The neighborhood was practically unrecognizable. Wooden buildings, flimsy to begin with, leaned against each other at precarious angles, if they hadn’t already fallen down. The sturdier structures, jogged from their foundations and further disturbed by mysterious flickerings from within, had shrugged layers of bricks and mortar onto the pavement, their cornices and moldings dropping off like rotten limbs. Most of the citizens had vacated their apartments and fled toward open spaces, but one or two were left hanging from windowsills while friends and relations hopped about underneath them with open arms. Taking in the scene from the raised sidewalk in front of Schloss’s Grocery, Jenny and Muni squeezed each other’s hands. Chimneys had collapsed and gas mains burst, releasing flames that rose from the streets like fumaroles illuminating a sulfur sky. Ruptured pipes spewed boiling water up through the asphalt, the water rushing forth to meet the stream that coursed from the breach that had opened at Catfish Bayou. The alluvial soil around the bayou, loosened by the quake, had slid into the frothing water causing the pond to overflow its banks. A channel was then created that forked around a stalled trolley and merged again to gush into North Main Street. Show racks and furniture were washed from their displays in front of the shops and carried before the flood, which swept all manner of detritus along with it: baby buggies, herring barrels, a loveseat, a bass viol. Rats, possums, and raccoons were also caught up in the surge, paddling desperately to stay afloat. Some had managed to scramble aboard the casket of a yellow fever victim disinterred from the sandy loam around the bayou. The whole floating menagerie poured past Commerce, Winchester, Market, and Exchange Streets, debouching into the basin of Poplar Avenue, where it swerved and cascaded downhill toward the levee.
One notable feature amid the general chaos was the portly Rabbi ben Yahya, flanked by his disciples and sporting his best beaver shtreimel as he waded into the flood. He was blowing discordant tekiot on an undulant ebony ear trumpet weeks before the holidays, while his Hasidim, dodging debris, danced an ecstatic hora in midstream.
Later, legend would have it that the current of the Mississippi River had reversed itself and flowed backward for hours, that tremors could be felt as far away as Nashville and New Orleans. People would claim to have witnessed portents: swarms of passenger pigeons had set upon cornfields devouring acres of crops; apple-green parrots, never before seen in these parts, had populated whole stands of catalpa trees. Cattle lowed in chorus and huddled together, as did other animals — bears, foxes, panthers, coyotes — not known for their camaraderie. The moon was pink; a forest had seen a mass exodus of squirrels; there were glades carpeted in a ropy weave of snakes. But for all these ill-omened sightings, the earthquake was not a far-reaching cataclysm: the rest of the city seemed to have been passed over, the damage confined almost exclusively to the Pinch.
Aftershocks continued to rattle the ground and ring the chimes of nearby churches, their clanging competing with the bells of fire stations all over town. A motorized steam pumper churned upstream into North Main and was briefly amphibious before becoming swamped. Firemen in steel helmets leaped into the waist-deep water and spread a net beneath the rotund Mrs. Gruber, who dropped from her fire escape like an overfed baby from the beak of a stork. The better part of the fire brigade, however, had been dispatched to the Phoenix Boxing Arena over on Front. That great barn-like structure, which was hosting the long-awaited rematch between Sailor Merkle and Eddie Kid Wolf, was in full conflagration. Its fractured gas lines, unintentionally ignited by an attendee’s cigar, had caused the place to go up like a signal flare. At the first cries of alarm the spectators had abandoned the premises in a stampede that trampled several unfortunates under foot. The heat from the arena’s flames cracked the windows of adjacent buildings, their glass panes breaking with the pff-pff of air rifle reports. In the backyard of Dlugach’s Secondhand a geyser of mud and brimstone had erupted, and riding its crest (in his short pants and middy blouse) was Benjy the ancient child. From the window of their apartment above Dlugach’s, Mr. and Mrs. Padauer, his presumptive parents, leaned out in a vain attempt to rescue the boy.
This was not the world in which Muni and Jenny had initiated their romance. Witnessing such pandemonium on the heels of an unconsecrated union left them both feeling woefully unbalanced — which was doubly disturbing in the case of the equilibrist Jenny Bashrig.
“It looks like curtains for the Pinch,” she concluded, and when her companion didn’t catch the expression, offered a sad “Kaput.”
For reasons he couldn’t identify, Muni resented her assessment. “So this is by you wishful thinking?” he wondered.
Jenny narrowed her eyes like gun ports but did not answer. Then they agreed that it was anyway time they should try to check on their people.
They made their way toward the river bluff, whose higher ground they’d been told the displaced population had retreated to, but along the way found themselves fighting a current of pedestrians headed in the opposite direction. The planet had not yet ceased its rumblings and already their neighbors were returning whence they’d fled. If they couldn’t reclaim their tenements, whose listing walls and fallen masonry the police had cordoned off, then they would at least reassemble within the ghetto’s Sabbath boundaries. Jenny and Muni about-faced with the crowd as it forded the torrent of North Main Street to regroup in the previously evacuated Market Square Park. Some, having salvaged oil lamps, groceries, and feather beds from their apartments, began claiming family-sized parcels of lawn. The favored spots were those closest to the crater from which sprouted the monstrous network of roots; because upright or topsy-turvy, the tree was still the focal point of the park that had so often served as a neighborhood dormitory. Where else should they take refuge on such a night?
Under a flapping marquee an advance guard of uniformed foot soldiers from the Salvation Army was already ladling soup, but a dispute among the local rabbis as to whether the stuff was trayf discouraged their congregants from partaking. The issue was anyway moot, since the refugees much preferred the day-old bagels the Ridblatts had begun to distribute. The butcher Makowsky, still wearing his blood-stained apron, passed out slices of pickled beef tongue, while Mr. and Mrs. Rosen were uncommonly generous with their Danishes. Children gamboled among the scattered lanterns like so many Jack-Be-Nimbles hurtling fairy lights, their parents greeting one another like long-lost relations. Despite their sudden grievously reduced circumstances, the mood of those gathered in the park bordered on festive.