by Steve Stern
He steered his unsteady steps toward a mulberry hedge, behind which he hoped to find some privacy. Rounding the hedge he came upon a young woman lying supine on the ground, her features marmoreal, her gorged blue breast bared to the living infant that fiercely sucked at it. “Gott in himmel,” gasped Pinchas, who believed in neither God nor heaven. In fact he was by then more prepared to expect the kind of intervention that directly took place: when a yipping, half-naked bedlamite, death riding the flapping tails of his gown, appeared out of nowhere to shove Pinchas to the ground; then scarcely breaking stride, he stooped to pluck the tyke from the dead mother’s breast and carry it away.
His cheek pressed against the prickly grass, Pinchas understood that what he’d witnessed had no place in a sensible world—or was it the peddler himself who no longer belonged? He was almost grateful when he felt his griping gut uncoil, giving up along with his insides a vital spark at the quick of his being in a muddy emulsion of pitch-black blood. His last conscious thought was how convenient it was that his remains should already be swaddled in their graveclothes.
When reading aloud to Rachel from The Pinch, I would glance at her from time to time, watching for signs that she thought the words were more than stories. Certainly she was receptive, often changing positions on the mattress to make herself more comfortable: she hugged her knees, stretched her legs to loll on her side, tilted her head to catch a peculiar turn of phrase; sometimes she admitted an inward smile, sometimes laughed outright. But I could tell that the book remained for her merely a book, the stories only stories, a whimsical gloss on the factual history of North Main. Occasionally her attitude infected mine, reducing Muni’s chronicles to diversions for the gullible, fabrications that had little in common with the real life of the street. And honestly, there were times when it was a relief to share that perspective. Meanwhile I never let on that at some point in the narrative we would run into yours truly; then fact and fancy would collide or maybe blend into one and the same.
Her unwilling suspension of disbelief aside: naked, Rachel was herself a catalog of enchantments. She was tickled when I undressed her, not from the undue exposure so much as from her amusement at my shaking hands and chattering teeth. “Such an enfant terrible!”she would tease me. “Scared of a naked lady.” And it was true that no bogey I’d encountered during my pharmaceutical escapades had instilled in me such awe as Rachel’s close-pored flesh. Her breasts, when I lay my cheek against them, were soft as spongecake, her belly like the trough of a salt lick I traced with my tongue. Her burnished thighs fluctuated like waves, parting to reveal a floating garden I swam toward from over the crest of a hip. Entering her I tried not to lose myself, and looked to her human face to gauge the rectitude of my progress; but the moods of her face kept changing till I didn’t know whether I clung to a heroine or a whore or an impish child.
Okay, so the multitudes she contained gave me a fright—and then they didn’t; because letting go (and I could let go tumultuously since Rachel was on the pill) I would find myself again in familiar surroundings. For there sat tailor Bluestein at the machine in the window of his shop, sewing garments with odd apertures for the mutant creatures that sheltered in the outhouse behind his building. The merchant Shapiro was advising Mrs. Grunewald that the fabric she fingered was a sample from the pargod, the curtain that surrounded the Lord’s holy throne. “Note the irregularities that they’re unborn souls stitched into the material like pinned butterflies.” The butcher Makowsky sank his cleaver into marbled meat carved from a flank (or so he claimed) of the Messiah Ox, and the pot at Ike Taubenblatts’ pinochle game was stuffed with forfeited shadows. Ridblatt delivered fresh challah to Rosen’s Deli, where the alter kockers tore off pieces and stuffed their faces, the bread foaming like a benign hydrophobia in their toothless mouths. But Rachel lived elsewhere, and after I’d tarried a spell on North Main Street I made the journey back to my bed, where we would twine, my girl and me, like those vines that grew over the graves of legendary lovers.
And so I had for a time the best of both worlds.
