Afloat in their knocking vessels, the neighbors frowned in fitting apprehension, but no one was fooled; the frowns were forced. The harbor they were anchored in was an eminently safe one. So what if their buildings were crippled, some with toppled walls exposing entire cross sections of interior — such as the one in which an unveiled Widow Teitelbaum could be seen seated in her bath, turning faucets from which no water flowed? There was no gas and the coal cellars were swamped, nor was there any unspoiled meat or produce to be had in the inundated groceries and butcher shops. But never mind, a new dispensation was afoot. The feeling was infectious: they were participants in a grand regatta, and while ordinary life might be turned on its noodle—“mit kop arop,” as the old folks said — the transformation of their neighborhood was an astronomically bracing sea change.
All heads turned to watch a downed sycamore sailing past at a respectable clip. It was straddled by Rabbi Eliakum ben Yahya’s band of fanatics making for their Commerce Avenue shtibl. The rabbi himself, seated like a bosun astride the roots at the stern, exhorted his disciples manning brick trowels to put their backs into it. No sooner had they passed than a thickset creature caked in mud and brandishing a rod and reel came splashing along the street from the northern end. Children squealed: how many golems had the quake set free? But their parents assured them that this one was only the blacksmith Tarnopol emerged from the quicksand around Catfish Bayou.
All that afternoon and into the evening the Pinch was a hive of industry to which Muni gladly lent a hand. Boats sailed into the inlet at Auction Street, where the farmers sold live chickens and potatoes by the bushel in the muddy wagonyard; then laden with fresh cargo, the boats sailed back to the busy port of North Main. A bucket brigade transferred water from a working pump above a horse trough in front of the No. 7 firehouse. Wriggling fish were snatched from the ooze of the largely drained bayou and brought to Mr. Saccharin and his minions to be pickled and smoked. In lieu of coal the wood from fallen lintels and windowsills was broken up and fed to cookstoves cobwebbed in soot. The population organized by lantern light, like a squadron of will-o’-the-wisps, a kind of triage with regard to the crooked structures themselves. With whipsaws donated by Hekkie’s Hardware they cut down the cottonwoods growing in the backyards and alleys, some of whose trunks were already split from the quake. They hewed the scrub locusts that the tremors had caused to twine like cadeucei. With them they boarded up and buttressed the walls of the canted buildings, left them leaning on crutches like wounded soldiers.
Though working after dark had its hazardous element, the neighbors were not fearful in the least. For one thing, they were aware of being aided in some of the riskier tasks by shadowy figures holding ladders and even driving home nails — that is, when those same bantam creatures weren’t removing the ladders from under them and hammering their thumbs. They were also aware of an access to unusual energies and, despite their swag bellies and duodenal ulcers, a shared capacity for physical exertion forgotten since their distant youth. In the morning they would review their handiwork and find that it lent the street an extemporaneous aspect, like the crazy town constructed by the legendary fools of Chelm. But tonight they were conscious only of the theatricality of their labors, as if they were at once the perpetrators and spectators of their actions. It was a consciousness they took with them to their beds — which slid along the sloping floors of foundered apartments — where they slept a righteous sleep above the moonlit lagoon.
Having spent himself in strenuous activity along with the others, Muni had also surrendered to a well-earned slumber, though he’d lain awake for hours on his cot. From his off-kilter room over the store he was still able to hear the hammers and saws (though their noise had altogether ceased) and the fiddle. Retiring for the night, he had himself witnessed the fiddler Asbestos emerging from the security of a floating steamer trunk, whose lid sprang open to release a mordant music. Not without a nod to melody, the blind man’s fiddling remained a grave counterpoint to the evening’s chimerical atmosphere. But while it might once have taunted him, tonight Muni thought the music was rather catchy; it bore him up the way it had Jenny in her rope-dancing days. Strange that he’d scarcely thought of the girl during his labors, as he dangled light-headedly from the shaky scaffolding he was helping to erect. Only at the brink of sleep had he recalled that he was a young man in love, dwelling in an extraordinary land. It was a condition he perceived as a memory even as the experience unfolded.
He was awakened by her tapping at what was left of the window sash. Opening his bleary eyes, he rubbed them until he was certain that he saw what he saw: Jenny standing again in midair. Her onyx-black hair was slipping out of its twist, her white cotton shift slightly billowing, her dark eyes possessing depths beyond sounding. But rather than bouncing on a rope, this morning she swayed a bit jerkily from side to side. When Muni had bundled himself in his sheet and shuffled still half-asleep to the window, he saw that her coltish legs appeared to have grown overnight to an inordinate length. There were many things he supposed he would have to get used to in this curious new order.
“Kiss me?” she invited, and though he hesitated an irresolute beat — for when had he waked to such a proposition? — it never occurred to him that he could do other than oblige. Poking his head out the window, Muni tasted her lips, hungrily as it happened, their saltiness reinvigorating the living current between them. Catching his breath, he looked down to see the twin tupelo poles extending from beneath her shift into the sodden alley below. Stilts. Resourceful girl, she must have manufactured them during the night. “Funny thing,” she said, reeling a little herself from the embrace. “It’s a new day but also the same one as yesterday. How can that be?”
Muni nodded at the assertion and knew it was true. That it was also impossible seemed somehow irrelevant. He made a mental note to ask his uncle to explain the phenomenon, as Jenny beckoned him to climb on board. “You nuts?” he wanted to know, which she confirmed. So he asked her not to look (though she did anyway) as he dropped the sheet in order to pull on his shirt and pants over his drawers. Then he clambered gingerly across the jagged window ledge onto the lyre-like curve of Jenny’s back. With his feet he discovered the pegs on which her own bare feet rested and clasped his hands around her firm waist, amazed that such an unprecedented act should feel so natural.
“Shouldn’t we be afraid?” he wondered.
“What’s to be afraid?” Then she took a giant step pretending to stumble, which made Muni yip with fright.
En route she offered him a poppyseed pastry dug from the pocket of her shift, which he scarfed up with gusto though it was stale. All his appetites, it seemed, were wide awake. The street from their tottering elevation had the quality of appearing both authentic and illusory, the familiar buildings in their unplumb incarnations utterly strange. Old North Main Street was at the same time itself and a fanciful stage version of itself, its properties bolstered up and likely to fall apart at any moment. But the players, as they went about the business of attempting to salvage their goods, most of which were unredeemable, appeared unconcerned with the imminent collapse of their shops and homes. Several sailed the coppery lagoon in their makeshift vessels to no particular purpose, all of them clearly in a holiday mood.
The Days of Awe were still weeks away, but the quake and its dramatic aftermath had enforced, for better or worse, an interlude from the ordinary run of things — and there seemed to be the conviction at large in those irrigated streets that time was stalled. Of course there was as yet no real evidence beyond the stopped clocks that such a situation obtained. Yesterday morning had advanced into afternoon, afternoon ebbed into evening, and there was every expectation the same pattern would recur today. In fact, the exquisite clarity of this morning’s robin’s egg sky was the looking-glass image of the day before. It was safe to assume that the world beyond Poplar Avenue persisted as usual, commerce along the river was uninterrupted, and society east of Alabama Street adhered to its seasonal calendar. But the Pinch, no longer landlocked, was quarantined (it was generally agreed) by a species of time that had relinquished its linear progress.