“And wasn’t it his people themselves that poisoned the wells back in the day of your allover Black Death?” mused Cashel, his voice rising an octave with every syllable. Then he and his boys might have laid hands on the peddler, tossing him into the mire at their doorstep, had not the daughter of the house stepped between them. Katie shooed them away from the sickbed and refused to hear a discouraging word concerning her charge.
Her father sulked, her brothers groused, and Pinchas began gradually to come back to himself. Gradually, because he was in no hurry. He marveled that the affliction of a single night could have taken such a ruinous toll on his constitution. But then it was not every day that one dropped dead and was rescued intact from the other side; and while he didn’t believe for a second that such a thing had actually happened, he felt nonetheless that he was somehow changed. After a few days he was able to stand with Katie’s assistance and take some steps about the shanty’s beaten earth floor. This was no easy feat given the clutter, the fishing gear and rat traps (some with the rats still in them) obstructing his path; for Katie was not a conscientious housekeeper. He was eventually able to sit at the table, enduring the dagger stares of the menfolk as they consumed their mounds of jacketed potatoes. The stares were doubly intense from young Tighe, in whose plaited shirt and trousers the girl had recently appareled her patient. But for all the tension his presence bred in the house, Pinchas was not anxious to leave. He knew well enough the grim necropolis that awaited a penniless peddler beyond their door.
But that wasn’t the only reason Pinchas was reluctant to reveal the full extent of his recovery. He luxuriated in Katie’s attentions, even when the measures she took to restore him verged on the heroic: for she administered regular doses of castor oil and calomel to reactivate kidney function and loosen the bowels, the effects of which Pinchas suffered in grateful humiliation. Reborn, he was content there should be a period during which he was reduced to the condition of a virtual babe in arms. When his body began to regain its previous vigor, his clearing brain acknowledged certain stirrings that had been — though unrecognized till now — a fundamental motivation all along. Because, beyond his need to escape the cloistered life of the shtetl and the incarceration his treasonous sympathies promised, Pinchas had yielded as well to a call to adventure. And adventure included an unspoken quest for romance. True, such a desire was not wholly compatible with his commitment to dialectical materialism, or to the cruder materialism he’d lately practiced. In fact, he was as vexed by this desire as he was by his inexperience. He derided his growing fondness for the girl even as he regarded her as the agent of his salvation, a notion her father affirmed in his cups.
“It’s a mockery of our Lord’s own resurrection you’ve made with this Jew man,” Cashel was heard to mutter.
And Katie: “Put a cake in it, Da!”
The brothers, less vocal, satisfied themselves with pissing discreetly in the peddler’s porridge and thumping him in places where the bruises wouldn’t show. Pinchas was stoic in suffering their abuse, having endured worse at the hands of the girl herself, whom he was coming to adore.
He knew it was an impossible infatuation, not the least because he was a Hebrew and she the daughter of a popish clan who viewed him as essentially vermin. But such obstacles the peddler, perhaps delusional in his re-invigorated state, believed he could overcome. Added to these deterrents, however, was the further inconvenience of a fiancé. For it seemed that Katie Keough had been pledged to one Phelim Mulrooney, a barkeep who operated a dram shop over in Catfish Alley. It happened that the Keough men, averse to their own rotgut (whose side effects rivaled the symptoms of the plague itself), had run up an exorbitant tab at Squire Mulrooney’s tavern. In point of fact, they were in default of a bill they could never hope to settle. The barkeep, though, had magnanimously agreed to waive their debt, and even to extend them a line of credit, in exchange for the hand of the fair but undowered Katie. The maid herself had not objected to the betrothal; its imminence was the trump card she held over her father and brothers, and played whenever the occasion called for it. To break off the engagement would have meant severing their lifeline, and by periodically threatening to do just that, Katie would have her way in most matters. Besides, the girl had been approached by worse suitors, and despite a face so infested with blackheads that he looked to have been peppered by buckshot, Phelim Mulrooney was a man of parts. The proprietor of a thriving business, he made a more or less honest, if disreputable, living. The Pinch had offered her no better prospects.
Pinchas had ascertained all this during the tavern keeper’s visits. The man would appear on the gentile Sabbath, doff his stiff bowler, and greet them — often with wilting flowers for Katie — with a “God save all in this house.” The Keoughs would respond with false enthusiasm, because it was clear none were overly fond of their benefactor. He would pay his shamefast respects to his intended, embarrassed by his own transparent carnality, and even inquire after the welfare of her patient, whom he regarded as the girl’s innocent pastime. Then he would sit down with the men and, casting the occasional cow’s eyes in Katie’s direction, discuss items concerning the wedding. Impatient though he was, however, Phelim agreed there was nothing for it but to postpone the affair until the ongoing crisis had abated. For death still held dominion over the district.
“A feller can’t unstopper a keg or raise a bucket from a well without he turns up a corpse,” the suitor would repine. “They’re after saying there ain’t enough living to bury the dead and it’s the niggers are having to do it.”
Of course there was always the question, never expressed, of their own survival. Phelim himself wore as a charm against misfortune a moonstone amulet sold to him by a fishwife who was later stoned for a witch. “The world’s gone plain medieval and no kicker.” Eavesdropping from where he lay on his pallet, Pinchas silently maintained there was no impediment so great that he couldn’t surmount it, as long as the girl felt about him as he did about her. But so far there was little evidence in support of that.
Perhaps the barkeep Mulrooney was right and he was nothing to her but an ephemeral pet. Living among louts in the absence of her mother, she was in need of a creature on which she could expend some tenderness, and in lieu of a broken-winged bird a sick Yid peddler would have to do. As soon as he was mended, she would set him free without a second thought. So he continued to call forth the odd fit of coughing and dissemble a frailty he no longer felt. Then he would try to count the freckles that sprinkled her cheeks like spilled nutmeg as she passed a saucer of rum vapors under his nose. He held his breath to glimpse the shady contours of her camisole as she knelt to give him a mustard footbath, and spied her emerald eye peeking at him from behind a helix of strawberry hair. Her hands, as she dried them in her apron, darted like sparrows in a bath; her slight breast lifted suspensefully before a sigh. Sometimes she caught him ogling her and they both blushed in mutual discomfiture, though he might think he detected the hint of a smile. Then he could believe that, along with the turbid light that filtered into her hovel from the hellscape outside, she had allowed herself to bask an instant in his adoration.
“Katie,” he had resolutely confided in her, “the man I was before you have saved me I am no more.” To which the girl inquired, “Are you then no more a man at all?” Ignoring her retort, he stood by his statement: because the previous Pinchas had had no tolerance for magical thinking; the credulity of the Russian Pale with its deathless prophets and hidden saints was a world he’d long since left behind. But how to argue with the fact that he’d been raised from his coffin by an angel? And now he felt his identity as erstwhile revolutionary and peregrine merchant was a casualty of that event. All that once defined him had been displaced by his overriding passion for the girl. “Katie, I am gornisht vi a vantz,” he avowed, “nothing but a insect without you.”