He opened his eyes to darkest eternity. Of course Pinchas Pinsker had never supposed there would be an afterlife, and it humbled him to find himself in one, though this straitened confinement hardly qualified as any kind of a life. It angered him as well, his cramped situation, or at least he registered an emotion that might have risen to the status of anger had he had the strength for it. Because an afterlife gave the lie to the strict rationalist view he’d adhered to since rejecting the Torah of his student days; it vindicated all the narishkeit he thought he’d left behind him in the shtetl. His nose twitched against the stink of the effluvium that saturated his winding sheet. This must be Sheol, the inky perdition to which Jewish no-goodniks were everlastingly sentenced; though it seemed to Pinchas he’d scarcely had time in his brief life to earn such a bleak retribution. Granted, his few virtues might not have merited Paradise—but Sheol? Had he really been so great a sinner?
He felt himself momentarily in motion, floating for a spell in a shifting, desultory manner until he landed kerplump. The demons of the left side of darkness were toying with him, Pinchas assumed, the pain in his restricted limbs compounded by the unhappy realization that death had made him superstitious. He thought he heard voices and concluded that he wasn’t alone. Naturally there would be myriad others condemned to a similar solitude, fated to listen to one another’s mumblings and blubberings without a hope of ever understanding or being themselves understood. Then it came to him that there was an alternative he’d failed to consider: maybe he wasn’t actually dead. But that one seemed even less plausible than the other options. Again he heard muffled voices and decided it wouldn’t hurt to cry out, but the best he could muster in his feeble state was a pathetic inaudible groan. He discovered, however, that he still had the use of his fingers, and so began to rap on the ceiling of his horizontal cell. No sooner had he done so than he felt himself floating again, tilting to left and right then sliding downward with a velocity that left his stomach behind. He continued his desperate rapping, gathering what energy remained to him to deliver a full-blown, close-knuckled knock. Banging away on the lid of his captivity, Pinchas was aware of his mortal thirst, of wanting now beyond reason to be let out already from this airless purgatorial box!
The voices outside his stifling space grew louder. There was a sound like the squeal of a sphincter and a coffin-shaped seam of light appeared above him; then the lid was prized all the way off, and lustrous human faces—one with a broken nose and prognathous jaw, the other with a conflagration of ginger hair—hovered over him in the torrid afternoon. Drained of energy, Pinchas lay back unmoving in his enclosure.
“It’s a queer look that’s on him for a man that’s dead,” said the plug-ugly fellow.
“Dada,” exclaimed the redheaded girl, “he’s alive!”
“Faith, how can you tell, Katie darling?”
“Look how his sorrowful eyes are upon us.”
“Similar, I’m thinking, would be the eyes of any carcass.”
“But this one’s,” she said, poking an obtrusive index finger into Pinchas’s solar plexus, “are not past blinking.”
Her father allowed that that was the case but cautioned her not to touch his revolting person again. Then an argument commenced between father and daughter over whether the man deserved redeeming from his current circumstance. The father was of a mind to leave sleeping dogs lie. “After all, we don’t know where the filthy beggar has been.” This opinion was backed up by the pair of thick-ribbed lads lumbering on either side of the father, though the girl shut them both up with a word: “Eejits.” Then she protested that the man’s animate condition made it incumbent on every Christian to do his duty. “Besides, the very fact of his breathing gives the proof he survived the distemper and is no longer a danger.”
“But Katie mavourneen, we’ve our own grief to bear and it’s no affair we have to be shouldering an extra burden. Look about you, daughter, and you
r mother still unburied in this hidjiss place where no priest would attend us.”
For they were standing amid a congregation of knotty pine coffins in the broad gash of the open plague pit at the Elmwood Cemetery, where paupers were consigned to mass burial.
“My mother it was,” said the girl with a flash of temper, “that you drove into this early grave with your wanton ways. For her the distemper was a mercy and even this dreadful place a welcome rest. He”—pointing to the invalid in the box, who was trying without success to mouth some defense of his own—“is the Lord’s opportunity for you to do penance.”
“It’s a hard unforgiving lass you are altogether, Katie Keough, but when did your loving da ever refuse you? Neither the lame cur nor the mangy tom you were wont to drag to our humble door did I turn away.”
