My father died with feet like tree roots, split and blackened, for he walked the fields barefoot forty years and gave the one pair of clogs to my brother, who wore them till they wore to nothing.
Now I am handed these. Two of them, a matched pair, sewn snug as a glove for the foot, soft within as a lamb's belly. No holes. No lord's cast-offs gone hard with another man's sweat. Made new, for one man, and that man me.
I turned them over in my hands a long while. The sole is thick as a Bible, and stitched, not cracked. A body could walk the whole pilgrimage road on these and come home with feet as pink as the day he was churched. I have known men lose toes to the frost for want of half this leather.
And they tell me there are more. That a man may own two pairs, three, and choose among them of a morning as a lord chooses his hawk. That some sit in a chest unworn.
I did not believe it. Unworn shoes. Good leather, resting idle in the dark while somewhere a child goes barefoot on the ice.
I will wear these until they are dust, and thank God nightly for the mercy. But I know how the Lord keeps His accounts. Somewhere a man must have paid the price of these easy feet, and I fear it was not the man wearing them.