Authors: Steve Stern
The audience, having assumed that everything thus far was part of the act, were confused by the current turn of events. If they’d been previously well disposed toward the entertainers, they were dumbfounded now to the point of outrage. With the defeat of the Confederacy always fresh in their memories, it was not in their nature to sit idly by while Caucasians—albeit of Hebrew extraction—were torn apart by cannibals. However misguided their motives, a score of the diners abandoned their tables to storm the stage, some producing concealed weapons (such as a sword unsheathed from a cane) in the process. Standing beneath a pergola twined in artificial grapevines, the treble-chinned maître d’ signaled frantically to the waiters to intercede, while the waiters waved back in amiable helplessness.
But the shretelekh are finally not a confrontational race. The present kerfuffle notwithstanding, they much preferred flitting stealthily among mortals, creating discord then becoming scarce. So rather than make a stand against such wholesale insurgency, they scattered. Some slipped back behind the sequined curtain; others dove through skylights and bulkheads in varying stages of anatomical evaporation. They took with them their stolen child in his crushed stovepipe, who for all his talents remained perfectly discernible: a royally spoiled and squawling brat.
Indifferent to their own scrapes and abrasions, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer made to soothe their little goblin, Mama Rose straightening his sailor collar as Morris smoothed the part in his few remaining hairs. Benjy fairly purred at their petting. On the walk back from the Peabody Mrs. Padauer began to hum one of the jaunty minstrel airs (was it “Under the Matzoh Tree”?) while her husband asked her teasingly, “Mama, did we have tonight enough fun?” Then he stopped at a newsstand to purchase, for the first time in his life, a Havana cigar. They strolled home slowly in the cool of the evening, since Benjy’s short legs were especially bowed from the weight of the coins he’d swallowed. But after he’d used the WC—the loot having proved a much-needed laxative—he winnowed and washed the coins from his movement and presented his mama with a bulging piggy bank.
While Pinchas Pin was otherwise occupied, the czar was overthrown and the revolution that the merchant had waited for for so long finally happened. The so-called Sodomites of South Memphis, sworn enemies of the Pinch, released a sheet of raw ooze and filth from Carr’s tannery into the bayous around North Memphis; but that was before Pinchas’s time. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat on a flagpole above the
Commercial Appeal
building on Second Street as a crowd watched from Court Square then grew bored; but that came much later. Meanwhile, on the night he and his improbable companion Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya set out in pursuit of Katie’s absconded spirit, Pinchas was less concerned with this world than the next.
When he and the rabbi arrived by dinghy at the shore of Market Square Park, the inverted tree at its center was illuminated by a jumble of lantern-lit shacks. They were small, jerry-built shacks nestled amid the network of gnarled roots that had reared up in place of the great oak’s undulant branches. The shacks were made of the kinds of odds and ends from which the Jews constructed their sukkah booths, though to Pinchas’s knowledge it wasn’t Sukkot. Or rather, it was Sukkot, Passover, Purim, and Hanukkah rolled into one. For just as on holidays the Jews acknowledged themselves to be living contemporaneously with their biblical forebears, so in this new dispensation did all the holidays occur at once. And through the fabric walls of the booths, some of which dangled like lockets from ropes and chains, Pinchas could see the silhouettes of North Main Streeters at their tables observing simultaneous celebrations. The sight halted him a moment in his tracks, though it only took a tug at his sleeve from Rabbi ben Yahya to bring him back to the mission at hand.
“Did you think I forget!” fumed Pinchas, who needed no prompting.
“Touchy touchy.”
Pinchas sighed, sparing a worry for the frail old man who’d offered himself as his safe passage to the underworld. He’d always judged the tzaddik and his followers to be frankly insane, and now, when the old dotard should have been on his deathbed dispensing holy madness to his disciples, here he was leaning on his cane at the edge of an abyss. He was meshuggeh all right, as must be the dry goods merchant who had agreed to follow his lead.
