As he neared the big house, he wondered why no one had yet to appear. The hedges were neatly trimmed in elaborate topiary shapes, the kitchen garden weeded and pruned, but the house and grounds seemed otherwise abandoned. A gaunt hound with a panting pink tongue approached him, nuzzling his leg and whimpering pitifully; a lowing cow dragged her swollen udders through the tea roses. The air around the mansion, already oppressive in the afternoon heat, had a forbidding odor, miasmic like rotting silage. Pinchas marveled that he should have goosebumps despite his streaming perspiration. The whole day had in fact had a portentous quality about it, all the traffic along the rutted highway headed away from the city of Memphis toward which he was bound. The passengers in their traps and wagons piled with trunks and household furnishings looked distressed, some with sponges tied clownishly over their noses.
Curiosity overcoming his trepidation, he climbed the front steps and pressed his nose against the pane of a tall, rippled-glass window. The gallery overhead shaded the porch and shielded the glass from glare so that Pinchas was able to spy the sumptuous parlor inside. Empty of occupants, the parlor was appointed with a marble hearth, brass firedogs, and a portrait of a saber-wielding officer in Confederate butternut above the mantelpiece. The porch planks creaked under his hobnails as Pinchas slunk around the corner of the house and peered through the window of another room. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dim interior of what turned out to be a high-ceilinged bedroom containing a nightmare tableau; for beneath the canopy of a disordered bed lay a man and woman, their silk-robed bodies snarled in an unnatural configuration — their eyes stark-staring, faces frozen in the rigor of their final agony, as if their souls had wrenched themselves free of their gawking mouths. On the floor below the bed was another pair of lifeless bodies, similarly entangled: two ring-letted little girls in their alice-blue nighties. The twin daughters along with their parents were wreathed in flies and blanketed in what appeared to be a lava of black caviar, some of which was also sprayed across the wainscoting’d walls.
Pinchas’s first thought was irrationaclass="underline" the serfs had murdered their masters and children and fled the estate. Then he remembered that the serfs — the slaves? had there really been slaves? — were freed more than a decade before. “Vey iz mir,” he gasped aloud, lurching headlong back toward his cart. He took up the handles and steered it blindly through a cloud of mosquitoes so thick it left a peddler-shaped hole where he’d passed through, and without looking back turned again into the open road.
Now he was alert to the signs that told him he had stumbled into the Valley of the Shadow. Shacks along the way featured men with shotguns sitting sentinel in their yards, flinty wives standing fiercely behind them in their Sunday bonnets. The current of traffic moving always in the opposite direction grew denser, occasional passengers calling out to him from their carriages what might have been warnings. But if Pinchas didn’t exactly ignore them, neither did he take their words to heart — one of which (“yellow jack”) was repeated with some frequency. He imagined Yellow Jack as a Goliath terrorizing the city whose outskirts he had entered, a giant with whom he was destined to contend. At the same time he understood that this was nonsense. What Jew heads deliberately upstream during an exodus? But Pinchas had been so often discouraged from crossing borders and thresholds due to this interdiction or that imperial ukase that he proceeded on the strength of sheer dogged forward momentum.
He was halted at a bridge over a powder-dry stream by a pair of militiamen in partial uniform.
“What bidness you got in Mefiss?” asked the apple-cheeked younger, his weapon at the ready.
Pinchas was forthright. “Iss to make a livink, mayn beezniz.”
Said the slovenly older soldier with a sneer, “Seem like livin’ ain’t what folks’re about round here.” He spat. “Cross this bridge, Mister, and you might never come back.”
But since they were posted there to stop the infected from leaving the city, a function they’d shown themselves wholly inadequate to perform, they made no effort to block Pinchas’s progress. He soon wished they had.
The road was flanked by dismal shanties that gave way before long to two-story clapboard facades, decaying plank pavements, and a depraved citizenry. Individuals staggering in the lime-dusted roadway and assemblages spilling out the doors of saloons appeared to be simultaneously involved in acts of celebration and mourning; nor could you determine where one left off and the other began. A drunk with a shock of corn-tassel hair tottered up to Pinchas with a clay jug dangling from his pinky finger, saying, “Used to, the milkman’d shout, ‘Wide awake, all alive!’ Now it’s ‘Bring out your dead!’” He laughed like a loon as he offered the peddler a draft, which Pinchas kindly declined. He forged ahead past some bystanders watching idly as a man with a canary complexion looked to be running in circles while lying in the dirt. They watched until one of the bystanders, removing a tiny pistol from a breast pocket, shot the man like a rabid dog, after which they all moved away. On a stoop a buxom lady lay collapsed in a nest of calico; a preacher with graying temples like the wings on Mercury’s helmet mounted a barrel to declare that the plague was God’s vengeance for the pagan festival of Mardi Gras. In an upstairs window a woman was singing in a plaintive contralto: “Dream, dream, grah mo chree / here on your mama’s knee …,” while the air, riven with a general keening, provided a jarring disharmony.
The groceries and snack houses were largely boarded up — some with yellow cards and black crepe nailed to their doors — but the grog shops were thriving. Their clientele, as they exited, paused to inspect the fresh caskets that a company of kerchiefed Negroes were unloading from a furniture van. The empty caskets were then exchanged for the tenanted ones left on the doorsteps of stricken families. Some of the groggery patrons scrutinized the pine boxes as if shopping for their next berth, while others, pallid and less steady on their pins, looked as if they’d just crawled out of them. One box lay open on the curb as if for viewing: its occupant, marinating in a stew of tar and carbolic acid, was dressed in his full lodge regalia, his black tongue lolling like a slug.
There were drums of boiling creosote stationed along the curbs and burning bedclothes saturated in regurgitation. Asafetida bags tied around the necks of frightened citizens vied with the pungency of decomposing flesh. It was the stench that had preceded the city limits by several furlongs, and was suffocating in its intensity here. Making a mighty effort to place one foot in front of the other, Pinchas steered his cart around a bare-boned mule struggling to climb out of a sinkhole. The hole was the result of an overflowing basement privy, and rats as large as terriers rode the mule.
It was coming on dusk and Pinchas was near to falling down from exhaustion. Having slept these past weeks in haybarns and pastures, he’d looked forward to a night’s lodging under a proper roof, where he could wash off the shmutz from the road and refresh himself. He’d been told that Memphis was a city of cheap rooming houses run by maternal widows, but here the peddler had straggled into a charnel house instead. Then he’d passed out of the ramshackle quarter into a soberer district of Federal-style buildings, fashionable shops, and electric trolley lines. But the street, for all its elegant window displays, was as desolate at this end as it was anarchic at the other. There was no traffic save the clattering coffin wagons and the carts from which ragged men, like devils pitching brimstone, shoveled heaps of disinfectant powder. The only pedestrians were the scurrying gent in a cutaway holding a rosewater pomander to his nose and a pair of nuns dragging the hems of their habits in the greenish dust. Cannons boomed, church bells rang, and Pinchas came to a full stop in order to scratch the angry mosquito bites that stippled his neck and arms.