He felt himself momentarily in motion, floating for a spell in a shifting, desultory manner until he landed kerplump. The demons of the left side of darkness were toying with him, Pinchas assumed, the pain in his restricted limbs compounded by the unhappy realization that death had made him superstitious. He thought he heard voices and concluded that he wasn’t alone. Naturally there would be myriad others condemned to a similar solitude, fated to listen to one another’s mumblings and blubberings without a hope of ever understanding or being themselves understood. Then it came to him that there was an alternative he’d failed to consider: maybe he wasn’t actually dead. But that one seemed even less plausible than the other options. Again he heard muffled voices and decided it wouldn’t hurt to cry out, but the best he could muster in his feeble state was a pathetic inaudible groan. He discovered, however, that he still had the use of his fingers, and so began to rap on the ceiling of his horizontal cell. No sooner had he done so than he felt himself floating again, tilting to left and right then sliding downward with a velocity that left his stomach behind. He continued his desperate rapping, gathering what energy remained to him to deliver a full-blown, close-knuckled knock. Banging away on the lid of his captivity, Pinchas was aware of his mortal thirst, of wanting now beyond reason to be let out already from this airless purgatorial box!
The voices outside his stifling space grew louder. There was a sound like the squeal of a sphincter and a coffin-shaped seam of light appeared above him; then the lid was prized all the way off, and lustrous human faces — one with a broken nose and prognathous jaw, the other with a conflagration of ginger hair — hovered over him in the torrid afternoon. Drained of energy, Pinchas lay back unmoving in his enclosure.
“It’s a queer look that’s on him for a man that’s dead,” said the plug-ugly fellow.
“Dada,” exclaimed the redheaded girl, “he’s alive!”
“Faith, how can you tell, Katie darling?”
“Look how his sorrowful eyes are upon us.”
“Similar, I’m thinking, would be the eyes of any carcass.”
“But this one’s,” she said, poking an obtrusive index finger into Pinchas’s solar plexus, “are not past blinking.”
Her father allowed that that was the case but cautioned her not to touch his revolting person again. Then an argument commenced between father and daughter over whether the man deserved redeeming from his current circumstance. The father was of a mind to leave sleeping dogs lie. “After all, we don’t know where the filthy beggar has been.” This opinion was backed up by the pair of thick-ribbed lads lumbering on either side of the father, though the girl shut them both up with a word: “Eejits.” Then she protested that the man’s animate condition made it incumbent on every Christian to do his duty. “Besides, the very fact of his breathing gives the proof he survived the distemper and is no longer a danger.”
“But Katie mavourneen, we’ve our own grief to bear and it’s no affair we have to be shouldering an extra burden. Look about you, daughter, and your mother still unburied in this hidjiss place where no priest would attend us.”
For they were standing amid a congregation of knotty pine coffins in the broad gash of the open plague pit at the Elmwood Cemetery, where paupers were consigned to mass burial.
“My mother it was,” said the girl with a flash of temper, “that you drove into this early grave with your wanton ways. For her the distemper was a mercy and even this dreadful place a welcome rest. He”—pointing to the invalid in the box, who was trying without success to mouth some defense of his own—“is the Lord’s opportunity for you to do penance.”
“It’s a hard unforgiving lass you are altogether, Katie Keough, but when did your loving da ever refuse you? Neither the lame cur nor the mangy tom you were wont to drag to our humble door did I turn away.”
Which was how the peddler Pinchas Pinsker came to be lifted in his casket by the two lumpish brothers and loaded onto a rattling donkey cart. He was hauled from the burial ground under the skirts of the willow trees to the squishy banks of Catfish Bayou, just north of the district called the Pinch. This was the gangrenous sink that had greeted the peddler on his entry into the city: the bayou little more than an open sewer, a putrid channel around which refugees from the Great Hunger had pitched their miserable hovels. The Keoughs’ own dwelling consisted chiefly of the mud-plugged hull of an overturned johnboat, its kitchen a jerrybuilt postscript. Pinchas was installed in that kitchen on a rank pallet under a shelf that supported a flitch of dried pork, his presence forcing the eviction of the family hound that had so far escaped the city’s mass extermination of pets.
His first coherent thought with regard to his convalescent residence was that he may have been better off in the casket. Despite here and there a feminine touch — a lace doily under a growler, a crocheted cozy over a rifle stock — the place was a sty. It was little improved by the fumes from the sour mash whiskey still operated by father and sons. The still, Pinchas would learn, supplemented a meager income from their cottage fishing industry, since the fish they netted in the swill of the bayou were only marginally edible. If the house was in mourning, the peddler never saw any signs of it beyond the daughter’s fixed irritability toward her men. Nor did the family seem to heed the fever raging around them, which was carrying off their neighbors in droves. The smell of the bayou combined with the rancidness of their hovel did help to neutralize the universal putrescence that was a constant reminder of plague. But as he began, under Katie’s care, to regain a semblance of his former vitality, the peddler grew more accustomed to his surroundings and started to view them in a different light. He ate with gusto Katie’s spuds in their various incarnations, slurped the soup the girl called “fishyswaz,” and began to think he’d awakened into some snug household tale. Like the one he’d once read in a Yiddish translation in which a sea captain’s family lived in the rollicking warmth of a capsized vessel on a beach.
He was practically unaware of the hostility directed toward him by the patriarch, Cashel Keough, and his surly sons, Murtagh and Tighe. Bitterly they complained of the space Katie had appropriated for her charge in their already crowded quarters, never mind the amount of victuals he consumed. And to see the sapless intruder wearing his own bleached nightshirt, which ballooned about him like a baptismal gown, was almost more than the crapulent Cashel could bear. Adamant in her defense of the invalid, Katie alternated between cautioning her family not to interfere in her solicitations and assuring them their charity would be recorded in the annals of heaven. But Cashel was not as easily cowed by his daughter as were her brothers. He was suspicious of the way her patient mangled the Lord’s own English. And when he heard the man ask Katie in his lingering confusion, “Didn’t you paint it with lamb’s blood the doorpost of your house?” Cashel knitted his bristling brow in contemplation.
“Pin-skerr? Is that by way of being the lad’s heathen name?” Leaning closer to examine the hump at the bridge of the invalid’s nose. “I do believe it’s an Israelite we’re after nurturing in our boozum.” Tighe and Murtagh nodded their ungainly heads in accord with their da’s sage judgment.
Smiling weakly, Pinchas himself concurred, anticipating more of the kind of hospitable reception he’d been used to receiving from the rural folk.