Muni turned to his uncle, the answer man: “Vos iz?” And Pinchas, rolling his eyes: “It’s the golem that he didn’t finish making it, the rebbe.”
The laughter of their neighbors pervading the air seemed to clear it of the early morning haze. Many rubbed their eyes with the heels of their hands, trying to square the world they were looking at with the one they had woke to the day before. The difference wasn’t so much that North Main Street was under water, the flood having submerged their businesses and made tributaries of the side streets. That much they could observe from the park, which was still above sea level. But the real difference was the way the devastated district had everything and nothing in common with the Pinch. The atmosphere was somehow tonic despite the heat, every object sharply defined but with a michutz, a little something extra. The roots of the upended tree writhed like tentacles; they waved like the batons of a hundred concert conductors; the fire plug in front of the stucco synagogue spun like a bobbin. The blackbirds that perched on the telegraph wires were notes in a musical staff whose melody even the most tone-deaf could read.
Watching his neighbors in the act of evaluating their situation, Pinchas offered this studied aside to his nephew: “I think we don’t see things as they are so much as we see them as we are.” Muni tried to digest the statement, whatever it meant, though it clearly did nothing to alleviate Katie’s sour mood, and it frankly failed to rise to the level of the general intoxication to which Muni himself had succumbed.
People were performing their ablutions in the granite fountain, empty for years but filled now with a hot ground water that spurted up in sporadic jets through a crack. Children were using the fountain for a sailboat basin, their fleet of twigs rehearsing in miniature the flotilla their parents were beginning to launch for the purpose of reaching their front doors. For no sooner had they freshened themselves after their open-air nap, itself invigorating, than the North Main Streeters set out to reclaim their abodes. In this, they flew in the face of the injunctions the civic authorities had put in place overnight. There were sawhorse barriers, fire and police ordinances plastered to every doorpost declaring their habitations unsafe. The papers promised disaster relief: a distribution center would be established and necessities dispensed, arrangements made for temporary housing until reconstruction could render the tenements habitable again. But so far no such services had materialized. The city of Memphis made all the appropriate noises: the authorities intended to behave responsibly toward their citizens of Hebrew extraction. But other than the couple of independent organizations that had already come and gone, noise was what the city delivered; emergency measures seemed to have evaporated with the dew. And while the community didn’t like to appear ungrateful, they nevertheless dismissed the municipal response.
They dismissed the prohibitions that would have kept them from their homes, and set out to take up residence again above their flooded shops. No one interfered with them; having fulfilled their duty toward the ghetto, at least in print, the municipality under the auspices of Mayor Crump (called, for his ruddy complexion, the Red Snapper) washed its hands of North Main Street. After all, the city proper was perfectly intact; the banks, theaters, and retail stores that composed the heart of downtown Memphis were unharmed by the misfortune that had visited the Pinch. That district had always been a flyblown excrescence anyway. Moreover, there seemed a common reluctance on the part of outsiders to enter the self-styled Pale north of Poplar Avenue. It was as if, since yesterday, an invisible wall had been erected; and after giving short shrift to the disturbance and boasting of the city’s unstinting aid efforts, the local press for the most part forgot about the quake.
The water was not so deep that they couldn’t have waded, but Muni’s uncle, in order to spare his wife the immersion, ferried her along with their nephew back to North Main from the boat launch at Market Square Park. They held a course against the current toward Pin’s General Merchandise by means of a flat-bottomed pirogue hauled up for a price from the levee. Their neighbors employed similar conveyances, navigating skiffs, dories, a jury-rigged raft buoyed on oil drum pontoons, which they paddled with tea trays, dustpans, and the occasional oar. Most of the vessels had been bought for peanuts or procured in exchange for stopped pocket watches from the fisherfolk down at the Happy Hollow shantytown. They were hauled up the bluff to the park by energetic North Main Streeters who then shoved them off in a body, like an armada setting sail on a voyage of conquest.
The Pins arrived at the sunken portals of their store to find that its front doors had made an ineffective floodgate. They disembarked into waist-deep water, Pinchas lifting his wife in his arms, though she complained all the while that she was capable of managing on her own. Their nephew yanked open one of the glass-paned double doors, admitting a surge that instantly increased the level of the water inside. A flotsam of wallowing fabrics, fly swatters, toy soldiers, hampers, and fans bobbed all about them. Rolling hogsheads spilled straw and china cruets onto the surface of the mercantile soup. Submersed to the navel in that sloppy element, Muni looked toward his uncle to gauge his reaction, and saw that Pinchas had gone ghostly pale. He wasn’t taking stock of the shambles of his business, however, but peering over the spectacles that had slipped to the tip of his nose, he was studying the tight features of his wife’s faded face. He was cursing himself for having previously failed to notice her frailty, realizing upon lifting her above the risen water that she now weighed little more than her bones.
“Uncle?” said Muni, too distracted by the aquatic disorder to detect the particular nature of his uncle’s dismay. Unanswering, Pinchas was already sloshing through the swill toward the stairs at the rear of the shop, up which he carried his querulous bride.
Muni forged his way back through the cracked-open door and once again took in the ruined Pinch. It was a tragedy, was it not? But for the life of him he couldn’t see it that way. From Muni’s saturated vantage the world floated inside and out, and whatever wasn’t waterlogged rode the surface of the flooded neighborhood like the buoyant sensations that floated free in his breast and skull.
Over the gunwales of their ad hoc argosy the families were assessing their sunken shops and homes. Fathers briefly left their wives and children to wade into their businesses and inspect the losses, only to slosh back out — heads shaking — to the comparative serenity of the boats. The pharmacist Blen sat in a rocking dinghy beside his pie-faced wife, gazing at the wreckage of his drugstore. The window had given way, allowing the water to liberate the large glass show globes, which in turn had discolored the flood with their red and green dyes. Mr. and Mrs. Elster in their leaky cockleshell watched a parlor suite (swarming with cats) that had escaped their discount emporium drifting by. Mose Dlugach and his shiftless sons, Sam Alabaster and his brood in their half-submerged skiff, old Ephraim Schneour wearing his bowler at an unusually rakish angle — all appraised their damaged livelihoods and weighed their options. Muni could hear their voices carrying across the narrows.
Sam Alabaster: “Commercial insurance we got, but only we paid for theft and fire, no?”
Mendel Blen: “That way, God forbid, we could get from our parnosseh a little something back in hard times.”
Sam: “Tahkeh, but who didn’t waive the clause that included coverage for floods?”
Nobody didn’t. The Mississippi River, for all the deluges it had wrought north and south of the city, could never climb the bluff to their doorsteps — that was the conventional wisdom. And as for earthquakes, who ever heard of such a thing in this part of the world? Nearly everyone, as it turned out, except the residents of the Pinch, as the New Madrid fault line upon which the city of Memphis sat rivaled the most fretful on earth.