An excerpt from ROOMS: Rooms of Texas, Book One of UNIFORMS: How America Dressed Itself, a novel by A.K. Nolan. San Antonio, 1886. Sam Lucchese has been open two years. Elias Pruitt has been the bootmaker to the Post for considerably longer.
Captain Bledsoe
Lucchese Bros. East Houston Street. 1886.
The officer Sam called Bledsoe—not his real name, because the record does not give it—came in on a Thursday in 1886, with parade dust still on him and the Post not half a thought behind. Sam had taken a room where an officer could step down from his horse, onto the street, and through his door before the shine wore off. Bledsoe still carried some of the parade ground on him—the stiff-backed posture, the hard polish, a trace of French pageantry, and the sense that a man might be measured at a glance and found wanting. He entered the way very confident men enter rooms: as if the room had been expecting him and had only itself to blame.
He was the kind of officer Pruitt had always done well by: not extravagant, not careless, not interested in novelty for its own sake. A man of rank, habit, and standards. He came in wearing Pruitt’s work. That mattered. “I don’t need anything fancy,” he said. “Just a shine and a fix.” This sentence, Sam had already learned, meant exactly the opposite. It was what Texas men said when they wanted something quite good and needed permission to want it. “Of course,” Sam said. The boots were respectable black, properly kept, sound enough in the sole and acceptable in the line. But the left boot pinched at the instep and the right had begun to slip slightly at the heel.
Bledsoe set one on the counter and explained the problem in the tone of a man describing a clerical error. Sam did not argue with the boot. He turned it in his hands, looked once at the wear, then once at the Captain’s stance. “You ride harder on the right,” he said. Bledsoe looked at him. Sam measured the arch, the heel, the instep, the exact point where the toe wanted to begin its taper. When Sam reached for the measure, Bledsoe did not stop him. Three weeks later, Bledsoe returned and tried on the finished boots. He took three steps. He stopped. He took three more. “Good,” he said, in the tone men use when they mean considerably more than good but have decided that elaborating would cost them something.
He paid without flinching. At the door, he paused. “My wife, she’s interested in shoes.” “We make ladies’ shoes,” Sam said. Bledsoe nodded, satisfied, as if this resolved more than one household matter. Then he left. That night Sam opened his notebook and put a check beside: Military.
Captain Bledsoe—Pruitt’s most reliable officer customer back when the Post still had frontier work to do—walked into Pruitt’s shop one Thursday afternoon in the spring of 1887, looked at a display of half-made cavalry boots, and said, with the elaborate casualness of a man who had decided to deliver bad news obliquely: “Elias, you heard of a fellow on Houston Street? Italian?”
Pruitt had heard of him. The way you hear of something that is not yet a problem and file it under not yet a problem. “Lucchese,” he said. “Shoemaker.”
“Bootmaker,” Bledsoe said—a distinction that should not have mattered but somehow, in the way he said it, did. “Took a pair of mine in hand. Took my measure too.”
A silence in which Pruitt calculated what this meant. “Good work?” he asked, though he could already tell from the way Bledsoe was standing—the ease of a man whose feet had recently been correctly attended to—that the answer was yes.
“Good work,” Bledsoe confirmed. And then, with the gentleness of a man who was not trying to be cruel but had become cruel anyway: “I believe I’ll have him make the next pair.”
After Bledsoe left, Pruitt stood behind his counter for a long moment. Then he went to the back and resumed work on a cavalry boot he was making for a Lieutenant Harrigan, who had not, to Pruitt’s knowledge, visited Houston Street. Not yet.
That was the first thing Sam took from him. Precedence.
ROOMS: Rooms of Texas is Book One of UNIFORMS: How America Dressed Itself. First edition, available now. Buy the first edition
Rebel.Rebel Press. We make cultural property.