tarp has worked loose. The wipers are going fast. She's in second gear and taking the grade steady, not too much throttle, the way you would if you'd driven ice before.

No chains on it.

The back end steps out on the last bend below the house. It comes back. She doesn't touch the brake. The truck keeps climbing.

I go down the steps into the sleet.

The truck stops in the turnaround below the porch with the engine running. Through the windshield I can see her. Wool hat. The braid over her shoulder. Both hands on the wheel. She looks at me through the glass, and she lets out a breath I can see from here, and she lifts one hand off the wheel and waves.

The gravel under my boots crunches once and then doesn't, because it's glazed over.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

Get the e-book