Always Pinchas had regarded himself as a forward-thinking man, who, had he lived in the age of Spinoza, would also have been declared a heretic. But his wife’s untimely end had reduced him to a fool like the rest of his demented neighbors. The rebbe had explained it all so plainly in the boat on the way to the park: how, thanks to the interference of himself and his fanatics, below was now above, and vice versa; existence was turned on its head. This afforded the individual a rare opportunity, since one could now enter the afterlife (which in this instance came
before
) without having to die. By the same token, those who expired during this erratic interlude were not officially defunct. Katie had perished at an opportune moment …
At which point Pinchas had shouted, “Shvayg!” and held his ears; for his yearning after his departed wife finally wanted no explanation. It wanted only her foggy green eyes and washed-out terra-cotta hair, the swan’s-neck curve of her spine in her taffeta waist; it wanted her flashes of temper, her terrible jokes (“They say Saint Paddy chased the snakes out of Ireland, but he was the only one who saw the snakes”), her roast potatoes like kidney stones. In the absence of Katie’s animate presence, Pinchas’s desire for her had overwhelmed his grief and stunned him with the force of an apoplexy. Then it had set him in motion.
Throwing away his cane, the rebbe leaped with a single bound from the lip of the crevasse into the roots of the tree. With an agility that seemed to Pinchas indecent in one of his dropsical and dilapidated years, he lowered himself as far as the base of the sunken trunk; then crab-like he began to scramble down its incline until he was swallowed up by darkness. Leaning over the edge of that obscurity, Pinchas froze. How pointless it would be—he reasoned—if in the course of chasing after his lost wife, he should lose himself. But frightened as he was of the descent, he found he was even more frightened at the prospect of losing sight of Rabbi ben Yahya. So the merchant, no young man himself, overcame once again the rational turn of mind he’d set such store by and, exhaling a prayer, made the thrilling leap into the roots.
He caught hold, absorbing the bruising impact with his chest and chin, and astonished at finding himself still in one piece, hugged the tree for all he was worth. Then, with extreme caution, he began the treacherous downward climb. Steep as was its declivity, the thick trunk was studded with hollows and knobs, so there were no end of ridges and footholds to hang on to, and the cool loamy scent of the earth was somehow beckoning. Even now Pinchas was skeptical that the tree, in its inversion, could serve as an artery between two worlds, but once he’d begun his descent he seemed to have left (along with his logic) his fears largely aboveground. He gave himself up entirely to this penumbral element, which presumably had a logic of its own—one he hoped to discover as he inched his way down the long incline. It was an endless descent that provided him plenty of time to contemplate his objective: for Katie’s runaway soul, in its corporeal aspect, was—he believed—inextricable from his own. He had the sense that, sinking farther into the earth, he was sounding the depth of his devotion, which ought not—if he were worthy—to have a bottom.
He was deep enough now that the hole above his head had shrunk to the size of a penny embossed with a silver sliver of moon. Though the coin had no capacity to shed light into the fissure, the spores and slick mosses that Pinchas encountered appeared to give off a phosphorescence of their own. An orchid-like flower sprouting from a knothole shone like a gas burner. There was sufficient light to give the merchant fair warning that he should halt and let pass the fiddler Asbestos, who was tapping his way out of the mouth of a broken sewer tunnel. The fiddler was followed, as he groped his way round the tree trunk and into a similar segment of sewer pipe on the other side, by a raggedy column of Negro men. Each had an arm on the shoulder of the one in front of him so as not to be left behind in the dark, as they disappeared into the far conduit. Farther down, there was more traffic and Pinchas had to make way for a party of elemental creatures (some still in costume) with a pouting human child in tow. Back from their theatrical exile, they skirted the tree’s broad diameter and burrowed into an oval grotto on their way to reclaim their native haunts.
Though he must have been by now many fathoms beneath North Main Street, Pinchas had yet to arrive at the spreading branches that had tipped foremost into the crevasse when the oak was toppled. The nubbly trunk itself seemed interminable, and where, by the way, was the old rabbi who’d volunteered to be his guide? For some reason Pinchas refrained from shouting after him, afraid perhaps that his raised voice might cause a cave-in. Or was it that in the quiet of his descent he rather cherished the solitude?
