The Village Beautiful

Abstract

The Village Beautiful Zack Finch (bio) Something happened to me one summer, four years ago. I was walking up the sidewalk not far from my house, when I saw a shoe lying by the side of the road. I paused, half-circled, stooped closer. It was, as I would later be able to describe it, a wedge sandal with a cork heel, with black canvas straps, and merona printed on the inner sole, size 8½. So what? Even around here, stray shoes appear all the time. I mean, people just throw trash out the car window, abandon pets, no one knows why. It was a period in my life when I was briefly happy. Not happy exactly. Content, maybe. I no longer desired. It was as if something within me had been settled and becalmed me: a newborn son, a stoic woman who had taken my name when we married (she would later give it back). We lived in a little college town that called itself "the village beautiful" on its welcome sign. The sandal, like a dial tone, spoke to me of something else. I stood there for a couple minutes, as before a difficult section of text. I snapped two pictures, from different angles, then resumed walking uphill toward my destination—the rare books library at the private college that owns over half of this town, established in the eighteenth century by a wealthy slaveholder who gained fame as a vicious colonel in the French and Indian Wars. They were exhibiting some first folios by Shakespeare. My son was in daycare, and I had a couple hours to spare. The folios were there. I stood before them. They were preserved in glass, of course, as holy relics are; but after the encounter with the forsaken shoe, they inspired no feeling in me. I felt numb to them. They didn't rip of the sublime. In an effort to lean in, to whet something awake, I asked the student at the reference desk if she knew what their provenance was. She picked up a phone, and in a minute, there appeared a man holding a thick black binder containing information related to my question. I leafed through, noting how they were purchased by G. C. Morrison from James Toovey in 1877, who gifted it to his father George L. Harrison of Philadelphia, upon whose death in 1885 it passed to his widow, upon whose death it passed through various holdings (Rosenbach, Chaffers) before turning up in a sale at Anderson's in November 1915 where it was bought by the James F. Drake Company, from whom it was purchased by . . . But the whole time I was thinking about something else. How it symbolized—what? The astonishment of something molted, the skin abandoned and broken. Some things, they just make you feel the rough rupture of discovery, the danger of non-meaning, like a huge big black snake coiled around a pale human body in a painting by Poussin. Did it come off the foot of someone running downhill too [End Page 52] drunk or distressed or endangered to turn back? Was it jettisoned on purpose, from a car window, as an act of emancipation or disgust? There was something about the sandal's flagrant haecceity, the way it burned like a roadside flare, that made me feel like Mike Hammer in a film noir, that first scene with the woman running down the middle of a darkened road, barefoot on the white line, breathing heavily, the panting almost sexual, she is wearing a tan trench coat, having just escaped from a mental institution. The library had some other holdings on display too—a 1663 Eliot Indian Bible used for converting Indians, some colorful Audubon plates, an original copy of the Declaration of Independence hanging vertically behind glass. I walked around to the back—Mike Hammer in a dream—and noticed some handwriting on the back side. Not words, but a math problem: someone in 1776 had used the back of this broadside to tally five numbers, the way we might use the back of an envelope. I went through the mental motions, to see if this person had...