Authors: Steve Stern
I was reading to Rachel when I noticed that her eyes were getting heavy, so I flipped ahead in the book until I found the passage. “‘Later on in a bookstore on Main Street,’” I read, “‘a scrawny, hook-nosed lad’”
—lad
was my own edit as the text said, unflatteringly
, nebbish—
“‘a lad named Lenny Sklarew chanced to open a fat volume called
The Pinch
…’”
Her eyelids fluttered open and she sat up abruptly, unheeding the sheet that had fallen from her breasts (their nipples like tiny berets). “Give me that,” she said, snatching the book away from me to peruse the page. She returned it in a moment with a harrumph. “Lenny, you’re such a card,” she assured me, having apparently seen no reference to her bedfellow in the text.
“Yeah,” I replied, recalling a caustic rejoinder from some old noir film, “the Ace of Spades.” Then I quickly checked the book again to make sure that I was still there.
In Memphis Muni worked for his uncle Pinchas in his general merchandise and did odd jobs in and around North Main Street. Across the way, at the new Idle Hour Theater, a Keystone Cops two-reeler called
Cohen Collects a Debt
premiered, and blind Helen Keller spoke on behalf of the Wobblies at the Lyceum off Court Square. A famous evangelist challenged the devil to a wrestling match at a tabernacle erected in Riverside Park, and a black boy, accused of raping a white woman in a Gayoso Avenue brothel, was lynched and dismembered. Muni Pinsker fell in love with the wirewalker Jenny Bashrig, and against every law of decency on or off the books, got her with child. Then he abandoned her to chronicle the history of the Pinch. The history included incidents that took place after the timeless time that was brought about by local fanatics through a regimen of spiritual exercises and prayers. It also included events that preceded and followed that great enchantment, including the fate of the book after Muni had stopped writing it. He wrote with his brain ablaze, as if fueled by the mephitic tea he’d sipped long ago on a frozen lake; wrote in the hope that, in the writing, the task would ultimately reveal to him his reason for pursuing it.
He described an incident involving the blacksmith Oyzer Tarnopol and his prodigal son Hershel, who was swallowed by a fish. This happened a few years after the father and son had come to the Pinch via the port of New Orleans. They’d come to Memphis because Oyzer had heard it said that the city still maintained a large number of livery stables full of draft horses. These were the horses that pulled the fleets of municipal ice and refuse wagons, and they would require an endless supply of iron shoes. But by the time father and son arrived on North Main Street, they discovered that much of the transport labor had already been mechanized. Moreover, the bulk of the metal work that had been Oyzer’s mainstay in the Old Country was now performed by machinists in factory shops. It was a situation that further aggravated the blacksmith’s already virulent temper.
His temper had not always been so foul. Back in the village of Hrubeshoyb on the River Wieprz, where his family had dwelled for generations, Oyzer had been a principled householder and good provider; he was a gentle if strict father to his son and daughter and an attentive husband to his wife, the baker Pesha Sarah. But late one afternoon in the month of Nissan, as he and his son returned from a fishing expedition (little Hershel trailing behind him toting a string of spiny-finned perch), Oyzer heard shouting and saw smoke. From below the brow of the hill above the river he could spy the street of the Jews with its shake roofs burning. He watched a gang of peasants overseen by uniformed Cossacks looting shops and torching houses, including his own. He saw them beating his neighbors and worse, and lest his son see it all as well, held the boy down and covered his eyes with a hand. But Hershel did see—through the visor of his father’s thick fingers—what the hoodlums had done to the women (among whom were his mother and sister) who had been dragged into the street. He also observed his father’s terrible fixed expression as they lay on their bellies in the eel grass, and when the cries of the martyrs became unbearable, the blacksmith turned his heavy head toward Hershel and saw that he saw. Afterward he could not forgive his son for being a witness to his cowardice.
In America, to which they fled after the pogrom, the blacksmith cursed his son along with his failing livelihood. He cursed his neighbors even as they tried to ease his destitution by bringing him small jobs. “Tinker’s tasks!” he groused, when they asked him to repair a damaged sausage stuffer or lard press. In fact, he might have made a tidy living had not his self-defeating temper driven potential clients away.