Which was how the peddler Pinchas Pinsker came to be lifted in his casket by the two lumpish brothers and loaded onto a rattling donkey cart. He was hauled from the burial ground under the skirts of the willow trees to the squishy banks of Catfish Bayou, just north of the district called the Pinch. This was the gangrenous sink that had greeted the peddler on his entry into the city: the bayou little more than an open sewer, a putrid channel around which refugees from the Great Hunger had pitched their miserable hovels. The Keoughs’ own dwelling consisted chiefly of the mud-plugged hull of an overturned johnboat, its kitchen a jerrybuilt postscript. Pinchas was installed in that kitchen on a rank pallet under a shelf that supported a flitch of dried pork, his presence forcing the eviction of the family hound that had so far escaped the city’s mass extermination of pets.
His first coherent thought with regard to his convalescent residence was that he may have been better off in the casket. Despite here and there a feminine touch—a lace doily under a growler, a crocheted cozy over a rifle stock—the place was a sty. It was little improved by the fumes from the sour mash whiskey still operated by father and sons. The still, Pinchas would learn, supplemented a meager income from their cottage fishing industry, since the fish they netted in the swill of the bayou were only marginally edible. If the house was in mourning, the peddler never saw any signs of it beyond the daughter’s fixed irritability toward her men. Nor did the family seem to heed the fever raging around them, which was carrying off their neighbors in droves. The smell of the bayou combined with the rancidness of their hovel did help to neutralize the universal putrescence that was a constant reminder of plague. But as he began, under Katie’s care, to regain a semblance of his former vitality, the peddler grew more accustomed to his surroundings and started to view them in a different light. He ate with gusto Katie’s spuds in their various incarnations, slurped the soup the girl called “fishyswaz,” and began to think he’d awakened into some snug household tale. Like the one he’d once read in a Yiddish translation in which a sea captain’s family lived in the rollicking warmth of a capsized vessel on a beach.
He was practically unaware of the hostility directed toward him by the patriarch, Cashel Keough, and his surly sons, Murtagh and Tighe. Bitterly they complained of the space Katie had appropriated for her charge in their already crowded quarters, never mind the amount of victuals he consumed. And to see the sapless intruder wearing his own bleached nightshirt, which ballooned about him like a baptismal gown, was almost more than the crapulent Cashel could bear. Adamant in her defense of the invalid, Katie alternated between cautioning her family not to interfere in her solicitations and assuring them their charity would be recorded in the annals of heaven. But Cashel was not as easily cowed by his daughter as were her brothers. He was suspicious of the way her patient mangled the Lord’s own English. And when he heard the man ask Katie in his lingering confusion, “Didn’t you paint it with lamb’s blood the doorpost of your house?,” Cashel knitted his bristling brow in contemplation.
“Pin-skerr? Is that by way of being the lad’s heathen name?” Leaning closer to examine the hump at the bridge of the invalid’s nose. “I do believe it’s an Israelite we’re after nurturing in our boozum.” Tighe and Murtagh nodded their ungainly heads in accord with their da’s sage judgment.
Smiling weakly, Pinchas himself concurred, anticipating more of the kind of hospitable reception he’d been used to receiving from the rural folk.
“And wasn’t it his people themselves that poisoned the wells back in the day of your allover Black Death?” mused Cashel, his voice rising an octave with every syllable. Then he and his boys might have laid hands on the peddler, tossing him into the mire at their doorstep, had not the daughter of the house stepped between them. Katie shooed them away from the sickbed and refused to hear a discouraging word concerning her charge.