Then he’d reached a depth where the darkness was absolute. The tree bark had become less coarse, more slippery with bubbling sap; there were whole stretches where, still hugging the trunk, the merchant was unable to find a purchase. In addition, exhaustion had begun to overtake him in every limb, and he wondered again how such precipitous folly could result in the recovery of his bride. He was slipping more often, barely hanging on until his gumsoles could snag on a protuberance or his fingers grab hold of another indentation. Still Pinchas had no thought of turning back; the climbing up would in any case be more arduous than the climbing down, and the oblivion that awaited him if he fell was no more menacing than the oblivion he’d already penetrated. Then his foot struck what seemed to be a solid bough projecting from the trunk and, completely spent, Pinchas folded onto his haunches, sitting down at long last and dangling his legs. But before he could draw a breath in relief, his stomach lurched into his throat and his brain was swamped by a wave of total disorientation; bereft of his internal compass, he found himself hanging by the crook of his knees whose strength was close to giving out. In a moment he would drop into the abyss and God (whose authority the merchant disdained) help him.
At that juncture a hand grasped his arm and hauled him upright, where he was seated on the bottommost limb of the patriarch oak. “Aliyah tzerichah yeridah,” came the singsong voice of Rabbi ben Yahya, who, perched on a neighboring branch, appeared to have aged a decade or so in reverse. “To ascend you got first to descend,” he chirped. “What took you so long, Reb Pin?”
His heart kettle-drumming in his ears, Pinchas looked out over the park and the street beyond, and had no idea where he was. Then gradually it dawned on him that this was the Pinch, though this particular incarnation looked to have awakened from the sublime dream of itself to a threadbare reality. The houses and buildings from his elevated vantage were smoke gray against the heliotrope sky, the park itself appearing neglected, the neighborhood deserted though unaltered by natural disaster. With a groan the dry goods merchant began creakily to lower himself from the stout branch. The rebbe dropped neatly to the ground beside him, his billowing caftan covering his head as he landed. When he swept it back, Pinchas saw there was color in the tzaddik’s pursy cheeks, his wispy beard become robust and full. Even his previously deflated skullcap rode his head like a proud cupola.
“Nu?” said the rejuvenated old man.
“It’s a ghost town,” asserted Pinchas, but the rebbe begged to differ.
“We are here the ghosts. Is waiting, this place, for the world to get tired from magic.”
Pinchas squinted at him. “You don’t make no more sense down here than you did up there.”
“What makes you think this ain’t ‘up there’?”
Then Pinchas felt again the hot pain of his loss boiling up from his chest into his throat. “Katie!” he cried, and heard his voice echoing through the empty streets and alleyways surrounding the park.
The rabbi rested a hand on his shoulder. “Go home already,” he said.
The merchant let go of one last sob, pushed his eyeglasses back over the hump of his nose, and was calm. Though he hadn’t run since who could remember, Pinchas began to lope down the gravel path past the dry fountain, out into Second Street and over to North Main, gaining momentum. He ran beneath unflapping awnings past vacant shopfronts whose dirty windows showed his reflection with its lanky legs pumping like pistons. Arrived at the grimy portals of Pin’s General Merchandise, he burst through the front door and bolted up the stairs through the parlor and into the kitchen, where he found his wife seated at the table, singing a cradle song (“Oh hush thee my lapwing …”) as she peeled the skins from a bowl of spuds.
Looking up at him with her emerald eyes clear of clouds, she said, “Sometimes I think my whole life was about potatoes.”
In his head he’d already rushed forward to take her in his arms, so what held him stalled and still hesitating in the doorway? Winded from his sprint, Pinchas swallowed the heart that had heaved into his throat again. “Katie,” he replied, “I don’t believe you are all-the-way dead.”
She was nowhere as pale as the blue marble woman he’d left in their marriage bed, though her complexion was still a bit tallowy, the bones still prominent beneath the flesh. Here and there about her fingertips and split ends were signs of a transparency that might, if uncared for, spread to the rest of her anatomy. Ignoring his remark, Katie reflected aloud that the illness that had taken her was perhaps a reprise of the one that took half the town in the early days of their romance. “Sure all our years together were borrowed from the distemper that returned to take back the years.”
But Katie’s symptoms were not those of the yellow jack; Pinchas rejected her theory out of hand, and in so doing summoned the courage to dismiss it with an emphatic “Feh!” “Speakink of which,” inching a gingerly step closer to the enameled table, “to take you back is why I came here.”