To offset their poverty and further stoke his father’s ire (which he preferred to the blacksmith’s neglect) young Hershel took to thievery, stealing tinned victuals and various other essentials from the shelves along North Main. Aware of the hardships the boy endured at the hands of an irascible father, the shop proprietors were likely to turn a blind eye to his petty thefts. There was some tacit consensus that his modest burgling was a kind of insurance against greater encroachments, and there were those who even admired the dexterity of his sticky fingers. Hershel’s father, however, was not grateful for the provisions his son laid in at the forge, serving as they did to emphasize the blacksmith’s inadequacy. But his curses and throttlings did little to discourage the boy. The more he was punished, the more Hershel seemed to step up his delinquent activities, compounding plunder with random pranks. In the end he was more of a nuisance than even the yokels who sometimes invaded the Pinch to bedevil the Jews.
A day came, however, when something seemed to break in Oyzer Tarnopol. One minute he was at his anvil tapping at the twisted barrel of a toy gun (a dainty job beneath his dignity), the next he let go of his hammer, which caused a minor tremor as it struck the earth. He stood a moment with limp arms, his bullet head sagging as if the thick shaft of his neck could no longer support it, then dropped his considerable bulk onto a workbench. Maybe his sudden lassitude was due to the infernal heat of the forge on that mid-September afternoon, or maybe it was the appearance of Zlotkin, the junkman, so wasted with age that he must have thought he had nothing to lose by invoking the blacksmith’s wrath.
“Your boy, the ganef, that he took by me the shmattes from my wagon,” he was complaining, when the blacksmith abruptly wilted and sank onto his bench. The junkman was peering curiously at Oyzer when the culprit himself wandered in with an armload of secondhand clothes. Seeing his father in this uncustomary posture, he demanded of the fossil Zlotkin, “What you did to my papa?”
“I didn’t do nothink,” stated Zlotkin, who seemed disgusted by the blacksmith’s woebegone attitude. In truth the whole of North Main Street had grown so accustomed to Oyzer’s explosive temper as almost to rely on it as a natural feature of the neighborhood. Shrugging his bony shoulders, the junkman shuffled out the open doors of the smithy, snatching back his clothes from the boy as he left.
“Papa?” asked Hershel tentatively, still braced for the inevitable volley of curses, the boxing of his ears that would follow Zlotkin’s charge. He was waiting for the branched veins to stand out on his father’s broad forehead as he rose to deal with his son. Once, he had lifted Hershel by his unruly hair and the boy felt his scalp come unstuck from his skull, admitting whole galaxies of pain.
But the hulking blacksmith remained slouched on his bench. “It smells from your mama’s challah, the hearth,” he said at last, an unprecedented exhaustion in his voice. Hershel looked toward the glowing firepot, which exuded as usual the trenchant stench of burning coal.
Though it fascinated him at first, in the days that followed, the son found his papa’s chastened behavior even more unnerving than his late evil humor. Hadn’t the boy become the neighborhood scapegrace less from cupidity than the wish to provoke a father whose attention he could command in no other way? He would take the blacksmith’s abuse over his quiescence any day. Rascal he might be but no fool, Hershel knew his father’s emotive torment was a last defense against paralyzing despair, and it was the son’s job to keep that torment alive.
With a mind ordinarily geared to capers and practical jokes, the boy set about hatching a serviceable plan. It was nearly Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when the entire population of the Pinch paraded beyond the trolley lines out to Catfish Bayou and tossed into it the crumbs representing their sins of the past twelve months. Although the blacksmith had long since dropped all pretense of religious observance, the tashlikh ceremony was a custom he’d always insisted on performing back in Hrubeshoyb. They’d made a family excursion of it every year along the myrtle-thronged banks of the River Wieprz. Thus did Hershel decide to take advantage of his papa’s docility by persuading him to take part in this year’s ritual.
His idea was that, since the unpardonable sin that fueled his father’s fury now seemed only to weigh him down, perhaps a symbolic unloading of that sin would allow the rage to return. It was worth a try. So on the day in question he dissolved the yeast and mixed the flour and milk himself; he kneaded the dough in the trough but didn’t wait for it to rise. Molding it into a substantial glob, he delivered it to the blacksmith, who received the lump of dough like a convict receives a ball and chain. Then, a little intoxicated by the new power he wielded over his father, Hershel goaded Oyzer into the train of citizens marching to the banks of the bayou. There he pressed the blacksmith to heave his burden into the murky inlet, where a large, stipple-scaled fish leapt up to swallow the dough before it even entered the water.