Her father sulked, her brothers groused, and Pinchas began gradually to come back to himself. Gradually, because he was in no hurry. He marveled that the affliction of a single night could have taken such a ruinous toll on his constitution. But then it was not every day that one dropped dead and was rescued intact from the other side; and while he didn’t believe for a second that such a thing had actually happened, he felt nonetheless that he was somehow changed. After a few days he was able to stand with Katie’s assistance and take some steps about the shanty’s beaten earth floor. This was no easy feat given the clutter, the fishing gear and rat traps (some with the rats still in them) obstructing his path; for Katie was not a conscientious housekeeper. He was eventually able to sit at the table, enduring the dagger stares of the menfolk as they consumed their mounds of jacketed potatoes. The stares were doubly intense from young Tighe, in whose plaited shirt and trousers the girl had recently appareled her patient. But for all the tension his presence bred in the house, Pinchas was not anxious to leave. He knew well enough the grim necropolis that awaited a penniless peddler beyond their door.
But that wasn’t the only reason Pinchas was reluctant to reveal the full extent of his recovery. He luxuriated in Katie’s attentions, even when the measures she took to restore him verged on the heroic: for she administered regular doses of castor oil and calomel to reactivate kidney function and loosen the bowels, the effects of which Pinchas suffered in grateful humiliation. Reborn, he was content there should be a period during which he was reduced to the condition of a virtual babe in arms. When his body began to regain its previous vigor, his clearing brain acknowledged certain stirrings that had been—though unrecognized till now—a fundamental motivation all along. Because, beyond his need to escape the cloistered life of the shtetl and the incarceration his treasonous sympathies promised, Pinchas had yielded as well to a call to adventure. And adventure included an unspoken quest for romance. True, such a desire was not wholly compatible with his commitment to dialectical materialism, or to the cruder materialism he’d lately practiced. In fact, he was as vexed by this desire as he was by his inexperience. He derided his growing fondness for the girl even as he regarded her as the agent of his salvation, a notion her father affirmed in his cups.
“It’s a mockery of our Lord’s own resurrection you’ve made with this Jew man,” Cashel was heard to mutter.
And Katie: “Put a cake in it, Da!”
The brothers, less vocal, satisfied themselves with pissing discreetly in the peddler’s porridge and thumping him in places where the bruises wouldn’t show. Pinchas was stoic in suffering their abuse, having endured worse at the hands of the girl herself, whom he was coming to adore.
He knew it was an impossible infatuation, not the least because he was a Hebrew and she the daughter of a popish clan who viewed him as essentially vermin. But such obstacles the peddler, perhaps delusional in his re-invigorated state, believed he could overcome. Added to these deterrents, however, was the further inconvenience of a fiancé. For it seemed that Katie Keough had been pledged to one Phelim Mulrooney, a barkeep who operated a dram shop over in Catfish Alley. It happened that the Keough men, averse to their own rotgut (whose side effects rivaled the symptoms of the plague itself), had run up an exorbitant tab at Squire Mulrooney’s tavern. In point of fact, they were in def
ault of a bill they could never hope to settle. The barkeep, though, had magnanimously agreed to waive their debt, and even to extend them a line of credit, in exchange for the hand of the fair but undowered Katie. The maid herself had not objected to the betrothal; its imminence was the trump card she held over her father and brothers, and played whenever the occasion called for it. To break off the engagement would have meant severing their lifeline, and by periodically threatening to do just that, Katie would have her way in most matters. Besides, the girl had been approached by worse suitors, and despite a face so infested with blackheads that he looked to have been peppered by buckshot, Phelim Mulrooney was a man of parts. The proprietor of a thriving business, he made a more or less honest, if disreputable, living. The Pinch had offered her no better prospects.
Pinchas had ascertained all this during the tavern keeper’s visits. The man would appear on the gentile Sabbath, doff his stiff bowler, and greet them—often with wilting flowers for Katie—with a “God save all in this house.” The Keoughs would respond with false enthusiasm, because it was clear none were overly fond of their benefactor. He would pay his shamefast respects to his intended, embarrassed by his own transparent carnality, and even inquire after the welfare of her patient, whom he regarded as the girl’s innocent pastime. Then he would sit down with the men and, casting the occasional cow’s eyes in Katie’s direction, discuss items concerning the wedding. Impatient though he was, however, Phelim agreed there was nothing for it but to postpone the affair until the ongoing crisis had abated. For death still held dominion over the district.