Despite the miscarried gesture, Hershel waited for his father to be transformed back into the man he’d been before the junkman’s visit, or even—halevai!—back before the destruction of his home and family. But if anything he appeared even more deflated, as if he’d jettisoned what little was left of his spirit along with his burden of sin. The brawny blacksmith now seemed as vacant as a passive clay golem. He still pottered bare-chested about the forge in his dangling suspenders, listlessly busying himself with whatever work came his way. (Ironically, there were more jobs since his customers seized any excuse to view the spectacle of a tame Oyzer Tarnopol.) But he could scarcely muster the strength to pump the bellows or manipulate his hammer and tongs. His inefficacy made his son’s freebooting among the businesses of the Pinch all the more needful, but Hershel’s forays went far beyond mere expedience. On a spree, he stole items that had no practical application—bust food, secret society buttons, a Heidelberg electric belt; he engineered dangerous pranks involving gunpowder. His out-of-hand antics culminated in the theft of a cumbersome shot-metal clothes wringer from Pin’s General Merchandise. Its employee, Muni Pinsker, recent refugee from a Siberian labor camp, fed up with the kid’s terrorizing of the neighborhood, gave chase. He pursued the boy as far as the bayou, where Hershel leapt from the bank and was swallowed by a bloated fish grown immense on the misdeeds of North Main Street.
Or so Muni reported. Nobody disputed him though neither was he especially believed. Since the arrival of the Shpinker Hasids, who conducted their mystical experiments above a Commerce Avenue feed store, the citizens of the Pinch were aware of goings-on that did not comport with the prosaic routine of their days. But even Muni wasn’t entirely convinced that he’d seen what he’d seen. “It’s a fact even if it isn’t true,” he’d declared to Jenny, further confounding himself with the qualification “or vice versa.” He wasn’t in any case too surprised when Oyzer Tarnopol came into his uncle’s store in his stained leather apron to purchase a jointed bamboo rod and reel. Every morning after that the blacksmith was seen to set out for Catfish Bayou, where he baited his hook with a rubber frog, cast his line into the still water, and sat on the muddy embankment all day. And every evening he returned empty-handed to his ill-lit rooms above the smithy. Still, he persisted even during the period immediately following the earthquake, when a breach in its banks caused the bayou to be nearly drained. With something akin to his old energy the blacksmith flung himself into shoring up the rupture, rallying others to pitch in until a dike was constructed and the shallow basin replenished again. Then, while most residents of the Pinch seemed to go bughouse in the wake of the quake, Oyzer Tarnopol continued sitting his stationary vigil beside the bayou with his rod and reel.
Owing to the peculiar time zone that the district occupied after the earth’s upheaval, the prehistory of the Pinch was as available to Muni, from his current perspective, as was the present. In fact, past and present were often indistinguishable, jumbled as they were with visible auguries from the future. As a result, Muni could include in his chronicle, alongside an account of Mrs. Elster’s dancing fever, an appearance by the demagogue Davy Crockett haranguing the tipplers in Bell Tavern; and Yankel Zlotkin hondling malbushim (soul garments) to the lawless flatboat fraternity—half men and half alligator—that tyrannized Smoky Row. Then there was the shiftless kid who found Muni’s “history” in a used book store on Main Street, its contents bleeding into his own late twentieth-century neighborhood; and the golden child of Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, who was stolen from his bassinet by marauding shretelekh and replaced with one of their own.
The shretelekh are a largely innocuous class of Jewish elemental, though known in their caprices to hinder as often as help a human being. Mostly, however, they prefer to remain, unless disturbed, in subterranean habitats—cellars, caves, grottoes, and the like. This particular tribe had dwelled for some time under Market Square Park, in and out of the crannies and tunnels beneath the roots of the great patriarch oak. Only once before the quake had they ventured as a body aboveground. That was when they’d surfaced in order to rid themselves of a superannuated member of their society, a decrepit old specimen who’d long outworn his usefulness. With the hog-tied party in tow, they skulked (knee-high and semitransparent) about the tenements of North Main Street after midnight, surveying the fresh crop of newborns in their cradles. They settled on a crocus-curled, angel-faced little kaddishel, the offspring of Rose and Morris Padauer, a weary-winged couple with an apartment over Dlugach’s Secondhand. Poor in spirit as well as pocket—she a footsore hausfrau, he a luckless traveler in ladies’ corsets and stays—the Padauers had always felt that their beautiful child was an anomaly; he was more good fortune than humble folk such as they seemed entitled to. They were therefore disheartened but not entirely surprised to find that the boy had turned overnight into a shriveled homunculus; though how he’d gotten himself trussed like a Passover pullet remained a mystery. In any event, after the shock had worn off, they continued to care for the “child” as their own, which they after all believed him to be.